THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
June 2004
Week One
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"[The Bush administration's] idea of diplomacy is to say, 'Look f*cker, you do what we want." -- Richard Armitage to Colin Powell, quoted by Bob Woodward
- Summer: US ground forces commander General John Abizaid tells Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, "We've got a really bad situation over here" in Iraq. "Can't win it militarily." Armitage, concerned, passes Abizaid's remarks to his boss, Colin Powell. Worse, Armitage has noticed that a regular topic of discussion in the NSC meetings is now the daily body counts. Armitage and the other Vietnam veterans in the room remember all too well those discussions during the Vietnam era. Abizaid had told Bush previously that there were about 5,000 insurgents, but later has to report, "We've killed well over 5,000 of them and there's a whole bunch of them out there." Even later, Abizaid reports that US soldiers have killed three times the original estimate of 5,000. Bush, obsessed with numbers and body counts, always asks after news of a big battle, "How many did we kill?" Abizaid always obliges with an estimate. In 2003, deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, tells reporter Bob Woodward, "Not once in this building have we ever reported a number. Probably because guys like me from Vietnam know what happens when you start counting. You completely skew the way people think, the way folks on the ground operate. What we want the people on the ground to understand is that we want to get the job done with the least amount of killing, but with whatever is needed to be done to protect our own guys." Regardless of Pace's denial, body counts have been, and are continuing to be used as a measure of progress. (Bob Woodward)
- June: Former FBI special agent Myron Fuller speaks with journalist Seymour Hersh about the US intelligence community's failure to share information about Islamic terrorism. Fuller, who was in charge of 200 FBI employees in 46 countries throughout Asia and the Pacific, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, and whose primary job was to help curb international terrorism, says that by the spring of 1999 his agents had uncovered a raft of information about the impending threat from Islamic militants, but that no one in the intelligence community seemed to be listening. In 1997, the FBI found that the CIA had held on to critical information surrounding the murder of four American businessmen in Karachi, Pakistan, because CIA officials had asked that the information not be revealed to anyone in the field. Fuller believes that the murders of the four, all auditors for Union Texas Petroleum, led back from the murderers themselves to the country that sponsored the murders, and possibly back to the planners of the 9/11 bombings. The 9/11 commission was inundated with similar stories, leading the commission to report that CIA director Tenet "was accountable for a community of loosely associated agencies and departmental offices that lacked the incentives to cooperate, collaborate, and share information," and conclude, "as a result, a question remains: who is in charge of intelligence?" (Seymour Hersh)
- June: Author Laurence Britt writes an examination of fascism, which he defines as having a number of tenets based on his examination of the following regimes: Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. "Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power," he writes. "These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity." Those 14 tenets include: the powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism; disdain for the importance of human rights; identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause; the supremacy of the military/avid militarism; rampant sexism; a controlled mass media; obsession with national security; religion and ruling elite tied together; power of corporations protected; power of labor suppressed or eliminated; disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts; obsession with crime and punishment; rampant cronyism and corruption; and fraudulent elections. "Does any of this ring alarm bells?" he asks, and answers most sarcastically, "Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not." In a blog entry from August 8, feminist advocate Morgaine Swann writes a well-thought out response entitled "Why I Won't Apologize for Calling Bush a Fascist," linked below, that demonstrates the Bush administration has conducted itself in accordance with every one of Britt's 14 tenets of fascism. She concludes, "It hasn't happened yet. Just remember -- it did happen before, and it happened here. It happened in Germany to the Jews, some of whom live right here, right now. If we truly want to honor them, we need to recognize the signs when we see them. 14 out of 14 is fourteen too many for an American Presidency." (Free Inquiry, )
- June 1: The Army is widening its investigation into at least 91 cases of potential "misconduct" by soldiers against detainees and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The investigation, which focuses on abuses inside and outside US-run detention centers, run the gamut from possible murders to sexual assaults to theft of Iraqi property. The Washington Post reports, "Taken together, the 91 cases indicate misconduct by U.S. troops wider in type and greater in number than suggested by the focus simply on the mistreatment of Iraqis held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. ...President Bush and other senior administration officials have sought to explain the abuses at Abu Ghraib as reflecting the aberrant behavior of a few low-ranking soldiers last fall, graphically exposed in photographs and an internal Army report that emerged a month ago. But the Army's list of investigations appears to bolster the contention of others, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, that misconduct by U.S. forces has been more extensive -- and its consequences more damaging -- than can be blamed on the troubled actions of a small group." Over 50 of the 91 cases have already been closed, resulting in 14 courts-martial and a number of non-judiciary punishments. Few details of these cases or their results have been provided. (Washington Post)
- June 1: CPA administrator Paul Bremer is threatening to veto the selection of Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar as Iraq's interim president. Bremer is instead pushing for the naming of Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi diplomat far more sympathetic to US aims in Iraq. Bremer told the Iraqi Governing Council to postpone their vote, and that if they voted for Yawar, he would veto the selection. Further talks were postponed until today. Along with Bremer, Robert Blackwill, a special envoy for President Bush, and UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi are attending the talks. Iraqis are outraged at the spectacle of the Americans trying to bully the IGC into accepting their choice, and is threatening to destroy the interim government's credibility. The US already faces widespread accusations that the handover is cosmetic, and designed so that President Bush can claim the occupation is over ahead of the American presidential election in November. The Bush administration has made it clear it intends to keep US forces in their current numbers in Iraq after the June 30 elections, and that it does not want them to be under the command of the interim Iraqi government. It is unclear why the US has decided to dig in its heels over the presidency, which will be a largely ceremonial role -- especially after the controversial selection of Iyad Allawi, a Shia with close links to MI6 and the CIA, for the more influential post of interim Prime Minister. Originally UN envoy Brahimi was supposed to choose the new government, but the process was hijacked last week when the Governing Council got in first and voted to appoint Allawi, to Brahimi's clear astonishment. With Brahimi's role already completely undermined, the Americans now seem to be ready to completely abandon its support for the Governing Council, and in doing so, expose the new interim government as one appointed by the US alone, without Iraqi involvement.
- In truth, according to UN sources, Brahimi has been outmanoeuvred by the Iraqis on the governing council seeking to perpetuate their power. Bremer announced the new prime minister before Brahimi had been informed, "an extension of the [Bush] doctrine of pre-emption," writes Sidney Blumenthal. Then Brahimi was sidelined again on the selection of the president. Presented with this fait accompli, the UN sources say, he had to accept it or else destroy any remnant of legality. "Once it was done, it was done," says a UN source. The UN plans for no central part in the new Iraq, but a small mission performing humanitarian work that will be ringed by Gurkhas. The Governing Council was never the most likely guardian of Iraqi legitimacy. It was appointed by the US to give a veneer of Iraqi involvement in their occupation administration, but quickly proved unpopular, and its members were denounced as collaborators. It was also ignored by the Americans when they made controversial decisions such as the launching of April's siege of Fallujah, which many council members denounced. Yawar, the Sunni head of one of the country's most powerful tribes, has recently criticized the US occupation: "We blame the United States 100 per cent for the security in Iraq," he said. "They occupied the country, disbanded the security agencies and for 10 months left Iraq's borders open for anyone to come in without a visa or even a passport." Pachachi, by contrast, insists that only the US forces can restore security. Even Brahimi has spoken out against the current security situation. "The security situation is just impossible," he recently told Time magazine. (Independent/CCMEP, Guardian)
- June 1: An article in Time magazine reveals a memo circulated through the White House in April 2004 that delineated three ways to "marginalize" Ahmad Chalabi and reduce his influence, methods ranging from gently pushing him offstage to cutting off US funds for his intelligence-gathering operation. The April memo marked the beginning of the White House's strategy to cut its ties to Chalabi, a campaign that reached its climax late last month when Iraqi police, backed by US forces, raided the former exile's house and office in Baghdad. But that move hardly came out of the blue. New details of the relationship between the US and Chalabi reveal that after a decade of lobbying Washington, Chalabi began to lose his footing early this year after he ran afoul of President Bush and Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq. Senior administration officials say that the US is investigating whether Chalabi revealed to the Iranians highly sensitive information about how the US gathers intelligence in the region. Other US officials say that the FBI has begun reviewing logs and other data that might turn up clues as to when sensitive information was divulged; authorities are also interviewing and giving lie-detector tests to US officials in Iraq who may have had access to the information. (Time/Hypocrites.com)
- June 1: The Justice Department belatedly releases a seven-page document summarizing the "evidence" it has against suspected terrorist Jose Padilla, who has been incarcerated without charge since 2001. The DOJ insists that the release was prompted by a request from GOP senator Orrin Hatch for information on Padilla, ignoring the fact that it has repeatedly ignored similar requests from other lawmakers, and refusing to countenance speculation that the release coincides with a growing public outrage over the Padilla case as well as the Supreme Court's expected ruling on the constitutionality of Padilla's incarceration later in the month. The information is not released by Hatch, but by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who presents the evidence and allegations against Padilla in a press conference. Padilla's lawyers were not present at the conference to dispute the presentation. (Padilla's lawyers are virtually handcuffed by Justice Department decisions that everything said between Padilla and his lawyers is classified, and that anything Padilla has said in interrogations may not be revealed to his lawyers.) Comey, therefore, is free to say anything he likes about Padilla, and he does so, claiming that during the two years of interrogation Padilla "admitted" to certain assignments from al-Qaeda. Comey also claims that these "admissions" have been corroborated by several al-Qaeda terrorists who have been interrogated about Padilla; Comey fails to note that some of these sources have told conflicting stories. Comey also downplays the government's own finding that "Padilla tried to downplay or deny this commitment to al-Qaeda and the apartment building mission. He said he never pledged an oath of loyalty and was not part of al-Qaeda. He said he and his accomplice proposed the dirty bomb plot [for which he was first arrested at O'Hare Airport] only as a way to get out of Pakistan and to avoid combat in Afghanistan. He said he returned to America with no intention of carrying out the apartment building operation." Comey insists that the unprecedented press conference, where the Justice Department presents "evidence" against a suspect in a press conference and not in a courtroom, is only designed to give the US public information about Padilla. Many think that the real reason for the revelations about Padilla is to influence the Supreme Court, who is about to rule whether or not American citizen Padilla should be entitled to the basic due process of appearing for himself in an American courtroom, and particularly an attempt to influence "swing" justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
- Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick points out that Padilla's Constitutional rights have been repeatedly violated, not only in denying him his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to confront his accuser and to due process under the law, but the Constitutional right to habeas corpus, a bedrock civil liberty delineated in Article I of the Constitution. The US must also defend in court the likelihood that any information obtained from Padilla was obtained illegally, through coercion and abuse prohibited in the Constitution. Lithwick writes, "In his comments accompanying the release of the Padilla document, Deputy Assistant Attorney General James Comey offered the following weird little tribute to the joys of suspending the Constitution at will: Had the government charged Padilla criminally, he said, 'He would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right. ...He would likely have ended up a free man.' Comey's point seems to be that constitutional protections produce bad evidence, in which case we should probably get rid of the Constitution in every criminal case. What he was really saying was that if you permit them to perform unconstitutional interrogations, the administration can get the accused to say exactly what we all wanted to hear." She concludes, "The lesson of Abu Ghraib was that we no longer trust what happens in dark dungeons, where the rule of law has been cast aside. To reassure us, the Justice Department responds with the assurance that no one there trusts what happens in the bright light of a constitutional democracy." (Slate, FindLaw, Village Voice)
- June 1: The Bush campaign says it will wage an "ideological war" against John Kerry in the presidential campaign, painting the race as a race between liberalism and conservatism. The article, written by Bush ally Bill Sammon, also passes on the false contention that Kerry is "the most liberal senator" in Congress, a label pasted on Kerry by the "nonpartisan" National Journal and quickly embraced by the mainstream media. The article also plays up the GOP's efforts to make this a "grass roots campaign." (Washington Times
Audiotapes prove that Enron deliberately "gamed" the California energy grid
- June 1: Audio tapes of Enron traders reveal that the traders celebrated the massive fires in California that cut transmission lines into the state and contributed to a spike in energy prices. "Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing," one trader sang on the tape. Four years after California's disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard gloating and praising each other, often in obscene terms, as they helped bring on, and cash in on, the Western power crisis. "He just f*cks California," says one Enron employee. "He steals money from California to the tune of about a million." "Will you rephrase that?" asks a second employee. "OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day," replies the first. The tapes, from Enron's West Coast trading desk, confirm that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down. "If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?" an Enron worker is heard saying. "Oh, it's not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let's put it that way," another says. "Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down." Officials with the Snohomish Public Utility District near Seattle received the tapes from the Justice Department. "This is the evidence we've all been waiting for. This proves they manipulated the market," says Eric Christensen, a spokesman for the utility. That utility, like many others, is trying to get its money back from Enron. "They're f*cking taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?" Yeah, grandma Millie, man." "Yeah, now she wants her f*cking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a**hole for f*cking $250 a megawatt hour." And the tapes link top Enron officials Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to schemes that fueled the crisis. "Government Affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," says one trader. "OK." "Do you know when you started over-scheduling load and making buckets of money on that?" Before the 2000 election, Enron employees pondered the possibilities of a Bush win. "It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy," says one Enron worker. That didn't happen, but they were sure President Bush would fight any limits on sky-high energy prices. "When this election comes Bush will f*cking whack this sh*t, man. He won't play this price-cap bullsh*t." On May 29, 2001, Bush said, "We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse and that's why I oppose price caps." Both the Justice Department and Enron tried to prevent the release of these tapes. (CBS)
- June 1: Bush awards a $10 million Department of Homeland Security contract to Accenture, formerly Arthur Andersen, a tax accounting firm convicted of fraud and malfeasance in the Enron scandal, and a firm that recently moved offshore to avoid paying US taxes. The contract is awarded less than two years after the White House and its allies in Congress gutted a House-passed provision that would have banned awarding homeland security contracts to corporations who exploit tax loopholes, move offshore, and avoid U.S. taxes. At the time, Accenture lobbied to eliminate the provision, hiring GOP political consultant and Bush family confidant Charlie Black to lobby on its behalf. Accenture executives have given President Bush more than $68,000 in campaign contributions since 2000. When Congress was considering bills to curb the practice in 2002, Bush "said the Bermuda loophole should be closed" but refused to support "any of the bills that would do so" and then allowed his Republican allies in Congress to kill the legislation. (Congressional Quarterly/Baltimore Sun/OpenSecrets/ABC/Daily Misleader)
- June 1: More details are emerging about the stint served by Ahmad Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, at the New York Times, fanning accusations that not only was the Times "misled" about the so-called WMDs in Iraq, but that it consciously colluded with the US government, or at least officials inside the government, to promote the government's position on the non-existent weapons as a premise for war. Khalil worked at the Times for five months in 2003, and during her stint with the paper, as the Times' office manager in Kuwait, the paper printed nine stories regarding Chalabi. While with the paper, she personally helped Chalabi get across the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq. The Times fired Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached New York. Reporter Jane Mayer, who published her article in the New Yorker, writes: "[T]wo months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper's war coverage, hired Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper's office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi's daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father's efforts while she was working for the Times. In early April 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the border into Iraq." Tyler claims he didn't know about Khalil helping her uncle get into southern Iraq. He said that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that Chalabi hadn't been a factor in the war when he hired her -- something of a stretch, given that fellow reporter Judith Miller has identified him as the prime source for her biggest scoops. "We were covering a war, not Chalabi," Tyler says. When asked about Khalil's rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing editor of the Times, said, "The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether it happened. If so, it was out of bounds." (Editor and Publisher)
- June 1: Progressive columnist Robert Scheer calls on the Kerry campaign to recognize that the US electorate has lost confidence in the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation and the more general war on terror: "It is high time [Kerry] showed some real, from-the-gut, anger over a president who so shamelessly led him and the nation astray. The public is onto Bush, but Kerry has to provide it an alternative by exposing the lies and deceptions that have weakened our country." (Working for Change)
- June 1: A Buzzflash reader takes the New York Times to task for its ingenuous mea culpa regarding its coverage of the Iraqi WMDs. Jon Brown characterizes the Times's apology thus: "Now it appears the threatening shapes were without substance, hoaxes and illusions foisted upon an otherwise capable, even exemplary staff of doughty professionals who did their utmost to present 'an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time.'" Brown then writes, "Garbage. Here is what was obvious at the time, though not at the Times. The entire discussion of WMD was a canard, a red herring, a decoy, call it what you will. Allow me to refresh the paper's institutional memory: The inspectors, with full access, were finding no evidence of weapons stockpiles or active programs; the US intelligence community was dubious of claims put forward with alarming stridency by political appointees; and sources like Chalabi and the INC, the brainchild of lie factories like Rendon and Hill & Knowlton, were likely to churn out more imaginative -- and wholly untrue -- tales of babies thrown from incubators to have their way. All of which was duly reported in the international press. What did the Times do? In editorial after editorial, report after report, the vaunted newspaper of record framed the Iraq debate as a question of WMD, making its coverage inseparable from Bush administration propaganda. The war was never about WMD. That was obvious to all but the most cravenly stenographic of so-called journalists from the get-go. It was about, to name a few, midterm elections, military bases, crackpot imperialist ideology, Israel, payoffs to cronies, and even, though you'd never, ever guess it from the New York Times, plentiful, cheap oil. But WMD? An imminent threat? Calling for a 'preemptive' war outlawed in the UN charter? When the shelf life of brash official claims (uranium! aluminum tubes!) couldn't match the expiration date on a quart of milk? ...Yet the Times went on dignifying administration arguments, not least by excluding discussion of other, more plausible motives for which ample evidence was in plain view.
- Why? Apparently because for the Times, if the Bush administration said the war was about WMD, then clearly it was about WMD, which in turn called for months of solemn rumination: Does he (i.e., Saddam, butcher of Baghdad, ally of al Qaeda, er...they're all Arabs, aren't they?) or doesn't he? That was the question -- in essence the only question -- for the New York Times. This despite the exposure of glaring 'mistakes' by officials whose absolute commitment to the truth was already highly questionable. That's not to say the Times need attribute every statement by, say, a Dick Cheney or a Condoleeza Rice with the phrase 'and a known liar,' though it would not be inaccurate to do so. That might interfere with all-important access to the known liars. No, it's to stand in wonder at the newspaper's willful refusal to print alternative versions given the state of common knowledge and, even more, common sense at the time. For instance, when, might I ask, did the Times forget the most rudimentary advice to the political journalist: to follow the money? ( Hey, what manner of lowlife would trick out a war for a measly couple hundred billion -- certainly not the virtuous former lobbyists and corporate executives populating the Bush administration.) At the Times, money was no object; certainly it was no subject. That role WMD held virtually exclusively. Again, why? Craven bootlicking? Profound ignorance? Farcical incompetence? Whatever the causes, the Times not only hung the window dressing for a war but supplied among its fanciest fabrications. About which the 'correction' is dead silent. So let me give the Times something to put in its next mea culpa. The paper was complicit in a war of aggression that led to the death and mutilations of tens of thousands -- that bears repeating, the death and mutilation of tens of thousands -- mounted for stupefyingly cynical, shortsighted, vicious reasons. Its dogged refusal to stray from the Bush administration script about WMD and admit into mainstream discourse other explanations for the hell-bent rush to war is nothing less than a monumental journalistic disgrace. What the Times did was bad enough; what it failed to do was perhaps worse. It's past time to see a correction about that." (Buzzflash)
Ghazi al-Yawir named interim Iraqi president
- June 2: Sunni Muslim tribal chief Ghazi al-Yawir is sworn in as Iraq's new interim president by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. Al-Yawir will preside over an interim cabinet of technocrats named by the council. The job was offered to al-Yawir after Adnan Pachachi, a candidate favored by Washington, refused the position. (Pachachi says he was denied the position by a conspiracy led by Ahmad Chalabi; see below.) The interim vice-presidents are Ibrahim Jaafari, head of the Shia Muslim Dawa party, and Rowsch Shways, a politician from Iraq's non-Arab Kurdish minority. Pachachi explains that he declined the offer of the post of Iraq's interim president after being accused of being the candidate of the United States. "I gathered that certain parties were not satisfied that I should hold the post," says Pachachi. "It is a lie...that the Coalition Provisional Authority wanted to impose me as president," he says, and notes that UN envoy al-Ibrahimi had put him forward. He says the post is a "symbolic" position but also represented "the sovereignty of Iraq." The president had to "have the support of all sectors of society... because he must be a factor for unity not disunity." Pachachi suggests that "certain parties" wanted to keep him out of the job because of his "democratic and liberal views" and for his "opposition to any confessional carve-up" of political power in Iraq. But the job had "to go to a Sunni Arab," he adds. Bush pledged to work with the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, days after the United States was caught off guard when the Iraqi Governing Council chose him to lead a government that takes over on June 30 and is to guide the country to national elections in December or January. "All the new prime minister needs to know is that I look forward to a close relationship with him," Bush says during a news conference. The Iraqi Governing Council decided to dissolve immediately after the appointment of the new interim government. Council member Yunadam Kana tells reporters that 20 of the 22 members of the US-appointed body, which was appointed last July, agreed to go out of business. The council had been expected to remain in office until the transfer of sovereignty on 30 June. (Al-Jazeera)
- June 2: UN envoy to Iraq Lakhimi Brahimi says that his hands were tied in the selection of Iyad Allawi as Iraq's interim prime minister because CPA administrator Paul Bremer "is the dictator of Iraq," and what Bremer wants, Bremer gets. "He has the money. He has the signature," Brahimi says, and adds, "I will not say who was my first choice, and who was not my first choice.... I will remind you that the Americans are governing this country." Sadoun al Dulame, the head of a Baghdad research organization and polling center, says he spoke with Brahimi last week and that the diplomat was discouraged: "He was very disappointed, very frustrated," al Dulame says. "I asked him why he didn't say that publicly [an]d) he said, 'I am the UN envoy to Iraq, how can I admit to failure?'" (Knight Ridder)
- June 2: Former neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi accuses CIA director George Tenet of being responsible for allegations that Chalabi leaked classified information to Iran. Chalabi says that Tenet "was behind the charges against me that claimed that I gave intelligence information to Iran. I denied these charges and I will deny them again." In Washington, a US law enforcement official says the FBI is examining whether Pentagon officials who had frequent contacts with Chalabi may have leaked sensitive information that US intelligence had broken Iran's secret communications codes. Chalabi is under investigation for leaking intelligence to Iranian intelligence officials, possibly for ten years or longer. (USA Today)
- June 2: Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee send a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft demanding that the Justice Department investigate ties between Vice President Dick Cheney and his former firm, Halliburton. They accuse Cheney of collusion in his intervention to assure Halliburton received a multi-billion, no-bid contract for handling much of the rebuilding of Iraq. The signees remind Ashcroft that the law requires such an investigation when evidence of criminal activities is proferred, and such evidence has been in the media for months. They also remind Ashcroft that Cheney has repeatedly lied, both to the press and under oath to Congress, about his ties to Halliburton and his actions on behalf of his former firm. The letter follows calls by Democratic senator Patrick Leahy for a Senate investigation into ties between Cheney and Halliburton. The allegations, which have circulated for years, were bolstered in March when an e-mail from an Army Corps of Engineers official to another Pentagon employee surfaced. The e-mail, first obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that Pentagon official Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, approved the arrangement to award a non-competitive contract to Halliburton. It reported the contract was "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP's office." John White, a Pentagon appointee in the Clinton and Carter administrations, says the e-mail suggests an "unprecedented" level of involvement by senior Pentagon officials in the awarding of contracts. "I've never seen of anything like this -- never heard of anything like this," White says. "I think the vice president's office has a lot of questions to answer, as does the Pentagon." White House spokespeople say the memo means nothing, and does not prove Cheney was involved in the bidding. Leahy faults Republicans for not wanting to examine the issue. "This is the same Congress that during the Clinton administration would have five new investigations started by midday Monday, and just add to them all week long," he says. "Now they won't hold hearings, no matter what it is -- if you have cost overruns or anything else -- they just refuse to hold hearings, but of course they should." Bush campaign advisor Mary Matalin says the Democrats should "just let it go." (CNN, House of Representatives)
- June 2: The Supreme Court decided 5-4 that police need not always inform teenaged suspects of their Miranda rights after arresting them. The decision is based on a California case where a teenaged suspect confessed to participating in a murder on tape while being interrogated by the police; the five justices rule that, since the suspect was not technically in the "custody" of the police, he did not need to have his rights read to him. In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer writes that "ordinary common sense" says that the youth was, indeed, in police custody and therefore should have been read his rights: "Would a reasonable person in [the suspect's] position have felt free simply to get up and walk out of the small room in the station house at will during his two-hour police interrogation? I ask the reader to put himself, or herself, in [his] circumstances and then answer that question," Breyer writes. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg join in the dissent to the decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Los Angeles Times/Contra Costa Times)
- June 2: Former deputy attorney general and Harvard law professor Philip Heymann writes, "For the president to claim power to lock up Americans on executive say-so for an indefinite period of time without charges or legal representation remains a terrible and frightening idea, and nothing in the release of Padilla information changes that in any way." (Village Voice)
- June 2: With the presidential campaign heating up, Maureen Farrell revisits the 2000 Republican campaign platform to examine how well the Bush adminstration kept the promises it made to the electorate.
- The GOP platform denounced rigged elections, saying, "Gerrymandered congressional districts are an affront to democracy and an insult to the voters. We oppose that and any other attempt to rig the electoral process." Aside from the entire Florida imbroglio, the GOP ensured its control of Texas by what the Washington Post called "surgically redesigned districts" that were drawn up by Tom DeLay and his Texas GOP cronies to make sure Democrats could not win control of the Texas legislature. And just one week ago, CNN sued Florida to make its list of ineligible voters public, noting that in 2000, over 50,000 legal voters were disenfranchised.
- The platform accused the Clinton administration of alienating America's allies around the globe: "The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration's diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries." Within months of taking office, the Bush administration's high-handed methods of dealing with the US's European allies were sorely tasking the formerly strong relations between the US and Germany, France, and others. In March 2003, the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The leaders of France, Germany, Russia and China, all nations Bush hoped to count as allies in the confrontation with Iraq, have joined to resist the president's drive toward war, with complaints over what they see as American highhandedness. Even staunch allies such as prime ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain have sent word to Bush that some U.S. bravado -- like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's dismissal of 'Old Europe' -- has done more harm than good." A month ago, conservative columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, "I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today.... The Bush Administration needs to conduct a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise it is courting a total disaster for all Americans."
- The GOP platform was critical of the Clinton administration for not supporting the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi: "The [Clinton] administration has used an arsenal of dilatory tactics to block any serious support to the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization reflecting a broad and representative group of Iraqis who wish to free their country from the scourge of Saddam Hussein's regime." It is now proven that Chalabi is, and has been for years, an Iranian spy whose false intelligence duped the administration into going to war with Iraq. Former counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson said last month, "'When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."
- The platform asserted that removing Saddam Hussein was necessary for peace and stability in the Middle East: "We support the full implementation of the Iraq Liberation Act, which should be regarded as a starting point in a comprehensive plan for the removal of Saddam Hussein.... Republicans recognize that peace and stability in the Persian Gulf is impossible as long as Saddam Hussein rules Iraq." Even leading Republicans have now acknowledged that the war with Iraq has resulted in serious destabilization of the region, and has created an entire army of new terrorists determined to strike back at America.
- The platform blamed the Clinton administration for America's low standing in the Middle East and for high gas prices: "What happened? Eight years ago, the nation was energy confident. Our standing in the Middle East was at its zenith. The oil cartel was in retreat; gasoline was affordable, even as automotive progress reduced emissions from cars. Today, gas prices have skyrocketed, and oil imports are at all-time highs." Instead of repairing America's image in the Middle East and bringing down oil prices, America has never been more hated in the Arab world, and domestic gasoline prices have soared.
- The platform vowed that the Bush administration would honor America's intelligence community: "Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments." The CIA has been forced to take the blame for the misjudgments, errors, and outright lies fed to the American people about Iraq, leading the former head of counter-intelligence at the CIA, Vincent Cannistraro, to complain about "cooked intelligence" in high-level policy statements. In addition, as an act of political revenge, someone in the Bush administration outed one of the CIA's deep-cover assets, Valerie Plame Wilson, helping to cripple the US's ability to gather real intelligence about the events in the Middle East and possibly committing treason in the process.
- The platform accused the Clinton administration of engaging in stonewalling, evasion, deceit and cover-ups: "The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice." This site is stuffed with evidence of "evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity" by the Bush administration, from the secret Cheney energy task force, to criminal collusion with corporations such as Enron and Halliburton, to the administration's attempt to stonewall the 9/11 investigation, to the ongoing coverups surrounding the Iraq torture scandal.
- As a corollary to the previous item, the platform promised a new era of honor, purpose and accountability: "As idle indulgence gives way to a new Republican president in the coming new 'period of consequences,' the United States can again regain the hope it lost eight years ago. We can restore our country's sense of international purpose and national honor." Instead, we have seen three years of the administration's endless attempts to muzzle and stonewall investigations into 9/11. We have seen the White House hide its information about the Plame leak, though the leak was potentially treasonous, definitely criminal, and undoubtedly damaging to the US efforts to curb terrorism. The New York Times quotes one official as saying, "As far as I can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient truths." Watergate figure John Dean writes that the Bush administration is far more secretive and authoritarian than Nixon's, and is, in fact, "the most secretive presidency of my lifetime." The Bush administration has also presided over the creation of a series of American "gulags" and extralegal torture centers, where hundreds of innocent people are routinely tortured and abused.
- The platform asserted that the Clinton administration was sending soldiers on back-to-back deployments and jeopardizing retention rates and morale. It also criticized the administration for equipment shortages and soldiers' inadequate training: "When presidents fail to make hard choices, those who serve must make them instead. Soldiers must choose whether to stay with their families or to stay in the armed forces at all. Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness." With the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan draining the US military's personnel and materiel at a drastic rate, the military has had to use every method at its disposal for keeping troops from leaving after their tours of duty are up, including the issuance of controversial "stop-loss" orders preventing soldiers whose service is complete from leaving. Report after report indicates that troop morale has never been lower in modern US history. Critical weaponry and gear, including body armor, properly equipped vehicles, and even bullets, are in short supply and are often not issued to soldiers facing death in the field. Poorly trained soldiers, many reservists, are part of the problem in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
- The platform asserted that Republicans are opposed to reinstating the draft: "The Republican party created the all-volunteer force and opposes reinstitution of the draft, whether directly or through compulsory national service." While the draft has not yet been instituted, the Bush administration and the Pentagon has quietly taken the steps necessary to begin the draft, making it possible to begin involuntary conscription within weeks of official reinstatement.
- The platform criticized the Clinton administration's record on troops' health care and veterans' benefits: "When it comes to military health, the administration is not providing an adequate military health care system for active-duty service members and their families and for retired service members and their dependents. The nation is failing to fulfill its ethical, and legal health care obligations to those that are serving or have honorably served in the Armed Forces of the United States." Instead of taking care of the health needs of its veterans and its wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration has compiled a truly shameful record in its willingness to provide decent care for the military. Wounded troops were routinely billed for their meals in military hospitals before a media outcry ended the practice. While drastically raising defense spending, the administration has repeatedly made draconian cuts in veterans' benefits, including health care and benefits for families whose breadwinners were killed or disabled in action.
- The platform promised to build an international coalition to jointly deal with Saddam Hussein: "A new Republican administration will patiently rebuild an international coalition opposed to Saddam Hussein and committed to joint action." Instead, the US virtually went to war with Iraq alone except for Great Britain and a small "coalition of the willing," composed largely of countries whose support was strictly symbolic. Instead of building a coalition similar to that of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Bush has alienated and humiliated many of its NATO allies in the run-up to war. Former defense secretary Robert McNamara accuses the Bush administration of making the same mistakes that it made in Vietnam: "And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."
- The platform promised that Republicans would defend the First Amendment: "The First Amendment enshrines in our Constitution and guarantees indispensable democratic freedoms of speech, press, and association, and, the right to petition our government. The Republican party affirms that any regulation of the political process must not infringe upon the rights of the people to full participation in the political process." The Bush administration has routinely employed illegal "free-speech zones," exiling protesters into designated areas far from his campaign rallies and presidential appearances: "A favorite tactic of the Bush administration has been to herd protestors at presidential appearances into 'designated protest zones,' out of sight of [the president's] motorcade, and to arrest people who refuse to be moved," reported Fox News. The adminstration is the most hostile to the press of any in recent memory, and has repeatedly released government-made propaganda videos made to look like actual news reports, designed to be aired on news broadcasts to an unwitting public. Republican Ron Paul said, "We are moving in the direction of undermining the First Amendment."
- The platform criticized Vice President Al Gore for wanting America to act as a 'global social worker': "Vice President Gore's 'new security agenda' that adds disease, climate, and all the world's ethnic or religious conflicts to an undiminished set of existing American responsibilities. If there is some limit to candidate Gore's new agenda for America as global social worker, he has yet to define it." The Bush administration has perpetuated the same "errors" that the platform accused Gore of advocating, mostly in a strictly evangelical Christian manner that excludes members of other faiths.
- The platform promised to punish countries that sponsor terrorism: "[We] will isolate, pressure, and punish the state sponsors of terrorism." Instead, the Bush administration has, among other things, protected the Saudi regime against investigation into its involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and colluded with Pakistan, a prime supporter of international terrorism. It has also protected corporations like Halliburton when those corporations were found to have illegally done business with sponsors of terrorism such as Iran and North Korea.
- The platform criticized nation building: "A humanitarian intervention in Somalia was escalated thoughtlessly into nation-building at the cost of the lives of courageous Americans." The Bush administration has indulged in the worst excesses of nation building in the Middle East; in August 2003, the Boston Globe editorialized, "In the 2000 presidential debates, Bush said he would stop 'extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions.' Bush is now so obsessed with nation-building that he is blind to how killings of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers devalue Iraqis even as he claims to liberate them."
- The platform promised that medical privacy would be protected: "The revolution in information and medical technology has created concerns about who has access to personal data -- and how it might be used. Patients and their families should feel free to share all medical information with their doctor, but they will feel safe in doing so only if that information is protected." Instead, the administration has moved to implement new rules that, according to the Christian Science Monitor, "gives data-processing companies, insurers, doctors, hospitals, certain researchers, and others legal permission to share citizens' personal health information -- including genetic information -- without individuals' consent." The Department of Justice has illegally sought the names of women who had abortions. (This item was written almost a year before the Terry Schiavo debacle of March 2005.)
- The platform promised that Republicans would better protect Americans against bioterrorism: "The current administration has left our public health system inadequate to respond to the threats of emerging infectious diseases and the possibility of bioterrorism. We pledge to ensure the ability of the public health service to detect, track, and prevent infectious outbreaks, whether natural or provoked by those who hate America." Instead, the administration has seriously cut funding for bioterror protection measures for the general populace. And when the country was paralyzed by the 2001 anthrax attacks, the administration impeded the FBI's investigation into the identity of the anthrax sender, to the point where, in February 2004, the FBI acknowledged that it had all but given up on ever finding out who launched the attacks. The question of why Bush, Cheney, and other high-level administration officials began taking the anti-anthrax drug Cipro nearly a month before the attacks began has never been answered.
- The platform promised to make environmental conservation a priority: "Today's Republican party stands in the proud tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, the first president to stress the importance of environmental conservation. We approach both the national and individual stewardship of natural resources in the spirit of his maxim: 'The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.'" The Bush administration's record on environmental issues has been a disaster. Writes the League of Conservation Voters, "On issue after issue -- public lands, clean air and water, toxics, energy, wildlife conservation -- the Bush administration, at the behest of its corporate allies, has worked systematically to dismantle and subvert fundamental environmental protections while obscuring their actions with 'green' rhetoric. The results have been nothing short of disastrous for America 's natural resources and have made unseating President Bush LCV 's primary goal for 2004."
- The platform vowed that the Bush administration would tighten 'lax' immigration policies: "The administration's lax enforcement of our borders has led to tragic exploitation of smuggled immigrants, and untold suffering, at the hands of law-breakers." John Kerry observed in January 2004 that "[Bush's immigration program] rewards business over immigrants by providing them with a permanent pool of disenfranchised temporary workers who could easily be exploited." Even Republicans such as congressman Virgil Goode have said, "I'm not for allowing illegals to stay in this country. I think they should have to go back...and get in line...and apply for a guest worker position."
- June 2: Journalist David Corn savages Bush over comments he makes touting the "new Afghanistan," comments that Corn says are outlandish. While touting the new interim Iraqi government, Bush lauds Afghanistan, saying that the Afghani people have a "different attitude" and a new "sparkle in their eyes." Corn asks what the Afghanis have to sparkle about. He notes that US financial aid to Afghanistan has been meager at best, lower per capita than its contributions to Kosovo, Palestine, Haiti, and Rwanda, according to the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. Afghanistan's opium production is skyrocketing, and poppy harvests are expected to account for nearly half of the country's gross domestic product. Residents in poppy-rich Wardak province complain that the US refuses to give them the wherewithal to grow anything else except opium poppies: "The government has taken away our guns, and now it is destroying our livelihoods. We have agreed to turn in our weapons in the name of peace, but we don't have enough water to grow any other crops but poppy. Why are they bringing this cruelty upon us?" Taliban attacks in Afghanistan are up sharply, resulting in the targeting of aid workers and the forced removal of organizations there to help the populace. The head of the National Solidarity Programme says, "This is a very bad, very desperate situation. ...All these areas are badly deprived, with poor people lacking basic facilities. But I am afraid the security simply is not there for us to continue with our work. It is too dangerous."
- Barbara Stapleton of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, which represents 90 aid agencies in Afghanistan, says, "We are very concerned about security and deterioration of the situation. Impunity rules in the country. It's not just the NGO community, but the Afghan people at large who are exposed to these levels of insecurity." Women's rights are still being largely denied: Amnesty International reports that "two years after the ending of the Taliban regime, the international community and the Afghan transitional administration, led by President Karzai, have proved unable to protect women. The risk of rape and sexual violence by members of armed factions and former combatants is still high. Forced marriages, particularly of girl children, and violence against women in the family are widespread in many areas." After the war, a number of girls' schools opened (or reopened) throughout the country. But since then, Islamic extremists have used intimidation to shut many of them down. Corn summarizes: "Drugs, warlordism, a surge in fundamentalism -- Afghanistan remains an unfinished, daunting and complicated challenge, as American GIs continue to lose their lives fighting the Taliban remnants and searching for Osama bin Laden. But Bush made it seem all is swell. What is it about him? Last fall, he declared his administration had 'put the Taliban out of business forever.' At that time, Taliban attacks were increasing, and US troops were being killed in pursuit of the Taliban. Now Bush tells us things are going fine in Afghanistan because there is a gleam in the eyes of Afghans. And, no doubt, they are all humming, 'The Future's So Bright I Got To Wear Shades.'" (The Nation)
