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 Two
- June 8: A Pentagon plan to withdraw two Army divisions from Germany and reshuffle US military forces around Europe marks the biggest rearrangement of US forces around the world since the beginning of the Cold War. Pentagon officials insist that while the aim is to afford maximum flexibility in sending forces to the Middle East, Central Asia, and other potential battlegrounds, it has nothing to do with the fighting in Iraq. Some experts and allied officials worry that the shift will reduce Washington's influence in NATO and weaken its diplomatic links with its allies, all at a time of rising anti-American sentiment around the world. (American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria)
- June 8: US administrator Paul Bremer bans Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr from running for office in Iraq's upcoming democratic elections. Bremer signs an order banning members of illegal militia groups for holding public office for three years after leaving their organizations. It is likely that Sadr would have won a seat in Iraq's parliament were he allowed to run; polls show that al-Sadr is far more popular than the appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi, and almost as popular as Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani. Welcoming Bremer's decree, Allawi says, "While recent news has associated the word 'militia' with the sort of violence orchestrated by Moqtada al-Sadr, in fact most of these groups and individuals were part of the resistance against Saddam Hussein's regime. To reward former resistance fighters for their service, opportunities have been created for them to join state security services or lay down their arms and enter civilian life." All of the groups have agreed to register their men and have the membership lists independently monitored. US officials hope that about 90% of the militiamen will have been demobilized or integrated into new security forces by the January elections. Allawi and his rival Ahmad Chalabi say they disbanded their own militias some time ago. It appears more and more likely that al-Sadr is more interested in building a political base than taking over cities with his Mahdi Army; a recent invitation to meet with al-Sistani, who previously has distanced himself from al-Sadr, tends to bear this out. "He was behaving in a way that the majority of Iraqis sympathize with," says Hamid Fadhel Hassan, a political science professor at Baghdad University. "His leadership is not from appointment by the Americans, it is from the people." Al-Sadr, Hassan saus, has become the man willing to stand up to the Americans while, in a lot of Iraqis' eyes, other leaders have been co-opted as puppets. (Guardian, Knight-Ridder/Indymedia)
Justice Department memo legitimizing torture hits the press
- June 8: The Washington Post reveals an August 2002 memo from the Department of Justice to the White House, saying that torture under certain circumstances can be construed as legal and legitimate. The memo, sent by the Justice Department's office of legal council in response to a Central Intelligence Agency request for legal guidance and addressed to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, said international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in the war on terrorism. It said torturing a suspect in captivity "may be justified" if the US government employee applying the torture "would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaeda terrorist network." Arguments centring on "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later, said the 50-page document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Baybee. The memo served as basis for a March 2003 classified report Pentagon lawyers prepared for Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained that they were not getting enough information from prisoners. The Wall Street Journal revealed the 2003 report on June 7. The memo also argued moderate or fleeting pain did not necessarily constitute torture, which "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." US Army manuals on interrogations are more restrictive, banning such practices as pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food deprivation.
- "It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke," says Human Rights Watch official Tom Malinowski, referring to the prison outside Baghdad where US military guards abused Iraqi prisoners. "It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogations," he adds.
- Meanwhile, a Pentagon spokesman claims torture was not approved for use on war on terror prisoners. "The idea that there is some trap door to permit torture in these procedures is just false, and it's demonstrably false," says Larry DiRita. "The procedures are what they are. We've briefed them in great detail and there is no torture involved." DiRita refuses to comment on whether lawyers argued in a draft report reviewed by the Wall Street Journal that Bush has authority as commander-in-chief to approve almost any physical or psychological interrogation action, including torture. The lawyers also argued that government agents who might use torture at the president's direction could not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. DiRita says the working group that reviewed interrogation procedures at Guantanamo considered the broadest possible range of options, including techniques that went beyond anything the commanders had requested, but, "There is no procedure approved for Guantanamo that allows for the use of torture. Period. Of the procedures that were approved for Guantanamo, the procedures that were approved by the secretary of defense, not a single one of those procedures could be alleged to be considered to be torture." The approved procedures are classified, although DiRita says members of Congress have been briefed extensively on them. (AFP/Daily Times)
- June 8: Attorney General Ashcroft refuses to turn over or even discuss memoranda that offer justification for torturing suspected terrorists. The memos were demanded by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee; some of those senators say that Ashcroft is risking being found in contempt of Congress, a federal crime. Committee Democrats ask Ashcroft about reports in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times that the Justice Department advised the White House in 2002 and 2003 that Bush is not bound by US and international laws prohibiting torture. Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein says the memo on interrogation techniques permissible for the CIA to use on suspected al-Qaeda operatives "appears to be an effort to redefine torture and narrow prohibitions against it." The document was prepared by the Justice Department's office of legal counsel for the CIA and addressed to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. (Gonzalez's own memo on the subject dismisses Geneva Convention restrictions as "quaint.") A concurring Pentagon report, which says Bush is not bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who torture prisoners at Bush's direction cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department, was compiled by a group appointed by Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes, who has since been nominated by Bush for the federal appellate bench. Ashcroft says he won't reveal advice he gave to Bush or discuss it with Congress. "The president has a right to hear advice from his attorney general, in confidence," says Ashcroft, who also refuses to answer whether he personally believes torture can be justified under certain circumstances, but denies that Bush has authorized torture as an interrogation technique.
- Democratic senator Joseph Biden challenges Ashcroft to say whether he was invoking executive privilege in refusing to give Congress the Justice Department memos. Ashcroft replies that he is not invoking executive privilege. "You might be in contempt of Congress, then," replies Biden. "You have to have a reason. You better come up with a good rationale." However, it is unlikely that committee chairman Orrin Hatch, a Republican, will issue such a citation. Democrat Richard Durbin says that Ashcroft must cite a federal statute to justify not sharing the requested information; Ashcroft replies that his refusal is "protected by the doctrine of separation of powers in the Constitution." "You are not citing a law," Durbin retorts. Ashcroft refuses to even confirm if some of the memos are classified or not. According to a Post report, a Justice Department memo says that government lawyers told the White House in August 2002 that torturing captured al-Qaeda members abroad may be justified in the war on terrorism. Democrat Edward Kennedy shows Ashcroft photos that document some of the abuses in Abu Ghraib and says, "This is what directly results when you have that kind of memoranda out there." Instead of discussing the issue, Ashcroft challenges the appropriateness of the questioning, and by inference, the patriotism of the Democrats questioning him: "We are at war," he says. "And for us to begin to discuss all the legal ramifications of the war is not in our best interest, and it has never been in times of war." Democratic senator Patrick Leahy retorts that Ashcroft's "practices seem to be built on secret detentions and overblown press releases." Leahy continues, "Hiding these documents from view is the sign of a cover-up, not cooperation. It is troubling to see Attorney General John Ashcroft take the Bush administration into cover-up mode as the Senate tries to get to the bottom of the prison abuse scandal."
- Writer Molly Ivins observes, "The damage is incalculable. When America puts out its annual report on human rights abuses, we will be a laughingstock." She adds, only partially in jest, "I suggest a special commission headed by Sen. John McCain to dig out everyone responsible, root and branch. If the lawyers don't cooperate, perhaps we should try stripping them, anally raping them and dunking their heads under water until they think they're drowning, and see if that helps." (Bloomberg, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Working For Change)
- June 8: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert attaches a rider to a huge jobs bill that provides protection for religious leaders who want to participate in politics without risking the tax-exempt status of their churches or religious organizations. (The bill itself provides large tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations in return for repealing subsidies that have triggered European sanctions on US farmers and manufacturers.) Conservative Christian groups have been pushing for such legislation for years, while civil liberties organizations and religious minorities have opposed it. A spokeswoman for the House Ways and Means Committee, Christin Tinsworth, says the provision was inserted in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 at the request of Hastert because "this is an election year and there are not many bills that will become law this year." The provision's conservative Christian backers, including the Southern Baptist Convention, say selective enforcement by the IRS has had a "chilling effect" on evangelical churches. But the Reverend Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, calls the latest legislation a "back-door attempt" to revise tax laws to help President Bush's reelection campaign.
- Last week, Americans United made public an e-mail from the Bush-Cheney campaign seeking to identify 1,600 "friendly congregations" in Pennsylvania. Campaign officials acknowledged that similar efforts are underway across the country as Bush seeks to take advantage of what political strategists call the religion gap: Polls show that frequent churchgoers overwhelmingly vote Republican. Under current tax rules, clergy members are allowed to speak out on political issues and to lead nonpartisan voter registration drives. But the IRS can revoke a congregation's 501(c)3 tax-exempt status if it endorses candidates or engages in partisan politics. Hastert's provision, entitled "safe Harbor for Churches," would allow clergy members to engage in political activity, including endorsing candidates, as long as they make clear that they are acting as private citizens and not on behalf of their religious organizations. They could not make partisan political statements in church publications, at church functions or using church funds. The provision also would allow clergy members to commit three "unintentional violations" of the tax rules on political activity each year without risking the loss of tax-exempt status. The bill does not go as far as a proposal made two years ago by Republican representative Walter Jones, which would have explicitly allowed religious groups to endorse candidates and spend money to help elect them. (Washington Post)
- June 8: Attorney General John Ashcroft is hammered by Democratic senator Patrick Leahy during Ashcroft's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In rebuking Ashcroft over the performance of the Justice Department, Leahy says, "There are two words that succinctly sum up the Justice Department's accountability and its cooperation with congressional oversight on your watch. Those two words are 'sparse' and 'grudging.' Even those of us who have served through several presidents cannot recall a worse performance record when it comes to responsiveness."
- Leahy lays out the specifics: "Just days ago we learned of Justice Department involvement in devising legal arguments to minimize our obligations under such US laws and international agreements as the convention on torture. Yet a letter I wrote to you last November, well before most of these abuses came to light, went unanswered for months, and when we are lucky enough to get responses, the premium is on unresponsiveness. Few of the answers we get are worth much more than the paper they are printed on. We often learn more about what's really happening in the Justice Department in the press than we do from you. In the 1,000 days since the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, we have learned little from our Justice Department. We know this: the Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down because the prosecution refuses to let the defense interview witnesses in U.S. custody; a German court acquitted two 9/11 co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. government refused to provide evidence for the cases; three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks did not have such knowledge; the department retracted your statement, and then you had to apologize to the court for violating a gag order in the case; the man you claimed was about to explode a 'dirty bomb' in the U.S. had no such intention or capability, and because he has been held for two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted; US citizens with no connection to terrorism have been imprisoned as material witnesses for chunks of time -- with an 'Oops, I'm sorry' when a '100 percent positive' fingerprint match turns out to be 100 percent wrong; noncitizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without charges and, in some cases, physically abused; interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our nation's reputation and likely given strength and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies; your department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria who was tortured; documents have been classified, unclassified, and reclassified to score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons; statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the department's success in fighting terrorism; and the threat of another attack on US soil remains high, although how high depends on who, in the administration, is talking and what audience they are addressing. We need checks and balances. There is much that has gone wrong that your administration stubbornly refuses to admit. For this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability."
- When Ashcroft refuses to provide the committee with the documents providing his department's arguments in favor of torture, even though the documents are available on the Internet, Leahy responds: "If government agencies have rationalized the use of torture, that would seem to go to the heart of what we are investigating. It is inexcusable to read about such memos in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times and then to have them denied to the Senate by the executive branch. Hiding these documents from view is the sign of a cover-up, not of cooperation." (St. Petersburg Times)
- June 8: Ed Kast, Florida's chief of elections, resigns after enduring public outrage over his call for a new voter purge similar to that which illegally struck thousands of voters from the rolls before the 2000 presidential elections. "When the key election official for the state resigns with just five months to go, it's a sign of serious disarray and instability," says Sharon Lettman, People for the American Way's Florida state director for its voter education and advocacy program. "Just when county supervisors are looking for clear leadership, here comes another curve ball." (Miami Herald [cached Google copy])
- June 9: Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, says he understood that some of the information being collected from tortured and abused prisoners was at the request of "White House staff," he says. Jordan says that a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues." Army investigator Major General Antonio Taguba asked Jordan whether it concerned "sensitive issues," and Jordan said, "Very sensitive. Yes, sir," according to the account provided by a government official. The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military's scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. During the period in question, the last quarter of 2003, virtually every senior military officer in Iraq, as well as at the Pentagon, was intensely interested in determining who was behind the rising insurgency in Iraq and using that information to squelch it. But no reference has previously been made in the publicly available Abu Ghraib investigative documents to a special interest by White House staff. Jordan has been described by other military personnel as playing a key role at Abu Ghraib in overseeing interrogations; they have described him as being deeply involved in a November 24, 2003 incident when a detainee was confronted in his cell by snarling military dogs, which Taguba deemed a violation of the prisoner's rights. In a March 9 report on the abuse scandal, Taguba listed Jordan as one of four military intelligence officers he suspected were "directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." He also said Jordan had "failed to ensure that soldiers under his direct control were properly trained" in interrogation techniques and were aware of Geneva Conventions human rights protections for detainees.
- Colonel Thomas Pappas, the chief military intelligence officer at the prison, said in his statement to Taguba that Jordan was working on a special project for the office of Major General Barbara Fast, the top US intelligence official in Iraq. Pappas also described Jordan as "a loner who freelances between military intelligence and military police" officers at the prison. Asserting that Jordan repeatedly took part in searches of detainee cells without notifying military police commanders -- an activity that fell outside the customary duties of an intelligence officer -- he also told Taguba that "I must admit I failed in not reining him in." Jordan disputes Pappas's statement, saying that Pappas was actually in charge and describing himself as merely a "liason" between Fast and those collecting intelligence at the prison. "My direction when it came to the [center]...was to set up a structure [of] target folders on individuals," he said, evidently referring to specific detainees. He said he was aware of the "rules of engagement" approved by commanders for interrogations, which have been a topic of controversy. But the rules changed several times, and he did not clarify which set he relied on. Pappas, he said, was the officer who approved lengthy sleep deprivation or keeping detainees in isolation for more than 30 days. He also said that an "OGA" team -- or Other Government Agency, a euphemism for the CIA -- known as Task Force 121 had caused problems by bringing detainees they had captured to Abu Ghraib and essentially dumping them without conducting any follow-up. "It's a very cowboy kind of affair," he said of Task Force 121. (Washington Post)
Padilla case disintegrates
- June 9: Fearing an unfavorable ruling from the Supreme Court, Justice Department officials are scrambling to construct a conventional criminal case against accused terrorist Jose Padilla. DOJ officials intend to charge Padilla with providing "material support" to al-Qaeda. Most of the evidence consists of a "new applicant form" apparently completed by Padilla to allow him to attend a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan in 2000. None of Padilla's previously obtained "confessions" will be admissible in court, Justice officials admit. They also admit that their previous allegations that Padilla was planning on constructing and setting off a radioactive "dirty bomb" are wrong, and that no such allegations can be made in court. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in Padilla's case and two other related cases that the government may not indefinitely detain suspects without due process. "They are 99 percent certain they are going to lose," says a conservative lawyer close to the case. "It's a very sobering realization." The recently released Pentagon report, made public by Deputy Attorney General James Comey and intended to bolster the DOJ's case against Padilla, may have backfired due to material in the report that show the initial charges against Padilla are groundless.
- Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write: "The alleged dirty-bomb plot -- with its stark imagery of radioactive terror -- was central to the entire rationale the Bush administration used from the outset when it took the extraordinary step of declaring Padilla an 'enemy combatant' who could be detained indefinitely in a military brig without access to a lawyer. 'In apprehending [Padilla] as he sought entry into the United States, we have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive "dirty bomb",' Attorney General John Ashcorft stated at a press conference from Moscow on June 9, 2002, announcing Padilla's detention. Two months later, in a declaration submitted in federal court to justify the detention, Pentagon special adviser Michael Mobbs stated that intelligence reports had established that Padilla and an unidentified associate had discussed with [captured al-Qaeda terrorist] Abu Zubaydah a plan 'to build and detonate a radiological dispersal device (also known as a "dirty bomb") within the United States, possibly in Washington D.C." The Mobbs declaration, conceded, however that the so-called dirty-bomb plan of Padilla 'was still in the initial planning stages, and there was no specific time set for the operation to occur.'" But the report contains information, never shared with the courts reviewing Padilla's case, that shows while Padilla did indeed propose such a mission, Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda contacts refused to countenance the plan. Padilla was sent to Pakistan in March 2002 to discuss his proposal with al-Qaeda operational planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who also vetoed the plan and instead suggested the conventional bombing of an apartment building. Padilla says he never swore an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda, and after training in a terror camp, had second thoughts and wanted to go home. According to the Pentagon report, "He says he and his accomplice proposed the dirty-bomb plot only as a way to get out of Pakistan and avoid combat in Afghanistan, yet save face with Abu Zubaydah." When he flew back to the United States in May 2002, Padilla has told interrogators he also had "no intention of carrying out the apartment-building operation," the report states. "Their reasons for labeling him an enemy combatant keep changing," says Donna Newman, Padilla's lawyer, about the new disclosures in the Pentagon report. The new information about the purposes of Padilla's mission to the United States -- apparently derived from interrogations with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- suggests that the Mobbs declaration may well have been "misleading," she adds. Newman says she and Padilla welcome a conventional court case. (MSNBC/Newsweek)
- June 9: Tampa International Airport finally verifies that, two days after the 9/11 attacks, a jet carrying three Saudis, an FBI agent, and a police officer left the airport and flew to Lexington, Kentucky. The flight, which carried one of the Saudi royal family, was one of a number of flights which helped ferry over 200 Saudis, some of whom were suspected terrorists, out of the country immediately after the bombings and before they could be questioned by the FBI. Until TIA releases its verification, the US government has consistently denied that this and other such flights ever took place. Even the 9/11 commission, which said it knew of six flights with 142 Saudis that left the US with government approval after the attacks, did not report any knowledge of the Tampa flight. Retired police officer Dan Grossi, who was on the flight, refuses to talk about it: "I'm over it," he says. "The White House, the FAA and the FBI all said the flight didn't happen. Those are three agencies that are way over my head, and that's why I'm done talking about it." (St. Petersburg Times)
- June 10: John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, was stripped naked and tied to a stretcher during interrogation after the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" when questioning him. Rumsfeld's legal counsel instructed the officers to push the limits when questioning Lindh, captured in Afghanistan with Taliban and al-Qa'ida forces in late 2001. The treatment of Lindh appears to foreshadow the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The details of Lindh's interrogation confirm claims made by his lawyer, Tony West, that when he was captured by Northern Alliance forces and handed to CIA operatives near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, he asked for a lawyer. Not only was he refused a lawyer and not advised of his rights, but his interrogators were told to get tough to obtain "actionable" intelligence in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.
- Documents show that when an US Army intelligence officer started to question Lindh he was given instructions that the "secretary of Defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and asked whatever he wanted." The documents show that in the early stages, Lindh's responses were cabled to Washington every hour. Though Lindh initially pleaded not guilty, he later admitted reduced charges and was sentenced to 20 years. He and his lawyers also agreed to drop claims that he had been tortured by US personnel. The documents are the latest evidence to emerge revealing the efforts of the Bush administration to sidestep international laws and treaties when dealing with prisoners after the 9/11 attacks. Critics say they show the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a deliberately pursued and systematic approach for dealing with prisoners without affording them their rights contained within the Geneva Conventions. A memo this week revealed that in March 2003, administration lawyers concluded that Bush had the authority under executive privilege to order any sort of torture or interrogation of prisoners. Yesterday, Congresswoman Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the views the memo contained were "antithetical to American laws and values." She added: "This memo argues that the President is not bound by criminal laws in the context of his role as Commander-in-Chief during war; that the President may be above the law. This is a concept of executive authority that was discarded at Runnymede in the 13th century and has absolutely no place in our constitutional system." Despite the international outcry over the prisoner abuse cases, US forces will continue to be responsible for running two Iraqi prisons where "security detainees" are held, after the handover to a "sovereign" Iraqi government. A senior British official says that the US military would continue to be responsible for up to 2,000 "fairly hard-core" prisoners at Abu Ghraib and at another jail in southern Iraq. The exact number of such prisoners, deemed a threat to Iraqi safety and security, is not known because although the Americans let many inmates out of Abu Ghraib, many others have been arrested. Britain is pressing for Iraqis to help run the top-security prisons, but details are still to be worked out. (Independent/Axis of Logic)
- June 10: Despite rosy reports from the Bush administration, the head of armed forces training says that misguided US training of Iraqi police has contributed to the country's instability and has delayed getting enough qualified Iraqis on the streets to ease the burden on American forces. "It hasn't gone well. We've had almost one year of no progress," says Army Major General Paul Eaton, who departs Iraq next week after spending a year assembling and training the country's 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops. "We've had the wrong training focus -- on individual cops rather than their leaders," Eaton admits. A strong, reliable Iraqi police force is critical to any pullout of the 138,000 US troops currently deployed in Iraq. One of the rosy, and false, reports recently came from Paul Wolfowitz, deputy US defense secretary, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi army will begin assuming some security duties over the next few months. Iraqi forces could soon "take local control of the cities," with US troops moving into a supporting role, Wolfowitz wrote. It now appears that Wolfowitz's predictions are based in fantasy. In April, Iraqi security forces failed their first big test, when about half the police and military forces deserted during rebel uprisings in Fallujah, Najaf, Karbala and elsewhere. Eaton says soldiers of Iraq's 2nd Brigade simply ignored US orders to fight their countrymen. "They basically quit," Eaton says. "They told us, 'We're an army for external defense and you want us to go to Fallujah?' That was a personal mistake on my part." When the uprising broke out in Fallujah, Eaton says he saw a chance to begin transferring the security mission to Iraqi forces. He agreed to allow the Iraqi army's just-created 2nd Brigade to take on guerrillas that had seized control of the restive western city. "We were premature," says Eaton. "I could have stopped it. I had a bad feeling and I should have acted on it."
- The lesson learned was that the soldiers needed an Iraqi command hierarchy. Eaton said the soldiers may have battled Fallujah's Sunni Muslim rebels if Iraqi leaders were spurring them on. Wolfowitz also cited the importance of Iraqi commanders and said the April desertions shouldn't have been a surprise because of the Iraqis' shortcomings in training, equipment and leadership. "No one had any expectation that Iraqi security forces would be ready this past April to stand up to the kind of fighting they encountered in Fallujah and in the Najaf-Karbala region," Wolfowitz wrote. One US military official says Wolfowitz is partly to blame for those shortcomings. Some $257 million in spending authority was held up by Wolfowitz's office for two months, delaying construction of Iraqi army barracks for four brigades awaiting training, the official says. The desertions could have happened in any country, says Iraqi Army Brigadier General Khaled al-Sattar, the commander of the army brigade training at the Taji camp. "The soldiers didn't want to fight their own countrymen. Would you?" al-Sattar says. "Once there are division commanders and an Iraqi defense minister, the soldiers will start obeying orders because the orders come from an Iraqi leadership." US leaders, too, arrived in Iraq unprepared for the type of insurgency that began to flare last summer, Eaton adds. "We thought we were going to be nice and comfortable in a benign environment and rebuild this country," he says. "Not everyone wanted to get Iraqi leaders in fast. I'd have been more aggressive early." Brigadier General James Schwitters, who has an Army special operations background, will take over the Iraqi army training mission from Eaton. British Brigadier General Andrew Mackay will head police training. By January, the Iraqi army is expected to count 35,000 soldiers, with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps expected to number 40,000 by fall, according to Wolfowitz. There are now close to 90,000 Iraqi police officers and tens of thousands more Ministry of Interior forces; according to Wolfowitz, many have little or no modern police training. (AP/Military.com)
- June 10: Despite the interest of emergency officials, the Bush administration continues to withhold the distribution of a US Army antidote for chemical attacks from US communities, an antidote widely stockpiled for civilian use in other countries. The antidote, called Reactive Skin Decontamination Lotion, was developed in Canada years ago, was approved by the FDA in 2003, and is sold in other NATO countries for neutralizing the effects of sarin, mustard gas, and other chemical toxins. The companies that make it aren't permitted to sell it or even advertise it to state and local governments in the United States. "Right now they have no product to decontaminate people other than soap and water," says Phil O'Dell, president of O'Dell Engineering, a Canadian-based company licensed by the Canadian government to sell the lotion. "There is only one FDA-approved. It's the RSDL. These first responders correctly have been trying to buy RSDL since FDA approval." The Army insists that it will not make RSDL available until it can complete tests proving its compatibility with bleach. The Army says it may be two years or more before it releases RSDL for use in the public sector. (USA Today)
- June 10: Cristina Beato, the Bush nominee for assistant secretary of health (a position that would put her in charge of the US Public Health Service), may not be considered for the post much longer due to questions about her resume and credentials. Among other achievements, Beato, a physician, says she served as medical attache at the US Embassy in Turkey, received a master's degree in public health from the University of Wisconsin, "established" an occupational health clinic at the University of New Mexico and published a scientific paper on inert gases. Several institutions Beato lists on her resume say they have never heard of her, and the University of New Mexico accuses her of "puffing" her involvement in the health clinic, including her claim of being the clinic's medical director. Former colleagues in Albuquerque are surprised by her assertions that she was "one of the principal leaders who revolutionized medical education in American universities by implementing the Problem Based Learning curriculum." The curriculum was actually developed while Beato was in medical school. "That's an exaggeration," says Gary Rosenberg, chairman of the neurology department at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, the university's hospital system. She also claims to have completed course work for a master's degree in occupational medicine at the University of Wisconsin; that institution does not offer such a degree. She has played down her history at the UNM hospital, where, as chief medical officer, fellow physicians and patient advocates have said that Beato worked to keep profits up and expenditures down at the expense of patients. Beato was suid for refusing to treat a comatose teenaged girl and her premature infant; the case was settled out of court. In another case, Beato refused critical dialysis treatment for an indigent patient, Rafael Paz, and threatened to "call the police" if Paz and the neighbor who brought him in, lawyer Lauro Silva, did not leave. After Silva threatened a lawsuit, Beato agreed to give Paz a single dialysis treatment if Silva would sign a form agreeing never to bring Paz to the hospital again. Paz died weeks later. Beato's nomination was advocated by Republican senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico; Beato has contributed over $1,200 to Domenici and Republican campaign committees. Beato is currently serving as acting assistant secretary of health. (Washington Post)
- June 10: Slate's Fred Kaplan uses recently declassified government documents to prove that Ronald Reagan was a key figure in the rise of Osama bin Laden as a major terrorist figure. The story centers on the December 1986 efforts by the USSR's Mikhail Gorbachev to implement an exit strategy for Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Gorbachev informed Afghanistan's puppet ruler, Najibullah, that the Soviets would pull out within 18 months, leaving him to rule Afghanistan as best he could without Soviet military support. In February 1987, Gorbachev announced a plan to coordinate the Soviet withdrawal with the reduction and eventual cessation of American aid to the rebel mujahaddin. Gorbachev was stunned to learn that the Reagan administration intended to oppose the deal in order to put the USSR in a bad light. Without Reagan's cooperation, the Gorbachev exit plan would not work. Instead, Gorbachev allowed the fighting in Afghanistan to escalate. One key battle, the Battle of Jaji, took place in April 1987, between Soviet troops and a compound of Islamic fighters, many Arab volunteers, led by Osama bin Laden. Historian Steve Call writes in his book Ghost Wars: "...the battle of Jaji marked the birth of Osama bin Laden's public reputation as a warrior among Arab jihadists. ...After Jaji he began a media campaign designed to publicize the brave fight waged by Arab volunteers who stood their ground against a superpower. In interviews and speeches...bin Laden sought to recruit new fighters to his cause and to chronicle his own role as a military leader. He also began to expound on expansive new goals for the jihad." Had Reagan been willing to strike a deal, the battle of Jaji would never have happened, and bin Laden's reputation would not have been made.
- Kaplan writes, "Reagan can't be blamed for ignoring the threat of Osama bin Laden. Not for another few years would any analyst see bin Laden as a significant player in global terrorism; not till the mid-1990s would his organization, al-Qaeda, emerge as a significant force. However, Reagan -- and those around him -- can be blamed for ignoring the rise of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and for failing to see Gorbachev's offer to withdraw as an opportunity to clamp the danger. Certainly, the danger was, or should have been, clear. Only a few years had passed since the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in Iran -- the shah toppled, the US Embassy employees held hostage, the country turned over to the mullahs, the region suddenly destabilized. Reagan beat Jimmy Carter so decisively in the 1980 election in part because of the hostage crisis. Gorbachev had accepted that Afghanistan would become an Islamic country. But he assumed that Reagan, of all people, would have an interest in keeping it from becoming militantly, hostilely, Islamist. ...Ten years earlier, had Reagan taken Gorbachev's deal, Afghanistan probably still wouldn't have emerged as the 'friendly, neutral country' of Gorby's dreams. Yet it might have been a neutral enough country to preclude a Taliban takeover. And if the Russian-Afghan war had ended earlier -- if Reagan had embraced Gorbachev on the withdrawal, as he did that same autumn on the massive cutback of nuclear weapons -- Osama bin Laden today might not even be a footnote in history." (Slate)
- June 11: The use of dogs to terrorize prisoners at Abu Ghraib was authorized by the highest level of military intelligence personnel at the prison, according to sworn testimony from the dog handlers. A military intelligence interrogator also tells investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs. The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a US Army general to be "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses." Bush and top Pentagon officials have said the criminal abuse at Abu Ghraib was confined to a small group of rogue military police soldiers who stripped detainees naked, beat them and photographed them in humiliating sexual poses. An Army investigation into the abuse condemned the MPs for those practices, but also included the use of unmuzzled dogs to frighten detainees among the "intentional abuse." The military intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib told investigators that the use of unmuzzled dogs in interrogation sessions was recommended by a two-star general and that it was "okay."
- Sergeants Michael Smith and Santos Cardona, Army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib, told investigators that military intelligence personnel requested that they bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites multiple times to assist in questioning detainees in December and January. Colonel Thomas Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, told both soldiers that the use of dogs in interrogations had been approved, according to the statements. "I have talked to Col. Papus [sic] and he said it was good to go," Smith told an investigator on January 23. The Army previously has said that the commanding general of U.S. troops in Iraq -- Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez -- would have had to approve the use of dogs.
- Human rights experts say the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib violates longstanding tenets regulating the treatment of prisoners and civilians under the control of an occupying force, including the Army's field manual, which prohibits "acts of violence or intimidation" by American soldiers. "Using dogs to frighten and intimidate prisoners is a violation of the Geneva Convention," says Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, an international organization based in New York. "It's a violation of US policy as stated in the Army field manual, and it's a violation of the prohibition against cruel treatment."
- The dog teams at Abu Ghraib were part of a security detail that also searched for weapons, explosives and contraband. The general in charge of military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, said the dog teams were under the control of military intelligence but had no training or experience in helping with interrogations. Smith says military intelligence personnel asked him to instill fear in detainees. He says that he would bring his dog to the tier specifically to scare prisoners after they were pulled out of their cells. At the behest of interrogators, he says, in some cases he would bring the barking dog to within six inches of the prisoners. "Is using the dog in this manner an allowable tool by the MI interrogators?" an investigator asks Smith. "Yes," he replies.
- Navy dog handler William Kimbro recalls that he was summoned to a cell block to have his dog search for drugs and that a soldier told a detainee that, "if the detainee did not provide the information the guy was asking about, then he would have me let...my dog go on him." Kimbro was upset that interrogators had tried to use his dog as an interrogation tool. "I was leaving because this is not what my dog is trained for," Kimbro says. "We do not use our dogs for interrogation purposes." Kimbro was singled out for praise in Major General Antonio Taguba's report about abuse at the prison for refusing "to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI personnel at Abu Ghraib."
- Smith and Cardona say they complied with the MI requests because they believed the tactics had been approved by Pappas, the military intelligence officer in charge of the prison. They told investigators that they spent time on the cellblocks, allowing their dogs to bark at the detainees. They said a non-commissioned officer from military intelligence approached them in mid-December. "He asked us if we could use our dogs for interrogation purposes," Cardona says. "They were trying to get it cleared. We went outside and saw Colonel Pappas. He told us MI wanted to use the dogs for interrogations and he told us that they had received permission to use dogs in an interview." Smith recalls the same conversation, saying he spoke with Pappas in the parking lot the night after Saddam Hussein was captured, December 14. He said he was told that the use of the dogs was permitted. Later that night, the two dog handlers took their dogs to an interrogation booth holding a detainee. Interrogators told them the dogs did not need to be muzzled, they say. "When we got to the room the detainee was sitting in the doorway, with his feet in the doorway and the door was open," Smith says. "My dog and Sgt. Cardona's dog were both barking at the detainee and we never got closer than 18 inches. Neither dog had a muzzle on."
- Also in mid-December, the dog handlers say they were asked by one of the MPs, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, for help in dealing with an uncooperative detainee. Part of what followed was captured in photographs that have come to define the abuse at Abu Ghraib: A naked prisoner was up against a wall, two dogs squaring off against him. The detainee, identified in the documents as Ballendia Sadawi Mohammed, said he was suddenly snatched from his bed in cell No. 5 one night and sent into the hallway handcuffed. "They sent the dogs toward me. I was scared," Mohammed told investigators. "The first dog bit my leg and injured me there and this was bad luck. The bite from the first dog caused me to have 12 stitches from the doctor of my left leg as a result I lost a lot of blood." Specialist Sabrina Harman, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, said she saw the incident and said the detainee was bitten after he tried to run from the dog and was cornered. Cardona, whose dog apparently bit the detainee twice, once on each leg, justified letting his dog go to the end of its leash because he believed the detainee was fighting with Specialist Charles Graner. Military investigative records show that Frederick and Graner were key participants in the abuse. Harman, who said she saw two other inmates with dog bites around late December, also has been charged.
- In early January, Cardona says, he used his dog during an interrogation at the "Wood" facility at Abu Ghraib, a collection of wooden interrogation booths set up behind the prison. Cardona said a non-commissioned military intelligence officer asked him to bring his dog into a booth and make it bark to scare the prisoner. "I asked him if he wanted Duco [the dog] to be in a muzzle and he said no," Cardona tells investigators. "We went into the booth and there was a detainee in the booth with a bag over his head. Duco barked at him for about two or three minutes and they were asking the detainee questions."
- On January 13, Specialist John Harold Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators. "When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on themselves," Ketzer said. (Washington Post)
- June 11: Republican congressman Dennis Rehberg denies he and his delegation of GOP aides were drunk and disorderly during their visit to Kazakhstan at the end of May. Rehberg broke two ribs in a fall from a horse during the visit. A widely circulated but anonymous e-mail from the US Embassy in Kazakhstan asserts that Rehberg and his group were drunk for most of the visit, and engaged in several incidents mocking the Kazak culture, including an impromptu drunken "Coneheads" skit during an official delegation. Though Rehberg denies any improper activities, the Capital Hill journal Roll Call says it has been able to verify much of the e-mail's allegations. (Helena Independent Record)
- June 12: Reporter Naomi Klein lists just some of the many ways that US money has been misspent, misappropriated, and outright stolen in Iraq. The State Department has taken $184 million earmarked for drinking water projects and moved it to the budget for the lavish new US Embassy in Hussein's former palace. Short $1 billion for the embassy, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul." In fact, writes Klein, "he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent study by Public Citizen, are facing 'massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhea, nausea and kidney stones' from drinking contaminated water." Reconstruction is horribly behind schedule -- electricity is far below prewar levels, streets are described as "rivers of sewage" -- partially because Paul Bremer and his staff have spent only $3.2 billion of the $18.4 billion allocated by Congress. Klein writes, "At first, Bremer said the money would be spent by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently someone had a better idea: Parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John Negroponte can use it as leverage. With $15 billion outstanding, how likely will Iraq's politicians be to refuse US demands for military bases and economic 'reforms'?" At least $2.5 billion of Iraqi oil profits have been "redirected" to pay for projects already funded by US tax dollars.
- Klein writes, "From the start, [the] architects [of Iraq's reconstruction] rejected the idea that it should be a New Deal-style public works project for Iraqis to reclaim their country. Instead, it was treated as an ideological experiment in privatization. The dream was for multinational firms, mostly from the United States, to swoop in and dazzle the Iraqis with their speed and efficiency. Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans, Europeans and South Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as a recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign invasion of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the reconstruction itself became a prime target. The contractors have responded by behaving even more like an invading army, building elaborate fortresses in the Green Zone and surrounding themselves with mercenaries. And being hated is expensive. According to the latest estimates, security costs are eating up 25 percent of reconstruction contracts -- money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or telephone exchanges.
- "Meanwhile, insurance brokers selling sudden-death policies to contractors in Iraq have doubled their premiums, with insurance costs reaching 30 percent of payroll. That means many companies are spending half their budgets arming and insuring themselves against the people they are supposedly in Iraq to help. And according to an estimate by Charles Adwan of Transparency International, quoted on NPR's Marketplace, 'At least 20 percent of US spending in Iraq is lost to corruption.' How much is actually left over for reconstruction? Don't do the math. Rather than models of speed and efficiency, the contractors look more like overbilling, underperforming, lumbering beasts, barely able to move for fear of the hatred they have helped generate. The problem goes well beyond the latest reports of Halliburton drivers abandoning $85,000 trucks on the road because they don't carry spare tires.
- "Private contractors are also accused of playing leadership roles in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A landmark class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights alleges that the Titan Corporation and CACI International conspired with US officials to 'humiliate, torture and abuse persons' to increase demand for their 'interrogation services.' ...If Iraq's occupiers were capable of feeling shame, they might have responded by imposing tough new regulations. Instead, Senate Republicans just defeated an attempt to bar private contractors from interrogating prisoners and also voted down a proposal to impose stiffer penalties on contractors who overbill. Meanwhile, the White House is also trying to get immunity from prosecution for US contractors in Iraq and has requested the exemption from the new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi. It seems likely that Allawi will agree, since he is, after all, a kind of US contractor himself: A former CIA spy, he is already threatening to declare martial law, while his Defense Minister says of resistance fighters, 'We will cut off their hands, and we will behead them.' In a final feat of outsourcing, Iraqi governance has been subcontracted to even more brutal surrogates. Is this embarrassing, after an invasion to overthrow a dictatorship? Not at all -- this is what the occupiers call 'sovereignty.'" (The Nation)
- June 13: Al-Qaeda terrorists are claiming success in conducting a campaign of violence designed to destabilize the world's oil markets as well as the Saudi Arabian regime. A number of Westerners have been murdered or kidnapped recently in Saudi Arabia, and several oil pipelines have been bombed. "They have a program, those militants -- and they want to 'Talibanize' Saudi Arabia -- and they will not be allowed to do so," says Jamal Khashoggi, a spokesman for the Saudi ambassador in London. Meanwhile, the US has urged the 35,000 American citizens in Saudi Arabia to leave. "It's not unraveling, but it's certainly a dangerous situation right now," says Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Terrorists are going after the Saudi leadership, they're trying to make the country unstable. I know that the Saudis are treating it with the utmost seriousness and they're counter-attacking." A statement apparently from al-Qaeda spokesmen posted on an Islamic web site also threatens to torture American kidnap victims in similar ways that Iraqi prisoners have been torturred at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers. (AP/CBS)
- June 13: The US says it will continue to hold some 4000 to 5000 Iraqi prisoners in its own detention even after the June 30 transfer of power to an Iraqi government. Some 1500 other prisoners will be transferred into Iraqi hands. The International Committee of the Red Cross says that all Iraqi prisoners of war and interned civilians should be released when sovereignty is transferred. "In principle all prisoners of war and interned civilians must be released July 1," says ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger. "If prisoners remain under the responsibility of the multinational troops, then we'll have to check whom we should report to. We will negotiate directly with the Iraqi authorities over our visits to prisoners in their care," he says. (CBC)
- June 13: Bush Republicans have hired a PR firm to set up a Web site, MoveAmericaForward.com, to attack Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 911. The site claims to be nonpartisan, but the site staffers are all ideologically radical conservatives. The PR firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers, is a GOP consultation firm that has worked on several Republican political campaigns. The site is determined to create a groundswell of public support for its efforts to keep Moore's movie from being distributed. (Alternative Press Review)
$8 billion in tax dollars for Iraq "mismanaged" by Halliburton
- June 14: A Pentagon investigation shows that Halliburton has mismanaged over $8 billion in reconstruction funds in Iraq, mostly caused by systematic overcharges. Examples from former Halliburton employees include charging $100 for a bag of laundry to be done, and the abandoning of $85,000 vehicles because of flat tires. Critics are not only going after Halliburton, a company which still has ties to former CEO and current vice president Dick Cheney, but are also questioning the Pentagon's widening usage of private contractors. Democratic congressman Henry Waxman published the findings before today's hearing before the House committee on government reform. Waxman wrote to Tom Davis, the Republican committee chairman, that the whistleblower testimony and the findings of the Pentagon and congressional auditors "portray a company and a contracting environment that has run amok." Waxman also said the committee was neglecting its duty by not allowing the whistleblowers to testify, with the Republican majority balking, supposedly because of questions about their credibility. A spokesman for the committee says they were checking the whistleblowers' credibility. "We have never said 'no', just 'not yet'," he says, in reference to the possibility that they might testify before the committee.
- Halliburton has been a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration since it emerged in March 2003 that the politically connected company was awarded a contract worth up to $7 billion to fight oil fires in Iraq without competition. The company's Kellogg Brown & Root division has billed the Pentagon $4.5 billion under a separate logistics contract for work in Iraq and Kuwait. The latest Pentagon audit, prepared in May, follows a January report that found "systemic deficiencies" in the way the company accounted for costs in Iraq that were passed on to the US government. The new report says the company failed to monitor subcontractors adequately. "The cost impact to the government is indeterminable; however, we consider the potential impact to be significant based on the size of KBR's operations," it concludes. KBR said in written responses to the Pentagon audit that it was in the process of upgrading accounting procedures in Iraq. The company did not immediately respond to the whistleblowers. Marie de Young, a Halliburton logistics specialist, told Waxman's office she was discouraged by managers when she raised questions about the exorbitant prices for laundry and five-star hotels. De Young was told, she said, that she was providing too much information to Pentagon auditors, and concluded that the corporate culture was one of "intimidation and fear." James Warren, a former KBR truck driver, claims he was fired a few weeks after he called Randy Harl, the division's chief executive, to complain about widespread theft and the abandoning of trucks because of simple maintenance problems. (Financial Times)
Proof of Cheney's involvement in securing Halliburton contracts
- June 14: Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff were involved "from the start" in securing Halliburton their lucrative, no-bid governmental contracts in Iraq, according to proof obtained by House Democrat Henry Waxman. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, was briefed in October 2002 on a proposal to assign Halliburton the task of drawing up a secret plan for putting out oil-well fires and rebuilding Iraq infrastructure in the event of war in Iraq, according to Waxman. The following March, Halliburton was awarded the contract without going through the congressionally-mandated bidding process. At other critical junctures in the decision-making chain, political appointees insisted on hiring Halliburton, despite the objections of career employees at the Pentagon, Waxman says. "For months, Vice President Cheney has been saying that his office was not consulted before the award of the Halliburton contracts, but that does not appear to be true," Waxman says in a statement. Insisting that lawmakers are not "getting straight answers from the White House," he has called for an independent congressional investigation.
- Waxman has sent a letter to Cheney that says the circumstances "appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts. ...They also seem to contradict the Administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton." In the letter, Waxman points to a special team created before the war in Iraq called the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group. This team, led by Michael Mobbs, a political appointee and special adviser to Douglas Feith, the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, was instrumental in getting Halliburton selected for the job, Waxman says. Mobbs, briefing committee staffers last week, said he was told by colleagues in the government that three companies -- Halliburton, Bechtel and Fluor -- were qualified to conduct the planning study, Waxman said. Mobbs concluded Halliburton was the best company for the job. In the October 2002 meeting, chaired by Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, administration officials discussed the plan to assign Halliburton to conduct the study. Hadley later told Feith the group had no objection to the proposal. But lawyers for the Army Materiel Command apparently did, Waxman says. The plan was to assign Halliburton to conduct the study under an existing contract, in which Halliburton provided logistical support such as serving up meals and washing clothes for US troops. Army Materiel Command lawyers apparently believed ordering the company to provide contingency planning for putting out oil-well fires was stretching the logistics contract too far. But the Defense Department's general counsel's office intervened and overruled their objections, Waxman says. Congress' General Accounting Office, which has been reviewing that decision, is expected to release a final report today concluding that decision violated federal procurement rules, Waxman says. After Halliburton had conducted the classified study, the company was selected to perform the actual oil fields repair work, a contract that could have generated revenues up to $7 billion. Stephen Browning, the US Army Corps of Engineers director of regional programs for the South Pacific Division, met with Feith on March 5, 2003, and urged him to declassify some details about the contract so Halliburton could line up subcontractors, Waxman said. On March 5, Browning sent an e-mail later unearthed by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch suggesting the Pentagon had "coordinated" with Cheney's office about releasing information about the contract. Feith, Browning wrote, had "approved, contingent on informing WH (the White House) tomorrow. We anticipate no issue, since action has been coordinated w (with) VP's office." The work contract was awarded three days later, but the decision was not made public for another two weeks, because at that point Bush had not announced the final decision to go to war. "These disclosures mean that your office was informed about the Halliburton contracts at least twice at key moments," Waxman wrote. (Houston Chronicle/Rense, Washington Post)
- June 14: In an interview with Britain's Independent daily newspaper, former counter-terrorism security chief Richard Clarke says that another major terror attack on the US is likely. "I think it is harder but I can think of ways of them doing it and I'm sure they can imagine ways of doing it," he says. "It's entirely possible there will be another major attack." A dirty bomb, he believes, is probably in the "too hard" category. It is more likely terrorists would use suicide-bombs to attack softer targets, such as casinos or shopping malls. "Those are the two scenarios I use all the time when discussing it," he says. "If you do eight guys in eight shopping malls you have an enormous effect on the economy...so much of the US economy is tied up with retail sales. If you did four casinos with four guys you could destroy the economy of Las Vegas. There are lots of low-end ways of doing things. And the reason they have not done some of the low-end threats, I think, is because they set the barrier for themselves very high with the 9-11 attacks. They may want another major attack; they may feel that if they do less than a major attack [they] will look like a lesser force." Clarke believes Bush's decision to invade Iraq undoubtedly damaged the hunt for al-Qa'eda. He also believes it has diverted much-needed resources from homeland security, leaving the country unnecessarily vulnerable. "[Iraq] is a fiasco," he says. "We can only hope there is a way of minimizing the losses and getting out in a way that allows us to leave behind some sort of stable government. If [it stays as it is] now there is a high risk that what we leave behind will be worse than what was there before.... Iraq could easily be much more of a problem for us than it would have been if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power" Clarke lists three ways that the Iraq occupation has diverted resources from the real "war on terror." Money is not available for the Department of Homeland Security to protect potential targets such as trains and chemical plants adequately. Funds are not available to help countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, which could do more to counter terrorism. Finally, the war was a great propaganda coup for the jihadist movement. "It probably greatly increased its recruitment," he says. "There was a period of time as well...where resources in the hunt for bin Laden were pulled away, satellite resources, special forces, Predator [drones] were sent to Iraq, rather than sent to Afghanistan. That has been somewhat rectified but not entirely. If bin Laden had written the scenario it would have been identical to what happened." (Independent/Information Clearinghouse)
- June 14: Former CIA anti-terrorism analyst Ray McGovern writes that after reading the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar assessments of Iraq, "The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The only silver lining is that the corrupter-in-chief, George Tenet, is now gone. When the former CIA Director departed Sunday, he left behind an agency on life support -- an institution staffed by sycophant managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts. The analysts are embarrassed at their own naivete in believing that the passage carved into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters -- 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free' -- held real meaning for their work. The Senate Committee report is meticulous. Its findings are a sharp blow to those of us who took pride in working in an agency where we could speak truth to power -- with career protection from retribution from the powerful, and with leaders who would face down those policymakers who tried to exert undue influence over our analysis. Although it was clear to us that much of the intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report did we know that the skewing included outright lies." According to McGovern, the report proves that "Joe," the so-called expert on nuclear missiles, deliberately skewed information about the notorious aluminum tubes to be used by Iraq for building conventional missiles; Joe falsified a number of test results and used those falsifications to "prove" that Iraq was bent on using those tubes as part of a nuclear missile program.
- McGovern is also appalled to find more information about the infamous Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball." Only one US analyst ever met with "Curveball," the source of the frightening but false story about mobile biological weapons factories. The analyst wrote a memo to the deputy director of the CIA's task force on weapons of mass destruction, raising strong doubt regarding Curveball's reliability before Colin Powell highlighted his claims at the UN on February 5, 2003. McGovern writes, "I almost became physically ill reading the cynical response from the deputy director of the task force." The response: "As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about."
- McGovern writes, "The Washington Times lead story on July 10 began: "Flawed intelligence that led the United States to invade Iraq was the fault of the US intelligence community, a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded yesterday." From the other end of the political spectrum, David Corn of The Nation led his own report with, "The United States went to war on the basis of false claims." Not so. This is precisely the spin that the Bush administration wants to give to the Senate report; i. e., that the president was misled; that his decision for war was based on spurious intelligence about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But the president's decision for war had little to do with intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It had everything to do with the administration's determination to gain control of strategic, oil-rich Iraq, implant an enduring military presence there, and -- not incidentally -- eliminate any possible threat from Iraq to Israel's security." (Counterpunch)
- June 14: A "glitch" in voting machine software may make it impossible to perform manual recounts in 11 Florida counties. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state calls the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a flaw. The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election. Officials with the company and the state Division of Elections said they believe they can fix the problem by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers. Florida's two largest counties -- Miami-Dade and Broward -- are among those affected by the flaws. Both Miami-Dade and Broward were key counties involved in the 2000 election debacle. Democratic representative Robert Wexler has asked state Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate whether the head of the state elections division lied under oath when he denied knowing of the computer problem before reading about it in the media. The elections chief, Ed Kast, abruptly resigned last week, saying he wanted a change of pace. During a May 17 deposition for a lawsuit Wexler filed seeking to require a paper trail for state voting machines, Kast said he had recently heard of the problem only days earlier. But in a letter to Crist, Wexler said the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizens' group, notified Kast and Secretary of State Glenda Hood of the glitch in March. Hood blamed Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan for the delay, telling Kaplan in a May 13 letter she should have notified state officials when she learned of the problem in June 2003. Nevertheless, state and county election officials insist the problem can be resolved in the five months before the November election. "These are minor technical hiccups that happen," says Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or could be lost." Wexler and coalition members said they want to know how the state can be sure that glitches will not prevent elections officials from even detecting computer malfunctions. "How do you know that any votes were lost if your audit is wrong?" asks Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade coalition. State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once -- an overvote -- and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race -- an undervote. They emphasize that the "glitch" in the touchscreen machines occurs when the audit is done after the election, not when the tally sheet is printed in each precinct when polls close. (Wired)
- June 14: David Brock, former right-wing columnist turned whistleblower, announces his new Web site, Media Matters, a site created to publicly debunk right-wing media spin. The site is joined by Brock's new book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy. Of the book, Brock says, "I think what [readers will] get out of it is an understanding of how the conservative system works, from heavy documentation going back to the early 1970s that there were specific plans put in place. The plans are in writing and I identify what those plans were, and how they were funded, and what exactly the strategies were over time to achieve what they've achieved. The book does deal with the present media landscape, but a lot of it is tracing how, through a lot of patience and a lot of money -– it's all about following the money -– the Republican right was able to achieve the goal of infiltration and penetration of the media. They understood from the beginning that all politics is translated through the media, so that has been their focus. And the irony is that at the same time they mounted a simultaneous strategy to bash the media as liberally biased. The two worked hand in hand to change the entire complexion of the media." (Buzzflash)
- June 14: The California GOP thwarts plans to honor nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee with a resolution on the Assembly floor. Lee was accused by Republicans of spying for the Chinese government; the case against Lee collapsed due to lack of evidence and malfeasance by Republican investigators, and though Lee was convicted of a lesser charge of mishandling nuclear secrets, the judge in the case apologized for Lee for being a target of a witch hunt. "The man lost his job, he was maligned for two years, people assumed he was a spy, he was shackled in leg chains, and he was put in solitary confinement for nine months," says Democratic assemblywoman Judy Chu, caucus chairwoman. However, Assembly Republicans forced cancellation of the Capitol ceremony. "I just didn't think it was right for us to honor someone convicted of a felony," says GOP assemblyman Tony Strickland. Lee still receives a "Profile In Courage" award from Chu's caucus, but at a nearby hotel, not the Capitol. (Sacramento Bee)
- June 14: Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, one of the architects of the Clinton economic boom, gives an interview in regards to his new book Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America. Reich calls the crop of conservatives currently running American government "radcons," and discusses the threat they pose to the US economy and the American style of democracy. (Buzzflash)
