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
May 2003
Week Two
- May 7: The undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, tells the press that the Defense Department is still putting together what it calls the Iraq Survey Group, to be sent to Iraq to search for individuals, records, and materials related to weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq war and occupation
The ISG will take over from the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a smaller military group previously in charge of finding and securing Iraq's WMDs. But the ISG has other duties besides finding and securing WMDs, including uncovering information relating to Saddam Hussein's regime, his intelligence services, any terror outfits with a presence in Iraq, war crimes, and POWs. Cambone emphasizes that WMDs are "only a part" of this "very large undertaking." The unit isn't even scheduled to deploy until the end of May. Cambone reports that before the war, the Pentagon had a list of around 600 suspected WMD sites, but currently only 70 or so of these sites have been visited, along with another 40 that were not on the original list. David Corn writes, "This hardly appeared to be the anti-WMD blitzkrieg that could have reasonably been expected by anyone who had listened to Bush's prewar rhetoric. If Saddam Hussein's weapons were such an imminent danger that the United States had had no choice but to spurn further investigations and invade and occupy, why had Bush not put together the Iraq Survey Group earlier? Why hadn't it been ready to roll as soon as US boots were on the ground? The war had come as no surprise to the Bush administration." In mid-May, the 75th Exploitation Task Force announces that it is wrapping up operations and will leave Iraq by the end of the month. Task force members complain that they lacked vital tools and, according to the Washington Post, "consistently found targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both." Task force commander Colonel Richard McPhee admits that he knows of no plans to secure any WMD sites had any been found. "Why are we doing any planned targets?" asks one task force soldier. "We know they're empty." The ISG will cut back on its own investigations of WMD sites even before deploying. McPhee says, "Do I know where they are? I wish I did...but we will find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here." (David Corn) - May 7: Bush administration lawyer Alberto Gonzales intend to invoke "executive privilege" to shield some documents from review by the National Commission on Terror Attacks Upon the United States, the independent panel created by Congress to probe all aspects of 9/11.
9/11 attacks
Panel director Peter Zelikow intends to force the release of the documents if possible. This is not the only example of government interference with the panel's investigation. In late April, one commission member, former Democratic congressman Tim Roemer, tried to read transcripts of three days of closed hearings that had been held last fall by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees -- hearings that Roemer, as a member of the House panel, had actually participated in. When Roemer went down to a guarded room on Capitol Hill to read the classified transcripts, he was "stunned" to learn that he was denied access. The reason was that Zelikow had acceded to a request by an administration official to permit lawyers to first review them to determine if the transcripts contained testimony about "privileged" material. Roemer called the deal "outrageous." White House lawyers eventually relented, averting an embarrassing public escalation of the dispute, and likely charges of a White House cover-up." (The Nation)
- May 8: Bush adminstration officials level false charges that the French government is supplying passports to Iraqi officials in Syria.
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France heatedly denies the charges, which are never proven, and accuse the Bush adminstration of orchestrating a smear campaign against France. The next day, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld makes a point to tell the press that "France has historically had a very close relationship with Iraq. My understanding is that it continued right up until the outbreak of the war. What took place after that, we'll find out." A week later, press secretary Scott McClellan admits that the government has no evidence of any collusion between the French government and the Hussein regime. (Amy Goodman and David Goodman) - May 8: Political activist and environmentalist Mark Gaffney writes that the administration's next target of invasion is likely to be Iran.
War with Iran
Gaffney writes that the issue revolves around Iran's burgeoning nuclear power plant at Bushehr, planned since 1974 and scheduled to be finished later this year with the help of Russian technicians and funding. The US and Israel have not yet decided whether to allow the plant to be completed; though Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Regulatory Treaty, and no evidence exists of its intention to develop nuclear weapons, both the US and Israel believe than Iran intends just such development. The recent discovery of two secret Iranian nuclear research facilities, at Arak and at Natanz, have only heightened suspicion. (Information Clearinghouse)
- May 9: The Washington Post reports that military commanders in Iraq are complaining about Donald Rumsfeld's plan to win the war with a small, fleet force left them unprepared to provide security after Hussein's ouster.
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"A month after US forces left Baghdad," it notes, "the Pentagon's occupation authority remains plagued by insufficient resources and inadequate preparation, fueling complaints from Iraqis and doubts about the Bush administration's promise to reconstruct the country swiftly and set its politics on a new, democratic course.... US officers, acknowledging Iraqis' complaints about lax security, have pleaded that their troops are stretched too thin." Electricity and water are sporadic at best. Civilians wait in mile-long lines for gasoline. Hospitals, forced to work under primitive conditions, are stretched past their limits. Looting is rampant. Crime is rampant. Relief workers are being assaulted. Iraqis are settling old scores with revenge killings. Baghdad lacks a functioning police force. And the US occupiers don't even have language interpreters. "The planning was ragged," says a senior US official in Baghdad, "and the execution was worse." But Rumsfeld tells the press that the military under Tommy Franks and the reconstruction organization led by retired general Jay Garner are doing "outstanding job[s]...[W]e are continuing to make things better in almost every corner of the country." Within days, Garner will be fired and replaced by corporate honcho Paul Bremer; most of Garner's team is also dismissed and replaced. The White House refuses to explain the shake-up. Bu mid-May, the number of US and British troops in the country nears 200,000, and the situation is not improving. (Washington Post/David Corn)
Democrats begin to question rationale for invasion and are labeled traitors (see below)
- December 10 - on: Democratic questioning of the war and its rationale begins to escalate, led by several Presidential candidates and the senior Democratic senator, Robert Byrd, who charges that the Bush administration deliberately deceived the American people.
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"It appears to this senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law, under false premises," Byrd says. "There is ample evidence that the horrific events of Sept. 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who masterminded the Sept. 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not." Even fellow Republicans begin daring to criticize Bush's policies, most notably foreign policy expert Sen. Richard Lugar, who warned of a potential "catastrophe" in Iraq, said that the country was in danger of becoming "an incubator for terrorist cells and activity," and said that the administration clearly did not prepare for the task of handling post-war Iraq. (The Times/Truthout, Kansas City Star/AP, Portsmouth Herald)
"America and Great Britain were led to war under false pretenses. ...I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war." -- Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- May 11: Former CIA director James Woolsey, an influential neoconservative close to Bush, is the director of a US firm planning to cash in on the administration's "war on terror."
Military-industrial complex
Woolsey, a longtime supporter of the push to invade Iraq and a key member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, is a senior director of the private equity firm Paladin Capital. The company was set up three months after the terrorist attacks on New York and sees the events and aftermath of 9/11 as a business opportunity which "offer[s] substantial promise for homeland security investment." Paladin's first priority was "to invest in companies with immediate solutions designed to prevent harmful attacks, defend against attacks, cope with the aftermath of attack or disaster and recover from terrorist attacks and other threats to homeland security." Paladin plans on raising $300 million from investors by the end of the year, and calculates that the US will spend at least $60 billion on anti-terrorism; corporations will spend twice that much to ensure their security and continuity in case of attack. Paladin is poised to rake in a substantial amount of those funds. - In 2001, Woolsey went to Europe at the behest of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to argue the case for links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Woolsey has long argued that the anthrax letter attacks in America originated with Hussein. More recently Woolsey spoke out about Hussein's attempts to produce a genetically modified strain of anthrax: "I would be more worried over the mid to long term about biological weapons, because the chemical gear, we're -- I think we're pretty well equipped to deal with. But there have been stories that Saddam has been working on genetically modifying some of these biological agents, making anthrax resistant to vaccines or antibiotics." No evidence of any link between Iraq and the anthrax attacks has ever surfaced. However, Woolsey's assertions added to a political atmosphere in which spending on equipment designed to protect individuals and firms from terror was predicted to mushroom. One of Paladin's first investments was $10.5 million in AgION Technologies, a firm devising anti-germ technology that it hopes will "be the leader in the fight against bacterial attacks initiated by terrorists on unsuspecting civilian and military personnel."
- Woolsey is only one of many members of the Defense Policy Board to profit from the US war on terror. Nine of the members have ties to defense contractors that won over $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Woolsey's fellow neo-conservative, Richard Perle, had to resign his chairmanship of the board because of conflicts of interest, although he remains a board member. There are a number of other high-level Bush administration officials lining up at the trough. Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton, has helped steer lucrative contracts to his company and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, in post-invasion Iraq. The Defense Department gave KBR exclusive rights to a $90m contract to cater for the Americans who are working on rebuilding Iraq. KBR also won a lucrative contract to repair Iraq's oilfields. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of European engineering giant ABB when it won a multi-million contract for two light water reactors to North Korea, a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil." Rumsfeld was paid $190,000 a year before he joined the Bush administration. Perle is managing partner of venture capital company Trireme, which invests in companies dealing in products of value to homeland security. Trireme sent a letter to Saudi arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi arguing that fear of terrorism would boost demand in Europe, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. Ex-secretary of state George Shultz is a director of the Bechtel Group, the largest contractor in the US and one of the favorites to land lucrative contracts in the rebuilding of Iraq. Shultz is chairman of the the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a fiercely pro-war group with close ties to the White House. (Observer/CommonDreams)
- May 12: Al-Qaeda masterminds a lethal attack on three housing compounds of the Vinnell Corporation, a US security firm providing mercenaries to supplement US occupation forces in Iraq, at Vinnell's complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Islamist terrorism
Subsequent terrorist attacks erupt all through the Middle East, some of which are linked to al-Qaeda. Although al-Qaeda spokesmen made it clear that such an attack was immiment, and that a "Gulf ally" of the US would be targeted, Saudi officials ignored the warnings and refused to increase security around the compounds. In late June, evidence surfaced connecting al-Qaeda sympathizers within the Saudi National Guard and the attacks. (Truthout, MSNBC, Democratic Underground)
Paul Bremer assumes leadership of Iraqi provisional government
- May 12: Apparently dissatisfied with Jay Garner's failure to stem the civil unrest and disorder, Bush and Donald Rumsfeld replace him with Paul Bremer as Iraq's new administrator.
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Bremer is a diplomat and the former head of the counter-terrorism unit at the State Department, as well as a corporate CEO. He refuses to allow Iraqis to select the members of its interim government, preferring to use his own team of advisors led by Ahmed Chalabi (widely viewed as a puppet of the Americans), and oversees the laying off or firing of nearly half a million Iraqi workers and soldiers under the aegis of "de-Baathizing" the country's workforce. The majority Shi'a population has no voice in the governing process. Dozens of Iraqi companies go into involuntary bankruptcy when Bremer opens the borders to multinational corporations, who flood in to take advantage of the chaotic Iraqi economy. "In less than a month he has readied large swaths of state activity for corporate takeover, primed the Iraqi market for foreign importers to make a killing by eliminating much of the local competition and made sure there won't be any unpleasant Iraqi government interference -- in fact, he's made sure there will be no Iraqi government at all while key economic decisions are made." See numerous other items about Bremer throughout these pages. (The Nation/Common Dreams, FactMonster, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
Texas GOP illegally redistricts state to ensure Republican majority
- May 12: In a last-ditch effort to stop a Tom DeLay-backed effort by Texas Republicans to redraw Texas's redistricting plan that is intended to ensure a GOP majority in that state, 51 Texas congressmen and women walk out of the legislature and hole up in a hotel in Ardmore, Oklahoma.
Election fraud
"There's 51 of us here today, and a quorum of the Texas House of Representatives will not meet without us," says state Representative Jim Dunnam, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Republicans answer by challenging the patriotism of the Democrats, and issue playing cards almost identical to the ones featuring Iraqi terrorists and outlaws, except these feature pictures of the Texas Democrats. In a statement released by the Democrats, they say, "We won't be present today -- or any day -- that the House plans to consider this outrageous partisan action. ...This misbegotten plan is a monument to Tom DeLay's ego. No one benefits more than Tom DeLay. He believes he should choose who represents Texas in Congress, not the Texas voters." The redistricting plan was largely drawn up by Jim Ellis, an aide to DeLay. - While Republicans blame the Democrats for dissension in the Texas legislature, Democrats say the blame falls on House Speaker Tom Craddick and the Republican-dominated House, which has run over the Democrats time and again on issues such as state spending and putting caps on lawsuit damage awards. Republicans mostly refused to debate the Democrats on the budget, voting down one Democratic amendment after another without allowing the Democrats to discuss them on the floor. "Redistricting was the last in a series of outrageous, iron-fisted power plays by Speaker Tom Craddick," says state Democratic Chairwoman Molly Beth Malcolm. "If Mr. Craddick wants to know who caused this, he should look in the mirror." The House's Republican majority issues orders for the Texas state police to bring the Democrats back to the house, under arrest if necessary; that order precipitates the Democrats' decision to leave the state. Oklahoma authorities refuses to arrest the Democrats, saying that no crimes have been committed and they have no legal obligation to interfere with them. "We're here in Ardmore, Oklahoma, because the real problems of Texas are budget problems, are school finance problems, are health care problems that are being cast aside because of a power play by Tom DeLay," says Dunnam. "We are here trying to get Texas government back on the right path."
- DeLay says the Democrats "ought to stand and fight," not "turn and run." Under House rules, the reapportionment plan would have to be brought to a vote by May 22 in order to pass. Republicans hold 88 seats in the 150-member House. "They may believe they are clever, but the majority of Texans see them as childish," says Texas GOP Chairwoman Sue Weddington. "And they may believe they are courageous, but the majority of Texans see them as cowards." Retorts House Democrat Barry Telford, "We're fighting for our constituents with the only tool we have left, which was to use the rules of the House to break a quorum." Political observers say the redistricting plan before the House could mean a shift of up to five seats to the Republicans, giving them a 20-12 edge over Democrats in the Texas congressional delegation and better odds of keeping control of Congress. The Texas Legislature failed to passed a new district map after the 2000 census, so a federal court ordered a reapportionment plan in 2001. November's elections gave Democrats a 17-15 edge in congressional seats, but Republicans took control of the state House and Senate and reopened the redistricting debate; the plan is designed to give Republicans up to a 22-10 edge. Democrats want to keep the court plan in place until the 2010 census as mandated by state law.
- The political brouhaha takes on a new dimension when it is revealed that DeLay illegally uses Homeland Security resources to locate the missing congressmen. Not only were Americans reassured that Homeland Security resources would never be used for domestic purposes, but such use is in violation of the DHS charter and a number of legal restrictions. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center, in Riverside, California, becomes involved in the Republican search for 51 Democratic state representatives who went to Ardmore to break a quorum of the House and block action on the redistricting bill, at the request of DeLay. The Star-Telegram reports, "The agency received a call to locate a specific Piper turboprop aircraft. It was determined that the plane belonged to former House Speaker Pete Laney." Laney is one of the Democrats who is fighting against the redistricting bill. "Laney's plane proved to be a key piece of information because, Craddick said, it's how he determined that the Democrats were in Ardmore. 'We called someone, and they said they were going to track it. I have no idea how they tracked it down,' Craddick said. 'That's how we found them.'" The Interdiction and Coordination center "falls under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department." The call to DHS is not the only effort the Republicans have made to bring the Democrats back to Austin. State troopers have followed the Democrats wives, parents and children. Troopers even staked out a hospital where one lawmaker's premature twins are being cared for. Staffers have been harassed. All this has happened after the location of the Democrats was known.
- Authors Eric Alterman and Mark Green write, "[I]t is difficult to imagine a more offensive abuse of the September 11 tragedy and resultant efforts to address the terrorist threat, to say nothing of the misuse of the government's police powers." Glenn Smith of the Rockridge Institute writes, "It was no doubt a ham-fisted, incautious and bungled attempt (like the Watergate burglary) by Republicans to use all the law enforcement they could find to overcome the Democrats' temporary advantage. But the use of the Homeland Security Department for partisan political purposes should alarm all Americans. It deserves a full, complete and independent investigation. The warnings of civil libertarians appear to have been justified. Even if it turns out that some half-crazed Republican staffer or independent investigator called the Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center, it raises disturbing questions about the operations of Homeland Security and the lengths Republicans will go enforce their will."
- As it turns out, the redistricting and subsequent GOP takeover of Texas politics was better orchestrated than first reported. Karl Rove disciple Jim Colyrando, an official with DeLay's TMRPAC, not only doles out funding, but, with his staff, carefully selects candidates for each new district, and provides them with hefty financing: a cut of the $1.5 million budgeted by TMRPAC for election expenses plus $35,000 in political research, $52,000 in phone banks, $12,600 in direct mail expenses, $27,000 for a Washington polling firm, and $27,600 to the fund-raising operation run by DeLay's daughter, Danielle Ferra. In short, each candidate and his or her campaign was chosen, funded, and paid for by DeLay's operation.
- On May 23, almost a week after Smith's essay, DeLay will admit to using DHS resources to have the Texas Department of Public Safety use Federal Aviation Administration records to track Laney's plane, beginning on May 12. The morning of May 14, the head of the TDPS law enforcement division orders all records of the search to be destroyed, hours before the Texas House drops the request to arrest the missing Democrats. TDPS claims that the destruction of records is a routine command because of the dropped arrest order, but it is far more likely that the records are destroyed in order to impede any criminal investigation. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge tells the House Select Committee on Homeland Security he cannot release tapes of the May 12 DPS telephone call to DHS because of ongoing criminal investigations. "This is now a potentially criminal investigation," Ridge says. Other federal and state investigations are also underway, though none will ever result in charges against DeLay or any Texas Republicans. Eventually the Democrats will give in, and the redistricting plan will become law, virtually ensuring Texas a GOP majority in the legislature no matter what the political makeup of Texas voters. An unusually harsh Washington Post editorial calls the plan "a remarkable feat of gerrymandering," and says that the state should rename itself "The Soviet Republic of Texas." (Houston Chronicle, CNN, CommonDreams, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, LA Weekly/Mark Crispin Miller)
- May 12: Condoleezza Rice tells Reuters that in Iraq, "US officials never
Iraq war and occupation
expected that 'we were going to open garages and find' weapons of mass destruction." (Reuters, Democratic Underground)
- May 13: Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, adds to the
Iraq war and occupation
backpedaling on WMDs: "I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, [or] whether they're still hidden." (Defense Department, Democratic Underground) - May 13: Kenneth Maxwell, the chief Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, resigns in protest over pressure from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's pressure for the CFR to stifle debate over American intervention in Chile during the 1970s, and particularly over Kissinger's role in overthrowing the government of Salvador Allende.
US actions in Latin America
"There is a question of principle at stake here," Maxwell writes in his letter of resignation. "'It was made abundantly clear to me, as you know, that there was intense pressure on you [James Hoge, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine], on Foreign Affairs and on my employer, the Council on Foreign Relations, from Henry Kissinger and others, to close off this debate about accountability and Mr. Kissinger's role in Chile in the 1970's." Maxwell was invited to write a review of the book The Pinochet File, a book that re-examines the American role in helping to unseat Allende, the socialist president who died during the military coup that brought the brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet to power. The book is based on 25,000 United States government documents that were declassified in recent years. Maxwell's essay largely summarized the unresolved questions surrounding American actions in Chile, mentioning three issues in particular: the 1970 assassination of a Chilean general, Rene Schneider; the September 1973 coup against Allende; and the assassination of Orlando Letelier, Allende's former foreign minister, in September 1976. The review confirmed "the deep involvement of the US intelligence services in Chile prior to and after the coup." - William Rogers, the former assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs under Kissinger and a vice president of his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, wrote a lengthy and angry response in the following issue of Foreign Affairs, calling the stories of American involvement a "myth." Maxwell retorted, "To claim that the United States was not actively involved in promoting Allende's downfall in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary verges on incredulity." Rogers was allowed by Hoge to have the final word in the exchange, agreeing to "shut off" Maxwell from any further published responses. "'The key is the suppression of debate on foreign policy by a major figure in a major foreign policy magazine," says Maxwell, who is now headed for Harvard University as a senior fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The incident has sparked dismay in some quarters. A letter to Foreign Affairs from Latin American experts who are members of the council severely criticized the way the prestigious journal handled the dispute, particularly in denying Maxwell the right to reply. The decision, it said, "denied readers an opportunity to weigh competing views, contrary to the journal's policies and traditions." (New York Times/John Dinges)
- May 13: Oliver Ray, a specialist on Islam, writes, "The rationale for the
Iraq war and occupation
military campaign in Iraq was not that Iraq was the biggest threat but, on the contrary, that it was the weakest and hence the easiest to take care of. The invasion was largely aimed at demonstrating America's political will and commitment to go to war. Reshaping the Middle East does not mean changing borders, but rather threatening existing regimes through military pressure and destabilizing them with calls for democratization. After Baghdad's fall, tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh should understand that America is back." Conservative columnist Thomas Friedman says more succinctly, "After 9/11, America needed to hit someone in the Arab/Muslim world." This jibes with the crowing of undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the war: "Can you imagine what our enemies think of us right now? The deterrent value of what we've accomplished far overshadows the direct results." (New York Times/Los Angeles Times/Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
"De-Ba'athification" policy in Iraq creates instant insurgency
- May 14: New Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer, on his first full day in Baghdad, issues an order for the "de-Ba'athification" of all elements of Iraqi society.
Iraq war and occupation
(Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn give the date of the order as May 16.) Bremer's "Order No. 1" mandates that anyone considered a "full member" of the party -- in essence, the top three to four ranks at the ministries -- would be immediately removed from their posts and banned from any future participation in government. Additionally, everyone in the top three layers of the ministries will be investigated for possible crimes and security risks. The idea is to purge any Hussein loyalists from government and other leadership positions, but the idea is disastrous, as almost anyone who wanted any position of leadership or influence in the Hussein government had to join the party whether they supported Hussein or not. There are two million members of the Ba'ath Party throughout Iraq. "We can't do this," says outgoing reconstruction chief Jay Garner. Garner's idea was to remove just the top layer of officialdom, under the supposition that the leaders were the most loyal to Hussein, and work with the others to keep the ministries and the various elements of society functioning while rooting out the other "bad guys" piecemeal. "It's too deep," Garner protests. Bremer hears Garner's objections, but refuses to listen. "Hell, you won't be able to run anything if you go this deep," Garner says. Bremer writes in an e-mail to his wife about the "sea of b*tching and moaning with lots of them saying how hard it was going to be. But I reminded them that the president's guidance is clear: de-Baathification will be carried out even if at a cost to administrative efficiency." - The CIA station chief in Baghdad, known only to reporter Bob Woodward as "Charlie," explains the ramifications of Bremer's order: "If you put this out, you're going to drive between 30,000 and 50,000 Ba'athists underground before nightfall," with the number closer to 50,000. "You will put 50,000 people on the streets, underground and mad at Americans." And these 50,000 are the most powerful, well-connected elites from all walks of life. In essence, Bremer is creating an instant insurgency. "I told you," Bremer retorts, "I have my instructions and I have to implement this." Rumsfeld denies to Garner that the order comes from the Department of Defense: "This is not coming from this building. That came from somewhere else." Rumsfeld is probably lying. The de-Ba'athification order is purely a Pentagon creation, likely pushed by the undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, and approved by Rumsfeld.
- The co-chairman of the de-Ba'athification program is Ahmad Chalabi, who works with his nephew and INC political advisor Salem Chalabi to obtain lists of Ba'ath Party members and payment records. Then Chalabi implements a sweeping purge that later proves to be less of an objective de-Ba'athification than a program of personal revenge and retribution. "He was using it to settle scores," says one senior NSC official. Thousands of innocent trash collectors, police officers, and teachers are thrown out of their jobs because of Bremer's and Chalabi's purge, helping facilitate a nationwide breakdown of basic services.
- Incoming CIA station chief John Maguire, the former leader of Operation Anabasis (and likely Woodward's "Charlie"), realizes that the Arab word used in official documents to describe the de-Ba'athification process -- ijtithaath -- has a dictionary meaning of "uprooting by root and branch, like a weed," but has a more colloquial meaning -- annihilation or eradication. Maguire realizes that, to many Iraqis, the program sounds more like the Third Reich's Final Solution. A horrified Maguire recalls, "We told Bremer that's a heinous word. He blew it off." Maguire realizes that the entire program is a disaster in the making. But like the rest of the US intelligence community, as well as the State Department and most other agencies, the CIA, who is already issuing warnings of potential calamities in the offing, is being systematically shut out of critical planning sessions and decision-making processes. Everything is going either through Bremer or through the Pentagon -- and everything in the Pentagon is going through Donald Rumsfeld. (Bob Woodward, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- May 14: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells a most amazing lie to the Senate's appropriations subcommittee on defense:
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"I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons." The number of times Bush administration officials, including Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush himself, have asserted that Iraq has nuclear weapons is too large to estimate. Two days later, Vice President Cheney will add to the pile of lies Rumsfeld is denying, by saying on NBC's Meet the Press: "We believe [Iraq] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Liberal Democrat Henry Waxman explains his own vote to support the war with Iraq by saying in June 2003, "The most powerful argument that President Bush made to take the country to war was that Iraq was soon to become a nuclear power and that would change things dramatically -- Saddam Hussein would have the ability to blackmail other countries in the region and it also meant that any other kind of military action we might have to take against them in the future would be far more serious. It was the reason, quite frankly, that brought me to vote for the resolution." (Slate, Salon/Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - May 14: Former chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler observes:
Bush's foreign policies
"This administration has a view of the special character of the United States, the singular and exclusive character that is new. I've talked to them about it and they make this plain. They say, 'We are the sole super power, we're therefore the exceptional country, we're outside of international law. Others have to obey the law and obey the rules, but we don't.' ...I mean, I'm not making that up. If they were sitting here tonight...the people I've talked with would readily agree. They'd say, 'Yeah, that's right, that's who we are. We are the exceptional country and we don't have to obey the law because we're different.'" (SBS/Buzzflash)
