- June 26: A fierce battle in the House between Republicans and Democrats results in House Republicans succeeding in blocking refunds for millions of Western consumers victimized by Enron's gaming of the energy markets. Democrats accuse their opponents of "coddling" Enron at the expense of ordinary citizens. Republicans refuse to allow the measure to come to a vote, insisting that Democrats are only attempting to embarrass President Bush and Republicans for their once-close ties to Enron. Moreover, they say that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is working to build a case against Enron and that Democrats should allow the agency to complete its mission. "This isn't a witch hunt, it shouldn't be a witch hunt," says Republican Doug Ose. "Come over here and help us find solutions. We cannot sit here flailing away at past history." Democrats, however, maintain that the ties between Enron and the Bush administration are directly related to what they consider a lax approach from regulators to repair the damage caused by Enron's actions. "We have crimes but what we don't have is restitution," says Democrat Peter DeFazio, adding that Enron executives have gone to jail for manipulating the market yet, three years after the fact, no payments have been ordered and expensive power contracts are still in force. "We are still paying more for our electricity day in and day out. Nothing is more detrimental to the economic recovery of the Pacific Northwest than the fact that we're still paying more than we should for our electricity because it was stolen from us by the Enron Corp. based in Texas," DeFazio says from the House floor. "And no relief has been granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission led by Pat Wood of Texas who was recommended for that job by Ken Lay of Enron...who was the largest lifetime contributor to George Bush, the president of the United States. This stinks."
- Instead of the refund provision backed by Democrats, the House adopts by voice vote a watered-down version that calls on federal regulators to make public thousands of documents detailing how the company manipulated Western energy markets. Lawmakers from both parties have complained that FERC has sealed documents as part of its investigation. "The FERC is not just sitting on its hands, it's literally sitting on evidence that could help protect people from getting robbed by Enron again," says Democratic senator Maria Cantwell after the vote. "The FERC should be put on notice that it is high time the commissioners start doing their jobs to protect consumers. The vote today in the House is a step in the right direction." Democrats say that while the company has been disgraced and sent into bankruptcy, Republicans are still protecting Enron. "They understood whose side their bread was buttered and they got what they wanted," Democratic representative Jay Inslee says, referring to Enron's corporate support for Bush when he was running in 2000 and after he came to office. "They got an administration that sat on their hands while Enron got into our pockets to the tune of over $8 billion and they did nothing." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
- June 27: The Bush administration is ready to unveil a plan, concocted by administration officials and pharmaceutical company executives, that will mandate testing public school children for mental disorders and possibly force diagnosed children to take controversial drugs. Many in the medical science and mental health community are raising alarms. The plan is based on a Texas program a government whistleblower has called "a Trojan horse" for pharmaceutical companies. The plan is derived from findings by the president's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, a committee of doctors and mental health care professionals established in 2002. Published by the New Freedom Initiative (NFI), the report recommends states start testing for and treating mental disorders as early as possible, focusing on students, who can be easily accessed in the public school system. The mental health component of the plan is based on the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which was engineered during Bush's tenure as governor. The New Freedom Initiative reported that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed," and recommended a screening program for "consumers of all ages," including pre-school children. The commission found that schools are in a "key position" to influence the phenomena of young children being "expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders." To do so, the NFI said that "state-of-the-art treatments" were in order, and praised TMAP for showing "results in better consumer outcomes." The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and critics contend that the plan is primarily designed to siphon education dollars into drug company coffers while undermining real approaches to assisting children with mental disorders. David Oaks, director of MindFreedom, a coalition of groups that campaigns for people diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities, says the issues of child mental health are not only more complicated than just testing for disorders and putting kids on drugs, but also colored by powerful societal pressures and millions of dollars in drug revenues. Oaks says the president's plan amounts to little more than "No child left undrugged." He continues, "It's very unimaginative. The idea sounds good: get help for the kids. But the mental health machine tends to label, label, label." The labeling, said Oaks, all too often stigmatizes children as "abnormal."
- Oaks says he believes the template for the NFI's plan originates in the kind of extreme treatments misdiagnosed patients suffered in "the back wards" of clinics and asylums of the past, like forced drugging or electroshock therapies. "This [has] been going on for years," he says. "The psychiatric model [of the past] has been mainstreamed. And now, the system's coming for all of us." Patricia Weathers, president of Ablechild: Parents for Label and Drug Free Education, says labeling children as mentally disordered places a great deal of stress on families to raise a "normal" child. "It's almost like a parent is beaten down. You want [your child] in a mainstream school, not in a special needs school." Weathers said her own son was dismissed from the public educational system because of her refusal to continue to drug him at the school system's request after school officials diagnosed him as having ADHD. "Parents are losing their children" to drugging and labeling regimens, she says. "We need to look at the underlying causes, and not be so quick to think a child has mental problems. Instead of saying [a child is] having trouble reading, and giving him an educational resource, they say, 'oh well, he's ADD'." In the case of her son, Weathers said he had physical conditions, among them anemia, that may have been hindering his educational progress.
- In 2002 Allen Jones, a former investigator for the Office of the Inspector General in Pennsylvania, had been looking into the propriety of an off-the-books account that originated within the Pennsylvania Department of Mental Health. According to Jones, when he went to the media with accusations that the drug company Janssen may have been attempting to influence the formation of a TMAP-style test and treat plan, he was told to "quit swimming upstream." When he refused to quiet down, he was fired. In a whistleblower report posted on the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights' website, Jones elaborated on his charges, and explained that during its pilot stage, TMAP was packed with doctors who had strong ties to the drug industry. Jones said that ties to the drug companies gave them a financial incentive to recommend expensive, brand name drugs, rather than cheaper comparable medicines. Jones also writes that a number of the New Freedom Initiative for Mental Health Commission members were linked to TMAP's founding or are advocates for the program's expansion in states like Maryland and Ohio. The NFI plan, says Jones, "doesn't have the Orwellian goal of drugging the populace for a political purpose; it's the Orwellian goal of drugging the populace for an economic purpose."
- Nationally, pharmaceutical companies have been generous in doling out campaign contributions to the former Texas governor and his party. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical industry has given Bush $764,274 so far this election cycle, making the president the number one recipient of campaign donations of either party from the pharmaceutical industry. Number two and three respectively are New Jersey Congressman Mike Ferguson and North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, each of whom are situated on the Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittees on Health, which oversees mental health and research, biomedical programs, Medicaid, and food and drug policies. Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has also received campaign contributions from the industry, with just over $149,000 in donations. This mix of money and politics is hardly helpful for members of the mental health issues community and their advocates, says Oaks. Instead, he said, "Imagine the whole environmental movement funded by the oil industry." (New Standard News)
Bremer transfers power to Iraqi government two days early
- June 28: The US formally hands over the responsibility of governing Iraq to a US-chosen Iraqi government; US administrator Paul Bremer leaves Iraq two days before the scheduled handover of power. (Bremer will embark on a lucrative speaking tour organized by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, telling audiences that "We paid a big price for not stopping [looting], because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. ...We never had enough troops on the ground.") While Bremer discussed the idea of leaving early with incoming Iraqi prime minister Iyad (or Ayad) Allawi, few others knew of Bremer's plans to leave early, including most CPA staffers. Some officials say the deception was meant to undercut the ability of Iraqi insurgents to spoil the handover with a hail of car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. "I'm sure many of their plans have been foiled. It's a victory over the terrorists as well," says Iraq's government spokesman Hamid al-Kifaei. "They will be on the defensive and we will be on the offensive."
- During his last meeting with his staff, Bremer formally dissolves the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-run body that has run Iraq for the past 14 months. He formally hands over power to Iraqi president Ghazi al-Yawer. The only other US official present at the meeting is Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the coalition deputy operations chief. Bremer reads the transfer document, which says in part, "As recognized in UN security council resolution 1546...[the CPA] will cease to exist on June 28," he reads. "The Iraqi interim government will assume and exercise full...sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people. We welcome Iraq's steps [to take] its rightful place among the free nations of the world." Two hours later Bremer boards a plane to take him back to the US; many CPA officials leave with him to join the Bush presidential campaign.
- It is worth noting that while Bremer posed for photos in the doorway of his "getaway plane," as New York Times columnist Frank Rich calls it, the plane is a decoy intended to distract possible attackers; Bremer actually does not board the plane, but, once the cameras are put away, helicopters to another part of the airport, where his plane to Jordan is waiting. "What started with neoconservative fantasies of cheering Iraqis greeting American liberators with flowers and sweets ended with a secret ceremony and a decoy plane," says diplomat Peter Galbraith.
- Many of those left behind in the "international zone" make no secret of their despair. "The ideology is gone. The ambitions are gone. We've no aims left," says one. "We're living from one day to the next. All we're trying to do now -- our only goal -- is to keep the lid on until January 2005 [when the first Iraqi elections are supposed to be held]. That's our only aim -- get past the elections -- and then get the hell out."
- The early withdrawal was first proposed on June 1 by CPA staffer Scott Carpenter, partially in response to rumors of plans of a wave of violence to coincide with the transfer. Bremer was particularly concerned to hear rumors of attacks on oil refineries and pipelines. What would they accomplish in those few weeks, Carpenter argued, that is worth the violence and bloodshed scheduled for June 30? Why not leave early and thwart the insurgents? Bremer liked the idea, but according to CPA and Pentagon lawyers, there are legal problems. An occupying power can't just up and leave under international law. Besides, there are all sorts of official events planned for June 30. On June 17, Condoleezza Rice told Bremer that Bush supported the idea of an early withdrawal. On June 27, Bremer, pushing for withdrawal the following day, discussed the idea via phone link with Bush, who was in Istanbul with British PM Tony Blair. Bush asked Blair for his comment, and came back on the line: "Yeah, sounds good. Okay."
- Middle East expert Juan Cole writes, "It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty. Since the US military is so weak in Iraq and appears to have poor intelligence on the guerrilla insurgency, the Bush administration could not take the chance that a major bombing or other attack would mar the ceremony." Cole observes, "This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it." Allawi is not an elected head of state, but was named to his post by Bremer and UN envoy Lahkdar Brahimi. Much of the Iraqi cabinet was named by the US. A 7-member commission appointed by Bremer can ban political parties and disqualify potential candidates. The supposedly dissolved Iraqi Governing Council retains veto power over legislation, has some control of the Iraqi budget, and will name the rest of the new government's senior officials. The 160,000 American troops in Iraq are not answerable to the new government. Almost all of the money from Iraqi oil production remains in the hands of American and British corporations, and the new government has no control over the oil monies. In reality, the most powerful political figure in Iraq will not be Allawi, but US ambassador John Negroponte. The biggest change is that Allawi, not Bremer, now has control of the Iraqi budget.
- Author Tariq Ali writes, "The plan to 'transfer sovereignty' to Iraqis on June 30 is, of course, another whopper. The irony in this case is that, as all Iraqis remember, this is a farcical repeat of what the British did after World War I when they received a League of Nations mandate to run Iraq. When the lease expired they kept their military bases and dominated Iraqi politics. The British embassy in Baghdad made the key decisions. After June 30 it will be the US embassy that will play this role and John Negroponte, a tried and tested colonial official, who watched benignly as the death squads created mayhem in Central America, will be the de facto ruler of Iraq. The former CIA agent, Ayad Allawi, who worked as a low-leval police spy for the Saddam regime and was responsible for handing over the names of numerous dissidents, will be the new 'Prime Minister.' How can even the most naive camp-follower of the American empire regard this operation as a transfer of sovereignty?" Little if any celebration takes place around Iraq, an unusual lack considering that the Iraqi people now supposedly govern their own country. William Rivers Pitt sourly observes, "This is the great gift Mr. Bush has delivered to us: A midnight deal, a washing of hands, and a quick exit out the back door. Honor and integrity indeed." (CNews, Informed Comment, Truthout, The Age, Independent/Truthout, CNN/Al Franken, Bob Woodward, Frank Rich p.128-9)
- Days before the takeover, Truthout's William Rivers Pitt writes, "Freedom [for Iraq] comes with corporate sponsorship: Halliburton, Carlyle, Bechtel, CACI, DynCorp, Parsons Corporation and many others. These corporations are, in many ways, the sharp end of American policy decisions in Iraq. The US military has the guns, and serves often as the enforcers of this corporate policy, but these are the companies doling out electricity, food and jobs to the people of Iraq. Some of these companies -- CACI and DynCorp for starters -- also have guns. They are the ones running the show, and the people of Iraq know this full well. In many ways, the Iraqi people are like the citizens of newly-minted America after the Revolution. Back then, the American people had a deep and abiding mistrust of corporations. In the days when they were subject to British rule, that rule was enforced by the strong arm of incredibly powerful corporations like the British East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company. The seminal moment of the American Revolution came when colonists defied the British East India Company's decision to tax tea, and 342 boxes of the stuff wound up adrift on the tide in Boston Harbor. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 freed the colonists not only from British rule, but from the rule of these corporations. For nearly 100 years afterwards, the citizens of the United States were profoundly suspicious of corporate power. Corporate charters were created by individual states as a legal convenience, and were automatically dissolved if they violated those charters. Corporations were not allowed to participate in the political process, could not buy stock in other corporations, and were destroyed out of hand if they were deemed to be behaving contrary to the public trust. While these corporations played an important role in the development of the nation, they were subservient to the rule of the people. ...The people of Iraq probably don't know this history, but they can see and feel the effects every day of their lives. Thus, they fight and resist. We Americans also see, feel, breathe and eat the affects of this coup. Thankfully, we have television and the supremacy of rampant materialism to salve the disquiet in our souls. When it becomes too much, we have Prozac and Ritalin to tame the inner rebellion. When airplanes come from the sky and blast our self-assurance into flaming bits, we are counseled by our President to go shopping. Words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' lose their truth as they are transformed into marketing vectors. The 'War on Terror' fills the coffers of corporations with umbilical ties to those who run the country. Those in office today purportedly serve in the interest of the citizenry. In truth, it is the [corporations] who benefit. War increases their power, which in turn makes war inevitable. It is an old story, too often repeated." (Truthout/Scoop)
- June 28: Bush says that US troops in Iraq will support martial law if declared by Iraq's new prime minister Iyad Allawi. "Iraqis know what we know, that the best way to defend yourself is to go on the offensive," Bush says during a joint appearance with Britain's Tony Blair. "Prime Minister Allawi, as head of a sovereign government, may decide he has to take tough measures to deal with a brutal cold-blooded killer," Bush says, in a reference to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "Our job is to help." (New York Times)
- June 28: The same day Paul Bremer skips out of Baghdad, newly appointed US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte arrives. His deputy, James Jeffrey, greets him with a slide showing over 100 red dots in Baghdad, each dot representing an insurgent or civilian attack during the last week alone. "John, this is your embassy compound," Jeffrey says. The main issue is security. "We don't have it."
- Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have instructed Negroponte to take a lighter approach than Bremer's heavyhanded proconsul role. Negroponte comes into Iraq intending to play a more traditional role, the foreign diplomat establishing relations with a sovereign country. But he finds that, although Iraq has most of the trappings of a modern government and modern society, almost nothing actually works. The entire country is one big Potemkin village. Chaos and disarray rule. Negroponte takes some immediate action, shifting $3.3 billion in funds for long-term electricity and water projects into more immediate needs. General George Casey gets $2 billion for security, and some $200 million in CERP funds that could be used on the spot to hire Iraqis to help in reconstruction. Casey is grateful, as is General David Petraeus, in charge of training Iraqi security forces. Both Casey and Negroponte are determined to avoid what became known as the "Jerry and Rick Show" -- the overt hostility between Bremer and Casey's predecessor, General Ricardo Sanchez. (Bob Woodward
Billions of Iraqi dollars have "disappeared" due to CPA mismanagement
- June 28: US officials have drained all but around $900 million from a $20 billion fund supposedly to be used to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, in a move that one watchdog group calls an "11th-hour splurge." The British charity Christian Aid confirms that billions of dollars allocated to the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) by the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority are missing and unaccounted for. The charity says that nearly $20 billion in oil revenues and other Iraqi funds intended to rebuild the country have disappeared from banks administered by the CPA, and says that the US-controlled coalition in Baghdad is handing over power to an Iraqi government without having properly accounted for what it has done with the $20 billion of Iraq's money. "Christian Aid believes this situation is in flagrant breach of the UN Security Council resolution that gave control of Iraq's oil revenues and other Iraqi funds to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)," says a group statement. "For the entire year that the CPA has been in power in Iraq, it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has been doing with Iraq's money," says Helen Collinson, head of policy at Christian Aid.
- UN Resolution 1483 of May 2003 says that Iraq's oil revenues should be paid into the DFI, that the money be spent in the interests of the Iraqi people, and that it be independently audited. But the group says that it took until April 2004 to appoint an auditor -- leaving only a matter of weeks to go through the books. The group is concerned that the handover of power means that this money may never be tracked down and that the CPA is not going to be around to be held accountable. The group compared the lack of audits of Iraqi oil money to the abundant information on the $18.4 billion of US taxpayer funds being spent in Iraq. Four separate audits of the US funds are underway. "Too many oil-rich countries go down the road of unaccountable government, riches for the few, and poverty for the many. Iraq can avoid this route, but only by ensuring transparency," says Collinson. While CPA officials maintain that the money was well spent, much of the missing $20 billion is untraceable, and much of what can be traced went to various American corporations in lavish no-bid contracts for services, services that in many cases have yet to be performed. US authorities have not identified all the contractors hired, but they have told international monitors that some of the contracts were awarded without competitive bidding to Halliburton, the Texas-based company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton has been at the center of numerous Pentagon and congressional inquiries.
- Some critics suggest that American authorities tapped the Iraqi money to avoid the stricter controls Congress demanded on the spending of US tax dollars, after reports last year of overcharges by Pentagon contractors. "Perhaps they prefer to have the flexibility to give away contracts to whichever companies they want on whatever terms they want," says Svetlana Tsalik, director of Revenue Watch, part of the Open Society Institute. Revenue Watch is partly funded by George Soros, a billionaire financier who is a harsh critic of the administration and has contributed heavily to groups seeking to defeat President Bush. In recent reports, both Revenue Watch and the nonpartisan Christian Aid have faulted the Coalition Provisional Authority for making commitments on spending of Iraqi oil revenue that will outlast the occupation. Revenue Watch refers to the spending as "the CPA's 11th-hour splurge." Some UN Security Council diplomats had previously criticized the CPA for cloaking the DFI -- authorized by the Security Council to safeguard the oil revenues and other money earmarked for reconstruction -- in secrecy. Christian Aid says that US authorities may also have understated by up to $3 billion the amount of Iraqi oil revenue that went into the development fund. "This lack of accountability creates an environment ripe for corruption and theft at every level," Christian Aid reports. In its report, Christian Aid calls on the Treasury Department, the US agency responsible for pushing Iraq to privatise its economy and, before that, for confiscating billions of dollars in Iraqi assets worldwide, and the CPA to come out publicly with clear figures. "We still do not know exactly how Iraq's money has been earned, which companies have won the contracts that it has been spent on, or whether this spending was in the interests of the Iraqi people," says the report. Christian Aid points to the difficulty of determining exactly what Iraq is earning from oil. Two different CPA documents give different figures for oil revenues through the end of May. One says Iraq earned $10 billion, while another cites $11.5 billion for the same period. Christian Aid says it attempted its own calculation of Iraq's oil revenues using publicly available figures and came up with $13 billion.
- Groups critical of the lack of transparency in the CPA's spending have been particularly angry that the authority is using Iraqi money to pay for questionable contracts -- some awarded without a public tendering process -- with US companies. Washington has restricted the most lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq to gigantic US companies that appear set to rack up profitable contracts, fueling accusations that the Bush administration is seeking to benefit a select few US companies rather than find the best, and possibly the cheapest, options to help the Iraqi people rebuild.
- The Development Fund for Iraq was set up by the United Nations Security Council last year after Bush declared major combat over in Iraq. Besides the new Iraqi oil revenue, it includes leftover oil revenue that was put into the UN-run Oil for Food program before the United States invaded Iraq. The development fund has been spent in several ways. As of May, more than half the money that can be accounted for had gone to operate Iraqi ministries. The rest went to relief and reconstruction projects; out of that money, about $350 million was put at the discretion of US military commanders for public relations projects intended to improve relations with Iraqis. Until the handover, the provisional authority had the ultimate say over how the money was used. Decisions were made in meetings with Iraqi officials appointed by the provisional authority and the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council. Noting the latest reports by the provisional authority, Joseph Christoff, who directs the General Accounting Office's international affairs section, said that of the $20 billion in the fund, all but $900 million had been committed as of late June. The GAO is an investigative arm of Congress. "They clearly spent [development fund money] at a much faster pace than the appropriated dollars," says Christoff. The GAO report said that as of April, the provisional authority had spent nearly $13 billion from the fund on reconstruction activities. By that time, the authority had spent only $8.2 billion out of U.S. tax dollars -- money that would likely invite greater congressional scrutiny. The Security Council created an International Advisory and Monitory Board for Iraq to watch how the development fund was spent. The board is made up of representatives of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.
- In February, the board began to question the awarding of no-bid contracts awarded by the provisional authority with money from the development fund, according to minutes of the board's meetings. The next month, the board was told that Halliburton won some of the contracts without competitive bidding. The provisional authority "indicated that as a general rule, effective January 2004 contracts were no longer awarded without competitive bidding," according to the board's minutes. The board demanded that the provisional authority turn over audits of the uncompetitive contracts. None had been provided by its June meeting. The board then delivered a public rebuke of the US authorities. In a June 22 statement, the board said it "regrets, despite its repeated requests, the delay in receiving reports on audits undertaken by various agencies on sole-sourced contracts" paid for by the development fund. The board launched an audit "to determine the extent of sole-sourced contracts." The new Iraqi government is now in control of deciding how Iraqi oil revenue is spent, though the international monitoring board will continue an oversight role. (Interpress/Not In Our Name, Baltimore Sun/Truthout)
- June 28: The Supreme Court reverses the dismissal of a habeas corpus petition, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, brought on behalf of "enemy combatant" Yasser Esam Hamdi, a US citizen detained without official charge since his capture in Afghanistan in 2001. Hamdi stands accused of fighting with the Taliban, though Hamdi, though his father, has always maintained that he was in Afghanistan as a relief worker and that all charges against him are groundless. Until it was discovered that he is a US citizen, Hamdi was detained in Guantanamo Bay; after the discovery, he has been incarcerated without a lawyer or contact with his family in a brig in Norfolk, Virginia, and later in Charleston, South Carolina. (In December 2003 the Justice Department will suddenly grant Hamdi access to a lawyer, though military observers have observed and recorded all contacts between Hamdi and his attorney.) The Bush administration has claimed that because Hamdi was caught in arms against the US, he could be properly detained as an unlawful combatant, without any oversight of presidential decisionmaking, or without access to an attorney or the court system. The administration argues that this power is constitutional and necessary to effectively fight the war on terror to ensure that dangerous terrorists were no longer a threat and could be fully interrogated. In June 2002, Hamdi's father, Esam Fouad Hamdi, filed a habeas petition in US District Court, which ordered that a federal public defender be given access to Hamdi. On appeal, the Fourth Circuit reversed the District Court's order, ruling that the District Court had failed to give proper deference to the government's "intelligence and security interests," and that it should proceed with a properly deferential investigation. The District Court denied the government's motion to dismiss Hamdi's petition, finding that the government's evidence against Hamdi was "woefully inadequate, based mostly on hearsay and bare assertions." When the Court ordered the government to produce documentary evidence of Hamdi's involvement with the Taliban, the government appealed the order, sending the case back to the government-friendly Fourth Circuit, which held that the broad warmaking powers delegated to the president under Article Two of the Constitution and the principle of separation of powers prohibited courts from interfering in this vital area of national security. Hamdi's father appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the Fourth Circuit on a 8-1 decision. The Court recognized the power of the government to detain unlawful combatants, but ruled that detainees must have the ability to challenge their detention before an impartial judge.
- The Court does not rule as a simple majority, but in a plurality, with Sandra Day O'Connor writing a plurality opinion along with Justices Kennedy, Breyer, and Rehnquist. O'Connor writes that although Congress had expressly authorized the detention of unlawful combatants in its Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, due process required that Hamdi have a meaningful opportunity to challenge his detention. This requires notice of the charges and an opportunity to be heard, though due to the burden upon the president of ongoing military conflict, normal procedural protections such as placing the burden of proof on the government or the ban on hearsay need not apply. O'Connor does not seriously address the issue of Hamdi's right to an attorney, because by the time the Court renders its decision, Hamdi has already been granted access to one. However, O'Connor does write that Hamdi "unquestionably has the right to access to counsel in connection with the proceedings on remand." The plurality held that judges need not be involved in reviewing these cases, rather only an inpartial decision maker was required. Justices Souter and Ginsberg agree with the plurality over Hamdi's right to a lawyer and to challenge his legal status, but disagree that the AUMF gives the president the broad warmaking powers he asserts. Interestingly enough, Justices Scalia and Stevens, the closest thing to polar opposites on the Court, join in a dissent that opines the government has only two options in cases such as Hamdi's: either suspend the right to habeas corpus outright (in effect suspending a large portion of the Constitution) or try Hamdi as the government would anyone else facing federal charges. Only the administration's lapdog, Clarence Thomas, sides with the government's arguments that national security concerns supersede Constitutional civil liberties.
- Philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer writes of the Bush administration's position on "enemy combatants" and their indefinite detention: "[T]he truth or lack of truth in the government's contention that [accused bombing suspect Jose] Padilla has plotted with al-Qaeda to carry out terrorist acts, and that Hamdi is a trained terrorist, are irrelevant. The significance of the cases lies in the Bush administration's attempt to deprive American citizens of their liberty, indefinitely and without legislative authority or any possibility of judicial review. The right to liberty is one of the most basic human rights. For anyone who believes that individual rights and the rule of law are essential elements in a free society, to deprive a citizen of his or her liberty by executive fiat should be anathema. The fact that Bush was prepared to do it, and not only to do it once, hastily, but to allow his administration to go into court, in two separate cases, and argue that it is right to do it, is inconsistent with an ethic that is committed to respecting human rights." (Wikipedia, Syracuse University College of Law [Hamdi's § 4001 argument], Peter Singer)
- June 28: Presidential candidate John Kerry says that one difference between him and Bush is that "troops come first, period." Kerry discusses with an Army Times interviewer what he calls the "failures" and "arrogance" of the Bush administration, and spells out how he would deal with key defense issues such as transformation, troop levels and stop-loss, the "don't ask, don't tell" rule for gays in uniform, relations with foreign allies, leadership and accountability and his suitability to be commander in chief. "Look at this administration," he says. "Four years ago they said, 'Help is on the way,' and they criticized the Clinton administration. They didn't do anything to change what was really the deployable capacity of the military at the moment they began this war. This is the Clinton military." After promising help, Kerry notes, the Bush administration cut support for public schools near military bases, tried to cut danger pay and family separation pay for deployed troops and failed to provide enough money for the Department of Veterans Affairs. "I think there has been a general disrespect -- my own opinion is, personal disrespect -- toward the realities of what this war is costing us in human terms for the rank and file. I remember from my own service, that is where it matters, not in offices in the Pentagon." He says he will halt the "stop-loss" program of keeping troops in Iraq after their period of service has expired, and says he will share the military burden with US allies: "Allies have a distrust for this administration. If you are not prepared to share decision-making with them, how can you expect them to put troops on the ground?" Kerry also opposes pulling troops out of Europe and Southeast Asia to reinforce Iraq, citing the necessity of those troops being in those stations to keep US allies stable.
- His harshest criticism is for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. "I think there's a serious question as to why Rumsfeld and any of them are still around," Kerry says. "When you miscalculate in war as badly as they have miscalculated, when you don't have equipment that you're supposed to have, when you short the number of troops you should have, when you don't even calculate the postwar process accurately, when you willfully refuse to look at plans drawn up by others in order to do this right, it's beyond negligence. When you pass off looting as a minor happening, it's beyond me." Kerry says his own Navy experience taught him it doesn't matter if a captain is asleep in his cabin when a ship crashes -- the skipper is usually held accountable and fired. He also criticizes Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders for "arrogance and an ideological rigidity that disregarded and disrespected professional military advice. There are countless examples from friends and others of the way people are shunted aside and proposals are shouted down and people are not, in fact, engaged in a legitimate process by which you really think through consequences and needs. The civilian military leadership has to be extraordinarily respectful of the professional leadership that is there through years of schooling and training and war fighting and deployments and experience. I think they've cast a pall on the professional military." He says he will keep the defense budget strong, and calls Vice President Cheney a liar for mischaracterizing his defense spending votes. "He knows as well as I do that's a lie. I didn't vote against body armor for troops. I voted to pay for the $87 billion, and when they weren't willing to pay for it, I voted against it because that was a protest against their unwillingness to be responsible. I have voted for the largest military budgets in American history. I have voted for 95 or 98 percent of all the combat systems we've ever had." In summation, he says, "I feel personally very angry about the position these troops have been put in by the president and this administration in their arrogance. I think our troops are in greater danger than they have to be. I think these kids are walking and riding patrols...waiting to be ambushed, very dangerous, where it's very difficult for them to determine the difference between friend and foe. It reminds me a lot of what we went through when you start waiting to be ambushed. I bleed every day about it. I feel the agony of every one of those families. I know what they're going through." (Army Times)
- June 28: Columnist and author Gene Lyons, in writing about the Bush campaign's decision to field a raft of negative and lying ads about John Kerry this early in the campaign, notes that the worst of the vitriol seems to be spewing from the group calling itself "swift Boat Veterans for Truth," an organization dedicating to trashing Kerry's honorable Vietnam service by claiming, among other things, that Kerry deliberately injured himself in order to win Purple Heart citations, and faked the battlefield reports that led to Kerry's being awarded the Silver Star for conspicuous bravery. Lyons writes, "Yesterday, I talked to Fred Short of Little Rock, Arkansas, who served under Kerry in Vietnam. Short doesn't recognize the individuals now questioning his commander's valor. But he was there when Kerry plunged their boat into a hail of enemy fire and took shrapnel, using his uninjured arm to haul a wounded soldier aboard. The action earned Kerry one of his three Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star for valor. ...Short recalls the boat deck slick with Kerry's blood, and resents bitterly those who question his honor -- less on Kerry's behalf than for 'some very good friends of ours whose names are on the [Vietnam Memorial] wall who can't speak for themselves.'" (Decatur Daily Democrat)
- June 28: New York's sexual professionals and prostitutes are gearing up for the 2004 Republican convention, to be held from August 30 through September 2. Agencies are flying in extra call girls from around the globe to meet the expected demand during the gathering at Madison Square Garden. "We have girls from London, Seattle, California, all coming in for that week," says a madam at a Manhattan escort service. "It's the week everyone wants to work." A midtown escort service operator agrees, "It's going to be big." "We've got everything organized -- the hotels, the flights, the advertisements," says another escort service operator. "We'll probably have 60 girls that week, instead of the usual 30." (New York Daily News)
- June 29: Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister of Iraq named by the US-driven CPA, is a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who later carried out anti-Hussein terrorist operations on behalf of the CIA. The political group run by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the 1990s, and financed by the CIA, the Iraqi National Accord, "used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Iraq" in an attempt to sabotage and destabilize Hussein's regime, according to the New York Times. Allawi is already warning that he may delay the national elections scheduled for January, and declare martial law, a move President Bush says the US will support. Many worry that Allawi is preparing to seize power directly, and may have ambitions to become another strongman in the Hussein/Qaddafi mold. Allawi is also demanding that his rival Hussein be turned over to a trial under his control, raising the possibility of a "show trial" where Hussein would be denied the opportunity to testify about his connections to Allawi, the CIA, the Reagan and Bush administrations, and other sensitive subjects. (The Nation)
GAO report shows that Iraq is worse off now than under Hussein
- June 29: A new GAO report shows that in many key areas, Iraq is worse off now than it was during the Hussein regime. The areas of electricity, the judiciary, and security are particularly bad. Some instances: In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces. Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations. The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts. The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped. The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May. The report comes out the same day that the CPA's inspector general releases three reports that highlight serious management problems at the CPA. The reports find that the CPA wasted millions of dollars at a Hilton resort hotel in Kuwait because it didn't have guidelines for who could stay there, lost track of how many employees it had in Iraq and didn't track reconstruction projects funded by international donors to ensure they didn't duplicate US projects.
- "There are a number of significant questions that need to be asked and answered dealing with the transition [to self-sovereignty]," says GAO comptroller David Walker. "A lot has been accomplished and a lot remains to be done." The GAO report is the first government assessment of conditions in Iraq at the end of the US occupation. It outlines what it calls "key challenges that will affect the political transition" in 10 specific areas. "The picture it paints of the facts on the ground is one that neither the CPA nor the Bush administration should be all that proud of," says Peter Singer, a national security scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution. "It finds a lot of problems and raises a lot of questions." One of the biggest problems, Singer says, is that while money has been pledged and allocated, not much has been spent. The GAO report shows that very little of the promised international funds -- most of which are in loans -- has been spent or can't be tracked. The CPA's inspector general found the same thing. "When we ask why are things not going the way we hoped for," Singer says, "the answer in part of this is that we haven't actually spent what we have in pocket." He says the figures on electricity "make me want to cry." Democratic senator Joseph Biden says the report shows major problems. "so while we've handed over political sovereignty, we haven't handed over practical capacity -- that is, the ability for the Iraqis themselves to provide security, defend their borders, defeat the insurgency, deliver basic services, run a government and set the foundation for economic progress. Until Iraqis can do all of that, it will be impossible for us to responsibly disengage from Iraq." (Knight Ridder/CommonDreams)
- June 29: Some European intelligence officials are now saying they believe that Niger was involved in illegal trading of uranium as early as 1999, and one of the destinations of the uranium under discussion was Iraq. Forged documents purporting to show the trade of uranium to Iraq were given to an Italian journalist in 2002, and used by the Bush administration to bolster its claims that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear weapons program before the documents were publicly denounced as forgeries. The Italian businessman who provided the documents, a former Italian military official dismissed from the Italian military 25 years ago for dishonorable conduct, apparently tried to sell the documents to several intelligence sources before providing them to the journalist, Elisabetta Burba. Burba suspected the documents were forged and gave them to US officials at the embassy in Rome. When US diplomat Joseph Wilson revealed publicly that the documents were, indeed, forgeries, and the claims surrounding the uranium were bogus, someone in the Bush administration struck back at Wilson by outing his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as an undercover CIA agent involved in WMD intelligence. Niger was Libya's main source of uranium for its nuclear program, which never got off the ground before Libya decided to publicly halt development. British intelligence still maintains that its claim that Iraq was the recipient of Niger's uranium are solid, even though no such uranium has been found in Iraq and no further evidence of the claim has been advanced. (Financial Times)
- June 29: Boston police say they will not picket the Fleet Center during the Democratic Convention after John Kerry honored a police union picket line and canceled a speech to a national mayors' meeting. "I don't cross picket lines. I never have," says Kerry. Boston mayor Thomas Menino says Kerry should have crossed the picket line to address the mayors, and conference spokeswoman Rhonda Spears says the mayors are "outraged" at Kerry's cancellation. Boston police have been working without a contract for two years, and are striking for higher pay. (CBS)
- June 29: Conservative maven William F. Buckley announces his retirement from his position as editor of the National Review, the magazine he founded 50 years ago. In a goodbye editorial in the New York Times, he writes, "With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war." (The Hill)
Britain reveals that in June 2003 the senior US military commander in Iraq ordered British troops to attack Iranian forces, an order that was refused, thereby avoiding open warfare with Iran
- June 30: The American commander of forces in Iraq ordered British troops to assault Iranian troops that had entered Iraq to claim disputed territory, it is revealed. The British high command refused the order and chose instead to use diplomacy and negotiation to deal with the Iranian incursion. The story is revealed by a senior British military officer who does not allow his name to be used. "If we had attacked the Iranian positions, all hell would have broken loose," he says. "We would have had the Iranians to our front and the Iraqi insurgents picking us off at the rear." Worse, the attack would almost certainly have provoked open warfare with Iran. The incident began in June 2003, when Iranian forces set up border and observation outposts about a kilometer inside Iraqi territory. US commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez then issued orders for the British to attack the Iranian outposts. The incident lasted around a week and was resolved peacefully by a telephone conversation between Jack Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary, and Kamal Kharrazi, his Iranian counterpart, British officials say. "It did look rather nasty at the time," one official recalls. "But we were always confident it was a mistake and could be resolved by diplomatic means. We got in touch with Baghdad and said, 'Don't do anything silly; we are talking to the Iranians.'" While Straw was trying to resolve the issue peacefully, British military commanders on the ground were calming their Iranian counterparts, the ministry says. (Daily Telegraph)
- June 30: A US congressional probe finds that Iraqi security forces are "unready" to take on the insurgency, as their units remain poorly trained, underequipped, and suffer from mass desertions sometimes exceeding 80%. The assessment comes one day after NATO leaders agreed, at a summit in Istanbul, to help train the new Iraqi army that is expected to gradually increase its role in combating Islamist insurgents now that the country's sovereignty has been formally restored. "Iraq's leaders are eager to assume responsibility for their own security, and that is our wish as well," President Bush says before leaving the summit. But the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issues a terse report detailing massive morale, logistical and training problems plaguing Iraq's various security organizations. "Iraqi security forces proved unready to take over security responsibility from the multinational force, as demonstrated by their collapse during April 2004," states the document prepared for the heads of the international relations committees in the Senate and House of Representatives. As many as 82% of personnel deserted from Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units deployed in Western Iraq and around the town of Fallujah last April, when anti-American guerrillas launched a spate of deadly strikes against coalition forces, congressional investigators found. The desertion rate reached 49 percent in corps units deployed in and around Baghdad, while in towns like Baqubah, Tikrit, Karbala, Najaf and Kut, it stood at 30 percent. Police squads fared little better. During just one week of April 17 to 23, the force lost 2,892 personnel because some of the officers others turned out to be rebel sympathizers or proved to be incompetent and had to be sent for retraining, according to the report. The figure also includes those killed in action.
- The police forces in Fallujah, Najaf, Karbala and Kut collapsed, the document says. In Fallujah, a battalion of the newly-reconstituted Iraqi army refused to support the US First Marine Expeditionary Force and engage the rebels. "One problem cited included the belief of the soldiers, reinforced by briefings during their training, that they would never be used as an internal security force," the report points out, citing weak leadership and insufficient or poor equipment as contributing factors. Clashes in April have shown that rebels units numbering between 10 and 20 fighters could easily overrun buildings guarded by the Facilities Protection Service, another of Iraq's security branches. Despite US assistance, Iraqi police continued to suffer from a shortage of equipment. At the end of March, they had only 41 percent of the patrol vehicles they needed, 43 percent of pistols, 21 percent of hand radios and nine percent of protective vests, the GAO says. In late April, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps was still waiting for the delivery of promised vehicles, radios, AK-47 rifles, machine guns, ammunition and night vision equipment. Moreover, a US-designed training course did not prepare the corps "to fight against well-armed insurgents," the report notes. Despite Iraq's newly-declared sovereignty, the United States, according to the GAO, will maintain a heavy presence in its government. The Interior Ministry will include as many as 27 American advisers while the Ministry of Finance will have 11. The report also points out that in some areas electric power supply has not been restored even to Saddam Hussein-era levels. Eight out of 18 Iraqi governorates had electricity for an average of eight or fewer hours a day, while nine had power for between nine and 15 hours, the investigators said. (AFP/Independent Media)
- June 30: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the al-Qaeda commander who was the main source for the White House's accusations that Saddam Hussein's forces had trained al-Qaeda operatives in the use of "poisons and deadly gases," recants his story. Al-Libi had been horrifically tortured by Egyptian interrogators at the behest of the CIA (see the related items from November 2001 and others in this site for more details), and, after weeks of abuse, told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear in order to make the torture stop. (Newsweek/Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
Saddam Hussein's first court hearing censored for US media
- June 30: US media outlets agree to let the American military censor portions of Saddam Hussein's preliminary court hearing in Baghdad. US and Iraqi officials refuse to allow footage of Iraqi guards or court personnel; additionally, US officials order CNN and al-Jazeera, the pool camera crews, to disconnect their audio equipment, supposedly at the order of the Iraqi judge. Following the hearing, the CNN footage is taken to the convention center, where a CBS News employee was not allowed to transmit the footage until it was viewed and okayed by two military censors. As the silent footage of Hussein begins to air on US networks, CBS News anchor Dan Rather explains that the tapes had been "taken to another location, edited, and what you're seeing is in effect a censored version" of what happened in court earlier today. "And whether you will hear what happened in court is yet to be determined," adds Rather. "We know that Saddam Hussein challenged the whole legitimacy of the court." (It is worth noting that Hussein was refused a defense counsel for the hearing.) TV journalists were frustrated by the fact that there was no audio -- at least initially. It turned out that some of the footage had ambient sound, albeit in Arabic. Some of the footage may have also been supplied by Defense Department cameras, which were allowed to recore sound. Throughout the day, several news nets said it wasn't always clear which footage was from what source, and that it could have been DOD footage, meaning the Pentagon was directly controlling what was being heard. Some portions of CNN videotapes containing audio may have been allowed to go through. News nets receiving the transmissions were alerted to the fact that authorities had ordered that there be no audio, and it was up to each individual net to decide whether to air that part of the video that had sound. Some news editors spent hours scouring the portion of the tape with audio for harsh words leveled at President Bush by Hussein, but as yet cannot not find the quote reported by New York Times reporter John Burns, who was the pool print reporter in the courtroom and accompanied by a translator. Burns reports that Saddam said, "Everyone knows that this is a theatrical comedy by Bush, the criminal, in an attempt to win the election." The only other Western journalists in the courtroom are ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and CNN's Christiane Amanpour. Besides CNN and the New York Times, an al-Jazeera camera crew was allowed in the courtroom, as was a print reporter for Arab newspapers. (Variety/Yahoo! News, Independent/Truthout)
US defies an Iraqi court order to release an Iraqi prisoner from Abu Ghraib
- June 30: An Iraqi prisoner remains in Abu Ghraib prison even after an Iraqi judge orders his release, when US prosecutors refuse to uphold the order. Iyad Akmush Kanum is accused of being in a car whose occupants fired on US troops on the outskirts of Baghdad. Kanum, who was charged with attempted murder, denies the charges, saying he has been mistaken for someone else. US prosecutors say that under the Geneva Convention they are not bound by Iraqi law. Even though the US has putatively transferred governance of Iraq to a transitional government of Iraqis, the Kanum case underlines the fact that the US is still in charge of Iraq, and will do as it pleases, whether or not its actions conflict with Iraqi law. "Iraqis who have been detained as a security threat can still be detained until firstly the coalition leaves or secondly they are considered to be no longer a threat," says Michael Frank, deputy special prosecutor for Multinational Force-Iraq (MNFI), who oversaw the case dressed in military fatigues.
- The Central Criminal Court is a hybrid legal institution, created by the American-led occupation, in which US lawyers prepare cases for Iraqi prosecutors to present to Iraqi judges, who were in turn chosen by the coalition. It tries cases based on Iraqi law and coalition decrees. Despite the end of the US occupation yesterday, US prosecutors said the Court would continue unchanged after the handover. It was created by Paul Bremer last June to hear "significant security trials" and enable occupation troops to testify without leaving the Green Zone. Saddam Hussein is among the detainees intended to enter its dock. Many Iraqis see the Central Criminal Court as a creature of the occupation which must be abolished now the US has handed sovereignty back to Iraqis. Faisal Estrabadi, an Iraqi lawyer, says yesterday after the refusal to release Kanum: "If the Iraqi courts have acquitted an individual he must be released. Anything else is a violation of sovereignty. ...Iraq cannot be one large Guantanamo Bay." He adds: "The Geneva Conventions no longer apply as of 10.26 this morning. Under UN Resolution the occupation has ended and the laws of war no longer apply." However, Frank said the measures were necessary because judges and prosecutors were reluctant to sentence Iraqis for attacking coalition forces. Another prosecutor, Maher Soliman, an Egyptian-born US attorney, also expressed his frustration. "We could have established our own military court and sentenced them the way we see fit," he says. "We didn't want to do that. We wanted Iraqis to run the court." Soliman was initially contracted as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib jail. Under laws introduced by the coalition, possessing illegal weapons carries a minimum sentence of 30 years and maximum of life imprisonment, but Iraqi judges routinely sentenced detainees to only six months, prosecutors say. "We have the feeling they're not putting their heart into it," says Frank. The court also sparked recent controversy after it was used to issue arrest warrants for rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and 15 members of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraq National Congress, on charges including fraud and kidnapping. Last week the court issued an arrest warrant for another member of the Governing Council, Karim Mohammedawi, after he expressed support for Sadr. (Financial Times)
- June 30: The Bush administration says that it cannot comply with a Justice Department request for information from a database on foreign lobbyists: to do so, says administration officials, would bring down the computer system. "Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating," wrote Thomas McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department's office for information requests. The claim strikes administration critics and computer experts as ridiculous: "This was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them," Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity says. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He says the group expects to appeal the Justice Department's decision. "It sounds like incredible negligence for an agency that is keeping public records to keep them in such a precarious condition," says Stephen Doig, interim director at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. "I've never heard the excuse that making the equivalent of a backup copy would somehow cause steam to rise out of the computer." (AP/Wired)
- June 30: Republican senator Chuck Hagel, viewed as somewhat of a maverick, rips the occupation strategy for Iraq, and says a draft will probably be needed to maintain its military commitments. Hagel says he believes the occupation of Iraq by the American military was poorly planned and has spread terrorist cells more widely around the world. "This put in motion a new geographic dispersion" of the terrorists, says Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran. "It's harder to deal with them because they're not as contained. Iraq has become a training ground." He adds that although it is too soon to judge how the war in Iraq will ultimately influence the war on terror, in the short term it has created more terrorists and given them more targets -- American soldiers. Hagel agrees with Bush that the duration of the war on terror may be measured in generations and that to sustain the badly overstretched military for the struggle, a new draft may be needed. "We are seeing huge cracks developing in our force structure," he says. "The fact is, if we're going to continue with this, we're going to have to be honest with the American people." Unlike most Bush officials, Hagel believes that the US needs the cooperation of its allies not only to handle the Iraq situation, but to peacefully and prosperously co-exist in the world at large. "We are pushing away our friends, our allies, the next generation around the world," he says of Bush's foreign policy. (Truthout/San Francisco Chronicle)
- June 30: An article in the Boston Phoenix identifies the anonymous author of the book Imperial Hubris, which roundly castigates the Bush administration's handling of the occupation of Iraq and its war on terror, as Michael Scheuer. (Interviews with Scheuer and material from his book can be found in citations earlier in this month's page on this site.) Scheuer is a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999. CIA officials say that Scheuer chose to remain anonymous for his own safety, particularly from al-Qaeda assassination attempts. The Phoenix article says, "A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all -- and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix's view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant -- a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous's name in both intelligence and journalistic circles." The reporter, Jason Vest, says that the man he identifies as Scheuer told him, "I suppose there might be a knucklehead out there somewhere who might take offense and do something, but anonymity isn't something I asked for, and not for that reason; it makes me sound like I'm hiding behind something, and I personally dislike thinking that anyone thinks I'm a coward." Veteran CIA observers say that the publication of such a book as Imperial Hubris by a former CIA agent, and its publication anonymously, is unprecedented. It is known that the book was vetted by the agency before its publication, and some references to classified material were deleted. (Editor and Publisher)
- June 30: In a particularly ugly bit of partisan politics, a Catholic lawyer files charges of heresy against John Kerry for taking Holy Communion as a pro-choice Catholic; according to the lawsuit, no proper Catholic can support abortion rights and still consider himself Catholic. The documents were filed June 14 but just released to the media by Marc Balestrieri, a Los Angeles-based canon lawyer and an assistant judge with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles' tribunal, an ecclesiastical court. The suit was filed with the Archdiocese of Boston. The Reverend Arthur Espelage, executive coordinator for the Canon Law Society in Alexandria, Virginia, says a Catholic layman can legitimately bring a case against another layman in a church court. The charges, known in church parlance as a "denunciation," are similar to a criminal complaint in secular law. "[T]his is really unique," he says. "I have never heard of a case like this being processed before." Balestrieri says he filed the heresy charge -- plus an additional complaint charging "harm" to himself as a result of Kerry's pronouncements on abortion and related issues -- because canon law entitles Catholics to "possession of the faith unharmed." "By spreading heresy, he is endangering not just mine by every Catholic's possession of the faith," he says. "I am inviting all baptized Catholics who feel injured by Kerry to join the suit as third parties" by sending a certified letter of agreement to the Boston Archdiocese. "People are saying you can be pro-choice and be a good Christian, that it is not contrary to the faith to support aborted murder," Balestrieri says. "This is a life-threatening heresy." While Kerry's campaign refuses to comment on the suit, it is clear that the suit is an effort to take Catholic votes away from Kerry. (Washington Times)
- June 30: Michael Moore defends his new film Fahrenheit 9/11 from criticism by CBS interviewer, and apparent conservative shill, Hannah Storm, in the process challenging CBS's and the mainstream media's impartiality. The exchange goes, in part, like this:
- Storm: "So this is satire and not documentary? We shouldn't see this as --"
- Moore: "It's a satirical documentary."
- Storm: "Some have said propaganda, do you buy that? Op-ed?"
- Moore: "No, I consider the CBS Evening News propaganda. What I do is --"
- Storm: "We'll move beyond on that."
- Moore: "Why? Let's not move beyond that."
- Storm: "You know what?"
- Moore: "Seriously."
- Storm: "No, let's talk about your movie."
- Moore: "But why don't we talk about the Evening News on this network and the other networks that didn't do the job they should have done at the beginning of this war?"
- Storm: "You know what?"
- Moore: "Demanded the evidence, ask the hard questions --"
- Storm: "Okay."
- Moore: "-- we may not of [sic] even gone into this war had these networks done their job. I mean, it was a great disservice to the American people because we depend on people who work here and the other networks to go after those in power and say 'Hey, wait a minute. You want to send our kids off to war, we want to know where those weapons of mass destruction are. Let's see the proof. Let's see the proof that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.'"
- Storm: "But --"
- Moore: "There was no proof and everybody just got embedded and everybody rolled over and everybody knows that now."
- Storm: "Michael, the one thing that journalists try to do is to present both sides of the story. And it could be argued that you did not do that in this movie."
- Moore: "I certainly didn't. I presented my side --"
- Storm: "You presented your side of the story."
- Moore: "Because my side, that's the side of millions of Americans, rarely gets told. And so, all I'm, look, this is just a humble plea on my behalf and not to you personally, Hannah. But I'm just saying to journalists in general that instead of working so hard to tell both sides of the story, why don't you just tell that one side, which is the administration, why don't you ask them the hard questions --"
- Storm: "Which I think is something that we all try to do."
- Moore: "Well, I think it was a lot of cheerleading going on at the beginning of this war --"
- Storm: "All right."
- Moore: "A lot of cheerleading and it didn't do the public any good to have journalists standing in front of the camera going 'whoop-dee-do, let's all go to war.' And, and it's not their kids going to war. It's not the children of the news executives going to war --"
- Storm: "Michael, why don't you do you next movie about networks news, okay? Because this movie --"
- Moore: "I know, I think I should do that movie."
- Storm: "-- because this movie is an attack on the president and his policies."
- Moore: "Well, and it also points out how the networks failed us at the beginning of this war and didn't do their job." (CBS/Buzzflash)
- June 30: Law professor David Cole learns the true meaning of "no spin" during his appearance on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News television show. After initially playing what Cole calls a "balanced sound bite" from the 9/11 commission, O'Reilly stops the taping of the show and kills the sound bite. When Cole protests, O'Reilly explodes, calling Cole a "son of a b*tch" and says Cole will never be invited back. The heated words, which were edited out of the program seen by viewers, involved O'Reilly's criticism of the New York Times and its coverage of the controversy over whether there were links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In kicking off what he called "no-spin coverage" of the issue, O'Reilly began the show by saying that "the Times and other newspapers have been under heavy fire for their misleading headlines, basically saying there was no link" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. As Cole listened from Washington, the program played a clip of commission chairman Thomas Kean saying: "There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States -- in other words, on 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, excuse me, al-Qaeda." O'Reilly complained that this was the wrong sound bite. In retaping the commentary, he paraphrased one of Kean's points but not the other: "Governor Thomas Kean says definitely there was a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. And he's the 9/11 investigative chief, but that's not enough for the Times." "I was sort of astonished he would do it so brazenly in front of guests," says Cole, an activist attorney who has challenged the USA Patriot Act in court. O'Reilly calls "totally absurd" the suggestion that he cut the sound bite "because it didn't fit my thesis." A producer had simply selected a clip that wasn't right for the segment, he says. But Cole says: "Here he is castigating the New York Times for misleading its readers, and he was misleading his viewers. I wish the show had been live because I'd love for his viewers to see what he was up to." "We make mistakes because we bring in people who are trying to cause trouble," O'Reilly says of Cole. "I thought he was a rational person." Cole takes his tale to Air America's Al Franken show; Franken is a vocal critic of O'Reilly. Cole also writes an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, which has yet to publish the piece. O'Reilly sees this as part of "a pretty well organized campaign" on the left to monitor his television and radio shows. He cited an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor last week by John Podesta, former chief of staff in the Clinton White House, who now heads a liberal think tank called the Center for American Progress. Podesta complained that "you compare Bill Moyers to Mao Zedong. You say that's a joke. You compare Al Franken to Joseph Goebbels, you know, the Nazi propagandist." "That was Michael Moore, by the way," said O'Reilly, adding that such comments were often satirical. "I said that Michael Moore is a propagandist and so is Joseph Goebbels. And then I explained what propaganda is." "It's a two-way street here, buddy," Podesta said at one point. "You do this all the time as well, you label people, you smear people." O'Reilly also cites what he calls a false claim by Moore, in publicizing his film Fahrenheit 9/11, that O'Reilly had "banned" him after a contentious interview. The host insists that is not the case and typical of his liberal detractors. "They're trying to say that we're liars," says O'Reilly. "If you can't beat 'em, slime 'em." (Washington Post)