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
March 2004: Week Three
Page Three
- March 19: South Korea has cancelled plans to send troops to northern Iraq because of security concerns, and is considering deploying them to other areas. "The United States and South Korea have agreed that it is inevitable to change the location for South Korean troops as the security situation in Kirkuk has become worse," the Defense Ministry says in a statement. "The two countries agreed to reconsider a possible location putting the whole of Iraq under review." South Korea's government has agreed to dispatch more than 3,000 troops, mostly non-combatants, to northern Iraq in phases, starting next month. Some 400 South Korean non-combatants, including medics and engineers, are already serving in Iraq. Washington had asked South Korea to allow US combat troops to remain in the area that was to be under South Korean military control, the statement said, a position South Korea was unable to accept. "south Korea said this proposal runs against the principles of the troop dispatch approved by the South Korean parliament which stipulate that South Korean troops will maintain their own independent command and control system in a defined area which they control for the purpose of carrying out peace and reconstruction efforts," it says. South Korea is now looking for a new location for its troop deployment, "where the troops will be able to carry out peace and reconstruction efforts efficiently in a more stable atmosphere...." it says. Candidate sites include Najaf in southern Iraq, where 1,300 Spanish troops are currently stationed, officials say. Spain's prime-minister elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has said he would pull the troops from the country unless the United Nations takes control of peacekeeping operations. (ABC News)
Richard Clarke's damning indictment of the Bush administration's efforts to combat terrorism; Clarke says the administration planned on attacking Iraq almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks
- March 19: Former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke says the Bush administration considered bombing Iraq immediately after the 9/11 attacks, even though it was clear that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda and that no connection with Iraq could be ascertained. "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11," says Clarke. "They were talking about it on 9/12." Clarke said he was briefing President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld among other top officials in the aftermath of the devastating attacks. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq. ...We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan,'" recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.'" Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, fired in a shake-up of Bush's economic team in December 2002, recently said he never saw any evidence Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- Bush's main justification for going to war. O'Neill also charged that Bush entered office intent on invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection" between Iraq and al-Qaeda, says Clarke. "But the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection.'" (Reuters/Truthout)
- March 19: The Bush Medicare reform bill, once touted as a centerpiece of his administration's domestic strategy, has rapidly become a "nightmare" for the administration, according to an analysis by William Douglas. Douglas writes, "The Bush administration deliberately didn't tell Congress that the measure could cost more than $100 billion more than advertised. House Republican leaders abused House rules to push the measure to a narrow victory. There are also allegations of threats and bribes that are under investigation. The Bush administration spent millions of taxpayer dollars on public service TV ads touting the Medicare reform law that look suspiciously like Bush campaign commercials. Those, too, are now under investigation. Polls show that a majority of Americans don't like the Medicare reforms." "It's something that's eating away at the credibility of the administration in an election year on a bill that he [Bush] thought was a building block for his re-election," says Stephen Hess, a political analyst for the Brookings Institution and a former aide to President Eisenhower. House Democrats are angry about the administration's deception on the cost estimates; Henry Waxman and other Democrats are threatening a lawsuit to force Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to turn over all of the administration's undisclosed estimates, and are demanding from White House chief of staff Andrew Card that the White House disclose its role in withholding the information from Congress. "In this case, there appears to have been extensive White House involvement in the development of the cost estimates for the prescription drug provisions," they assert in a letter to Card.
- Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, calls the Medicare issue "much ado about nothing," and White House officials indicate that they have no intention of undertaking any sort of investigation. Additionally, the General Accounting Office is investigating the legality of the barrage of television and print ads authorized by the White House, and paid for by taxpayer dollars, touting the Medicare provisions. Preliminary investigations have concluded that, while the ads are probably legal, they contain a wealth of misinformation and omissions. "There is no place for silencing the truth," says Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "I believe the American people deserve real answers on why this administration is keeping public officials quiet and keeping facts from the American people. We deserve better than this." Senator Edward Kennedy echoes the Watergate-era line, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" Congressional Republicans are rallying behind Bush and the Medicare reforms. They dismissed complaints about the bill's hidden cost estimates, ongoing investigations and controversy over the HHS ads as simply a Democratic scheme to discredit a GOP triumph. The controversy "says more about the Democratic attack machine than it says about the bill," sniffs John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Independent analysts, including conservatives, weren't so sanguine. "This bill will not go down in the annals of good government," says Robert Moffitt, the director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. "Now it's a political problem." (Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News/Miami Herald)
- March 19: Richard Foster, the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs who was threatened with firing last year if he disclosed too much information to Congress, says he believes the White House participated in the decision to withhold analyses that Medicare legislation President Bush sought would be far more expensive than lawmakers knew. Foster has said publicly that he was warned repeatedly by his former boss, Thomas Scully, then the Medicare administrator, that he would be dismissed if he replied directly to legislative requests for information about prescription drug bills pending in Congress. Foster now says that he understood Scully to be acting at times on White House instructions, probably coming from Bush's senior health policy adviser. Foster says he has no concrete proof of a White House role, but that his inference was based on the nature of several conversations he had with Scully over data that Congress had asked for and that Foster wanted to release. "I just remember Tom being upset, saying he was caught in the middle. It was like he was getting dumped on," Foster recalls. Foster says he believes, but can't be sure, that Scully had been referring to Doug Badger, the senior health policy analyst. He says that he concluded that Badger probably was involved because he was the White House official most steeped in the administration's negotiations with Congress over Medicare legislation enacted late last year and because Badger was intimately familiar with the analyses his office produced. The account by Foster, a longtime civil servant who has been the Medicare program's chief actuary for nine years, diverges sharply from the explanations of why cost estimates were withheld that were given this week by White House spokesmen and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. They suggested that Scully, who left for jobs with law and investment firms four months ago, had acted unilaterally and that he was chastised by his superiors when they learned of the blocked information and the threat. Thompson recently told reporters: "Tom Scully was running this. Tom Scully was making those decisions."
- Thompson said the administration did not have final cost estimates until late December predicting that the law would cost $534 billion over 10 years, $139 billion more than the Congressional Budget Office's prediction. Foster has said his own analyses as early as last spring showed that the legislation's cost would exceed $500 billion. White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy says, "It is my understanding that Mr. Badger did not in any way ask anyone to withhold information from Congress or pressure anyone to do the same." Duffy said he asked Badger this week whether he had done so and that Badger replied he had not. Foster suggests the White House had been involved as new details emerged of the manner in which he had been threatened. He has released an e-mail, dated last June 20, from Scully's top assistant at the time regarding one GOP request and two Democratic requests for information about the impact of provisions of the Medicare bill on which the House would vote a week later. In a bold-faced section of the three-paragraph note, Scully's assistant, Jeffrey Flick, instructed Foster to answer the Republican's question but warned him not to disclose answers to the Democratic queries "with anyone else until Tom Scully explicitly talks with you -- authorizing release of information. The consequences for insubordination are extremely severe." The warning came in response to an e-mail Foster had sent to Scully that same Friday afternoon, in which he said the three questions "strike me as straightforward requests for technical information that would be useful in assessing drug and competition provisions in the House reform package." Foster offered in that e-mail to show Scully his proposed replies in advance. Foster says that he and Foster had disagreed over how helpful an executive branch employee needed to be to Congress, calling it "a separation of powers issue." He continues by saying that while the e-mail was the only instance in which he had been explicitly threatened in writing, that "there were other instances in which Tom in an e-mail or just over the phone would clearly be unhappy and would say less formally something to the effect, 'If you want to work for the Ways and Means Committee, I can arrange that.'" Congressional Democrats are calling for the General Accounting Office to investigate the episode. Thompson announced recently he has ordered HHS's inspector general to conduct an inquiry. (Washington Post)
- March 19: While the Bush administration has long banned trade with Myanmar (Burma) for its horrendous record of human rights abuses, narcotics violations, and sex trafficking, apparently that ban doesn't extend to Bush's own campaign, which is marketing campaign materials made in that country. The decision by Bush's campaign to defy its own embargo directly contradicts his own pledge to enforce existing trade laws. In recent days, Bush said Americans need to be "treated fairly" and pledged to "make sure the playing field is level" on trade. But his decision to market Burmese textile products evades laws that prevent American workers from having to compete with Burmese workers who have no minimum wage, human rights or labor protections. Since Bush was elected, thousands of textile jobs have been lost, particularly in the South, and many have questioned whether the administration is adequately enforcing trade laws. On top of evading his own trade laws, Bush's effective endorsement of Burmese goods means his campaign is marketing products from a country the State Department has repeatedly condemned for human rights abuses and that the Treasury Department has cited for laundering money from illegal narcotics dealers. "Burma is one of the most repressive, brutal dictatorships in the world," says Charles Kernagan, head of the National Labor Committee, a group that seeks to combat sweatshops internationally. "The Bush-Cheney campaign was putting money into the hands of dictators with that purchase." Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch adds, "The US government, regardless of the administration, has widely condemned the human rights record of Burma. One would expect that they would be extremely diligent about where they buy their products." A spokesman for the Kerry campaign wryly remarks, "Well, all this time I was wrong that the President doesn't have a jobs program. Turns out it's in Burma." The Bush campaign says that the sale of campaign materials made in Myanmar is an oversight, and says it is committed to selling only products made in the USA. (Newsday/White House/State Department/Daily Misleader, Boston Globe)
- March 19: National security advisor Condoleezza Rice takes time from an "extremely busy day" to address a secretive gathering that includes global media mogul Rupert Murdoch and top executives from television networks, newspapers and other media properties owned by Murdoch's News Corp. conglomerate. Rice speaks at length via satellite to Murdoch and his colleagues, who have gathered at the posh Ritz Carlton Hotel in Cancun, Mexico. Rice was asked to address the group by executives of the Murdoch-controlled Fox broadcast and cable networks in the US. The Fox "family" includes, of course, the Fox News cable channel, described by the British Guardian as "hugely supportive of President George Bush." "Although she is not there in person, the presence of Ms. Rice underlines the importance of Rupert Murdoch's news operations to the Bush administration, which may face growing criticism that it led the country into war on false pretenses ahead of November's presidential election," the Guardian account of the Cancun gathering explains.
- In addition to Fox, Murdoch controls the Bush-friendly Weekly Standard magazine and New York Post newspaper, as well as 35 local television stations and the 20th Century Fox movie studio. Thanks to Bush Administration appointees to the Federal Communications Commission, Murdoch's reach is rapidly expanding in the US. In December, the FCC approved News Corp.'s $6.6-billion takeover of DirecTV, the country's leading satellite television firm. That decision made Murdoch the only media executive with satellite, cable and broadcast assets in the US. Since Murdoch is such a powerful media mogul, and has been so supportive of the Bush administration and right-wing ideologies in general (except when it suits his purposes, as with his sudden support of the Chinese communist government), it should probably not come as any surprise that, like the politicians in any number of countries where Murdoch has come to dominate the discourse, Bush administration officials jump when Murdoch speaks. Rice's willingness to brief Fox executives is especially intriguing in light of the fact that she continues to refuse to brief the bipartisan panel that is investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The 9/11 commission is expected to hear this week from CIA director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine Albright; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessor, William Cohen; and President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger. But Rice has rejected invitations to testify in public. It seems that, when the 9/11 commission calls, the Bush administration's national security advisor is not available. But when Rupert Murdoch calls, she is readily available. (The Nation)
- March 19: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz offends millions of Spaniards by saying that bullfighting shows they are a brave people and they shouldn't run in the face of terrorism. They see Wolfowitz's comment as narrow-minded and promoting a stereotype. "This is an ignorant comment," says Madrid firefighter Juan Carlos Yunquera. For a top official, it shows he doesn't know what he's talking about." Yunquera points out that Spaniards overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq, even as former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar joined President Bush's "coalition of the willing" a year ago and later contributed troops for the occupation. Prime Minister-designate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has insisted he would withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq unless the United Nations takes charge. In an interview on PBS television, Wolfowitz said Zapatero's withdrawal plan didn't seem very Spanish. "The Spaniards are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of bullfighting," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven't run in the face of the Basque terrorists. I hope they don't run in the face of these people." Waitress Carlota Duce says she has no use for such comments. "It's drivel. There is absolutely no comparison between bullfighting and Spain pulling out of Iraq." Bartender Oliver Iglesias says, "We are indeed very brave. But no one here likes the war in Iraq. And there's a big difference between killing a bull and killing a person." Gustavo de Aristegui, a legislator and spokesman in parliament for Aznar's Popular Party, also criticizes Wolfowitz, saying: "A top-ranking politician should be more careful about the remarks he makes, and that's all I'm going to say about Mr. Wolfowitz." Yunquera, the firefighter, says he is annoyed that Wolfowitz even mentioned bullfighting. "I've never liked bullfighting," he says. "If I was to describe Spain, I would say Spain is a tolerant and joyful country and not even mention bullfighting." (AP/Guardian)
- March 19: Norman Solomon, the co-author of the book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You, writes that the Bush campaign is waging an all-out campaign to spin the truth of the Iraq invasion in order to control the 2004 presidential election. He writes, "Top administration officials are going all out to airbrush yesterday's deceptions on behalf of today's. And tomorrow's. The future they want most to control starts on Election Day. And with scarcely seven months to go in the presidential campaign, the past that Bush officials are most eager to obscure is their own record. In late 2002 and early last year, whenever the drive to war hit a bump, they maneuvered carefully to keep the war caravan moving steadily forward. ...Perhaps such steeliness has been almost boilerplate in history; excuses for aggressive war have never been hard to come by. In this case, no amount of geopolitical analysis -- from media pundits, academics and other commentators -- could really do more to shed light than the lightbulb comprehension that these people in charge had from the outset made the determination that war it would be. So, every attempt at civic engagement and demonstrations against the war scenario was, in effect, trying to impede 'leaders' who had already gone around the bend. A very big bend. One of the American mass media taboos was to seriously suggest the possibility that the lot of them -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and, yes, Powell -- were, in their pursuit of war on Iraq, significantly deranged. Working back from their conclusion of war's necessity, top Bush administration officials -- with assistance from many reporters and pundits -- were reading the calendar backwards, hellbent on getting the invasion underway well before the extreme heat of summer. There was also political weather to be navigated. Though much more susceptible to manipulation than the four seasons, the electoral storms would be starting for the 2004 presidential contest, and a secured victory over Iraq well in advance seemed advisable. The peace-seeking pretense was dripping with charade in the months before the invasion. Journalists kept writing and talking about the chances of war as though President Bush hadn't already made up his mind to order it. Yet what Bush said in public was exactly opposite to reality.... When he talked about preferring to find an acceptable alternative to war, he was determined to bypass and destroy every alternative to war. Rational arguments would not work to forestall the presidential order to unleash the Pentagon. Despite the obstacles, which included vital activism and protests for peace, the chief executive easily got to have his war -- the best kind, to be fought and endured only by others. ...Key questions of the past are also crucial for the future. For instance, can the United States credibly wage a 'war on terrorism' by engaging in warfare that terrorizes civilians? Close to 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the war during the past year. Does the mix of mendacity and deadly violence from the Oval Office really strike against terrorism, or does it fuel terrorist cycles? And, in the realm of news media, how many journalists are willing and able to go beyond reliance on official sources enough to bring us truth about lies that result in death?" (CommonDreams)
- March 19: The latest Bush campaign ad slamming John Kerry for "voting against support for our troops" is a flat lie. The ad specifically refers to Senate Bill 1689, passed on October 17, 2003. The bill, which approved $87 billion to fund the Iraq occupation, was opposed by Kerry, Senator Robert Byrd, and other Democrats, not because they opposed support of the troops in Iraq, but because they called for oversight and accountability for those expenditures by forcing a vote which would have required it. The GOP-driven Congress passed the bill as it stood, mandating no accountability whatsoever. As of now, there is no way to know how that money is being spent. Byrd wrote that same day, "I twice tried to separate the reconstruction money in this bill, so that those dollars could be considered separately from the military spending. I offered an amendment to force the Administration to craft a plan to get other nations to assist the troops and formulate a plan to get the UN in, and the US out, of Iraq. Twice I tried to rid the bill of expansive, flexible authorities that turn this $87 billion into a blank check." (Buzzflash)
- March 20: The Bush re-election campaign officially begins its drive for the presidency in a kickoff rally in Orlando, Florida. The entire Bush administration has unofficially been in "campaign mode" for at least nine months, with Bush and campaign officials crisscrossing the country raising money, but today marks the official start to its re-election campaign. Using information provided by watchdog group Public Citizen, columnist Craig Aaron observes, "Bush has turned the election into an auction, an invitation-only opportunity for Corporate America to prove its loyalty to the president. The engine in Bush's money machine has been an elite regiment of 455 'Rangers' and 'Pioneers,l the honorary titles bestowed on fundraisers who can collect at least $200,000 or $100,000, respectively. Legally, each of these individuals is limited to a maximum donation of $2,000. But the Bush campaign has perfected a sophisticated system of bundling -- by which corporate executives, lobbyists or other insiders pool a large number of contributions to maximize their political influence. The Rangers and Pioneers have collected at least $64.2 million so far. In return, these worthies have received access to the administration, relaxed regulations, legislative favors, targeted tax breaks, lucrative federal contracts, and plum appointments at home and abroad. But some hold more of a stake in Bush's re-election than others: The 10 industries profiled here have been among the most generous supporters of the president -- and they stand to reap the greatest rewards if Dubya prevails in November. Nearly one in five Rangers and Pioneers comes from the financial sector. This group of 85 bankers, stockbrokers and wealthy private investors -- which has bundled at least $12.5 million for the 2004 Bush campaign -- includes 20 top Wall Street executives. Wall Street firms account for six of the top 10 companies whose employees have donated the most to Bush this cycle.
- "Bush's economic policies -- particularly the sweeping dividend, capital gains and income tax cuts -- have lined Wall Street's pockets. Now the industry is leading the drive to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, endorsing administration plans to overhaul the retirement system and salivating over the prospect of Social Security privatization. These same firms have been at the center of almost every major corporate scandal from Enron to Worldcom to Martha Stewart. Yet Wall Street is banking on Bush to muzzle watchdogs like New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and fend off further regulation of mutual funds, derivatives trading and arcane, highly profitable tax-avoidance schemes. The Wall Street Journal reported that hedge fund consultant Lee Hennessee sent out invitations to a March 11 Bush fundraiser with this message: 'The current administration is favorable to the hedge fund industry, and we need to do all we can to keep them in office.' Fundraising for Bush is a win-win situation for Washington lobbyists. Achieving Ranger or Pioneer status ensures insider access to the administration, which these influence-peddlers can then turn around and market to their clients. The client lists of major Bush backers read like a corporate scandal sheet -- from Boeing and Wal-Mart to Tyco and the tobacco companies. The 55 Rangers and Pioneers registered as federal lobbyists have bundled at least $6.7 million in contributions for Bush this cycle. These same lobbyists met repeatedly with Dick Cheney's secret energy task force to do the bidding of energy interests, took millions from drug companies to help push through the Medicare bill and led the fight for Bush's tax cuts on behalf of the business community. While the Bush campaign has produced ads attacking Senator John Kerry for being beholden to 'special interests,' the president has accepted more in direct contributions from lobbyists in 2003 than Kerry did in the past 15 years. 'The issue is hypocrisy in saying you're going to take on the special interests, not who took the most special interest money,' Bush media strategist Mark McKinnon told the Washington Post. 'You don't hear the president in the Oval Office railing against the special interests.'" Aaron goes on to detail the contributions, and the legislative rewards reaped, by various corporations in the oil, energy, and coal industries, real estate developers, pharmaceutical and health-care industries, the insurance industry, and the mass media, among others. (In These Times/AlterNet)
- March 21: Former Bush and Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke appears on 60 Minutes, to discuss the charges leveled in his book Against All Enemies that the Bush administration did little or nothing to protect the country from terror attacks until after the 9/11 tragedy, then used the terror attacks to serve as an excuse to invade Iraq. On the morning of the attacks, the White House was evacuated in case another airliner were to crash into the building; Clarke was one of the few who left. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice deferred to Clarke's authority throughout the crisis. "I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words of Marlon Brando, when he thought about Vietnam," Clarke remembers. "'The horror. The horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America." Almost immediately after the attacks, Bush and his advisors, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate.
- As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq. "Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke says. "And we all said...no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it. Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking. I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection." Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Clarke then says he was pressured by Bush. "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report." After Bush leaves, one of Clarke's aides says, "Wolfowitz got to him."
- Clarke continues, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.' I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer." Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously. "We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al-Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months. There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo -- wasn't acted on. I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years." Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request, but it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department. Paul Wolfowitz represented the Pentagon. Clark recalls, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al-Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
- Clarke adds, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." When reminded that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over." By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though US intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. Tenet joined Clarke in warning the White House about the possibility of impending atacks. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al-Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August." Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to "battle stations" -- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al-Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject." Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place -- one week prior to 9/11." In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al-Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden. The plan was rejected.
- Clarke says that while he feels he owes a certain loyalty to the Bush admininstration, he replies, "Yes.... Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside. I think the way he has responded to al-Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe. Absolutely." Deputy security advisor Stephen Hadley later contradicts Clarke's assertions: "The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with...George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'" Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001. "All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.' And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations." Hadley asserts Clarke is "just wrong" in saying the administration didn't go to battle stations. As for the alleged pressure from Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." 60 Minutes has found two independent sources that say they know the meeting occurred, including one who was actually part of the meeting. Hadley refuses to accept that, and states the administration's justification for connecting the 9/11 attacks and Iraq: "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists."
- Clarke believes that, contrary to making the US safer from terrorism, the Iraqi occupation plays into the terrorists' hands and makes the US less safe. "The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it. Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al-Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al-Qaeda have been greatly strengthened." A senior White House official has said he thinks the Clarke book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign. Clarke replies, "I'm an independent. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign. I have worked for Ronald Reagan. I have worked for George Bush the first, I have worked for George Bush the second. I'm not participating in this campaign, but I am putting facts out that I think people ought to know." (CBS, New York Times)
- March 21: Spain's withdrawal from Iraq is all but inevitable despite US pressure to stay the course, says incoming Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Zapatero, whose Socialists ousted the center-right government a week ago, vowed to stand by his pre-election pledge to withdraw 1,300 troops from Iraq, unless the United Nations takes control by mid-year. "A lot would have to change [in Iraq]," says Zapatero. "The return of Spanish troops is a decision that will be difficult to avoid." The Bush administration is insisting that Spain stay in the Iraq "coalition of the willing." US Republicans have complained that Zapatero's decision to pull troops out of Iraq amounts to appeasing terrorists, but he insisted the Iraq war was a "great mistake" and that better sharing of intelligence was the answer. "Terrorism is not defeated with wars," he says. (Reuters)
- March 21: Despite intense efforts by US and Pakistani forces in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, top al-Qaeda advisor Ayman al-Zawahiri seems to have escaped capture. A Taliban official confirms that both al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden are safe in the wilds of northeastern Afghanistan. Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf confirms the report, saying that the onslaught, code-named "Operation Mountain Storm," failed to pick up any senior al-Qaeda members. The Bush administration attempts to downplay the failure: "It would be of course a major step forward in the war on terrorism...but I think we have to be careful not to assume that getting one al-Qaeda leader is going to break up the organization," says US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. During a visit to Islamabad, Secretary of State Colin Powell praised General Musharraf for his country's help and announced Washington now regarded it as a "major non-NATO ally." In recent broadcasts, al-Zawahiri has described the war on terrorism as a war on Islam, and criticized Islamic leaders who co-operated with the US. "Bush appoints corrupt leaders and protects them," he said in a tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television.
- Ron Suskind, who dubs Ayman al-Zawahiri "bin Laden's Cheney, the older man who made sure that ideas were carried to action," writes in his book The One Percent Doctrine that at least four times in 2001 and 2002 reports reached Washington that Zawahiri was dead, reports that were always disproven. In one instance, a set of Afghan tribal chiefs claimed to be able to prove Zawahiri's death with concrete evidence: they delivered a mud-caked head to US intelligence agents in Afghanistan. Officials flew the head to Washington for DNA analysis. An FBI analyst who told Suskind of the incident remembers holding the jawless skull "as Hamlet did with Yorick's. [It felt] like a boccie ball." Bush, who was tracking the transaction, told a briefer -- half in jest -- "if it turns out to be Zawahiri's head, I hope you'll bring it here." The head was not Zawahiri's. (The Australian, Washington Post)
- March 21: A highly classified FBI program called "Catcher's Mitt" was drastically scaled back in the months before 9/11 after a federal judge criticized the FBI for improperly seeking permits to wiretap terror suspects. The program was designed to monitor and track terrorist conversations in the United States. (Newsweek/Yahoo! Finance, Newsweek)
- March 21: Far-right presidential candidate Tony Saca wins the election in El Salvador, promising to continue his country's support of the Bush administration's policies. Saca, a media mogul with no political experience and a wealth of connections to US right-wingers, won after a brutal campaign against opponent Schafik Handal of the left-leaning FMLN. Saca's party, ARENA, used a TV ad that showed first an airliner crashing into one of the WTC towers on September 11, then the face of Osama bin Laden, then finally the face of Handal. Other commercials and news stories aired by the predominantly right-wing news media emphasized Bush's preoccupation with apparent FMLN links to terrorism, the possibility of Salvadorans who live in the US being deported in the event of an FMLN win, the US supposedly reconsidering its ties to El Salvador if the FMLN were victorious, and the prevention of remittances (the key source of income) to flow from Salvadorans in the US back to their families in Central America if the FMLN won. International observers consider the election fundamentally tainted. ARENA is the party of the infamous "death squads" of the 1980s and 1990s, founded by murderer Roberto D'aubisson, who ordered the execution of Archbishop Oscar Romero 24 years ago. (ZMag)
- March 21: The Carlyle Group has positioned itself to make handsome profits in the case of any nuclear attack on the US. It has bought MedPointe, which is one of only three companies licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration to manufacture over-the-counter potassium iodide pills. Potassium iodide will be given out to victims of radiation poisoning in the event of a nuclear weapon being set off, or an attack on a nuclear power plant that causes radiation leakage. The other two firms licensed to provide potassium iodide are a tiny Florida firm, Anbex, which mostly sells its product to survivalists, and a small Swedish company, Recip. If a nuclear attack does occur, Carlyle will be able to sell millions of its Thyro-Block product to the government and to private concerns at a fine profit. (San Francisco Chronicle)
