May 2004: Week Three: This Far and No Further

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Powell says US will leave Iraq if asked

May 15: Secretary of State Colin Powell says that if the new Iraqi government requests the departure of US troops from Iraqi soil after June 30, then the troops will leave, but Powell doubts such a request will be made. Powell says that the UN resolution passed last year, as well as Iraqi administrative law, gives the US troops a legal presence in Iraq beyond the scheduled June 30 takeover. CPA administrator Paul Bremer echoes Powell's statement. In recent testimony before the House International Relations Committee, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, but was contradicted by Lieutenant General Walter Sharp, Joint Chief of Staffs director for strategic plans and policy, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January 2004. "If the provisional government asks us to leave, we will leave," says Bremer. "I don't think that will happen, but obviously we don't stay in countries where we're not welcome." French, Russian and Italian officials have pressed for the new Iraqi government to be given the authority to halt military actions by US forces, an authority which Powell says will not be given. Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, a strong supporter of the US occupation, says that such authority is necessary: "If we imagine a unilateral decision by coalition forces after June 30, without listening to the Iraqi people or without giving them the power to say no, there won't be a transfer of power." (Washington Post/Seattle Times)

Three Army divsions officially unready for combat

May 15: During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush made the claim that because of Clinton's policies, two Army divisions could be classified as unfit for combat. Bush's claims were lies. Now, though, after over a year of combat duty in Iraq, Bush's claims are now true: three full Army divisions are classified as officially unfit for combat due to personnel losses, lack of training, and equipment and personnel degradation. The Los Angeles Times reports, "This is a new experience for the Army. In World War II, conscript troops fought for the duration and came home to stay. In Vietnam, soldiers drafted for two-year stretches met up with units already in combat. In Iraq, a volunteer Army that for decades has been largely a peacetime force is being asked to fight hard for a year or more, come home, and gear up to go back again, with no end in sight." The three Army divisions reporting themselves as unfit for combat include the 101st Airborne, currently stationed in Iraq; the 82nd Airborne, currently retraining and refitting itself for further Iraq duty at its home in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and the 4th Infantry Division, whose soldiers are returning to Fort Hood and Fort Carson to retrain and refit for further duty. Another division that had been due to return home this spring, the 1st Armored, was ordered in April to stay in Iraq at least three more months. When the 1st Armored does come home, it will likely be in the same shape. While billions of dollars have technically been allocated to these and other divisions to retrain and rearm themselves, much of the monies have yet to actually be released. (Los Angeles Times/CommonDreams)
May 15: After the US military's decision to begin attacking the forces of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in the militia's three strongholds, Najaf, Karbala, and Sadr City, al-Sadr says that there can be no more negotiations or compromises with American occupation forces. "We have now entered a second phase of the resistance, and our patience is over with coalition forces," says al-Sadr spokesman Qais al Khazali. "Our policy now is to extend the state of resistance and move it to all of Iraq because of the occupiers' military escalation and crossing of all red lines in the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf." Al-Sadr's plan seems to be to lure American forces into all-out attacks on occupied shrines, such as the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, and then count on the damage inflicted on those shrines to trigger a general uprising of Shi'ites throughout Iraq. So far, moderate Shi'ite leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other Shi'a leaders have managed to head off a general uprising, but more and more Iraqi Shi'ites seem to be losing patience with the counsel of the moderates and are becoming more and more sympathetic to al-Sadr's position of total resistance to the Americans. Many Mahdi Army members believe that Sistani and the Iraqi Governing Council has given the US permission to attempt to destroy al-Sadr's militia. US forces recently destroyed the Mahdi Army headquarters in Sadr City; within 24 hours, the headquarters was rebuilt and functioning. The recent destruction of an ancient mosque in Karbala and a sacred cemetery in Najaf has further inflamed Shi'ite passions against the Americans. Political expert Juan Cole writes, "My own view is that Muqtada has now won politically and morally. He keeps throwing Abu Ghuraib in the faces of the Americans. He had his men take refuge in Najaf and Karbala because he knew only two outcomes were possible. Either the Americans would back off and cease trying to destroy him, out of fear of fighting in the holy cities and alienating the Shiites. Or they would come in after Muqtada and his militia, in which case the Americans would probably turn the Shiites in general against themselves. The latter is now happening. The Americans will be left with a handful of ambitious collaborators at the top, but the masses won't be with them. And in Iraq, unlike the US, the masses matter. The US political elite is used to being able to discount American urban ghettos as politically a cipher. What they don't realize is that in third world countries the urban poor are a key political actor and resource, and wise rulers go out of their way not to anger them." (Salon, TomDispatch)

Rumsfeld's SAP at heart of Abu Ghraib scandal; Copper Green

May 15: The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal are revealed to be a direct outgrowth of the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to expand the duties of a highly secret "special access program," or SAP, from hunting al-Qaeda members to interrogating Iraqi prisoners and extracting actionable intelligence from them. Rumsfeld's ultimate goal is to wrest control of clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA and to his own department, under his own control. The program, known by a number of code words including "Copper Green," mandates the interrogation of Iraqis using physical coercion and sexual humiliation. The interrogation procedures are in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions; intelligence officials worry that, if exposed, the program will, in journalist Seymour Hersh's words, "eviscerate the moral standing of the United States and expose American soldiers to retaliation." In last week's testimony before Congress, Rumsfeld implies that, though he can't discuss highly secret matters in an unclassified session, he was telling the public everything he knew: "Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding," he says. Asked about the testimony of Rumsfeld and Defense's undersecretary for intelligence Stephen Cambone, a senior CIA official tells Hersh, "some people think you can bullsh*t anyone."
Hersh later writes that even the most senior members of Congress are given little more than basic budget information of Rumsfeld's plan; it seems unlikely that anyone in Congress understood that "the United States was poised to enter the business of 'disappearing' people." The problem with finding and dealing with terrorist suspects was in evidence immediately after 9/11, with "command-and-control" problems hindering the military's ability to take suspected targets out. On October 7, the night the US began bombing Afghanistan, an unmanned Predator drone spotted what officials believed was a car carrying Taliban leader Muhammed Omar; by the time official permission was given to launch an attack, the car was out of range. Rumsfeld was "apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to [Hersh] that fall as 'kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.'" At least ten times during the early stages of the Afghanistan offensive, Air Force pilots believed they had senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in their sights, but were unable to attack due to legalistic hurdles. US Special Forces units had often lost targets because of the failure to get approval for attacks from local ambassadors in time. A former senior intelligence official recalls, "The White House is asking, 'How can we put this together? We can't get this together.'" To make matters worse, within weeks of the Afghanistan invasion, the military is overwhelmed with prisoners: "We exceeded our capability for interrogation and detention."
The US was getting intelligence from some prisoners turned over to foreign governments. "Our allies would tell us, 'We pulled out teeth and fingers from a prisoner, but we got some good sh*t. He's dead now, but we don't care.' ...The line gets blurred between using liason [foreign] officers to bust heads and getting American guys to do it." However, the tough tactics appeal to Rumsfeld and his aides. Their response is to create a SAP that operates outside of the normal military boundaries with the express purpose of capturing or killing known terrorist leaders. The SAP, "subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of security[,] was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon," writes Hersh. "The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so-called 'black' programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security."
Rumsfeld received permission to set up this SAP from National Security Director Condoleezza Rice, and the president was informed of the program. The program created its own code words, and recruited highly trained commandos and operatives from the Navy SEALs, the Army Delta Force, and the CIA's paramilitary experts. Congress would deliberately be left in the dark. "Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were 'completely read into the program,' the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. 'We're not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,' he said. 'The rules are "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."'" The Pentagon official at the heart of the SAP was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganization of the Pentagon. Hersh writes, "Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. 'Remember Henry II -- "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"' the senior CIA official said to me, with a laugh, last week. 'Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.'"
Like Rumsfeld, Cambone had been a strong advocate for war with Iraq, and shared Rumsfeld's contempt for the CIA's analyses and assessments, viewing them as weak and overly cautious. (Cambone was the first administration official to publicly claim, a month after Baghdad's fall, that a captured Iraqi truck might be a mobile biological weapons lab. He was wrong.) Cambone's military assistant was Army Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, who made his own headlines last fall when he publicly equated Islam with Satan; it is later revealed that Boykin was heavily involved, on Cambone's behalf, in the policies that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Cambone insisted from the outset that he be given control of all SAPs that were involved with the war on terror. Those programs had been monitored by veteran Pentagon official Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. By mid-2003, Copper Green was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active program," says the former intelligence official. "It's been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States -- and do so without visibility." Like other programs of its kind, however, some of its methods were troubling in their illegality and viciousness. The official notes that once politics became involved in the mission and methodology of the SAP, things began to go sour. "It's a Greek tragedy," he says. "The guys are asking me, 'When do we start blowing the whistle? When do small transgressions and physical abuse become a bigger offense? When does it cross the line from abuse of prisoners to war crimes?' As this monster begins to take life, there's joy in the world. The monster is doing well -- real well," at least from the perspective of those involved; the former official says those people began to see themselves as "masters of the universe in terms of intelligence. ...When you're in the heat of it, guys do strange things that in retrospect they can't explain or condone. Guys are having pangs of conscience now -- and they're scared sh*tless" of an investigation. "Once the crisis in Iraq is passed, somebody is going to start blowing the whistle. The good people are beginning to realize what they don't know."
After the war against Iraq was over, the SAP tried without much success to hunt down Saddam Hussein and the elusive weapons of mass destruction. It also tried, and failed, to stop the evolving insurgency. Part of the problem with the insurgency was Rumsfeld's insistence that the insurgency was little more than a gaggle of Baathist "dead-enders," criminals, and a sprinkling of foreign al-Qaeda operatives. The administration measured its success in handling the insurgency by counting how many of the 55 most wanted members of the old regime -- those immortalized on the infamous playing cards -- had been captured or killed. But after the August 2003 terror bombings of the Jordanian embassy and UN headquarters in Baghdad, Rumsfeld grudgingly acknowledged that "the dead-enders are still with us." He went on, "There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case." Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who "fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany." A few weeks later he declared, "It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States."
Others in the Pentagon had a different view -- the war was going badly and the insurgency was far more of a problem than Rumsfeld would acknowledge. US intelligence was largely unsuccessful in penetrating the insurgency, while the insurgents themselves were quite successful in acquiring and using intelligence of its own. According to an internal report, their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA's Green Zone. The study concluded, "Politically, the US has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA." It had become clear by the fall of 2003 that most in the Pentagon knew how badly they had misjudged the insurgency, both militarily and politically. Something drastic had to be done. The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.
Key to the new policy was the endorsement of recommendations mde Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Miller wanted to "Gitmoize" the Iraqi prisons to make them more focused on interrogation. He wanted US soldiers in Iraq to use the same interrogation techniques that he claimed were so successful in Guantanamo -- sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, and placing prisoners in tortuous "stress positions" for hours at a time. Since the Bush administration had declared al-Qaeda and other suspected terrorists to be illegal combatants and not subject to the coverage of the Geneva Conventions, the prisoners could be handled as the military wished. Rumsfeld and Cambone also expanded the scope of the SAP to bring its "unconventional methods" to Abu Ghraib. "The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan," writes Hersh. "The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation." "They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," says the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up -- the black special-access program -- and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets [prisoners in Iraqi jails] than people who can handle them." Cambone also decided to bring some of the Army's MI officers working in the prisons under the SAP's auspices. "so here are fundamentally good soldiers -- military-intelligence guys -- being told that no rules apply," says the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs. "And, as far as they're concerned, this is a covert operation, and it's to be kept within Defense Department channels."
The official says the military police prison guards included what he calls "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. "How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn't know what it's doing." By now, hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others -- military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, CIA officers, and the men from the special-access program -- wore civilian clothes. Even prison commander Brigadier General Janis Karpinski didn't know who many of these operatives were. "I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know," she says. "I called them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later. They were nice -- they'd always call out to me and say, 'Hey, remember me? How are you doing?'" The mysterious civilians, she says, were "always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out." Karpinski notes that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (The Taguba report found that Karpinski's leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By the fall, the CIA's senior leadership was rebelling. According to the former official, "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan -- pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets -- and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets" -- the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. "We've been there before" -- a reference to the Vietnam-era Phoenix assassination program, which spun out of control and resulted in the murder of thousands of civilians. "The CIA's legal people objected," and the agency ended its SAP involvement in Abu Ghraib. The rest in the intelligence community agreed. Many feared that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, once exposed, would expose the SAP and thereby bring to and end what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. "This was stupidity," a government consultant says. "You're taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against al-Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers."
The former senior intelligence official pins a charge of hubris on Rumsfeld and Cambone. "There's nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk. What could be more boring than needing the cooperation of logistical planners?" The only difficulty, the former official adds, is that, "as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We've never had a case where a special-access program went sour -- and this goes back to the Cold War." A Pentagon consultant agrees. "The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he says. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program." When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant notes, "but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means."
As noted elsewhere, the idea of subjecting Arab men to sexual humiliation as a means to extract intelligence is one that has long been a focus of discussion among Washington neocons. The book The Arab Mind, written by cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai and published in 1973, depitcs sex in Arabic cultures as a taboo subject fraught with shame and repression. One academic notes that the Patai book was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior. Two themes emerge from the neocons' discussions of Arabs, according to the academic: "one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation." Whatever the motivation, the idea of using sexual humiliation as an interrogation technique didn't work very well, and the various abuses and tortures caused tremendous hatred for Americans among the Iraqi people. "This sh*t has been brewing for months," says the Pentagon consultant. "don't keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick." The consultant explains that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. "We don't raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don't know the rules, that's another."
In 2003, senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General (JAG) office paid two surprise visits to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights. "They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation," Horton recalls. "They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur." The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton remembers. "They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The JAG officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process." They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush. The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The CID had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. "You can't cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it'll go away." The Pentagon's attitude last January, he says, was, "somebody got caught with some photos. What's the big deal? Take care of it." Rumsfeld's explanation to the White House, the official adds, was reassuring: "'We've got a glitch in the program. We'll prosecute it.' The cover story was that some kids got out of control."
Last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone tried to convince the legislators that Miller's visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller's recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the "flow of intelligence back to the commands" was "efficient and effective." He added that Miller's goal was "to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence." Senator Hillary Clinton isn't so easily gulled: "If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees," she asks, "then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller's arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved. ...Therefore, I for one don't believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller's orders were...how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of '03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward."
In April, Miller, whose recommendations had caused many of the problems in Abu Ghraib and among the US intelligence communities, returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. "His job is to save what he can," says the former official. "He's there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability." As for General Taguba, the former intelligence official added, "He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: 'Holy cow! What's going on?'" The former intelligence official says that Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because "they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement," as applied to the SAP. "The photos," he adds, "turned out to be the result of the program run amok." While he makes it clear that he wasn't alleging that either Rumsfeld or Myers knew that atrocities were committed, he says, "it was their permission granted to do the SAP, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses." He goes on: The black guys [those in the Pentagon's secret program] say we've got to accept the prosecution. They're vaccinated from the reality." The SAP is still active, and "the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?" The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. "If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances," he says. "Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended -- the poor kids at the end of the food chain."
The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone: "The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know how to do it." The former intelligence official says he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrays Abu Ghraib as "a tumor" on the war on terror: "As long as it's benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it -- it becomes a malignant tumor." The Pentagon consultant concurs. Cambone and his superiors, he says, "created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we're going to end up with another Church Commission," the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated CIA abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. "When the sh*t hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?" the consultant asks. "You do it selectively and with intelligence." He goes on to say, "Congress is going to get to the bottom of this. You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system. ...When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines."
"In an odd way," says Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, "the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized." Since September 11th, Roth adds, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. "some JAGs hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war," Roth says. "We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar." In June 2004, the Pentagon will briefly disband the SAP and, a few days later, reconstitute it, with new code words and new designators. The rules of engagement are the same: suspected terrorists are fair game, and no Geneva Conventions or laws against torture apply. (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh)
May 15: Reports from German news magazine Der Spiegel and Norway's Aftenposten disclose even more stories of brutality and torture from Abu Ghraib prison, including the news that over 100 Iraqi children were detained there. Some were detained so they could be used to pressure their parents to talk to interrogators. Sergeant Samuel Provance, who spent six months on duty at Abu Ghraib, disobeys his orders not to discuss his time at the prison to reveal what he saw there to Der Spiegel.
Provance clearly remembers his encounter with a 16-year old prisoner: "He was very afraid, very alone. He had the thinnest arms I had ever seen. His whole body trembled. His wrists were so thin we couldn't put handcuffs on him. As I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry. The interrogation specialists threw water over him and put him into a car, drove him around through the extremely cold night. Afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him to his imprisoned father, on whom they'd tried other interrogation methods. They hadn't been able to get him to speak, though. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father saw his son in this condition, his heart was broken, he started crying, and he promised to tell them anything they wanted." Provance says that even after the father broke down and talked, the boy remained in detention. While he was placed with the adult prisoners, Provance also reveals a special children's section at Abu Ghraib, a secret detention facility for children. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz says he has seen the children's section for himself while he was picked up and detained for 74 days. "There I saw a camp for kids, young, certainly not yet of puberty age," al-Baz says. "There must have been hundreds of kids. Some were released, others are certainly still there." He says one night he heard, from his cell in the adults' section, a girl of maybe 12 years of age crying. Later he found out that her brother was held in a cell on the second floor of the prison. Once or twice he says, he saw the girl himself. "she called out her brother's name. She was beaten, she cried out 'they took off my clothes, they poured water on me.'" He heard her cries every day. While stories of children being detained in Abu Ghraib are hard to confirm, the International Red Cross has determined that 107 children have been detained there. UNICEF has confirmed that children are being detained at a secret prison facility in Umm Qasr; UNICEF representatives have not been allowed to visit the children to ascertain their status. (Der Spiegel/Aftenposten/Sadly No)
May 15: The civilian who set up the Iraqi prison system for US military use is the former head of Texas's Department of Criminal Justice, and has an ugly past with that department. Lane McCotter headed the TDCJ during one of its most controversial periods, and later resigned as the head of Utah's prison system after an inmate died while shackled naked to a chair. McCotter, now director of business development for a private prison company, Management & Training Corp., says he never trained US military personnel working in Iraq's prisons and turned over the management of Abu Ghraib to military officials before the United States began housing prisoners there. But Democratic senator Charles Schumer is urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate how civilians such as McCotter were chosen to oversee the opening of prisons in Iraq -- noting that McCotter is an executive for a company operating a private prison in New Mexico that the Justice Department criticized last year for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. McCotter returned to the United States in September 2003 after four months of work in Iraq, first evaluating and then preparing the country's prisons for reopening. The first documented abuses in Abu Ghraib prison occurred in October. Schumer wants to know how someone with McCotter's "checkered record" was appointed to the team Ashcroft dispatched to Iraq to help rebuild its judicial system. "There are many questions begging for answers," Schumer said last week. "Mr. McCotter 's selection also raises serious questions about the role that was played by civilian advisers in setting prison policies, designing training programs for prison guards and directly influencing the environment in which the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib took place."
After serving in Vietnam, McCotter had been running military prisons for about 10 years when he resigned as commandant of the Army's disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 1984. He moved into civilian life to become assistant director of the Texas Department of Corrections, later renamed the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Less than a year later, McCotter was picked to head the Texas prison system in June 1985. Managing the TDC in those days meant complying with the strict guidelines established by U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-standing prison overcrowding lawsuit. McCotter spent 18 months administering the Texas system, a period when prison violence made frequent headlines and Justice was threatening to fine the state as much as $1,000 a day if it did not make court-ordered improvements in the system. The Legislature had required automatic release of prisoners when prison capacity neared the court-ordered limit of 95 percent. But McCotter was widely criticized for allowing early release of thousands of violent convicts who accrued "good time" in segregation cells where they were placed because they were too dangerous to mix with others. A special report of the Legislative Budget Board in December 1986 said that during the previous year at least 665 inmates received credit for good behavior while serving time in "solitary confinement" for misbehavior. McCotter resigned that same month under pressure from newly elected Governor Bill Clements. His supporters claimed McCotter had been unfairly made a scapegoat during the bitter political campaign, noting that prison violence dropped significantly during his tenure.
McCotter took a job as secretary of the New Mexico Department of Corrections in the late 1980s and later served as director of the Utah Department of Corrections. McCotter resigned from the Utah job in 1997, again under pressure, when inmate Michael Valent, a 29-year-old schizophrenic, died after being strapped naked to a chair for 16 hours. "At the time, prison officials attempted to blame Mr. Valent's death on head trauma supposedly caused by the inmate repeatedly bashing his head against a wall in a suicidal episode," Schumer said. Autopsies revealed that Valent died after blood clots formed in his legs during his confinement. "The treatment of Mr. Valent was described by a number of critics as 'torture,'" Schumer said. "Nonetheless, Mr. McCotter defended what was done to Mr. Valent and other prisoners, saying, 'You have to have a way to deal with violent inmates.'" Schumer continued, "Why Attorney General Ashcroft would send someone with such a checkered record to rebuild Iraq's corrections system is beyond me." (Houston Chronicle)
May 15: A federal appeals court has demanded that Justice Department prosecutors explain their "arguably inconsistent" statements about their involvement in the interrogation of captured terrorists of al-Qaeda who might provide valuable information to lawyers defending Zacarias Moussaoui. In the bluntly worded order, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit says disclosures this week by the department suggest that it might now be possible for Moussaoui's lawyers to submit written questions directly to the Qaeda detainees. The issue is important in the prosecution of Moussaoui, the only person charged in a United States court with conspiring in the 9/11 attacks, because the Bush administration is refusing to make the captured terrorists available to testify on Moussaoui's behalf. Court records show that the prisoners have provided information in interrogations that suggests that Moussaoui had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
Prosecutors have argued in the past that they, like Moussaoui's defense lawyers, have no ability to question the detainees, who are reported to be under intensive interrogation overseas by the CIA. They also say it would be impossible to submit written questions to the detainees about their knowledge of Moussaoui and his purported ties to the hijackers. But in a letter to the court on Wednesday that the Justice Department said would "provide clarification" on the issue, the department said "members of the prosecution team have of course been 'privy'" to information about the captured terrorists and have provided information that may have been used in their interrogations. The letter, heavily edited to remove potentially classified information, has been made public by the appeals court. The court orders a special closed hearing on the issue next month, saying that the Justice Department's new account was "arguably inconsistent with statements previously made to the court." The court says that the issue of whether written questions could be submitted to the detainees had been raised repeatedly in court hearings and that "the government unequivocally rejected such a possibility."
In its order, the court demands that the Justice Department prepare a statement explaining "why the information in the May 12 letter was not provided to this court or the district court prior to May 12. ...In light of the information contained in the May 12 letter and any other pertinent developments, would it now be appropriate to submit written questions to any of the enemy combatant witnesses?" the court says in listing the questions it wanted answered. "If circumstances have changed such that submission of written questions is now possible, when did the circumstances change and why was neither this court nor the district court so informed at the time?" The trial of Moussaoui, who was arrested in August 2001 after arousing the suspicions of a Minnesota flight school, has been repeatedly delayed because of legal disputes over his access to captured members of al-Qaeda, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been described by intelligence officials as the architect of the attacks. Attorney General John Ashcroft responds, "We welcome the opportunity through both pleadings and through the oral argument to be offered next month to make sure that the position of the department is clear." Although Moussaoui has acknowledged that he is a member of al-Qaeda and is loyal to Osama bin Laden, he has denied any involvement in the Sept. 11 conspiracy. The Bush administration has refused to say where Mohammed and other high-profile Qaeda leaders and operatives are being questioned. The circumstances of their confinement and what some have said are the coercive interrogation methods being used against them have been the subject of growing concern within the CIA. (New York Times)
May 15: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has confirmed that he intends to subpoena two journalists, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, as part of his investigation into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. Some White House officials have been interviewed, and some have testified before a grand jury, but the entire investigation is proceeding under intense secrecy. Many speculate that the subpoenaing of journalists presages the conclusion of the investigation, as journalists are usually the last to be called to testify. A Post lawyer says he will decide soon whether Pincus or Kessler will meet with Fitzgerald's investigators, or if they will claim journalistic immunity.
Unbeknownst to the public, Fitzgerald has already begun work to subpoena two other reporters, NBC's Tim Russert and Time's Matthew Cooper. Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, has already stated to Fitzgerald's grand jury that he learned of Plame's identity from Russert; Fitzgerald is sure Libby lied, but needs Russert's testimony to prove it. And Cooper is another source who can back up, or refute, Libby's claim that Libby learned of Plame's identity from the press, and in revealing Plame's identity to Cooper, was merely passing along gossip and not revealing classified information.
Fitzgerald asks Time and Cooper to cooperate in his investigation. He approaches Newsday to ask for the cooperation of reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce, who had written their own article confirming that Plame was a CIA agent after conservative columnist Robert Novak outed Plame in his infamous July 2003 column. He wants to talk to Pincus because of Pincus's October 2003 report that an unnamed Post reporter had been told by an administration official that Plame was a CIA agent who had sent her husband, ambassador Joseph Wilson, on a trip to Niger that the official described as a "boondoggle." Pincus had been referring to himself, but Fitzgerald didn't know that. He had obtained White House records showing that Libby had spoken to Kessler, so he wanted to know what the two discussed. (Kessler later confirms that he and Libby had not spoken about Plame.)
Unlike Novak, who had privately cooperated with Fitzgerald while publicly pounding his chest about his refusal to cooperate, both Time and Newsday flatly refuse to take part in the investigation, citing journalistic privilege and the need to protect sources. On May 21, Fitzgerald subpoenas Russert and Cooper. Many in the media are alarmed at Fitzgerald's subpoenas, seeing them as attacks on the bedrock principle of modern journalism: the need to protect anonymous sources. But many in the media also wonder how far they can push the principle, considering that it is likely that they are protecting White House officials who used reporters to generate lies in the media and, possibly, commit a crime by outing a covert CIA agent and promulgate classified information. While both Time and NBC file motions to quash the subpoenas on First Amendment grounds, the senior officials at the Post begin pondering ways to avoid a showdown with Fitzgerald.
In June, Fitzgerald agrees to meet with Floyd Abrams, the renowned First Amendment lawyer representing both Cooper and Time. Abrams urges Fitzgerald, "Don't go down this road, Pat." "I argued he really shouldn't do it unless it was absolutely essential to the case," Abrams later recalls. Fitzgerald is respectful, but unmoved. "He told me he had thought it through," Abrams remembers, "and he would not have started unless he was prepared to go to the end of the road legally." Fitzgerald doesn't see it as a major First Amendment issue. "When I walked out, I knew there was no way to resolve this," Abrams recalls. "I thought it was hopeless." (Washington Post, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
May 15: Vice President Dick Cheney tells a group of Jewish-Americans in Boca Raton, Florida, that the war in Iraq will benefit Israel He says a democratic government in Iraq would be to the benefit of Israel and help ensure its security. The Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach told Cheney before his appearance that it would not tolerate attacks on Democratic opponent John Kerry or other partisan broadsides; Cheney heeded the group's warning and refrained from launching his usual attacks. State representative Ron Klein, a Democrat, says political feelings remain strong in Palm Beach County -- home to the infamous butterfly ballot that some Democrats believe contributed to Bush's thin margin of victory in 2000. He noted that Cheney vowed to go after nations that support terrorism but said the Bush administration has failed to denounce anti-Semitic remarks attributed to the Saudi crown prince, who blamed "Zionist elements" for terrorism in his country. The federation is likely to extend an invitation to Kerry to deliver a similar address under similar guidelines. (Miami Herald)

Investigation documents the AARP's seduction by the GOP into supporting devastating Medicare legislation

May 15: An investigative report by the American Prospect reveals that the American Association of Retired Persons, or the AARP, was seduced and bribed by Republican lawmakers and Bush campaign operatives into supporting the Republican Medicare prescription-drug bill in July 2003, a bill widely viewed as the most destructive piece of legislation for elderly Medicare users in the history of the program. In July, the AARP threatened to oppose the bill because of its "program structure and the adequacy and affordability of the benefit package." Karl Rove and his aides were counting on the support from AARP to get the bill passed, which would give Bush an issue worth using in his re-election campaign. Democratic congressional members, who had been largely excluded from the debate on the bill, were encouraged by AARP's threatened opposition. They had insisted that the Medicare bill would seriously undermine traditional Medicare provisions. Their view was encouraged by AARP CEO Bill Novelli, who intimated to Hill Democrats that he was with them on the drug bill.
But privately, AARP informed the Bush administration that the organization was far more willing to settle on key issues than they had led the Democratic opposition to believe. "Privately, we are suggesting some fairly moderate ways for handling the biggest issues in an effort to find an agreement that can be passed," wrote Chris Hansen, AARP's associate executive director in charge of policy and a former aerospace lobbyist in an e-mail to a Bush assistant. "We are well aware of the negative advocacy that is building from a variety of groups. Some of that advocacy is now being directed at us. It is not going to change our course on this.... We know that there may be details that we will message differently but we are together on the big goal." Democrats didn't know about Hansen's e-mail; when recently told about it, one Democratic staffer expressed shock and said that AARP "double-crossed us."
But the GOP's business allies saw the e-mail. The White House sent it out to key Republican lobbyists and such groups as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable to make sure they knew that AARP was still on board. Over the next weeks, AARP leaders worked closely with House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to craft a final bill. It passed the House on November 22 in the early morning hours, when GOP leaders left the vote open for a totally unprecedented three hours after they were initially unable to get the votes needed for passage. Three days later the bill passed the Senate and, on December 8, President Bush signed it into law, which AARP hailed as "an important step toward fulfilling a longstanding promise to older and disabled Americans." Suddenly, the AARP wasn't looking like such a liberal Democratic ally. For many Democrats, AARP's support for last November's Medicare prescription-drug bill came as a total shock. Not only could the law cause millions of seniors to lose more generous employer and state-coordinated drug benefits while providing only limited help to others; it is a major step toward the Republican Party's goal of privatizing Medicare and decimating employer-based health coverage. To those watching closely, however, AARP's actions were not a surprise at all, and the group's conversion was anything but sudden. The story of the Republicans' seduction of AARP unfolded over nearly a decade, TAP reports, as GOP leaders cajoled, seduced, and occasionally threatened the group's leaders into changing their ways and accepting the reality of Republican congressional control.
TAP journalist Barbara Dreyfuss writes, "Today, with bad policy already law, the stakes are incredibly high, as regulations to implement the law loom, along with bills to repeal some of its worst aspects. And they will grow higher still if President Bush is re-elected and Republicans can continue toward their ultimate goals. As the battle to preserve Medicare unfolds, Democrats who were surprised by the bill's passage last November should understand a key part of the story, which has not been told, of how it happened." Dreyfuss targets former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as a key player in bringing the AARP on board with the Bush administration. As early as 1995, Gingrich told a Blue Cross conference that Medicare as a "government monopoly plan" was going to "wither on the vine" in favor of a Republican-designed "free-market plan." Gingrich has spent the last nine years working diligently to convert, seduce, cajole, and threaten key AARP leaders into supporting Republican Medicare positions. Dreyfuss reports that, "[a]ided by a coterie of Republican representatives and lobbyists, as well as a headhunter firm whose Washington office is run by a Republican operative, Gingrich helped maneuver AARP from the Democratic to the Republican column. The crucial moment arrived in June 2001, with the ascent to the executive director post of Novelli, who centralized policy making by limiting input from local AARP leaders and who brought with him a team of corporate executives to run the group's federal and state policy -- people much more comfortable with Republicans, open to private plans and market-oriented policies, and more willing to make deals than many of the veteran staff."
Gingrich and Novelli are close both politically and philosophically; Gingrich lauds Novelli's commitment to privatizing health care, and Novelli recently invited Gingrich to join an advisory panel Novelli had crafted from associates he has met over the years. The panel meetings, which have since concluded, discussed AARP's future strategies, as well as insurance and other products that AARP might offer. Novelli says, "I started an advisory committee to the CEO because I wanted to test the idea that outside, independent, creative thinkers could help me and our senior management acquire new perspectives. The committee included people from every sector and political stripe." Gingrich and Novelli appear bent on entirely revamping the American health-care system to remove it completely from government oversight and place it entirely in the hands of the large health-care corporations. AARP has never been a strong activist organization, and for years was primarily an insurance business. Its leadership in Washington, and around the country, consisted mostly of Democrats committed to maintaining Medicare as a strong government-run program. AARP helped pass a major expansion of Medicare in 1988. With Democrats controlling the House for 40 years, AARP's lobbying efforts in defense of Medicare were never really tested because the only argument that ever took place among Democrats revolved around how much to expand the government-run program. As Dreyfuss observes, that changed after Republicans swept Congress in the 1994 elections. Republicans targeted Medicare for major cuts, but they knew that AARP would be a formidable obstacle. Some Republicans could not stomach working with an AARP that then-Majority Leader Trent Lott called an "arm of the Democratic National Committee."
Others felt that AARP was "the enemy" that had to be replaced by newly created, Republican-controlled senior groups. But Gingrich, from the beginning, believed that AARP could be, as one Republican congressional staffer says it, "defanged." While the House leadership was quietly courting AARP, in the Senate, Republican Alan Simpson declared all-out war against the group. Helping to orchestrate Simpson's effort was his aide Chuck Blohaus, now a White House domestic-policy official, whose expertise is privatization of Social Security. Blohaus' blitzkrieg would have the effect of softening up AARP even further to Gingrich's seduction. In April 1995, Simpson launched an investigation into AARP's finances, including its receipt of government grants, which expanded in June into public hearings on the organization's tax-exempt status. "After the hearing, I said to them, 'I want to talk to your board,'" Simpson recalls. He told them that then-executive director Howard Deets, whom he derided as "a Svengali, a puppeteer," was manipulating them. Privately, according to former AARP officials, Simpson also told AARP that he might not pursue his investigation so intensely if the group would back off its fight against Republican balanced-budget efforts. "People like Simpson, who started looking at AARP early on, may have had the effect of moving them toward the middle of the political spectrum," says Jim Link, a former Simpson staffer.
Aiding Simpson were a coterie of "seniors" groups that had been created by archconservative and direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, including the United Seniors Association, the Seniors Coalition, and the 60 Plus Association. They hired former Republican representatives to lobby and coordinate activities. Although founded years earlier, none of these groups were very active on Capitol Hill until the Republican takeover. Suddenly they were invited to testify in support of Republican Medicare cuts. Jim Martin, president of the 60 Plus Association, testified in 1995 against AARP, arguing that as a lobbying group, it should not be allowed to receive federal grant money. Through public statements and reports detailing AARP activities and finances, these groups attempted to discredit AARP. In late November 1995, Congress passed a plan to slash a whopping $270 billion from future Medicare spending. Only opposition from the Clinton White House stopped its implementation. By 1997, AARP was working closely with Republican House leaders to craft the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which again made significant, although less severe, cuts in the program and took a major leap in opening Medicare to private insurers. Republican efforts to decimate Medicare had, throughout 1996, been blunted -- by presidential vetoes, government shutdowns when Congress and the White House could not agree to a budget, Republican election losses due to GOP support for $270 billion Medicare cuts, and opposition by Democrats. But by 1997, the Clinton White House and Republican congressional leaders were ready to have serious discussions on a balanced-budget deal and agreed on many of the provider payment cuts. Yet several key contentious issues remained, including how much to pay HMOs, their role in Medicare, how much to increase what Medicare enrollees paid, whether to make wealthier beneficiaries pay more for coverage, and whether to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.
As Dreyfuss notes, "AARP made a crucial decision. Rather than maintain an aura as a Democratic-leaning organization, it decided to promote itself as nonpartisan and to work closely with Speaker Gingrich on the details of a budget bill. Key Republican leaders such as Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas hoped to dramatically expand the role of private insurers in Medicare as part of the Balanced Budget Act. Democrats by this time were entreating AARP to 'kill the privatization scheme in its cradle,' but those entreaties were refused. In the end, the Balanced Budget Act created the Medicare Plus-Choice program, which allowed beneficiaries to enroll in a broad array of private insurance programs beyond HMOs. AARP officials believed that they had blunted some of the worst aspects of the programs. But some Hill Democrats contend that, by working with Gingrich, AARP had stymied efforts to improve aspects of the budget bill." Throughout, AARP made no public criticisms of Republican plans. Gingrich credits the group's silence with keeping the managed-care provisions in the bill. Gingrich said in October 2003, "When all the vicious, mean ads came out, the average senior citizen read his AARP bulletin...and said, 'Well, that scare stuff sure can't be true because AARP would be raising hell if it was true.'" Today, Gingrich says that he "worked hand in glove with [Deets] and his staff on the Medicare Reform Act that we signed into law in 1997. And we could not have passed that without [Deets'] help." In 1998, Deets talked privately about retiring, and in January 2000, he brought Novelli into AARP in a newly created position overseeing public policy, communications, human resources, and advertising. Novelli says he decided to take the job in order to have a shot at being CEO. Deets knew Novelli from the 1980s, when Novelli's public-relations firm, Porter-Novelli, did a health campaign for AARP.
"As AARP was getting ready for a transition in early 2001," Dreyfuss writes, "the larger political scene underwent a major change of its own. Suddenly AARP was faced with a Republican in the White House, as well as GOP control of Congress. A former AARP legislative staffer describes the mood at AARP as fatalistic, saying, 'People said Republicans are setting the agenda and there is not much we can do.' Gingrich, who was now in the private sector but still keeping an eye on AARP, saw an opportunity to cement a relationship between the new administration and the seniors' group. He contacted the Bush transition team. Josh Bolton, in line to be White House policy director, called AARP, which flew staff to Texas to talk to the new administration. That May, the AARP's board announced that Novelli would succeed Deets. But before Deets left, he brought Novelli in to meet with Hastert, Thomas, and White House health-policy staff. Gingrich had first talked extensively with Novelli at the farewell dinner for Deets and was delighted to find himself very comfortable with the new executive director. 'We really met the night they had a going away party for Horace Deets, and they asked me to be one of the speakers at the dinner,' Gingrich says. 'Afterward, we were so simpatico in our affection for [Deets] and our concern for finding solutions for the baby boomers, and that's really what brought us together.'" Republicans made it clear to AARP and other organizations that associations and corporate offices had to hire people who could work with Republicans if they wanted to get anything done in Washington, according to Republican insiders. "You don't necessarily have to call and tell an association you want them to hire more people able to work with Republicans," says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of Washington's most important Republican strategists. Norquist says that when newspapers reported about the "K Street Strategy," which he helped create, the message was clear. "It's an open conspiracy," he says, "not a closed one."
Novelli was not the man to lead AARP into becoming a stronger advocate for social progress. Novelli had first honed his marketing skills on behalf of Richard Nixon. He worked in 1972 with the November Group, the in-house advertising unit that helped devise attack ads against George McGovern. Then, during the 1980s, he turned his marketing skills toward helping the pharmaceutical industry. Although Porter-Novelli is often touted as a social marketing firm because of the public-health campaigns it did for such federal agencies as the National Cancer Institute, it used its government work to attract corporate clients. When Novelli left Porter-Novelli in 1990, the firm's clients included Bristol-Myers, Ciba-Geigy, Hoechst-Roussel, Hoffman-La Roche, Marion Merrill Dow, SmithKline Beecham, and the trade group Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. Key Republican insiders first worked extensively with Novelli when he headed the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids. Novelli likes to cite his work for this organization as proof of his concern for consumer interests. But activists charge that he accepted a very bad deal that protected the tobacco industry; the settlement put the tobacco industry under nominal Food and Drug Administration oversight, but it also immunized the industry from class-action lawsuits and punitive damages. Critics further charge that Novelli's tactics split the movement, preventing efforts on Capitol Hill to toughen the agreement. To sell the plan on Capitol Hill, Novelli hired the man who had been Gingrich's closest congressional ally, Vin Weber, along with Ed Kutler, Gingrich's former health staffer. They helped the staff at Tobacco-Free Kids get comfortable talking to Hill Republicans.
Many leaders of the anti-tobacco movement who watched the way Novelli operated on the Medicare bill felt like they were watching a rerun of a bad old movie. When AARP jumped on the Republican's Medicare bandwagon last year, "E-mails started zooming throughout the anti-tobacco community saying, 'It's Bill Novelli, at it again,'" says leading tobacco-control activist Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Under Novelli's much more autocratic rule, people who ruffle too many feathers are leaving or are not invited back into leadership roles. Susan Catania, former AARP Illinois state president, was not asked to continue in that role in 2002. She had become very upset with the national office for refusing to back a prescription-discount-card plan in the state legislature, a plan AARP staff originally helped draft. Illinois state Representative Jack Franks, the Democrat who sponsored the bill, which was enacted into law last year, says, "susan Catania supported my bill and they unceremoniously dumped her." Meanwhile, while exerting more control over the organization nationally, Novelli sought Washington staff who could reach out to Republicans. "[Gingrich] credits Novelli with recognizing [that] if they wanted a prescription-drug bill, that was what he'd have to do to get it with a Republican Congress," says Dan Meyer, former chief of staff for Gingrich. To find the right people, Novelli called on the executive search firm Korn/Ferry International and its managing director, Nels Olson, a well-connected Republican. Olson had worked in the first Bush White House, and in the 2000 campaign helped George W. Bush's communications campaign team. In 2002, Olson brought in a premier aerospace lobbyist, Chris Hansen, a 26-year industry veteran, as the AARP's director of advocacy, overseeing all its lobbying. Hansen soon moved up to oversee all grass-roots and community-service work, as well as lobbying and policy. Korn/ Ferry then helped Hansen bring in Mike Naylor to take Hansen's old job overseeing the lobbying. Naylor had spent the last 18 years as a government-relations executive for such corporations as John Deere and AlliedSignal.
Novelli says that bringing in new people "changed the culture at AARP, making it more aggressive and agile." And more accepting of a market-oriented approach to health care. Dreyfuss reports, "It was Novelli, Hansen, and Naylor who orchestrated the AARP's approach to the Medicare prescription-drug bill, working closely with Hastert and Frist. Frist had first developed a good working relationship with AARP when Deets was invited to be on the board of the Alliance for Health Reform, set up by Frist and Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller. Gingrich, who was helping the House leadership keep reluctant conservatives behind the bill, had always counted on AARP being willing to negotiate, rather than acting as an advocacy group. In a conference call last August to members of his health-care think tank, Gingrich stated, according to a summary, '[T]he internal debate for the administration is whether the center of focus is on pleasing the Senate Democrats or on pleasing AARP. They can't possibly pass a bill that has both groups opposed to it. My bet is on AARP.' It appears that Gingrich's bet paid off. AARP is now at a crossroads. About 60,000 members have already quit in outrage over the law, and a March USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll shows a majority of both enrollees and the general public now opposing it. The group has given its imprimatur to policies that will in fact cover only about 25 percent of seniors' prescription-drug costs and prevent those who enroll from purchasing any supplemental insurance to cover the difference. Beyond that, the law may spell the beginning of the end for publicly financed and run health care for the elderly and will call into question the future of employer-sponsored insurance for workers. Opposition to the measure is likely to grow as seniors increasingly understand its provisions, which include caps on federal Medicare payments, a voucher program, a significant boost to private insurers, and the means testing of beneficiary payments. And their anger over the drug provisions will likely grow as many lose generous employer and state benefits in return for bare-bones coverage. What's more, workers are likely to feel the impact next year as employers offer them the costly and skimpy plans allowed under the new law. AARP has maintained that it couldn't wait for a perfect bill, that the group's option was to take what passed or have nothing. Now the question for it will be whether it will back efforts by Democrats to repeal the worst aspects of the law and provide a real drug benefit." (American Prospect)
May 15: 84-year old Sun Myung Moon is on a mission to further increase his already-powerful ties to US conservatives and the Republican Party, though he publicly says he is leaving US shores for the last time. Moon considers himself to be the True Father, the Messiah, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and has stated numerous times that his goal, as Fred Clarkson put it in his book Eternal Hostility, is "an autocratic theocracy to rule the world" with him as the leader. In a ceremony in late March held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Moon presented seven US congressmen, including Democratic representatives Mark Dayton, Harold Ford, Danny David, Sanford Bishop, and Republican representatives Roscoe Bartlett, Christopher Cannon, and Curt Weldon, with "Crown of Peace" and "Ambassador of Peace" awards. Moon, sporting a floor-length cape, was presented with an ornate gold crown and a lifetime achievement award. Introduced by a shofar-blowing rabbi, Moon told the audience, made up of congressional members and a number of religious leaders, that a "new era" had come: "Open your hearts and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me." Moon said that, while he is as human as the next guy, "in the context of Heaven's providence, I am God's ambassador, sent to earth with His full authority. I am sent to accomplish His command to save the world's six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created." Observers familiar with Moon say that his declared intention to leave the US for his home in Korea should be taken with a grain of salt.
Moon has developed a special relationship with the Bush family. After supporting Bush's election through his flagship publication, the Washington Times, the newspaper's foundation sponsored a prayer luncheon attended by some 1,700 religious, civic and political leaders the day before Bush's inauguration. The guest list contained a host of religious-right luminaries, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, former National Evangelical Association President Don Argue, Trinity Broadcasting Network's Paul Crouch and a host of leaders from the Southern Baptist Convention. One of Moon's long-term projects -- developing a faith-based path to peace by re-vamping the United Nations -- is still on the organization's front burner.
A 1999 press release issued from the "Family Ethics and World Peace" conference called attention to the Reverend's intentions: "Citing the ultimately ineffective efforts of current peace organizations in securing world peace, Reverend Moon said that...world peace in the next millennium hinges on the involvement of united, world religious leaders." Alexander Haig, who served as President Richard Nixon's chief of staff and President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, introduced Moon to the assembly, and according to the press release, "credited Rev. Moon as being instrumental in overthrowing international communism." In early 2000, Moon fleshed out the idea, suggesting that the UN needed to transcend the narrow national interests of member states and form "a religious assembly, or council of religious representatives within" its structure. According to Moon, this new body, consisting "of respected spiritual leaders in fields such as religion, culture and education," could "speak for the concerns of the entire world and humanity at large." In October 2003, Moon organized the Inaugural Assembly of the Interreligious International Peace Council (IIPC) in New York City, which drew some 300 delegates -- including about a dozen former heads of state -- from 160 countries. According to the Moon-owned United Press International, attendees heard Moon talk about eliminating the "boundaries" that "cause division and conflict," which would bring about "a world of peace." The Moon-owned Washington Times reported that "Hundreds of demonstrators, in yellow baseball caps and bedecked in ribbons [sponsored by another Moon front group, the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace], rallied near the United Nations...in support of what they called 'a faith-based approach to world peace.'" Along with leaders in Africa and the South Pacific, the Bush Administration has shown interest in Moon's project. The Philippines agreed to sponsor a Moon-backed resolution in the General Assembly. During a May 2003 meeting with Bush at the White House, Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo suggested that the United States might consider co-sponsoring the proposal. Bush expressed strong interest and instructed his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to study the matter. (AlterNet)
May 15: Conservative Democratic senator Zell Miller, who has publicly thrown his support to the Bush campaign, attacks Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, calling him an "out-of-touch, ultraliberal from Taxachusetts." Miller, the lone Democratic senator publicly backing Bush, makes the remarks in a Bush-Cheney grassroots event during the Georgia Republican convention, where he is greeted as a hero. "I'm afraid that my old Democratic 'ties that bind' have become unraveled," he says in a speech that evokes sustained applause, cheers, laughter and two standing ovations. Miller says Kerry's handlers are trying to soften the Democratic candidate's image and depict him as an average guy. "Look, John Kerry couldn't find Main Street with both hands," he tells the crowd. "You can't make a chicken swim and you can't make John Kerry anything but an out-of-touch ultraliberal from Taxachusetts." Kerry senior adviser David Morehouse responds, "Zell Miller knows a lot about chickens, especially chickens that cross the road and switch to the other side." The word "turncoat" is being used by some of Miller's fellow Georgia Democrats. "For him to turn a blind eye to the fact that we're no more secure under George W. Bush, that we're in a morass in Iraq and that he hasn't told the truth to us about weapons of mass destruction makes you wonder what country he is looking at," says state Senator Vincent Fort, a Democrat. "In his speech, Miller says the nation is more secure with Bush in the White House. "With John Kerry on national security, it's vacillate, retreat and turn over to the UN," he said. "With John Kerry on domestic policy, it's tax, spend and redistribute income." He says Kerry deserves praise for his war record in Vietnam but declares his Senate voting record on national defense "shameful," saying Kerry voted "against every single major weapons system that won the Cold War." "The man now wants to be the commander in chief of U.S. armed forces? U.S. forces armed with what, spitballs?"
Miller, a lifelong Democrat, was Georgia's governor from 1991 through 1998 and was lieutenant governor for 16 years before that. In 2000, Democratic Governor Roy Barnes chose him to succeed the late Senator Paul Coverdell, a Republican. Miller was a strong, early supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton back in 1992 and delivered a nominating speech for Clinton at the party's national convention. But he has ruffled the feathers of Democratic colleagues since joining the Senate, siding with Republicans on virtually every key issue and writing a best-selling book in which he accuses his party of being out of touch with Southern voters. The speech was a hit with Republicans. Miller, who will be 73 next year, is not seeking re-election and he confirmed again following the speech that he is not changing parties. "I'm comfortable right where I am doing what I'm doing. I want to be doing everything I can to help President Bush be re-elected, and Dick Cheney. I think they're doing a superb job." (AP/Guardian)

Abuse documented at Guantanamo Bay prison facility

May 16: Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, according to information provided by former prisoner Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March. Dergoul's statements have prompted demands by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately. They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an institutionalized feature of America's war on terror. Dergoul spent 22 months at Guantanamo Bay. He says he and his fellow inmates were routinely assaulted by Camp Delta's punishment squad, known as the Extreme Reaction Force or ERF. Their attacks, he says, would be prompted by minor disciplinary infractions, such as refusing to agree to the third cell search in a day -- which he describes as an act of deliberate provocation. Dergoul tells of one assault by a five-man ERF team: "I was in extreme pain and so weak that I could barely stand. It was freezing cold and I was shaking like a washing machine. They questioned me at gunpoint and told me that if I confessed I could go home. They had already searched me and my cell twice that day, gone through my stuff, touched my Koran, felt my body around my private parts. And now they wanted to do it again, just to provoke me, but I said no, because if you submit to everything you turn into a zombie. I heard a guard talking into his radio, 'ERF, ERF, ERF,' and I knew what was coming -- the Extreme Reaction Force. The five cowards, I called them -- five guys running in with riot gear. They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting; in all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows."
Dergoul also discloses personal experience of the techniques pioneered by the former Guantanamo commandant, General Geoffrey Miller, to "set the conditions' for detainees" interrogation, which Miller then took to Iraq. He says they included humiliation, prolonged exposure to intense heat and cold, sleep deprivation, being kept chained in painful positions, and the threat of "rendition" to an Arab country where, his interrogators said, he would be subjected to full-blown torture. He experienced other forms of torture authorized by Miller. For one period of about a month last year, he says, guards would take him every day to an interrogation room in chains, seat him, chain him to a ring in the floor and then leave him alone for eight hours at a time. "The air conditioning would really be blowing - it was freezing, which was incredibly painful on my amputation stumps. Eventually I'd need to urinate and in the end I would try to tilt my chair and go on the floor. They were watching through a one-way mirror. As soon as I wet myself, a woman MP would come in yelling, 'Look what you've done! You're disgusting.'" Afterwards he would be taken back to his cell for about three hours. Then the guards would reappear and in Guantanamo slang tell him he was returning to the interrogation room: "You have a reservation." The process would begin again.
Dergoul also describes the use of what was known as the "short shackle" -- steel bonds pulled tight to keep the subject bunched up, while chained to the floor. "After a while, it was agony. You could hear the guards behind the mirror, making jokes, eating and drinking, knocking on the walls. It was not about trying to get information. It was just about trying to break you." Dergoul is unable to walk correctly due to severe frostbite of his feet suffered at Camp Delta and at his previous internment in Kandahar, a condition which was left untreated until he lost a toe to gangrene. He also lost part of an arm due to a shrapnel injury. Two months after regaining his freedom he has nightmares and flashbacks, especially of his many beatings, and is about to begin treatment at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. "'I get migraines, I'm depressed and I suffer from memory loss. There's stuff that happened, embedded in my head, that I can't remember." Dergoul was captured by Northern Alliance troops while he and several friends were touring Afghanistan as part of a proposed business venture.
Dergoul, who says he is apolitical and had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden before 9/11, was turned over to US troops in Afghanistan, who paid his Alliance captors $5,000 for Dergoul -- the standard payout for "terrorist suspects." Dergoul believes that he and many others were wrongfully identified as terrorist suspects in order to receive the payout. Dergoul's story is not the only one to emerge from Guantanamo. After their release last March, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, the so-called Tipton Three from Staffordshire, told of similar ERF attacks. Rasul said they led to a new verb being coined by detainees: "to be ERFed." That, he said, meant being slammed against a floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and beaten up by five armed men. Dergoul reveals that every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened. Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force spokesman, confirms Dergoul's statement, saying all ERF actions were filmed so they could be "reviewed" by senior officers. All the tapes are kept in an archive there, he says. He refuses to say how many times the ERF squads had been used and would not discuss their training or rules of engagement, saying: "We do not discuss operational aspects of the Joint Task Force mission."
A British military interrogator posted to Abu Ghraib raised the alarm about maltreatment of detainees by US troops as long ago as last March. While ministers insisted last week that the three Britons working in the jail did not see any of the systematic and sadistic abuse, an unnamed lieutenant -- a debriefer trained to deal only with co-operative witnesses -- made an official complaint to US authorities after seeing what he considered to be "rough handling" of prisoners. Senator Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has been an outspoken critic of the Abu Ghraib abuse, says he will demand that Rumsfeld must produce the videos this week. "Congressional oversight of this administration has been lax in many areas, including detention policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo," he says. "It is past time for that to change. If photos, videotapes or any other evidence exists that can help establish whether or not there has been mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it should be provided without delay to Congress. I have asked the Pentagon for sufficient information to allow Congress to evaluate the effectiveness and propriety of the treatment of those in our custody. Pentagon officials owe the Congress a comprehensive response. I have made clear that compliance must include any tapes or photos of the activities of the ERF or any other military or intelligence units there."
In London, Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, says: "The Government must demand that these videos be delivered up, and the truth of these very serious allegations properly determined once and for all. The videos provide an unequalled opportunity to check the veracity of what Mr. Dergoul and the other former detainees are saying." John Sifton, a New York-based official from Human Rights Watch who has interviewed numerous former Guantanamo prisoners in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says, "It is now clear that there is a systemic problem of abuse throughout the US military's detention facilities -- not merely misbehavior by a few bad apples." Formerly apolitical and irreligious, Dergoul's experiences have changed him forever, turning him into a devout and intensely political Muslim. "I now look on America as a terrorist state because that's what they have done -- terrorized us -- and I condemn Britain as well for contributing to it. Half the people I met in Cuba had been purchased. If they really had been captured on the battlefield, as the Americans are always saying, maybe I could understand it. But maybe now they'll get their comeuppance. After what's happened at Abu Ghraib, if I'd been the Americans I would have destroyed those videos. Let them be shown. Then the world will know I'm telling the truth." (Guardian, Guardian)

Rumsfeld proven to have authorized torture during interrogations

May 16: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directly authorized the use of abusive and torturous interrogation procedures in Iraq to make it easier to pry information from recalcitrant prisoners, according to an investigation by journalists for the New Yorker magazine. The Pentagon denies the charges, calling them "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with anonymous conjecture." The report says that Rumsfeld gave the green light to methods previously used in Afghanistan for gathering intelligence on members of al-Qaeda. Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita says the abuses of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison depicted in photos and videos has "no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction, or order of the Department of Defense." The New Yorker reveals the interrogation plan was a highly classified "special access program," or SAP, that gave advance approval to kill, capture or interrogate so-called high-value targets in the battle against terror. Such secret methods were used extensively in Afghanistan but more sparingly in Iraq, mainly in the search for former President Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. As the Iraqi insurgency grew and more US soldiers died, Rumsfeld and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone expanded the scope to bring the interrogation tactics to Abu Ghraib, the article says.
The magazine, which based its article on interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, reports the plan was approved and carried out last year after deadly bombings in August at the UN headquarters and Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. A former intelligence official says Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved the program but may not have known about the abuse. The rules governing the secret operation were "grab whom you must. Do what you want," says the unidentified former intelligence official. Rumsfeld left the details of the interrogations to Cambone, according to a Pentagon consultant. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program," the Pentagon consultant said. The CIA, which approved using high-pressure interrogation tactics against senior al-Qaeda leaders after the 2001 attacks, balked at extending them to Iraq and refused to participate. After initiating the secret techniques, the US military began learning useful intelligence about the insurgency, the former intelligence official claims. (Washington Post/Truthout)
May 16: A plan to torture and terrorize a Syrian prisoner in Abu Ghraib was concocted by Colonel Thomas Pappas, a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon, and sent for approval to General Ricardo Sanchez, the top military officer in Iraq, in November 2003. Pappas's plan proves the existence of a far wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed. The interrogation plan for the Syrian, which involved the use of attack dogs, sleep deprivation, and physical intimidation, "clearly allows for a crossing of the line into abusive behavior," says James Ross, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch. What makes its wording so troubling, Ross adds, is that it allows "wide authority for soldiers conducting interrogations.... Were the superior officer to agree to these techniques, it would be opening the door for any soldier or officer to be committing abusive acts and believe they were doing so" with official sanction. A number of directives from senior military officials have already attracted congressional attention. The first is a classified report by Army Major General Geoffrey Miller on September 9, 2003, demanding that the military police at Abu Ghraib be dedicated and trained to set "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees."
The report contained five recommendations spelling out how this was to occur and reported it had already begun. The second is an October 12 classified memo signed by Sanchez that demanded a "harmonization" of military policing and intelligence work at Abu Ghraib for the purpose of ensuring "consistency with the interrogation policies...and maximiz[ing] the efficiency of the interrogation." The memo also states "it is imperative that interrogators be provided reasonable latitude to vary their approach," depending on a detainee's background, strengths, resistance and other factors. It also explicitly demands humane treatment and requires that any dogs present during the interrogations be muzzled. The third is a November 19 memo from Sanchez's office that formally placed the two key Abu Ghraib cellblocks where the abuses occurred under the control of Pappas and his 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. It was 11 days later, after this memo placed the military police responsible for "security of detainees and base protection" in Pappas's hands, that he sought, in his memo to Sanchez, to draw military police explicitly into applying pressure on the Syrian. The fact that prison interrogations were so directly controlled by these military directives, as well as the apparent cultural sophistication of some of the abuses, has already led some lawmakers to conclude that much more experienced and senior officers were involved than the seven military police now charged by the Army with wrongdoing.
Republican senator Susan Collins expressed skepticism during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week that a group of military police from rural Maryland and West Virginia "would have chosen bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be offensive to Muslim men [as the photos depicted].... It implies too much knowledge.... And that is why, even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved." Senator Saxby Chambliss, a fellow Republican, expressed similar concerns on May 7: "On the surface, you could portray the 800th MP Brigade as a Reserve unit with poor leadership and poor training. However, the abuse of prisoners is not merely the failure of an MP brigade; it's a failure of the chain of command." All of the Iraqi prisons were understaffed because promised civilian contractors never appeared, according to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who formerly headed the units controlling Iraq's prisons. Unlike the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which has 800 police guarding 640 detainees, Karpinski had one soldier available to guard every 10 detainees in a prison population that included men and women of varying ages, criminals, terrorists and mentally ill persons. Discipline for infractions was rare; morale slumped; and prison guards and interrogators were increasingly free to do as they pleased.
Army investigators have concluded that the guards' low familiarity with Islamic culture provided a breeding ground for racism and a widespread conviction that Muslims were terrorists. One of its dog handlers insisted that the animals simply disliked Iraqis because of their appearance and smell. One of the most notorious photos to emerge from the prison -- of naked and cuffed Iraqi men pushed together on the prison floor in a simulation of sex -- originated in a decision by guards to punish two Iraqis for raping a 14-year-old male detainee, the participants said. On another occasion, a guard attacked, beat and hung a handcuffed Iraqi by his wrists -- dislocating his shoulders -- in a fit of anger over the Iraqi's role in smuggling a pistol into the prison. When Karpinski brought up a Red Cross complaint that intelligence officers had demanded recalcitrant prisoners be escorted back to their cells wearing women's underwear, a deputy to the chief intelligence officer joked about it. "I told the commander to stop giving them Victoria's Secret catalogs," the deputy said in a roomful of officers, Karpinski recalled. She said she replied that the Red Cross would not appreciate that response.
While Karpinski's replacement, General Miller, issued a raft of new directives aimed at curbing the worst of the abuses, the reality in the field, Army investigators quickly learned, was an absence of any supervision or monitoring. Pappas, for example, told them that no procedures were in place for the independent monitoring of the interrogations and no personnel were available to do it, officials familiar with his testimony say. Moreover, most of the Army soldiers accused of abuse have said they were encouraged to undertake it by military intelligence officials in the prison, who sometimes merely observed and sometimes took part in it themselves. "MI has . . . instructed us to place prisoners in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days," Army Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick said in a diary he wrote after being accused of wrongdoing. One of the soldiers "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth," said Sgt. Samuel Provance, a military intelligence officer who testified during a military court proceeding against one of the military policemen on May 1. "This was not to be discussed. It was kept 'hush-hush.'" Although at least four Army lawyers were assigned to the military intelligence brigade and its offices at Abu Ghraib, it remains unclear whether they played a meaningful role in trying to block abuses.
Major General Thomas Romig, the service's judge advocate general, testified last week that the Army is reviewing their "resourcing and training" in the wake of the scandal. Karpinski says that if the interrogation plan put forward by Pappas had been presented to her, "I would have said, 'Absolutely not. Not on my watch. Take your procedures somewhere else.'" If such a plan can be made, she says, "this whole thing is more offensive than I thought. That does sound like abuse and torture." Robert Goldman, an American University law professor who teaches a course on the law of war, comments on about the interrogation plan that, "in my view, a good deal of it crosses the line.... They are talking about breaking the detainee, and exercising extreme moral and possibly physical coercion. Why is the dog there? This is very coercive. It cannot be justified by any lawful interrogation technique." The strip searching of someone already being held in detention is clearly "to humiliate him. There is no question.... This is violative of the spirit if not the letter of the Geneva Conventions. It's like a B-grade movie." (Washington Post)
May 16: Questions arise about the establishment of a legal foundation by the Bush administration that opened the door to mistreatment and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions. He wrote, in part: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account in Newsweek. Asked about the Gonzales memo, the White House said, "It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations." The roots of the scandal lay in a decision, approved last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt for al-Qaeda, writes investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. The Pentagon has attacked the story, saying it was "filled with error and anonymous conjecture" and called it "outlandish, conspiratorial." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story." Hersh is renowned for his contacts within the US intelligence community and his impeccable reporting. Powell has admitted that high-level Bush officials last fall discussed information from the International Committee of the Red Cross alleging prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the focal point of the scandal. "We knew that the ICRC had concerns, and in accordance with the matter in which the ICRC does its work, it presented those concerns directly to the command in Baghdad," Powell says. "And I know that some corrective action was taken with respect to those concerns."
Congressional critics suggest the administration may have unwisely imported to Iraq techniques from the war on al-Qaeda. "There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment," says Democratic senator Joseph Biden. "We can treat al-Qaeda this way, and we can't treat prisoners captured this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope." Biden says the abuse scandal goes "much higher" than the young American guards watching over Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. In early 2002, the White House announced that Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees would not be afforded prisoner-of-war status, but that the United States would apply the Geneva Conventions to the war in Afghanistan. Democratic senator Carl Levin, the minority head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says the reports that Rumsfeld approved a secret program on interrogation for use in Iraq raise "this issue to a whole new level." Republican senator John McCain says, "We need to take this as far up as it goes" in investigating who in the administration knew about the procedures. Former CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro says it is a major miscalculation to apply interrogation methods that were specifically designed to extract information from al-Qaeda prisoners to Abu Ghraib and other holding centers inside Iraq. "It was probably the most counterproductive move that the policy-makers could have made and it showed the complete misunderstanding of the Iraq culture," says Cannistraro. The reasons for importing the techniques, Cannistraro says, were the frustrations at the policy level in Washington that not enough information was being obtained about weapons of mass destruction and the frustration over the lack of information about the resistance in Iraq. (AP/Guardian)
May 16: Former Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, who served in Iraq from the outset of the invasion until December 2003, gives a damning interview to the Sacramento Bee describing his experiences in Iraq. He says that the public needs to understand "[t]he cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any humanitarian support." He began to think about leaving the Marines during the invasion of Baghdad, after participating in the killing of a carload of Iraqi civilians; his platoon had been informed that the car was manned by suicide bombers, and when it approached their checkpoint, his platoon blasted the car. He found out moments later that the car was filled with innocent civilians who were following Army instructions to leave Baghdad. He helped throw the bodies into a ditch. Four other, similar incidents at checkpoints further disillusioned Massey. He also recalls killing dozens of peaceful demonstrators on the outskirts of Baghdad: "They were young and they had no weapons. And when we rolled onto the scene, there was already a tank that was parked on the side of the road. If the Iraqis wanted to do something, they could have blown up the tank. But they didn't. They were only holding a demonstration. Down at the end of the road, we saw some RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] lined up against the wall. That put us at ease because we thought: 'Wow, if they were going to blow us up, they would have done it.' His platoon was ordered by, Massey believes, "senior government officials, including intelligence communities within the military and the US government." He and his platoon mates fired .50-caliber machine guns into the crowd, killing a number of civilians, mostly teenagers.
Massey says that he, and many of his fellow soldiers, have been affected by depleted uranium. "I'm 32 years old. I have 80 percent of my lung capacity. I ache all the time. I don't feel like a healthy 32-year-old." He says that "DU is everywhere on the battlefield. If you hit a tank, there's dust." He says the Marines have no real precautions for dealing with DU contamination, and says that the Iraqi civilians are far more impacted than American soldiers, as many of them live in areas permanently contaminated with DU. "The civilian populace is just now starting to learn about it. Hell, I didn't even know about DU until two years ago. You know how I found out about it? I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine. I just started inquiring about it, and I said 'Holy sh*t!'" He continues, "The armed forces are in a tight spot over there. It's starting to leak out about the civilian casualties that are taking place. The Iraqis know. I keep hearing reports from my Marine buddies inside that there were 200-something civilians killed in Fallujah. The military is scrambling right now to keep the raps on that. My understanding is Fallujah is just littered with civilian bodies." Massey says that before the invasion, he was a typical gung-ho Marine, unquestioningly supporting the invasion. "I was like every other troop," he says. "My president told me they got weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam threatened the free world, that he had all this might and could reach us anywhere. I just bought into the whole thing." The civilian casualties began changing his perceptions, he says: "I killed innocent people for our government. For what? What did I do? Where is the good coming out of it? I feel like I've had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it." Massey says that he was in essence placed under house arrest after he snapped during a meeting with his lieutenant, when he told the officer, "You know, I honestly feel that what we're doing is wrong over here. We're committing genocide." He says, "I knew right then and there that my career was over."
Massey concludes, "I want to help people. I felt strongly about it. I had to say something. When I was sent back to stateside, I went in front of the sergeant major. He's in charge of 3,500-plus Marines. 'Sir,' I told him, 'I don't want your money. I don't want your benefits. What you did was wrong.' It was just a personal conviction with me. I've had an impeccable career. I chose to get out. And you know who I blame? I blame the president of the US. It's not the grunt. I blame the president because he said they had weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie." (Sacramento Bee)
May 16: The majority of Bush's campaign funds have been raised from a very small, very elite group of "Pioneers" (who have raised at least $100,000) and "Rangers" (who have raised at least $200,000) and who, in return, have gained unprecedented access to, and participation in, the Bush administration. The 2004 Bush campaign refuses to release a list of "Pioneer" and "Ranger" donors for this year, but based on the 2000 election records and what information has been unearthed for 2004, only about 631 people have raised anywhere from over a third to over half of the Bush campaign war chest, which currently stands at over $293 million since 1998. When four longtime supporters of George W. Bush in 1998 developed a name and a structure for the elite cadre that the then-Texas governor would rely on in his campaign for president, the goal was simple. They wanted to escape the restraints of the public financing system that Congress had hoped would mitigate the influence of money in electing a president. Their way to do it was to create a network of people who could get at least 100 friends, associates or employees to give the maximum individual donation allowed by law to a presidential candidate: $1,000. The Pioneers and Rangers have evolved from an initial group of family, friends and associates willing to bet on putting another Bush in the White House into an extraordinarily organized and disciplined machine. It is now twice as big as it was in 2000 and fueled by the desire of corporate CEOs, Wall Street financial leaders, Washington lobbyists and Republican officials to outdo each other in demonstrating their support for Bush and his administration's pro-business policies. "This is the most impressive, organized, focused and disciplined fundraising operation I have ever been involved in," declares Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, who has been raising money for GOP candidates since 1980. "They have done just about everything right."
And in return, they get big dividends. Of the 246 fundraisers identified by The Post as Pioneers in the 2000 campaign, 104 -- or slightly more than 40 percent -- ended up in a job or an appointment. 23 Pioneers were named as ambassadors and three were named to the Cabinet: Donald Evans at the Commerce Department, Elaine Chao at Labor and Tom Ridge at Homeland Security. At least 37 Pioneers were named to postelection transition teams, which helped place political appointees into key regulatory positions affecting industry. A more important reward than a job for many Pioneers is access. For about one-fifth of the 2000 Pioneers, this is their business -- they are lobbyists whose livelihoods depend on the perception that they can get things done in the government. More than half the Pioneers are heads of companies -- chief executive officers, company founders or managing partners -- whose bottom lines are directly affected by a variety of government regulatory and tax decisions. When Kenneth Lay, for example, a 2000 Pioneer and then-chairman of Enron Corp., was a member of the Energy Department transition team, he sent White House personnel director Clay Johnson a list of eight persons he recommended for appointment to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Two were named to the five-member commission. Lay had ties to Bush and his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and was typical of the 2000 Pioneers. Two-thirds of them had some connection to the Bush family or Bush himself -- from his days in college and business school, his early oil wildcatting in West Texas, his partial ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team and the political machine he developed as governor.
"It's clearly the case that these networking operations have been the key driving Bush fundraising," says Anthony Corrado, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and a political scientist at Colby College. "The fact that we have great numbers of these individuals raising larger and larger sums means there are going to be more individuals, postcampaign, making claims for policy preferences and ambassadorial posts." Of course, the Bush administration claims that fundraisers get no special treatments. When asked whether the president gives any special preference to campaign contributors in making decisions about policy, appointments or other matters, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "Absolutely not." The president, Duffy said, "bases his policy decisions on what's best for the American people." Few Pioneers are willing to discuss their contacts with the administration: "That's dead man's talk," says one. The Bush campaign refuses to reveal the entire 2000 list of Pioneers, saying it is contained in computer files they can no longer access. M. Teel Bivins, a rancher, Pioneer and member of the Texas Senate awaiting confirmation as ambassador to Sweden, was more open with the BBC in 2001: "You wouldn't have direct access if you had spent two years of your life working hard to get this guy elected president, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars?" he said. "You dance with them what brung ya." Of the 246 known Pioneers from the 2000 election, 126 are Pioneers or Rangers again. They are joined by 385 new Pioneers and Rangers whose backgrounds are less from Texas and the Bush circle than from the nation's business elite, particularly Wall Street and such major players as Bear Stearns & Co. Inc., Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.; Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston Inc. and Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc. Regionally, the campaign's most productive area this year is Manhattan's Upper East Side.
"This is the most successful political fundraising mechanism in the history of politics, and it will be emulated by other candidates and campaigns in the future," says Craig McDonald, executive director of Texans for Public Justice, a public interest group that has tracked the Pioneer network for five years. The Pioneers was founded in 1998 by four influential friends of the Bush family in 1998: Texas Republican fundraiser and public relations specialist James B. Francis Jr., fundraiser Jeanne Johnson Phillips, state Republican chairman Fred Meyer and Don Evans, then a Texas oil man. The four met in Midland, Texas to figure out how to capitalize on the extensive network of rich and powerful people that the Bush family had built up over the past century. Two wings of the family, the Bushes and the Walkers, had long been entrenched in the industrial Midwest and on Wall Street. This establishment, in turn, had produced the investors who had bankrolled the venture of George H.W. Bush into the oil industry after World War II, his acquisition of wealth through oil and his ascent to national prominence. George H.W. Bush built up a financial network that he in turn could pass on to two of his sons, George W. and Jeb. The initial goal for the fledgling Pioneers was to raise a minimum of $50 million to reject public financing for the 2000 Republican primaries and to be free to spend without limit until the summer nominating conventions. Other Republicans had rejected public money for the primary season before, in order to spend their own wealth. Bush, in contrast, was not going to use his own money; he was going to raise it from hundreds of thousands of donors.
Two problems loomed for the organization. The first was that the Bush network was made up of men, and a scattering of women, who were used to writing big checks. Donations to Bush's gubernatorial campaigns, to the Republican National Committee's "Team 100," to Jeb Bush's Florida Republican Party and to the Bushes' earlier oil and baseball ventures had no contribution limits. Transfers and gifts of $100,000 or more were commonplace within this universe. Federal elections, however, were different. A key provision of the 1974 Watergate reforms for the first time set a limit on individual contributions to a presidential campaign to a meager $1,000. "We had to turn these people into money raisers instead of money givers," Francis says: to get them to do the dirty work of politics, to make hundreds of calls to clients, subcontractors, to their corporate subordinates, to their law partners and fellow lobbyists and plead for cash. At the 1998 Midland meeting, the goal was to figure how to get "two steps ahead" -- to use Meyer's phrase -- of the $1,000 contribution limit. Francis came up with the idea of making it a competition. "We purposely set the bar high," Francis says. "These are very successful, very competitive people," and the requirement of raising at least $100,000 in contributions of $1,000 or less was designed "to tap into their competitive instincts." The fundraisers would compete to make Pioneer, but they would also vie to see who could raise the most money, and, even more significantly, who could recruit the largest number of other Pioneers.
The second problem was accountability. Fundraisers are notorious for making extravagant promises and claiming credit for every name they recognize on a donor list. "You can have an event that pulls in $3 million, and there will be 20 guys each saying they raised $1 million," says a Republican fundraiser. A system was needed to make certain there was no double or triple counting, that when a check came in for $1,000, proper credit was given to the fundraiser who had solicited the money. The solution was to assign each fundraiser a four-digit tracking number that would be printed on each check written to the campaign. Soon after the 1998 Midland strategy session, Francis, Evans, Phillips and Meyer joined other campaign operatives in Dallas to put the plan to work. The four reported directly to Karl Rove, Bush's principal political adviser. Francis took charge of the Pioneer program. In addition to Bush family members and friends, Francis had essentially four spheres of money to mine, all of which overlapped at various points.
The first sphere was formed by the group of men who had repeatedly gambled on George W. Bush as an entrepreneur, investing in failed Bush ventures in the oil business and then joining Bush in the highly profitable acquisition of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The Rangers made millions for Bush and his partners. The second sphere was made up of the Texas political elite and business community that supported him as governor. Many were involved in the energy industry. Others sought tighter restrictions on lawsuits against corporations and physicians. Governor Bush had won approval of state legislation favorable to both of these constituencies. The third sphere was made up of the Republican financial elite with strong ties to Bush's father, the 41st president. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, the senior Bush had cemented alliances on crucial fronts, serving in top posts at the United Nations, the Republican National Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency. More importantly, during three runs for the presidency, two terms as vice president and one as president, the elder Bush had cultivated and assiduously maintained a national base of major donors and fundraisers. Many were ready and willing to support his son -- including some of the 252 members of the Republican National Committee's "Team 100," each of whom had given the party at least $100,000. At least 60 of the 246 2000 Pioneers had been supporters of Bush's father in the 1980 or 1988 campaigns. The fourth sphere was composed of the supporters of Bush's fellow Republican governors, most importantly those of his brother, Jeb Bush in Florida. By November 1999, well before any primaries or caucuses had been held, George W. Bush already had the endorsements of 26 of 30 GOP governors.
The Bush campaign tapped these sources to raise a then-record $96.3 million for the primaries in 2000, far outdistancing Democrat Al Gore's $49.5 million. Both candidates received $68 million in public financing for the general election campaign. In 2002, Congress enacted the McCain-Feingold bill banning contributions to political parties of what is known as "soft money" -- unlimited donations from corporations, unions or the wealthy. Instead, the legislation raised the "hard money" limit on contributions to candidates from $1,000 to $2,000. "The organization of the Pioneers and Rangers is significant, and it is the way of the future," says Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. "People with Rolodexes and the ability to raise money have always been valuable, but with the passage of McCain-Feingold, they have become especially valuable.... [T]he ability to get friends, colleagues and business associates to give the maximum hard money amount is now even more valuable." With soft money banned, the 2004 Bush campaign has greatly expanded the Pioneer program, setting a new record of more than $200 million raised so far.
This year, Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, followed Bush's lead and rejected public financing for his primary campaign, fearing he would be crushed by the Bush organization if he were forced to abide by the $45 million spending limits that accompany public financing. Kerry recently released a list of 182 people who have each raised a minimum of $50,000, helping to bring his total to at least $110 million. The Democrats are increasingly relying on independent groups known as 527s, after their designation in the tax code. They currently raise unlimited funds for political ads that have been used to attack Bush. Two prominent examples are the Media Fund and Moveon.org. Financier George Soros and Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corp., have each given more than $7 million to these organizations. One of the most notorious 527s operating for the Bush campaign is the organization dubbed "swift Boat Veterans for Truth." For the general election campaign, Bush and Kerry are accepting public money; each will get $75 million. The Bush reelection campaign is currently riding a wave of Wall Street money and has consolidated the Republican establishment with the backing of prominent Washington lobbyists and trade association executives. They are not only highly effective fundraisers themselves but also their client and membership lists include some of the most regulated, and most politically active, corporations in every state. At least 64 Rangers and Pioneers are lobbyists, including Jack Abramoff, who until recently specialized in representing Indian tribes with gambling interests; Kirk Blalock, whose clients include Fannie Mae, the Health Insurance Association of America, and the Business Roundtable; Jack Gerard, president of the National Mining Association; and Lanny Griffith, whose clients include the American Trucking Associations, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the Southern Co., a major energy concern, and State Street Corp.
While big party donors have always enjoyed "perks" from the administrations they help elect, the Bush administration has taken the idea much farther than anyone has taken it before. The Bush campaign's innovation in the late 1990s was to institutionalize what other administrations had done more informally, which is to create a special class of donors that can be singled out from the pack and tracked with precision. Some of their transactions with the administration can also be tracked. Sometimes the interests of Pioneers are relayed in subtle, indirect ways, through members of Congress or Republican leaders, especially in the case of major administration bills enacted since Bush took office: three bills granting tax relief to the wealthy and to corporations, the 2003 Medicare bill supported by the drug industry and other major health lobbies, and pending legislation providing tax breaks and regulatory relief to the energy sector. At another level, requests for tickets to an event, such as a White House party, are likely to be more overt than the nuanced approach needed to get on the radar for a presidential appointment. "It is noticed that you are doing extra work and you have a lot of friends in the administration," says Representative Jennifer Dunn, a Pioneer who was considered for a presidential appointment. Her son, Reagan Dunn, was hired by the Justice Department, and her new husband, Keith Thomson, was appointed last year as the director of the Office of Trade Relations. "A lot [of Pioneers] have a particular interest and you have lots of contacts, and you say, 'I'd like to sign up to be an ambassador when one comes along.'" The Pioneer tracking system ensures that hard work gets noticed. That's why Representative Rob Portman signed up this year. He read that Dunn, Speaker Dennis Hastert, and others were Pioneers. Portman had already raised money, "but I didn't have a tracking number. I finally decided to get one. I wanted to be supportive, and be viewed as supportive."
Critics complain that the Pioneer and Ranger program allows the campaign to track those who raise big money while cloaking details about them from the public; campaigns are required to report the names of the individual donors, but not the fundraisers who solicit the donations. "The campaign is tracking them and giving them credit -- and supposedly all the access and influence that comes with huge campaign contributions," says McDonald of Texans for Public Justice. He said the Bush campaign has never released a complete list of Pioneers and Rangers with the specific amounts of money they have raised. Once, in response to a lawsuit, campaign officials said that such a list was not available, an excuse that is impossible to countenance. "It is unbelievable that the most successful fundraising list in the history of politics has been misplaced," McDonald says. Nancy Goodman Brinker, one of the 23 Pioneers from the 2000 campaign who became an ambassador, sayd she does not remember exactly when or who first brought up a diplomatic appointment. She says it "seemed to evolve" after someone asked her whether she wanted to serve. The next thing she knew, she was talking to Clay Johnson in the White House personnel office about her choices. "One of the reasons why I chose and asked to be placed in Budapest," Brinker said at her Senate confirmation hearing, "was because I think there's been an amazing story of loyalty by this country."
Patronage decisions for Pioneers and other friends of the president are made largely by Rove, the White House senior political adviser, and Andrew Card, the chief of staff, in consultation with the Office of Presidential Personnel, which handles the vetting process, according to senior Republicans. Any donor who wants to be considered for a major job must indicate interest to one of those two men, they say. These Republicans acknowledge that finance issues were taken into account, but say there were instances of donors being disappointed and people getting plum positions who had done little to help the campaign treasury. In making decisions immediately after the election, Rove consulted Jack Oliver, a trusted insider in Bush's political family who managed the fundraising effort for both of his presidential campaigns. Oliver's main function was to tell Rove "what people had really done" to raise money. Now, such decisions are made entirely within the White House, and Rove and Card also have sway over lesser favors, and "scrub the lists" of invitations to White House holiday parties. "I can call Karl, and I can call about half of the Cabinet, and they will either take the call or call back," says one lobbyist Ranger, who describes such access as "my bread and butter." Several major fundraisers in the lobbying community complained that as the election approaches, Rove has become a "little gun-shy" when dealing with association executives and lobbyists, fearful that his involvement with any special interest might produce adverse publicity.
Commerce Secretary Evans also plays a key role. "Evans acts as a kind of court of appeals...everybody knows that Evans is one of the president's best friends. So he can be very effective intervening for you with just about any department," one fundraiser-lobbyist says. Evans was the one fellow Pioneer Ken Lay turned to in desperation in the fall of 2001, when Enron spiraled toward bankruptcy. Lay wanted help with the company's credit rating, but Enron was in too much trouble, and Evans was unable to oblige. IN 2004, a new category, "super Ranger," was created. To qualify, fundraisers would have to raise an additional $300,000 for the Republican National Committee, where the individual contribution limit is $25,000. "The name of the game is maxing out the dollars," Oliver said to a meeting of Pioneers and Rangers. To reach the new goals, Travis Thomas, the Bush-Cheney finance director, explained to the gathered Rangers and Pioneers how they could hold fundraisers in their homes featuring an appearance by the president that would bring in $2 million to $3 million in bundled contributions. Private homes, he pointed out, are more comfortable for the president. And, he added, "If it is in a private residence, it can be closed to the press." (Washington Post)

US and Britain block investigation into finances of arms runner Victor Bout

May 16: The Bush and Blair administrations are resisting French efforts to freeze the assets of Victor Bout, a notorious arms trafficker once described by a British minister as a "merchant of death" for his role as a leading arms supplier to rebel and government forces in several African conflicts, including Liberia. The UN is considering who should be on a list of individuals whose assets will be frozen because of their involvement with the ousted regime of Charles Taylor, the Liberian leader overthrown last year. Western diplomats say they have been told of reports that an air freight company associated with Bout, who is subject to a UN travel ban because of his activities in Liberia, may be involved in supplying US forces in Iraq and that the US may be "recycling" his extensive cargo network. A former UN official says he had also heard of Bout's Iraq connection; the ex-official said he had been told by a reliable source about a month ago that "the American defense forces are using Victor's planes for their logistics." Another senior Western diplomat says, "We are disgusted that Bout won't be on the list, even though he is the principal arms dealer in the region. If we want peace in that region [of West Africa], it seems evident that he should be on that list." Another senior diplomat says that the UK originally had Bout's name on its preliminary list of targeted individuals, but US officials told their British counterparts they did not want Mr Bout included because he was "being used in Iraq." Bout's name did not appear on a subsequent UK list. US and British officials at the UN deny any knowledge of Mr Bout's alleged activities in Iraq. A UK official says, "We have supported in the past and continue to support international efforts to end Mr Bout's illegal activities," noting that he was subject to a travel ban and an international arrest warrant. (Financial Times)
May 16: Democrats credit House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi with bringing Congressional Democrats together to resist the autocratic rule of Congressional Republicans, particularly Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Under Hastert and DeLay, all significant legislation is to be passed by straight GOP party-line votes. Save on the most trivial issues, no floor amendments are permitted under DeLay's rules, and no Democrats are allowed on conference committees, which frequently rewrite major bills in accord with DeLay's dictates. "It's not anything to whine about," Pelosi says. "We just have to win. No whining, just winning." Under Pelosi, after years of defections to the Republican position on many key votes, the Democratic caucus now displays an almost unprecedented unity in its voting, showing more unity in its voting than any time since 1960. Before Pelosi became Minority Leader in 2002, Democrats in Congress were generally themeless, disunified and easily cowed by Republican banana-republic legislative tactics. Taking over from the genial but rootless leadership of Richard Gephardt, Pelosi worked tirelessly to unify Democrats against what they perceive as the strongarm tactics of Republican lawmakers in Congress. Widely perceived as one of the party's most liberal members, Pelosi has worked hard to forge new ties with the party's more moderate and conservative members. She has also worked to strengthen Democrats' ability to secure House seats in the upcoming election, so much so that, if Democrats show gains or even manage to retake the House leadership in 2004, the credit will be as much to Pelosi as to the campaign of John Kerry or the wide disaffection towards the Bush administration. (The American Prospect)

Powell says CIA misled about Iraqi WMDs

May 17: Secretary of State Colin Powell now says that he believes the CIA was deliberately misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a claim central to the Bush administration's justification for war against that country. He also says that he regrets some of the claims he made before the United Nations on February 5, 2003, claims that were seen by many in the international community to give much-needed credence to Bush administration assertions of Iraq's capabilities and intentions to wage war against other countries. Powell says that he, too, was misled by the same falsified claims of WMDs, and those claims influenced his UN presentation. Powell specifically notes that the claims of Iraq's possession of mobile biological laboratories was specious, a fact long since known to outside observers but never before acknowledged by anyone in the Bush administration. Powell goes on to say that much of the false information was provided by sources from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi Governing Council, a group much favored by Bush administration neoconservatives and which has now been proven as thoroughly unreliable. "Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it," says an official close to him. "And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war." (New York Times)

White House believes a terrorist attack on Washington will happen before the elections

May 17: White House officials announce they have a "working premise" about terrorism that presumes a major terrorist attack will happen before the November elections. "We assume," says a top administration official, "an attack will happen leading up to the election." And, he added, "it will happen here." There are two worst-case scenarios, the official says. The first posits an attack on Washington, possibly the Capitol, which was believed to be the target of the 9/11 jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. The second posits smaller but more frequent attacks in Washington and other major cities leading up to the election. To prepare, the administration has been holding secret antiterrorism drills to make sure top officials know what to do. "There was a sense," says one official involved in the drills, "of mass confusion on 9/11. Now we have a sense of order." The political impact is unclear, but many predict a wide upsurge of support for Bush as Election Day approaches and the nation rallies behind the president to oppose the attacks. (US News and World Report/Free Republic)
May 17: Jordan's King Abdullah tells the American press that Iraq is closer to civil war than it was a year ago. "If we see a disintegration of Iraq, if we see, God forsake, the worst scenario, civil war, then the whole region will be dragged into Iraq," he says in an appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He says Iraqi instability would likely escalate in the run-up to a planned June 30 hand-over to the interim government. "We had a slight glimpse of the civil war in Lebanon several decades ago [but] this would be completely different," he adds. "This would pull in countries from all over the region." Abdullah says the most crucial job in the new Iraqi administration will be the prime minister. The president's role would be more symbolic, he adds. Candidates for the prime minister's job should have been in Iraq during Saddam's rule, he notes. "I would imagine it would be someone from the inside, as opposed to somebody that came into Iraq once the Saddam regime fell," he says, "and somebody who's, you know, is a pretty tough individual, because you're going to need a powerhouse...to be able to bring stability and calm to the Iraqi streets." A long-time friend of the United States, Jordan will not contribute troops to a multinational peacekeeping force in Iraq, Abdullah says: "No, it's not that we don't want to play a part in sharing responsibility, but my own personal belief that we in Jordan, as a country that has a border with Iraq, as do other countries -- four or five other countries that do -- I think we all have personal agendas." (Reuters/Iraq.net)
May 17: A suicide bomber kills the head of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Shi'ite leader Izzadine Saleem. His car is attacked as he waits to enter the US compound in Baghdad. Paul Bremer, the US ruler of Iraq, says that the transfer of power to the Iraqis will go on as scheduled, and that terrorist attacks such as the murder of Saleem cannot interfere with the process. Saleem is the second member of the IGC to be murdered. The US military says the car bombing was a suicide attack and Kimmitt says it has the "classic hallmarks" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant with links to al-Qaeda. However, a previously unknown group, the Arab Resistance Movement, is claiming responsibility, saying in a Web site posting that two of its fighters carried out the attack on "the traitor and mercenary" Saleem. Kimmitt says he does not know if the Arab Resistance Movement was "a cover for the Zarqawi network or if it's an actual organization." (AP/Jerusalemites)
May 17: An artillery shell apparently containing a small amount of sarin, a nerve toxin, explodes near a US convoy, causing two to be hospitalized. The substance was found in a shell inside a bag discovered by a US convoy a few days ago, according to Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt. The shell had been set up as a roadside bomb, and it exploded while US soldiers were trying to defuse it. A senior coalition source says the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity. He says the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war, and coalition officials are not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained. An expert in chemical warfare confirms that the discovery of sarin in the improvised roadside bomb doesn't mean that Iraq has anything approaching a biological weapons program. Professor Alastair Hay of Leeds University, who has worked on chemical warfare related issues for nearly 30 years, says: "It's an old munition, not something that could be used as evidence that Iraq had a massive program of weapons of mass destruction. We know that Iraq had these munitions, we knew many had been destroyed, some by Iraq, many under the auspices of the United Nations Special Committee (UNSCOM), after the Gulf War and until 1998. This may have been a shell that was overlooked in that particular destruction. It will be a straw that the US and UK governments may want to grab hold of, but it's too early to say it's of major significance."
Hay agreed with the assessment of the US military that dispersal of the nerve agent from a device such as a home made bomb would be limited. "They have said it was an old binary munition, which requires the shell to be fired for the sarin to be produced," he says. "The chemical reaction takes place when the shell is in flight. When it lands and explodes, it is released, as an aerosol. The amount produced in a roadside bomb would be very low." He says it is possible that the people who built the bomb knew it contained a chemical warfare agent, but probably did not realize that the shell had to be fired. Asked if it was a worrying new threat for coalition forces, he says, "We don't know yet, but it's taken a long time to find this one munition -- I would have thought that if there was evidence of a lot of it around, it would have been found by now." David Kay, who last year led the post-invasion hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before stepping down, says the sarin was probably left over from the 1980s, produced either during the Iraq-Iran war or before the 1991 Gulf War. "It was probably just scavenged from one of the 125-plus ammunition storage points that still remain," Kay says. More forensic testing should determine with some confidence when it was produced, he adds. Predictably, the Bush administration takes a different tack, with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld characterizing the shell as a "field test" for a new round of attacks with chemical weapons. Rumsfeld does urge that caution should be taken not to jump to conclusions. (BBC, Reuters/Occupation Watch Scotsman)
May 17: About 100 Iraqi prisoners are being held in grim conditions in a prison camp on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport under a special chain of command that does not report to the top military commander in Iraq. The "high value detainees," designated because they are believed to have special intelligence information, have June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells without sunlight, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. While not tantamount to the sexual humiliation and other abuses inflicted on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, the conditions have been described by the Red Cross as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that the Bush administration has said it regards as "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq. Under arrangements in effect since October, explicit authorization from the American commander, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, has been required in each of about 25 cases in which prisoners have been subjected to isolation for longer than 30 days. The statement does not apply to the prisoners being held at the airport, because "we were not the authority" for the high-value detainees, according to a senior military official.
Defense Department officials say the principal responsibility for the high-value prisoners and their treatment belongs to the Iraq Survey Group, which is headed by Major General Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group was formed last June, principally to take charge of the hunt for Iraq's illicit weapons, although its mandate has also included gathering information about Iraqi war crimes. The survey group falls under the overall authority of the Central Intelligence Agency, under George Tenet, for matters related to the illicit weapons hunt. But on other matters it reports to the Central Command, under General John Abizaid. The detainees include Tariq Aziz, a top Hussein aide, and other former senior officials depicted on a deck of cards created by the Pentagon to represent a 55-member most wanted list. The designation of a "high value detainee" is described by military officials as subjective, assigned to prisoners based on an assessment of the intelligence information they might have about matters like illicit weapons, the anti-American insurgency or the conduct of Hussein's government. The Red Cross committee says it had written to American officials last October recommending an end to the isolation imposed on the high-value prisoners. "The internment of persons in solitary confinement for months at a time in cells devoid of daylight for nearly 23 hours a day is more severe than the forms of internment provided for" under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross said in its report. So far the US has refused to moderate its treatment of these prisoners. It has long been suspected that CIA and DIA officials have encouraged, and possibly even trained, military personnel in abusive and torturous interrogation procedures. US intelligence admits to having interrogated a number of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, including one who died during interrogation, and admits to having tried to hide a number of prisoners from Red Cross scrutiny. (New York Times)
May 17: Secretary of State Colin Powell says that the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal has had a "terrible impact" on America's international image as the Bush administration fights back against reports that it encouraged the abuses by emphasizing a get-tough approach to interrogations. Powell says the furor over US abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention facility was a recurring theme at an international economic conference he attended in Jordan over the weekend. He says he told the foreign leaders: "Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing." Concurrent with Powell's remarks, the State Department releases its annual report on the Bush administration's efforts to advance human rights and democracy in 101 countries, Iraq included. The report had been scheduled for publication May 5, but it was postponed out of concern that anger over the prisoner scandal would eclipse any positive news. In Iraq, the report said, the United States, working with other countries and international organizations, has sought "to address the effects of decades of political repression and human rights violations." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who released the report, says Monday that the Abu Ghraib incidents had not robbed the United States of its moral authority to expose excesses by undemocratic governments. "Who would be better off if we self-consciously turned inward and ignored human rights abuses elsewhere -- in places like Burma and Zimbabwe and Belarus?" he asks.
The report, a companion to an earlier annual document criticizing other countries' human rights abuses, is published as the Bush administration battles accusations that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized expansion of a secret program that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. The reports say Rumsfeld's decision last year broadened a Defense Department operation from the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan to interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Asked about an assertion that a CIA official had confirmed Rumsfeld's decision, Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the CIA, issues a strong denial: "The New Yorker story is fundamentally wrong," he says. "There was no DOD [Defense Department]/CIA program to abuse and humiliate Iraqi prisoners, despite what is alleged in the article. I am aware of no CIA official who would or possibly could have confirmed the details of the New Yorker's inaccurate account." The Defense Department also denounces the report, calling it "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." (MSNBC)
May 17: Former Iraqi prisoner Saddam Saleh says his US captors told him he was one of the hooded Iraqi prisoners shown in a picture standing in a row as a grinning female soldier pointed at their genitals. "This is your picture," one of the guards taunted him, displaying the photo. "'You are the fattest one here and that must be you." Saleh intends to file lawsuits against the MPs that he can identify as torturing him. He has already identified Specialist Charles Graner and Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick. Besides Graner and Frederick, Saleh recalls others only by partial names or nicknames: a sergeant named Schneider, another named Pearl, and "Nicolai" -- one of the intelligence officers who he says directed the torture in Cellblock I/A, where he spent all but one month of his time in Abu Ghraib. "One of them wore glasses and one urinated on me," Saleh recalls. Saleh blames his arrest on a misunderstanding and bad luck. He went to the Iraqi police to report a suspicious vehicle. He was carrying a large amount of cash, which he planned to use to buy furniture for his wedding. Once police discovered the cash, they became suspicious of him and turned him over to the Americans.
Saleh had been arrested by the regime of Saddam Hussein in 1999 and sent to Abu Ghraib because he tried to evade military service. "I was tortured under Saddam, but the torture was much more preferable to this because they didn't strip off my clothes and make me naked," he says. Saleh says the torture at the hands of the Americans began seven days after he arrived at the prison, when Graner put a bag on his head and tied his hands. "He pulled me by the back of the neck and started hitting me with an iron bar," he says. "I became hysterical. I couldn't believe what I saw. Everyone was naked in the room. I never saw such a thing under Saddam." Saleh said he was kept naked for 18 days. More frightening were the dogs, Saleh recalls. Guards held them on leashes as they snarled and charged at the prisoners, though none bit him, he says. After the inmates were "softened up" by torture, the interrogations began. "One of the interrogators was a guy by the name of Carlos and there were Mrs. Liz and Staff Sergeant Chris," a woman, he says. They asked him about his ties to al-Qaeda or Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian the Americans blame for car-bombings here and for the decapitation of Nicholas Berg. To avoid more torture, Saleh said he told his interrogators that he had ties to al-Qaeda. "I just wanted to say that so they would execute me, kill me," he says. Apparently the interrogators realized he was lying about terrorist links, because they eventually released him. (Chicago Sun-Times/USLAW)
May 17: Ahmad Chalabi tells a reporter from the New Yorker that he is fascinated with American history, and emulated Roosevelt's strategy to bring America into World War II when he laid his plans to convince the Bush administration into Iraq. "I followed very closely how Roosevelt, who abhorred the Nazis, at a time when isolationist sentiment was paramount in the United States, managed adroitly to persuade the American people to go to war," Chalabi says. "I studied it with a great deal of respect; we learned a lot from it. The Lend-Lease program committed Roosevelt to enter on Britain's side -- so we had the Iraq Liberation Act, which committed the American people for the liberation against Saddam." The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which committed the US to working towards "regime change" in that country, was one of Chalabi's, and his Iraqi National Congress's, finest moments. As a close advisor and confidante of senior Bush officials, Chalabi has had intimate and unprecedented access to, among others, Vice President Cheney, and the Defense Department's Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and William Luti. Now, says Chalabi, the administration is trying to make him a scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. "There is a smear campaign that says I am responsible for the liberation of Iraq," he says. "But how bad is that?"
Chalabi and his INC have received over $100 million dollars from the US government since 1992, $39 million of that from the Bush administration since 2001. What did he give the government in return? "I clarified the picture," he says. The reality is that Chalabi lied, systematically, repeatedly, and for his own purposes, which are tied to the Shi'ite regime in Iran for which he has been accused of spying. The litany of Chalabi's lies mirrors those of the Bush administration: Iraq was a clear and present danger to the US and the Middle East, or in Bush's own words, "an imminent threat;" Iraq had a large stockpile of biological and chemical weapons, and was very near acquiring a nuclear weapon; the regime of Saddam Hussein was intimately linked with al-Qaeda; and that, once the US forces entered the country, they would be welcomed with open arms by a rapt and appreciative populace. Says former CIA counterterrorism specialist Vincent Cannistraro, "With Chalabi, we paid to fool ourselves. It's horrible. In other times, it might be funny. But a lot of people are dead as a result of this. It's reprehensible." Chalabi faces accusations of spying for Iran, the INC intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, is fleeing an arrest warrant charging him with passing classified information to Iran, and two Pengaton officials with close ties to Chalabi are under investigation by the FBI for passing classified information about Iran to Chalabi. The spying charges have forced Chalabi's patrons at the Pentagon to distance themselves from him. Paul Wolfowitz, who was one of the earliest and most outspoken proponents of an invasion of Iraq, and who has been friends with Chalabi for years, now denies that Chalabi ever had serious influence at the Pentagon, nor was ever seriously considered for being installed as the leader of a new Iraqi government: "I think there's quite a bit of street legend out there that somehow he is the favorite of the Defense Department, and we had some idea of installing him as the leader of Iraq." In the fine tradition of everything connected with Chalabi and the invasion of Iraq, Wolfowitz is lying.
The special, intimate role Chalabi played in orchestrating the invasion and occupation of Iraq was carried out by the Office of Special Plans, a secretive Pentagon study group and source of "alternative intelligence" overseen by Douglas Feith. A State Department official familiar with the planning for post-invasion Iraq says, "Every list of Iraqis they wanted to work with for positions in the government of postwar Iraq included Chalabi and all of the members of his organization." Though Chalabi is known to be quite ambitious, and has long desired to create for himself a position of power in Iraq, he has repeatedly denied any interest in anything except getting rid of Hussein. But now Chalabi says he can "no longer uphold his promise that he would never seek office in Iraq," according to reporter Jane Meyer. "Never is a very long time," he says. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter recalls that Chalabi confided to him that he intended to run Iraq once America had overthrown Hussein, and of his plans to enrich himself from the sale of Iraqi oil. Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, says that the US only has itself to blame for trusting the duplicitous Chalabi and finding themselves in the quagmire that is Iraq. "Chalabi is one of the smartest people I know," he says. "[He] figured out in the eighties that the road to Baghdad ran through Washington. He cultivated whom he needed to know. If he didn't get what he wanted from State, he went to Capitol Hill. It's a sign of being effective. It's not his fault that his strategy succeeded. It's not his fault that the Bush Administration believed everything he said. Should they have? Of course not. They should have looked critically. He's not a liar; he believed the information he was purveying, and part of it was valuable. But his goal was to get the US to invade Iraq."
"This war would not have been fought if it had not been for Ahmad," says Francis Brooke, who is Chalabi's unofficial lobbyist and liason in Washington. Brooke and his family live for free in a stately Georgetown estate owned by a Chalabi family holding company, which doubles as a home for visiting Iraqi exiles and an office for the INC. Brooke says that Chalabi's intensive marketing strategies for the occupation of Iraq have been "an amazing success." A devout Christian, Brooke says, "I do have a religious motivation for doing what I do. I see Iraq as our neighbor. And the Bible says, When your neighbor is in a ditch, God means for you to help him." Brooke came to Chalabi from the Rendon Group, a public relations firm long associated with conservative and Republican causes, and which describes itself as specializing in "perception management." Brooke worked with Rendon in its 1991 efforts to market the Persian Gulf War to American citizens, a job he realized was being overseen by the CIA. For his efforts he was paid $22,000 a month.
In May 1991, then-president Bush signed a covert "lethal finding" that authorized the CIA to spend a hundred million dollars to "create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power." Robert Baer, a former CIA officer specializing in Iraq, says the policy was all show, "like an ape beating its chest. No one had any expectation of marching into Baghdad and killing Saddam. It was an impossibility." Nonetheless, the CIA had received an influx of cash, and it decided to create an external opposition movement to Saddam. Partly because of domestic operations cutback from scandals about CIA operations in the 1970s, the agency outsourced its project to the Rendon Group. Brook says that Rendon signed a secret contract with the CIA that guaranteed that it would receive a 10% "management fee" on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. "We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year," Brooke says. "It was a very nice job." Brooke says it wasn't hard to mobilize public opinion against a confirmed tyrant and despot like Saddam Hussein. "It was a campaign environment, with a lot of young people, and no set hierarchy," Brooke recalls. "It was great. We had a real competitive advantage. We knew something about the twenty-four-hour media cycle, and how to manage a media campaign. CNN was new at that point. No one else knew how to do these things, but Rendon was great at issue campaigns." The group began offering information to British journalists, and many articles subsequently appeared in the London press. Though it was a violation of laws against domestic propaganda for Rendon to plant stories in the international media that would be picked up and reported in the US, and sometimes project managers reprimanded the group for such illegal actions, that planting of stories for domestic propaganda purposes was central to Rendon's goals. "It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic."
In addition to generating anti-Saddam news stories and creating a travelling "atrocity exhibit," which documented the human-rights abuses of Saddam's regime, the Rendon Group was charged with the delicate task of helping to create a viable and unified opposition movement against Saddam. "That is when I first met Dr. Chalabi," Brooke says. Chalabi, an international banker and financier, was already the CIA's favorite Iraqi opposition leader, described by former CIA official Frank Anderson as having "rare administrative competence." For all of his skill at backroom politicking, Chalabi was disliked by other Iraqi exiles. In June, 1992, the Iraqi National Congress held one of its first organizational meetings, in Vienna; Chalabi didn't win enough backing to qualify for a seat on the fifteen-member board. By the time attendees returned from the meeting, however, Chalabi's name had somehow been added to the list of members. Chalabi ran roughshod over the group's attempts at democratic governance, and, with his CIA backing, soon had the entire group under his domination. Also, the CIA's alliance with Chalabi helped him with his legal problems: he had recently been convicted, in absentia, by a military court in Jordan for his part in a spectacular bank fraud that imperilled the country's fragile economy. With the help of the US government, Chalabi was able to recast himself from an accused swindler to a charismatic political leader and a champion of liberal democratic values.
Chalabi has a personal stake in the retrenching of the Iraqi government. His family was formerly one of Iraq's most powerful and influential Shi'ite families, until forced into exile in 1958; they lost their lands, including a huge chunk of property in central Baghdad, and much of their fortunes. He was 14 when his family fled to neighboring Jordan. According to Chalabi, before they were exiled, the Chalabis controlled more land and industrial power than anyone else in Iraq. Chalabi's grandfather held posts in nine cabinets; Chalabi's father had been president of the Iraqi senate and an advisor to the king. According to Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi exile who now lives in Canada, and who was a schoolmate of Chalabi's at a Jesuit academy in Baghdad, Chalabi's grandfather kept his own personal prison, in which he incarcerated serfs who failed to pay taxes or produce wheat. Khadduri remembers Ahmad Chalabi as a "very bright" but spoiled young rich man: "He threw a tantrum when he didn't get the highest grades." Khadduri, who severed his friendship with Chalabi after he learned of his ties to the CIA, says, "Ahmad wanted to avenge his father's ouster and the deprivation of his lands. Now he's trying to fit in his father's shoes, like your little Bush." Chalabi acquired a Ph.D in mathematics in the United States, and taught math at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon.
In 1977, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited him to found a new bank in the country, whose financial sector was largely dominated by Palestinians. With the help of royal patronage and of innovations previously unavailable in Jordan, such as consumer credit cards, computerized banking, and ATMs, the company created by Chalabi, Petra Bank, grew impressively. Within a decade, it had become the second-largest bank in Jordan, and Chalabi became a rich and well-connected man in Amman. Like his father and grandfather, he extended easy credit to important benefactors. He boasted to an American friend that he had personally made Prince Hassan, the King's brother, "a wealthy man." For a time, Chalabi lived in a palatial estate outside of Amman. But in 1989, a financially unsteady Jordan demanded that Petra and other Jordanian banks place 30% of their foreign currencies into the government's accounts. Petra balked, and the resulting audit found a plethora of fraudulent activities. Two days later, Chalabi and his family fled before he could be arrested, and resettled in London. On April 9, 1992, a military tribunal in Jordan delivered a 223-page verdict, which concluded that Chalabi was guilty of thirty-one charges, including embezzlement, theft, forgery, currency speculation, making false statements, and making bad loans to himself, to his friends, and to his family's other financial enterprises, in Lebanon and Switzerland. He was sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor, and ordered to repay $230 million in embezzled funds. An Arthur Andersen audit commissioned by Jordanian authorities found that the bank had overstated its assets by more than $300 million, and $158 million more had disappeared completely. (In 2000, a Swiss investment firm, Socofi, run by Chalabi's brothers Jawad and Hazam, collapsed under similarly fraudulent circumstances.)
From his exile in London, Chalabi claimed that the entire Petra affair was nothing more than a political frame job orchestrated by his enemies because of his outspoken opposition to Saddam Hussein. He claimed that his political enemies in Jordan were beholden to Iraq for oil and other economic aid. American and Jordanian audits found that almost all of Petra's assets in the US never existed, except for one "office" that purportedly held valuable bank documents; it was actually a luxurious country estate in Middleburg, Virginia, owned by the Chalabi family, which rented it to Petra. "There was not one business record in the whole place," says a Jordanian bank official. "This man is a vicious liar. There is no end to it. It's like you find someone killing with a gun in his hand, and he says he's innocent. He just wears you down." The official refuses to be named, because he fears Chalabi's influence: "He has more powerful friends in Washington than you or me. Really, some of your people are such suckers."
By 1993, questions about the INC's own finances were arising. "The agency didn't know how he spent his money," says a former INC colleague. "All transactions were cash." Kurds who had joined the INC complained that Chalabi wouldn't tell them anything about the group's finances. A Kurdish leader recalls that Chalabi "snapped" when asked about debts that were still owed to Kurds, and argued that he couldn't disclose funding details because his financing was "covert." Though CIA audits initially prove no wrongdoing, auditing INC finances proved quite difficult. According to a former CIA officer, at one point INC officials "refused to cooperate with an audit because they argued that it would breach the secrecy of the operation." According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, the entire INC was little more than a front for the enrichment of Ahmad Chalabi. "He was like the American Ambassador to Iraq," Baer recalls. "He could get to the White House and the CIA. He would move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers." However, Baer says, Chalabi had little real influence as a so-called opposition leader. "If he was dangerous, they could have killed him at any time. He was the perfect opposition leader." Chalabi was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from the CIA in cash, salaries, cars, and, says Baer, "it was just a Potemkin village. He was reporting no intel; it was total trash. The INC's intelligence was so bad, we weren't even sending it in." Chalabi's agenda, he says, was to convince the United States that Husseins regime was "a leaking warehouse of gas, and all we had to do was light a match." But when the agency tried to check Chalabi's assertions about troop movement or palace plans, Baer says, "there was no detail, no sourcing -- you couldn't see it on a satellite."
Baer remembers one visit to an INC "forgery shop" in Kurdish Iraq. "It was something like a spy novel," he recalls. "It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in." While Baer has no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents used by the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq, Los Angeles Times reporter Hugh Pope wrote of one document from the INC forgery presses, a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam's human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton's National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi's help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. "It was a complete fake," Baer says; he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam. When the letter turned up in Washington, angry CIA officials accused Baer of being involved in the forgery; the accusations were only dropped after Baer passed a polygraph test.
In 1995, Chalabi was busily using CIA funding to build an armed militia in Kurdistan, the Kurdish-controlled section of northern Iraq. Soon after, he led his new militia into a debacle. Chalabi, with CIA assistance, planned a three-city strike against Hussein's military forces, an assault quickly discovered by the Iraqi government. Baer told Chalabi that the CIA would not support the mission now that its secrecy had been blown. Chalabi insisted that the assault be carried out anyway, but most of the Kurdish insurgents who would form the bulk of the strike forces deserted, and the "revolt" foundered. CIA officials were furious. In April 1996, another disaster befell Chalabi, when one of the Kurdish factions within the INC invited Hussein's troops into Kurdistan, to crush a rival faction that was allied with Chalabi. 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and 300 tanks crossed into Kurdish territory, a flagrant violation of US restrictions. The US failed to react promptly to the incursion, and Hussein's forces captured, tortured, and killed thousands of Chalabi's supporters. The US eventually evacuated 7,000 supporters. Brooke felt sick over the calamity, and felt partially responsible for the carnage. In response, Brooke and Chalabi sought revenge through the press, with Brooke using his PR and marketing skills to help ABC put together a documentary that blasted the CIA's mistakes in northern Iraq. The documentary inflamed the swelling anti-Chalabi sentiment in the CIA, and the agency cut off most of his funding.
Now cut off from the bulk of his CIA funding, Chalabi reached out to the most extreme conservative members of the US Congress to become his benefactors. "We needed a new campaign," Brooke says, and "Chalabi was a great candidate. He'd spent his whole life getting ready for this." Brooke and Chalabi decided to imitate the strategies used by the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), which had been so successful in organizing support for Israel within the government and the citizenry. In June 1997, Chalabi gave a speech at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, in Washington. He told the audience that it would be easy to topple Saddam and replace him with a government that was friendly to Israel, if the US would provide minimal support to an armed insurgency organized by the INC. Although Chalabi later denied that oil had played a role in his campaign, he told the Jerusalem Post in 1998 that he offered the restoration of the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa, which had been inoperative since the creation of Israel in 1948. Chalabi won the interest and support of a number of American neoconservatives, most of whom had been members of the first Bush administration and were now part of Washington think tanks. The neocons were looking for a new cause to take the place of their opposition to worldwide communism, and Chalabi -- educated, secular, charming, comfortable in the American centers of power, receptive towards Israel and apparently committed to spreading democracy throughout the Middle East -- fit the bill. In return for their support, Chalabi became far more right-wing in his political views, making, in the words of the director of the Council on Foreign Relations, Judith Kipper, "a deliberate decision to turn to the right." American liberals and moderates were less likely than conservatives to back Chalabi's plans to oust Saddam Hussein.
Brooke recalls, "We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people" in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the CEO of Halliburton. Brooke says, "From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, 'Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.'" But the neoconservative most enamored of Chalabi was Paul Wolfowitz. "Chalabi really charmed him," recalls an American friend of Chalabi's. "[Wolfowitz] told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer. ...He just thought, This is cool -- he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can't roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets."
To solidify his support from American conservatives, Chalabi and Brooke concocted a policy that even Brooke admits was "naked poiitics." The INC had a disastrous record of achievements and foiled CIA operations under Clinton -- why not turn that on its head and blame Clinton for the failures of the CIA and the INC? "Clinton gave us a huge opportunity," Brooke recalls. "We took a Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really hurt and embarrassed the President." According to Brooke, the Republican leadership in Congress "didn't care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat up the President." But senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms "were very receptive, right away" to Chalabi's ideas of overthrowing Hussein. In 1998, after the Republicans in Congress forced hearings on the CIA's failures in Iraq, Chalabi's think-tank allies such as Richard Perle gave testimony that excoriated the Clinton administration.
Chalabi also pulled off what might be considered his own intelligence coup against the Clinton administration, obtaining information that he used later to whip up public sentiment against the White House and galvanize Republican backing for the INC. On January 27. 1998, Chalabi met with UN inspector Scott Ritter in London, claiming to have sources inside Hussein's government that could help the UN locate a number of weapons that Hussein had claimed to have dismantled, but had not offered proof to the inspectors. Ritter went into the meeting intending to get critical information from Chalabi, and found himself giving Chalabi more information than Ritter would receive. "I should have asked him what he could give me," Ritter recalls. "Instead, I let him ask me, 'What do you need?' [As a result,] we made the biggest mistake in the intelligence business: we identified all of our gaps." Over the next several hours, Ritter outlined what the UN knew and didn't know about Iraq's weapons, and of their speculations about Hussein's mobile chemical or biological weapons laboratories. Ritter says of the mobile facilities, "We made that up! We told Chalabi, and, lo and behold, he's fabricated a source for the mobile labs." Ritter says of the INC's detailed intelligence about Hussein's WMD programs, "it was all crap." Chalabi and the INC had fabricated every bit of evidence it presented to their congressional allies. Ritter recalls that in another London meeting with Chalabi, Chalabi described his proposal of a coup d'etat against Hussein, relying largely on Iraqi insurgents with just a small force of American troops in support. "I don't think the small units could do the jobs you're saying," Ritter told Chalabi. "It's a ploy" to get the Americans involved. Chalabi agrees that this is the case, and admits that any plans that detailed a large American involvement was "too sensitive" to present to Congress. Ritter recalls Chalabi discussing his grandiose plans for Iraq, with himself in charge. "He told me that, if I played ball, when he became President he'd control all of the oil concessions, and he'd make sure I was well taken care of. I guess it was supposed to be a sweetener." Ritter refused to work with Chalabi; Chalabi now calls Ritter a liar.
The Iraqi Liberation Act, co-written by Brooke, Chalabi, and their Congressional allies, passed Congress almost unanimously on October 7, 1998. The act calls for "regime change" in Iraq, but, partly because of the firestorm of criticism swirling around Bill Clinton over Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky, is almost ignored in the press. The ILA also skims over any mention of serious US involvement in any overthrow of Hussein, because Chalabi again pitched the overthrow to Congress as something that could be achieved almost entirely by insurgent Iraqis. Congress also authorized $97 million for the INC. General Anthony Zinni, then the commander of CENTCOM in the Middle East, saw Chalabi's military plans for overthrowing Hussein shortly thereafter. "It got me pretty angry," Zinni recalls. Zinni went before Congress and called Chalabi's plan "pie in the sky, a fairy tale. ...They were saying if you put a thousand troops on the ground Saddam's regime will collapse, they won't fight. I said, 'I fly over them every day, and they shoot at us. We hit them, and they shoot at us again. No way a thousand forces would end it.' The exile group was giving them inaccurate intelligence. Their scheme was ridiculous."
In January 2001, the Bush administration took control of the executive branch, and Chalabi's allies such as Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle found themselves once again at the controls. Chalabi's plans for toppling Hussein came right along with them. In February 2001, Wolfowitz called Brooke and promised that this time, the US would take Hussein down, and that he was so committed to this goal that he would resign if he couldn't bring it off. (Wolfowitz denies this conversation.) After the attacks of 9/11, the invasion plans for Iraq, already under serious consideration, became a prime focus for Bush administration officials, who eagerly sought Chalabi's advice and intelligence. In 2002, the Information Collection Program for the INC, previously funded by the State Department, was transferred to Defense, where Chalabi's allies were clustered. "Chalabi was the crutch the neocons leaned on to justify their intervention," says Zinni. "He twisted the intelligence that they based it on, and provided a picture so rosy and unrealistic they thought it would be easy." The CIA remained skeptical of the INC information, but Bush sided with Cheney and his neoconservative allies in taking Chalabi's information over the warnings and caveats of the CIA. Chalabi's intelligence began appearing in public statements made by Bush, Cheney, and other White House officials, including, to his everlasting sorrow, Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State.
One of the most spectacular assertions from the INC, and one that found its way into numerous statements and presentations, including Powell's now-infamous presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, was of what Powell said were "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails." It was, said Powell, "one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq." Investigative reporters from the Los Angeles Times and other outlets have now proven that the source of this and other bogus intelligence claims is an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," who is the brother of one of Chalabi's INC aides. (Chalabi denies this, and in fact denies that Curveball has any connections to the INC.) Curveball approached German intelligence officials and provided them with detailed maps and descriptions of mobile weapons labs. German intelligence had no idea that he had been jailed in Iraq, not for political purposes, but for embezzlement; they did know, and warned US intelligence, that not only had they found his intelligence unreliable, he was a convicted sex offender whom intelligence officials considered to be mentally unstable. When US and UN inspectors followed up Curveball's information, they found nothing except two trucks that have now been proven to have had nothing to do with weapons development; experts now believe, even though Dick Cheney and other officials continue to insist on their function as weapons labs, that the trucks were used to store equipment for weather balloons. Former counterterrorism specialist Cannistraro says that the CIA is "positive" that INC intelligence chief Aras Habib arranged for Curveball to meet with the Germans.
After the invasion, even Chalabi's supporters at the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency concede that Chalabi's intelligence was "of little or no value." In early 2003, an official CIA report concluded that several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence by the INC had falsely claimed to have direct knowledge of illicit weapons programs in Iraq. Baer observes, "Chalabi was scamming the US because the US wanted to be scammed."
Part of this is the June 26, 2002 memo from INC official Entifadh Qanbar to the Senate Appropriations Committee that claimed credit for planting false information in at least 108 influential media stories that appeared between October 2001 and May 2002. Qanbar says these articles featured information from INC-provided Iraqi defectors, as well as reports and raw intelligence from INC sources. Qanbar also says that INC information -- or, more accurately, disinformation -- was routinely provided to the highest levels of the Bush administration, particularly through the Pentagon's William Luti and through John Hannah, the special assistant for national security in the Office of the Vice-President. The stories include the sensational December 20, 2001 claim by Judith Miller of the New York Times that an Iraqi engineer has direct knowledge of 20 secret chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons sites in Iraq, and of tests of these weapons and toxins performed on Kurdish and Shi'ite prisoners. Miller described the INC defector as a source of "dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases." The defector's name is Adnan Ihsan Saheed al-Haideri, and not one of his assertions has ever borne fruit, even though intensive searches have been mounted by several US and UN inspections teams. Haideri failed a polygraph test administered to him by the CIA three days before the Miller interview. A Chalabi aide disputes the polygraph story, and the aide says he was told by DIA officials that Haideri "was a gold mine" of information, and that "even if only 3% of it was true" it was worthwhile. In May 2004, long after the damage was done, the Times admitted that its coverage of the Iraq controversy was improperly influenced by Chalabi and the INC. "Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted," the Times noted; "It looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in." Part of the Times's being "taken in" was the hiring, two months before the invasion, of Chalabi's niece Sarah Khalil to be the Times's office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi's daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, has verified that Khalil helped get Chalabi's information to the Times, and even helped him cross the border from Kuwait to southern Iraq. The Times fired Khalil in May 2003 when word of her relation to Chalabi reached the New York offices; in her five months on the job, her direct employer, regional chief correspondant Patrick Tyler, had published nine articles mentioning Chalabi.
The INC is also the source of the famous, and long-debunked, story (still pushed by Cheney and other Bush officials) that proclaimed "proof" of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to INC sources, one of the main plotters behind the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001. In February 2002, Vanity Fair reported that a defector named Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy said that he had worked at a terrorist camp in Iraq called Salman Pak, where non-Iraqi fundamentalist Arabs were trained to hijack planes and land helicopters on moving trains. He also asserted that Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. Another INC-provided defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, said on a November 2001 video feed provided to the press that he could prove that Islamist terrorists were training at Salman Pak. Lami, described as a former colonel, said that the camp was contaminated by anthrax, an accusation made soon after the US began investigating incidents of anthrax poisoning in New York, Florida, and elsewhere. Since the overthrow of Hussein, US troops and investigators have combed through the Salman Pak and other sites; they have found nothing indicating any terrorist involvement. INC disinformation found its way into official White House documents, including "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," released as supporting material for an address replete with misinformation and lies on Iraq that Bush delivered before the UN on September 12, 2002. The source, the INC's Haideri, "supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contacts, complete with technical specifications," according to the study.
The case of Khidhir Hamza is most telling. Hamza is a nuclear scientist who served as a senior administrator in Hussein's nuclear-weapons program during the nineteen-eighties. He defected from Iraq in 1994. At first, he was spurned by the CIA, who felt he knew little of interest. In 1997 he joined the Institute for Science and International Security, an organization in Washington run by David Albright, a former nuclear-weapons inspector. Albright recalls that Hamza seemed reliable at first; in 1998, he even helped debunk an inflated story offered by another defector, just as Chalabi was trying to drum up support for the Iraq Liberation Act. "We saw the claws of Chalabi then," Albright says. Albright says that a subsequent phone call from INC officials left Hamza shaken and vowing never to work against the INC again. Hamza subsequently wrote a book, Saddam's Bombmaker. Albright says that many of the claims in the book, including those about the importance of Hamza's role, "were just ridiculous." Hamza, who had not been involved in Iraq's nuclear program for nearly a decade, wrote that Hussein was within years, and possibly months, of developing a nuclear bomb. Though it was bogus, Hamza's claim was electrifying. How did Hamza's book become so influential so quickly? In part because Chalabi's aide Francis Brooke, the former Rendon Group marketer, helped promote it. After Hamza's book made a splash, Dick Cheney began incorporating some of Hamza's most alarmist claims about Iraq's nuclear program into his speeches; for example, on August 26, 2002, Cheney warned that Hussein had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," and might soon be able to engage in "nuclear blackmail" with his enemies. Like many other INC defectors, Hamza went from a life of poverty and desperation in their adoptive country to a position of money, influence, and media exposure. Of course, no evidence of any of Hamza's claims has ever been found. Hamza was invited back to Iraq to join the Coalition Provisional Authority as a top official in the Ministry of Science and Technology, with partial control of Iraq's nuclear industry; after a brief, combative tenure marked by arguments and absences, the CPA did not renew his contract.
On September 20, 2001, Chalabi addressed a meeting of the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Chalabi's old ally Richard Perle was then the chairman of the DPB. Brooke calls the meeting, which took place with the smell of smoke from the jetliner attack still hanging in the air, "very emotional." The group agreed with Chalabi that the US should not bother with Afghanistan, where the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda, but should instead immediately target Iraq. One participant in the meeting recalls that Chalabi made a compelling case for invading Iraq, focusing on the ease of an American victory. "He said there'd be no resistance, no guerrilla warfare from the Baathists, and a quick matter of establishing a government." While Chalabi had little difficulty selling the administration on moving towards an invasion of Iraq, he found himself at odds with some officials over the rationale for such an action. Chalabi says he and the INC would have rather sell the war to the American people on philosophical grounds, as a fight against genocidal tyranny and in favor of bringing democracy to the Arab world, but that this approach was rejected by the administration; administration officials wanted to push the concept of Iraqi WMDs. "Look, our focus was on Saddam's crimes, moral crimes, genocide," he says. "We were not focused on WMD. The US asked us. We didn't bring these people up; they asked us! They requested this help from us." Brooke says that no one specifically ordered the INC to focus strictly on WMDs, but "I'm a smart man. I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy." In 2003, Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that everyone knew the WMD issue was not the strongest argument for the war, but that, for bureaucratic reasons, "we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction." As a result, the war was largely marketed domestically as a scare campaign, and the INC was enlisted to promote the danger posed by Iraq. Brooke recalls, "I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, 'Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on WMD, send it!'"
Soon after Chalabi returned to Iraq in January 2003, in preparation for his putative coronation as the new leader of Iraq, allegations of corruption and criminal behavior began to surface. A former INC member said said that some of Chalabi's militia, the Free Iraqi Fighters, had been accused of looting and robbing their way into Baghdad. He also said that some members of the militia had stolen a fleet of SUVs that belonged to Hussein's regime, then sold them abroad. According to police officers in Baghdad, several of Chalabi's men were taken to the Al Baya station and arrested for stealing cars and having false IDs. A CPA official confirmed the incident, and said that more charges might be added. Similar charges have been made against Chalabi's "de-Ba'athification" program, a policy he claims was initiated to bring justice to those in the Sunni and Ba'athist ruling class who had colluded with Hussein's crimes, but which now seems to have been little more than an excuse to confiscate -- steal -- homes, assets, and property. $500,000 allocated by the US government for de-Ba'athification has simply disappeared; Chalabi claims no knowledge of any corruption or illegalities.
Now that Chalabi is involved in the highest levels of Iraqi government, he denies any involvement in Iraqi business ventures. "I am in politics now," he insists. But a number of American businessmen confirm that Chalabi has a strong foothold in Iraq's financial sector, partly by placing relatives and business colleagues into key positions. For himself, he heads the finance committee of the Iraqi Governing Council, a US-appointed group of 25 people representing Iraq's religious and ethnic factions; as a result, he was able to install the oil, finance, and trade ministers, as well as the governor of Iraq's Central Bank. Ali Allawi, the Minister of Trade and Defense, is Chalabi's nephew. Nabeel Musawi, a former INC spokesman, is a deputy on the Governing Council. The Central Bank is run by Sinan Shabibi, another close ally. Chalabi had wanted to nominate Mudar Shawkat, his deputy at the INC, as Minister of Finance, but the IGC balked. Instead, Shawkat was awarded a large stake in a mobile-phone contract. Several of Chalabi's friends aside from Shawkat have been awarded lucrative contracts. Abdul Huda Farouki, a Jordanian-American businessman, has obtained big stakes in two companies, Nour USA and Erinys Iraq, that will be paid millions of dollars to supply the Iraqi Army and to secure the country's oil infrastructure. Farouki became a friend of Chalabi's when he took out twelve million dollars in loans from Petra Bank. An American official says that Chalabi has so far encountered little resistance to his cronyism: "People are scared to death. He may become Prime Minister still, and he has some very fancy friends." At least publicly, most of his friends in the Bush administration and the CPA are having little to do with him, prompting him to complain of the US's ABC -- Anybody But Chalabi -- policy. When UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi refused to include Chalabi or any INC members in his interim Iraqi government, Chalabi was infuriated. In return, Chalabi is holding showy investigations into American complicity in the corrupt UN oil-for-food program, is trying to build a coalition of Shi'ites to be called the Shi'ite Political Council, and has begun to show public support for radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. His influence with the US is still considerable: when Chalabi joined a sit-in at a mosque in Najaf and insisted that US troops leave the city in the control of Sadr's militias, the US acquiesced within hours.
Not only do his former colleagues and friends not believe Chalabi's recent reinvention of himself as a religious leader -- "He'll become an imam if he has to!" snaps a former financial official from Jordan -- his embrace of the Shi'ite faction in Iraq has fed speculation that he is an Iranian spy for that country's Shi'ite theocracy. The INC's intelligence chief, Aras Habib, has long been suspected of being an agent of Iranian intelligence. Though Chalabi and his aides dismiss all allegations along these lines, Chalabi has long been cozy with the less extremist elements of Iran's religious and political leadership, and just before the US invasion of Iraq, was living in a gated villa in tehran that the US had bought for him as a satellite branch of the INC. Chalabi says his relationship with tehran is merely political expedience: "There are geopolitical reasons to be friendly with Iran," he says. "Iran has the longest border with Iraq. Also, Iran is a much stronger state than Iraq, with three times the population. So strategically it's not a good idea to be on bad terms. My good relations were not a secret from the US." But Brooke says Chalabi's friendship with Iran is inconvenient for his former friends in Washington. "We got between a President and his reëlection," says Brooke. Tamara Chalabi told me that her father's problems could be traced to the fact that "a foreigner, and an Arab, had beaten the administration at their own game, in their own back yard." What Chalabi will do now is unclear. He has political power, but little if any support from the Iraqi people, who view him as an American puppet; in polls, Chalabi wins less support from the populace than Saddam Hussein. But his recasting of himself as a political dissident in opposition to the Americans, and a devout Shi'ite, may pay off. "He's extremely shrewd politically," says neoconservative Danielle Pletka. "His obit has been written many times before, and he keeps clawing his way out of the grave and coming back." One of his INC confidants says that Chalabi may spend the summer repositioning himself as a fierce critic of Brahimi's interim government, with an eye toward the coming election. Chalabi himself merely says, "I think I have more of a future than the CPA." (New Yorker, Los Angeles Times/Truthout)
May 17: A harsh editorial in the Army Times blames "the highest levels" of military leadership for the Iraqi prison scandals. The editorial, also printed in the Navy Times, reads, in part: "Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war. Indeed, the damage done to the US military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable. But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons. There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Major General Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed. But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership. The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes. In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides.
"This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world. How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein's henchmen. One can only wonder why the prison wasn't razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime. Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked 60 Minutes II to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put US troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn't read Taguba's report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media. By then, of course, it was too late. Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world. If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush. He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders. On the battlefield, Myers' and Rumsfeld's errors would be called a lack of situational awareness -- a failure that amounts to professional negligence. ...This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war." (Army Times)
May 17: Slate's Fred Kaplan sums up the trail of the Iraq prison scandals: "Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations -- from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else -- but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation. That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial." (Slate)
May 17: Najim Abed Mahdi, an English teacher from the southern port of Umm Qasr, has been praised for his "truly historic" contributions to democracy in Iraq. He has always been a staunch US ally. But, when he was found in a house in Baghdad during a raid, he was imprisoned for 144 days in Abu Ghraib without a charge being filed. The Red Cross estimates 70 to 90 percent of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib are innocent; only 600 of the 43,000 Iraqis imprisoned since the March 2003 invasion have been prosecuted for any crimes. Najim was the first person in Umm Qasr to criticize Saddam Hussein and give his support to the US-led coalition. He worked so hard for the coalition that the US gave him a "certificate of achievement" for his "exceptional service" and "loyalty" to the rebuilding of Iraq. Despite his demonstrated loyalty, when he was swept up in a raid during a visit to Baghdad in the fall of 2003, it took more than 20 weeks for his release to be effected. He managed to avoid the abuses that some prisoners suffered at the hands of prison guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib. But his imprisonment was still an ordeal. He got only two meals a day. When he needed to use the toilet, he had to walk barefoot through grounds that were often swampy when it rained. "The conditions were very bad," he recalls. Shortly after his arrest, a prison guard told him unofficially that the arrest was a mistake. Yet he remained in jail for five months, and never received a formal apology when he was freed. He wants to be compensated for the ordeal: "It was very difficult for my family to live without income when I was in prison." (Toronto Globe and Mail [cached Google copy])
May 17: US and British soldiers have swapped "sick" DVDs of battlefield deaths of Iraqi soldiers and civilians among themselves since the war's outset, according to a Scottish reservist who served with a private security firm in Iraq. "Americans are sticking video cameras on top of their tanks while engaged in a firefight," the reservist says. The images provided by the reservist include grainy footage shot through a nightscope showing an American helicopter gunship killing a wounded Iraqi as he crawls from a burning truck. US troops copy the video footage onto DVDs and pass them to coalition troops, including the British, he says. (Sunday Mail)
May 17: Investigative journalist David Corn wants to know why no one has been fired, and no Congressional investigations mounted, over Colin Powell's recent admission that he and the Bush administration have systematically misled the nation and the world over the issue of Iraqi WMDs. The intelligence came primarily from Ahmad Chalabi, who was being groomed to take over the Iraqi government before his duplicity with his information, and his ties to Iran, were revealed; now Chalabi is persona non grata with the administration, but no one has been discomfited over the fact that Chalabi's lies were used, sometimes knowingly, by the administration to make a case for war where none existed. Corn asks, "so who's been fired over this? After all, the nation supposedly went to war partly due to this intelligence. And partly because of this bad information over 700 Americans and countless Iraqis have lost their lives. Shouldn't someone be held accountable? Maybe CIA chief George Tenet, or his underlings who went for the bait? Or Chalabi's neocon friends and champions at the Pentagon: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle? How do they feel about their pal, the great Iraqi leader, now? For months after the invasion, George W. Bush told the public that he had based his decision to invade Iraq on 'good, solid intelligence.' Does he still believe that? Has anyone told him that his government was hornswoggled by Chalabi, who was once convicted of massive bank fraud in Jordan. (Since Bush has said he does not read the newspapers or pay much attention to conventional media, he may not have heard about Powell's remarks unless an aide bothered to brief him on them.) And in January, Dick Cheney said that there was 'conclusive evidence' that Saddam Hussein had manufactured bioweapons labs on wheels. Is he willing to say he was wrong?" Corn concludes, "Think about it. The secretary of state revealed that he, the CIA and the administration were conned (perhaps too easily) by exiles supported by the Pentagon, and this fraud helped set the stage for a war and a bloody and difficult occupation that still is claiming the lives of Americans. If this is not cause for investigations, dismissals, and angry statements from congressional leaders and administration officials, then what is?" (The Nation)

HAVA exposed

May 17: Investigative journalist Greg Palast exposes the cheerily named "Help America Vote Act," or HAVA, as a time-bomb designed to help states like Florida purge their voter rolls of minority and other voters less likely to vote for Bush than for a Democrat. The act, signed into effect on October 29, 2002, specifically allows for such voting roll purges as enacted by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush in Florida, a purge that threw Florida into the Bush camp and saw the selection of George W. Bush as President. Palast writes, "In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this 'scrub' list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half -- about 54 percent -- are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state -- fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of 'suspect' voters."
The firm that generated the "purge" lists for Florida in 2000, the GOP-connected ChoicePoint, confirmed that 91,000 Floridians were questionably tagged. Palast cites hospital employee Willie Steen as one of the voters illegally disenfranchised. (Steen, who could not work at a hospital if he had a criminal record, was named because his name is similar to an ex-con named O'Steen, enough to tag him.) The NAACP used Steen as an example to the courts of the illegal nature of the voting purge; though Florida admits Steen's innocence, a year after the courts found in favor of the NAACP lawsuit, Steen still cannot vote. "Why was he still under suspicion?" Palast asks. What do we know about this 'potential felon,' as Jeb called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an African-American."
Palast continues, "If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in election offices. Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some 600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's black male population. At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote -- but it did not guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven cases, they aren't. Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest 'spoilage' rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).
"How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name. Their votes did not count. Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes -- one in seven -- were 'invalidated,' i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled. Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the votes 'spoiled' were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida -- 162 times Bush's official margin of victory.
"That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was -- county by county, precinct by precinct -- in direct proportion to the local black voting population. Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's -- both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don't count. 'In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled -- not counted -- as a white voter,' explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. 'National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters.' So there you have it. In the last presidential election, approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by computer -- because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote. One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day." (The Nation/Greg Palast)
May 17: The last non-terrorist to see Nicholas Berg alive may have been an Iraqi-American named Aziz Kadoory Aziz, also known as Aziz al-Taee. Aziz says that on April 10 Berg "surprised me by calling me at 9 or 10, to say that he found some friend to travel with to Jordan." Berg said he was en route, but Aziz doesn't know who he was with or what kind of vehicle they were driving. "He said they were nice people. I told him to have a nice trip." Aziz hooked up earlier this year with Berg to start a small company called Shirikat Abraj Babil, or Babylon Towers Co., that would install, inspect and repair telecommunications and utility towers. Aziz is well known in the US as the highly visible spokesman for a group he'd founded called the Iraqi American Council, which became the focus of much attention and money from right-wing conservatives. He appeared frequently on major media outlets like Fox News calling for the military ouster of Saddam Hussein. Aziz' outfront role also included speaking at pre-war, pro-troop rallies. After it was revealed that in 1994, Aziz had pled guilty to working with Russian organized crime in the selling of drug paraphenelia and stolen electronics, Aziz continued to represent his group in the right-wing media. Aziz left the US for Iraq in late 2003 before a court case to deport him could proceed. Aziz says that Berg contacted him to help Berg set up a business in Iraq. Berg described Aziz as his "office manager." Aziz says Berg, who was unsuccessful in his first business ventures, refused to acknowledge that traveling around Iraq could be dangerous, even after Berg was robbed by Iraqi criminals. "I was always pressuring him to keep a low profile, but he ignored all my caution and advice," Aziz says. "Berg kept a high profile, wandering around late at night or took public transport. Sometimes he got upset, looked at me in such a way, or said, 'You're not my dad' or 'I'm an adult, I can make my own decision.'" It is unclear whether Berg knew of Aziz's connections to either the IAC or the Russian mafia. Aziz says he understands Berg's cell phone was used as recently as April 19, and that three calls were made that day to Jordan, to the United Arab Emirates and to a local number. "He could still have been alive," Aziz says. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Calls for investigation of links between Riggs Bank, the Bush family, and Riggs' laundering of terrorist funds

May 17: A recent decision to fine Riggs Bank $25 million for a "willful, systemic" violation of US money-laundering laws is prompting calls for investigations into the Bush family's connections to the bank and raising new questions about whether the Bush administration's ties to powerful moneyed interests is unduly influencing US foreign and national security policy. Riggs Bank is headed by longtime Bush family friend Joe Allbritton, employs President Bush's uncle Jonathan Bush as a top executive, and other executives have been financial donors to the Bush campaign. The bank is at the center of a controversy, according to the Wall Street Journal, for failing to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian and Equatorial Guinean embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." Republican senator Charles Grassley "said members of the bank's board of directors should be held to account for failing to exercise their watchdog role over Riggs's operations" and said refusal to follow money laundering laws "allows terrorists to funnel their blood money through the system." Jonathan Bush, President Bush's uncle, was appointed CEO of Riggs Bank's investment arm in May of 2000, just months after his nephew secured the nomination for the presidency. At the time of the appointment, Jonathan Bush had already become a major financial backer of his nephew, rising to "Bush Pioneer" status by raising more than $100,000 for his nephew in 2000. The move solidified the relationship between Jonathan Bush and Riggs, which was originally initiated in 1997 when, according to American Banker newsletter, Riggs paid Bush $5.5 million for his smaller investment firm. That transaction, according to the New York Times, "deepened [Riggs's] links to the Bushes."
While Riggs denies any connection between Bush and the accounts being investigated in the money laundering probe, Riggs President Timothy Lex told the Washington Times in 1997 that "there's a blurring of distinctions between banks, mutual-fund families, broker dealers and everything else across the board." Allbritton, who said during the federal probe that he was stepping down from Riggs's board, also was close to the Bush family. As the Times reported, he (along with Riggs client Saudi Prince Bandar) was a financial backer of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, with the National Journal noting he contributed between $100,000 and $250,000 to the project. And there also appears to be a personal bond with the current President Bush: As the Washington Post noted in February 2001, "When President Bush climbed out of his limousine on Inauguration Day at the corner of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted Allbritton, waved and said, 'Hey Joe, how are you doing?'" That might have something to do with the fact that the Allbritton-owned TV station KATV in Little Rock, Arkansas, the biggest in the state, broke 39 years of precedent and publicly endorsed Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The station proceeded to air its endorsement 10 times throughout Arkansas, and refused to give equal time to Democrats "who asked for the time to present an alternative to the station's endorsement."
According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's Age of Sacred Terror, upon taking office the Bush administration tried to halt efforts to tighten international banking laws, some of which may have affected Riggs. As he notes, the new Bush Treasury Department "disapproved of the Clinton administration's approach to money laundering issues, which had been an important part of the drive to cut off the money flow to bin Laden." Specifically, the Bush administration opposed Clinton administration-backed efforts by the G-7 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that targeted countries with "loose banking regulations" being abused by terrorist financiers. Meanwhile, the Bush administration provided "no funding for the new National Terrorist Asset Tracking Center." Newsweek reported that checks to "two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers" may have come "from an account at Washington's Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan." This, and other details, were reportedly part of the bipartisan House-Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the Saudi money flow after 9/11. Yet, instead of allowing the committee's final report to be published in full, "Bush administration officials, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, have adamantly refused to declassify the evidence" surrounding the transactions. Riggs's fines were also in relation to its business with Equatorial Guinea, the oil-rich West African country headed by brutal dictator General Teodoro Obiang. As the LA Times notes, though the country's offshore oil fields "generate hundreds of millions of dollars, there are few signs of the petroleum boom" there, and the Guinean ambassador admits "the country's oil funds are held in an account at Riggs Bank" controlled by the dictator. But while the IMF and other international institutions have refused to do business with the regime until it accounts for its country's financial resources, the Bush administration "initiated a political thaw with the Obiang regime" in late 2001, "authorizing the reopening of the US Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, which had been closed six years earlier, in large part due to the country's horrific human rights record." The move came even though "there's been little, if any, improvement" on human rights. (Center for American Progress, Max Blumenthal)
May 17: Michael Moore's controversial new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, predicted to make a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, is predicted to have a dramatic impact on the American electorate. Moore has said only that his film contains evidence of links between the Bush and bin Laden families, and now says that he has incorporated footage from the Iraq occupation that few Americans have ever seen. Moore says, "When you see the movie you will see things you have never seen before, you will learn things you have never known before. Half the movie is about Iraq -- we were able to get film crews embedded with American troops without them knowing that it was Michael Moore. They are totally f*cked." He continues, "The film is only partly to do with the Bin Ladens and Bush. I was able to send three different freelance film crews to Iraq. Soldiers had written to me to express their disillusionment with the war. It's a case of our own troops not being in support of their commander-in-chief." He says that at the few low-key preview screenings that have already taken place in the midwest "the reactions were overwhelming. People who were on the fence -- undecided voters -- suddenly weren't on the fence any more." Moore is candid about his hopes that his film will help ensure the defeat of George W. Bush in the upcoming elections. "We thought, 'We cannot leave this to the Democrats this time to f*ck it up and lose,'" he says. He wants to "inspire people to get up and vote in November."
Moore claims that Disney's decision not to distribute the film was purely political, a decision made in hopes to prevent the film from being released before the elections. Other distributors have lined up to handle the film, and it will be released as scheduled around the world. Disney has refused to release two previous films, 1995's Kids, which frankly depicted teenage sex, and 1999's Dogma, a film that savagely satirized the Catholic Church. In both cases, Disney sought alternative distribution. Moore is unhappy with the way the controversy has been handled in the media. "The press have said, 'Isn't it great for the movie?'" Moore says. "But the last two times this happened -- with Dogma and Kids -- you only have to look at the box office to see that the controversy didn't help. No film-maker wants this to happen. I don't like the message this sends, which is, 'Don't even think of making a movie like [Fahrenheit 9/11] -- it won't get distributed.' This is a chilling effect it will have. Five men and one woman [the Disney board] make a decision about what Americans can see. This is not a sign of an open and healthy society." Moore also claims that the Bush administration has attempted to block the distribution of the film, accusing "someone connected to the White House" and a "top Republican" of pressuring Disney and other distributors to not release the film. "It is certainly something the Bush administration does not want people to see," he says. (Guardian, BBC)

NBC refuses to allow footage of Bush to be used in a documentary because "unofficially, we don't think it makes the President look good"

May 17: In a prime example of the American media's bias in favor of the Bush administration, NBC is refusing to allow award-winning documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald to use a minute's worth of footage from George W. Bush's appearance on the February 8 edition of Meet the Press in Greenwald's expanded version of his film Uncovered. The film uses an array of governmental sources to prove the malfeasance and self-serving reasoning behind the Bush decision to invade Iraq. Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, testifying before a House of Representatives subcommittee on proposed revisions in copyright law, says NBC refused to allow the inclusion of a one-minute clip from Tim Russert's oval office interview with the President on February 8 in an upcoming film on the war in Iraq. "In preparing the extended version of the film, Greenwald wanted to include a one-minute clip from NBC's Meet the Press interview," Lessig tells the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. "Greenwald was denied permission. The agent informing Greenwald's agent of the decision stated, 'Unofficially, we don't think it makes the President look good.'" Bush appeared poorly prepared and uncertain in his responses to Russert's questions about the war, and was widely criticized in the media. But NBC refused to allow any of the footage to be released and thus, said Lessig, put anyone using excerpts from the show under the "fair use" doctrine at legal risk. "When permission cannot be secured, it forces the creator into an extremely difficult choice: whether to risk substantial exposure for copyright liability, or to remove the speech from the creator's work," Lessig says. He says presidential statements and actions should be considered public, not private, property. (Buzzflash)
May 17: New York City has denied a second request by an anti-war group to use Central Park as a site for protesting the upcoming Republican National Convention. The Parks Department previously denied United for Peace and Justice's application for an August 29 rally for 250,000 people, saying such a crowd was too large and would damage the Great Lawn. In denying the appeal, the agency said the group had not sufficiently answered those concerns. "We again encourage the organizers to meet with the NYPD to discuss an alternative location," Parks spokeswoman Megan Sheekey says. "In the context of this particular event the city seems to be saying that Central Park is now off limits to political rallies," responds Chris Dunn, associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The group also has applied for a permit to march up Eighth Avenue before the rally on August 29, the day before the convention begins. That application is still pending, along with about 20 others from various groups. City officials say they are trying to consider all the permits together to better plan for the convention. United for Peace and Justice has threatened to sue if permits are denied for the park and the march, and said activists were prepared to march without them. (AP/PhillyBurbs)
May 17: An aide to Colin Powell tries to interfere with the Secretary of State's questioning by journalist Tim Russert on Meet the Press. To his credit, the Secretary refuses to let the aide interrupt the questioning and continues with the interview. Russert asks Powell about the false information he presented to the United Nations in February 2003, but before Powell can answer, an aide shoves the camera filming Powell away in what appears to be an attempt to stop the camera from filming Powell's response. Powell chides the aide by saying, "Get out of the way, Emily," and Russert is heard saying, "This is highly inappropriate, Mr. Secretary." After more off-camera scuffling, the camera moves back to Powell and he answers the question. Russert later thanks Powell for overruling "his press aide" and answering the question. (Buzzflash)
May 17: Billionaire businessman and Democratic financier George Soros gives the commencement speech to graduates of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. Soros, whose speech nicely summarizes three years of failed foreign policy conducted by the Bush administration, says in part, "[T]he real world is a very troubled place and international relations are at the core of our troubles. So it may be appropriate to pause for a moment and reflect on the world you are about to face. Why are we in trouble? Let me focus on the feature that looms so large in the current landscape -- the war on terror. September 11 was a traumatic event that shook the nation to its core. But it could not have changed the course of history for the worse if President Bush had not responded the way he did. Declaring war on terrorism was understandable, perhaps even appropriate, as a figure of speech. But the President meant it literally and that is when things started going seriously wrong. Recently the nation has been shaken by another event: pictures of our soldiers abusing prisoners in Saddam's notorious prison. I believe there is a direct connection between the two events. It is the war on terror that has led to the torture scenes in Iraq. What happened in Abu Ghraib was not a case of a few bad apples but a pattern tolerated and even encouraged by the authorities. ...It is easy to see how terrorism can lead to torture. Last summer I took an informal poll at a meeting of eminent Wall Street investors to find out whether they would condone the use of torture to prevent a terrorist attack. The consensus was that they hoped somebody would do it without their knowing about it."
Soros continues, "It is not a popular thing to say, but the fact is that we are victims who have turned into perpetrators. The terrorist attacks on September 11 claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives and the whole world felt sympathy for us as the victims of an atrocity. Then the President declared war on terrorism, and pursued it first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Since then the war on terror has claimed more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks on September 11. This fact is not recognized at home because the victims of the war on terror are not Americans. But the rest of the world does not draw the same distinction and world opinion has turned against us. So a tremendous gap in perceptions has opened up between us and the rest of the world. The majority of the American public does not realize that we have turned from victims into perpetrators. That is why those gruesome pictures were so shocking. Even today most people don't recognize their full import. By contrast, the Bush administration knew what it was doing when it declared war on terror and used that pretext for invading Iraq. That may not hold true for President Bush personally but it is certainly true for Vice President Cheney and a group of extremists within the Bush administration concentrated in and around the Pentagon. These people are guided by an ideology. They believe that international relations are relations of power not law and since America is the most powerful nation on earth, it ought to use that power more assertively than under previous presidents. They advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein even before President Bush was elected and they managed to win him over to their cause after September 11.
"The invasion of Afghanistan could be justified on the grounds that the Taliban provided Bin Laden and al-Qaeda with a home and a training ground. The invasion of Iraq could not be similarly justified. Nevertheless, the ideologues in the administration were determined to pursue it because, in the words of Paul Wolfowitz, 'it was doable.' President Bush managed to convince the nation that Saddam Hussein had some connection with the suicide bombers of September 11 and that he was in possession of weapons of mass-destruction. When both claims turned out to be false, he argued that we invaded Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people. That claim was even more far-fetched than the other two. If we had really cared for the Iraqi people we would have sent in more troops and we would have provided protection not only for the Ministry of Oil but for the other Ministries and the museums and hospitals. As it is, the country was devastated by looting.
"I find the excuse that we went into Iraq in order to liberate it particularly galling. It is true that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and it is good to be rid of him. But the way we went about it will make it more difficult to get rid of the likes of Saddam in the future. The world is full of tyrants and we cannot topple them all by military action. How to deal with Kim Jong-il in North Korea or Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the Turkmenbashi of Turkmenistan is the great unsolved problem of the prevailing world order. By taking unilateral and arbitrary action, the United States has made it more difficult to solve that problem. ...The symbolism of Saddam's notorious prison is just too strong. We claimed to be liberators but we turned into oppressors. Now that our position has become unsustainable, we are handing over to local militias in Falluja and elsewhere. This prepares the ground for religious and ethnic divisions and possible civil war à la Bosnia, rather than Western style democracy after we transfer sovereignty. The big difference between us and Saddam is that we are an open society with free speech and free elections. If we don't like the Bush administration's policies, we can reject him at the next elections. Since President Bush had originally been elected on the platform of a 'humble' foreign policy, we could then claim that the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq constitute a temporary aberration induced by the trauma of September 11. I would dearly love to pin all the blame on President Bush and his team. But that would be too easy. It would ignore the fact that he was playing to a receptive audience and even today, after all that has happened, a majority of the electorate continues to have confidence in President Bush on national security matters. If this continues and President Bush gets reelected, we must ask ourselves the question: 'What is wrong with us?' The question needs to be asked even if he is defeated because we cannot simply ignore what we have done since September 11.
"We need to engage in some serious soul-searching. The terrorists seem to have hit upon a weak point in our collective psyche. They have made us fearful. And they have found a willing partner in the Bush administration. For reasons of its own, the Bush administration has found it advantageous to foster the fear that September 11 engendered. By declaring war on terror, the President could unite the country behind him. But fear is a bad counselor. A fearful giant that lashes out against unseen enemies is the very definition of a bully, and that is what we are in danger of becoming. Lashing out indiscriminately, we are creating innocent victims and innocent victims generate the resentment and rage on which terrorism feeds. If there is a Single lesson to be learned from our experience since September 11, it is that you mustn't fight terror by creating new victims. By succumbing to fear we are doing the terrorists' bidding: we are unleashing a vicious circle of violence. If we go on like this, we may find ourselves in a permanent state of war. The war on terror need never end because the terrorists are invisible, therefore they will never disappear. And if we are in a permanent state of war we cannot remain an open society. The war on terror polarizes the world between us and them. If it becomes a matter of survival, nobody has any choice but to stick with his own tribe or nation whether its policies are right or wrong. That is what happened to the Serbs and Croats and Bosnians in Yugoslavia, that is what happened to Israel, and that is the state of mind that President Bush sought to foster when he said that those who are not with us are with the terrorists. That attitude cannot be reconciled with the basic principles of an open society. The concept of open society is based on the recognition that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. Might is not necessarily right. However powerful we are, we may be wrong. We need checks and balances and other safeguards to prevent us from going off the rails. After September 11, President Bush succeeded in convincing us that any criticism of the war on terror would be unpatriotic and the spell was broken only 18 months later when the Iraqi invasion did get us off the rails. Now it is not enough to reject the Bush administration's policies; we must reaffirm the values and principles of an open society. The war on terror is indeed an aberration. We must defend ourselves against terrorist attacks but we cannot make that the overarching objective of our existence. We are undoubtedly the most powerful nation on earth today. No single country or combination of countries could stand up to our military might. The main threat to our dominant position comes not from the outside but from ourselves. If we fail to recognize that we may be wrong, we may undermine our dominant position through our own mistakes.
"We seem to have made considerable progress along those lines since September 11. Being the most powerful nation gives us certain privileges but it also imposes on us certain obligations. We are the beneficiaries of a lopsided, not to say unjust, world order. The agenda for the world is set in Washington but only the citizens of the United States have a vote in Congress. A similar situation, when we were on the disadvantaged side, gave rise to the Boston Tea Party and the birth of the United States. If we want to preserve our privileged position, we must use it not to lord it over the rest of the world but to concern ourselves with the well-being of others. Globalization has rendered the world increasingly interdependent and there are many problems that require collective action. Maintaining peace, law and order, protecting the environment, reducing poverty and fighting terrorism are among them. We cannot do anything we want, but very little can be done without our leadership or at least active participation. Instead of undermining and demeaning our international institutions because they do not necessarily follow our will, we ought to strengthen them and improve them. Instead of engaging in preemptive actions of a military nature, we ought to pursue preventive actions of a constructive nature, creating a better balance between carrots and sticks in the prevailing world order. As graduates of a school of international affairs, I hope you will have an opportunity to implement this constructive vision of America's role in the world." (Buzzflash)

Army may recall 6,500 retired soldiers to duty

May 18: Some 6.500 retired Army soldiers may be called up for duty in Iraq whether they want to rejoin or not, according to Pentagon sources. The Army is so short-handed that it is screening the files of 17,000 soldiers who have left the Army after completing their service, looking for needed specialists in, among other areas, civil affairs, military police, advanced medical specialists, orthopedic surgeons, psychological operations, and military intelligence interrogators. The Army has been forced to look to the Individual Ready Reserve pool and elsewhere for soldiers because it's been stretched thin by a recent decision to maintain American troop levels in Iraq at 135,000 to 138,000 at least through 2005. Additionally, one of two mechanized infantry brigades currently stationed in South Korea will be rotated to Iraq, adding approximately 3,600 more troops to the current number of Americans stationed there. (Knight-Ridder/Lexington Herald-Leader)
May 18: Pentagon officials confirm that the abuses detailed in Abu Ghraib originated in an effort that began last fall to find out why interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay elicited far more useful information than interrogations in Abu Ghraib. After the two detention facilities were compared, the guards at Abu Ghraib began using the same abusive and coercive tactics that were being employed at Guantanamo. The officials, who refuse to be identified, name senior Pentagon officials Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone as the two aides who led the inquiry, and Donald Rumsfeld as the man who originated the inquiry. Feith is the undersecretary of defense for policy, and Cambone is the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. "The idea was to get a handle on what worked in Cuba and to apply it to Iraq," says one of the officials. "The trend [in Iraq] was negative, and they wanted that reversed, and they wanted Saddam's head on a platter." Cambone tasked his deputy, Lieutenant General William Boykin, with traveling to Guantanamo Bay and assessing whether tactics employed there that had successfully produced "actionable intelligence" might be transferred to Iraq. Within a few weeks, Boykin had dispatched Major General Geoffrey Miller, the officer who had implemented White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' "new paradigm" interrogation rules at Guantanamo Bay, off to Baghdad to figure out how to crack captive insurgents. "There was a realization that the U.S. needed to be much more methodical about getting at the insurgent networks in Iraq," says William Arkin, a military analyst and intelligence specialist. "There was a well-known understanding that these thousands of Iraqis who were being detained needed to be exploited, and Boykin definitely dispatched Miller to figure that out. But you can't draw a straight line from that to what happened at Abu Ghraib." Boykin has been all but left out of previous military analyses of the Abu Ghraib scandals, leery of Boykin's previous run of bad publicity due to his jingoistic, evangelical pronouncements about Islam and Christianity. Cambone denied Boykin's role during Senate testimony last week. But officials say Boykin played a significant role. Already newspapers in the Muslim world, where he is known as "the Holy War general," are speculating about how a man nearly fired last year for his public denigration of Islam suddenly appears at the center of a scandal involving the abuse and humiliation of Muslim prisoners. (MSNBC)
May 18: US authorities release 293 prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison, the first mass prisoner release since images of abuse at the hands of the US military surfaced several weeks ago. Earlier, officials had said 315 prisoners were freed, but Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said the release of 22 prisoners was delayed. Approximately 475 more prisoners will be released next week, and the 22 prisoners whose release was delayed should be free in a matter of days. Hundreds of Iraqis gather around the prison after hearing about the imminent prisoner release. About a week ago, there were about 3,800 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The new US commander of detention operations in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, says he plans to reduce that number to somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000. Miller took over for Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was relieved of duty on January 17, a day after the coalition military announced an investigation into abuse in the prison. (CNN)
May 18: The Pentagon announces that certain prisoner interrogation techniques have been banned in Iraq following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Among the tactics barred are sleep and sensory deprivation and keeping prisoners in stressful positions for periods of time. According to the military, none of the tactics, which required the approval of the commanding general before use, had been requested in Iraq. Lieutenant General David Barno, who leads the Combined Forces Command in Afghanistan, confirms he is "in the midst of putting out some new policy guidance" to underscore a mandate of "treating all of our detainees with dignity and respect." Barno says a newspaper's report of mistreatment of an Afghan police colonel in US custody was the "first indication" he had of any problems among detainees. (CNN)
May 18: Three Iraqis working for Reuters and one working for NBC report that they were beaten and abused by US soldiers while being detained in a military camp outside Fallujah during January 2004. The news organizations were aware of the abuse, but the four Iraqis only went public with their stories after US officials denied that the abuses ever took place. Two of the three Reuters staff said they had been forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture. All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs. They said they did not want to give details publicly earlier because of the degrading nature of the abuse. The soldiers told them they would be taken to the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for long periods. The Pentagon has yet to respond to a request by Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger to review the military's findings about the incident in light of the scandal over the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The abuse happened at Forward Operating Base Volturno, near Fallujah. They were detained on January 2 while covering the aftermath of the shooting down of a US helicopter near Fallujah and held for three days, first at Volturno and then at Forward Operating Base St Mere. The three -- Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja-based freelance television journalist Ahmad Mohammad Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani -- were released without charge on January 5. "When I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs, I wept," Ureibi says. "I saw they had suffered like we had."
Ureibi, who understands English better than the other two detainees, said soldiers told him they wanted to have sex with him, and he was afraid he would be raped. NBC, whose stringer Ali Muhammed Hussein Ali al-Badrani was detained along with the Reuters staff, says he reported that a hood was placed over his head for hours, and that he was forced to perform physically debilitating exercises, prevented from sleeping and struck and kicked several times. "Despite repeated requests, we have yet to receive the results of the Army investigation," NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley says. Schlesinger sent a letter to General Ricardo Sanchez on January 9 demanding an investigation into the treatment of the three Iraqis. The US Army said it was investigating and requested further information. Reuters provided transcripts of initial interviews with the three following their release, and offered to make them available for interview by investigators. A summary of the investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division, dated January 28 and provided to Reuters, said "no specific incidents of abuse were found." It said soldiers responsible for the detainees were interviewed under oath and "none admit or report knowledge of physical abuse or torture. The detainees were purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation; they were not tortured," it said. The version received by Reuters used the phrase "sleep management" instead. The US military never interviewed the three for its investigation. On February 3, Schlesinger wrote to Lawrence Di Rita, special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying the investigation was "woefully inadequate" and should be reopened. "The military's conclusion of its investigation without even interviewing the alleged victims, along with other inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the report, speaks volumes about the seriousness with which the US government is taking this issue," he wrote. (Reuters/CommonDreams)
May 18: Dozens of soldiers other than the seven military police reservists who have been charged were involved in the abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and there is an effort under way in the Army to hide it, says a key witness in the investigation, Sergeant Samuel Provance. "There's definitely a cover-up," Provance says. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet." Provance was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He is defying orders from his commanders not to speak to the press. "What I was surprised at was the silence," he says. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something." Provance, now stationed in Germany, ran the top secret computer network used by military intelligence at the prison. He said that while he did not see the actual abuse take place, the interrogators with whom he worked freely admitted they directed the MPs' rough treatment of prisoners. "Anything [the MPs] were to do legally or otherwise, they were to take those commands from the interrogators," he says.
Top military officials have claimed the abuse seen in the photos at Abu Ghraib was limited to a few MPs, but Provance says the sexual humiliation of prisoners began as a technique ordered by the interrogators from military intelligence. "One interrogator told me about how commonly the detainees were stripped naked, and in some occasions, wearing women's underwear," he recalls. "If it's your job to strip people naked, yell at them, scream at them, humiliate them, it's not going to be too hard to move from that to another level." According to Provance, some of the physical abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib included U.S. soldiers "striking [prisoners] on the neck area somewhere and the person being knocked out. Then [the soldier] would go to the next detainee, who would be very fearful and voicing their fear, and the MP would calm him down and say, 'We're not going to do that. It's OK. Everything's fine,' and then do the exact same thing to him."
Provance also describes an incident when two drunken interrogators took a female Iraqi prisoner from her cell in the middle of the night and stripped her naked to the waist. The men were later restrained by another MP, presumably before assaulting her. Major General George Fay, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, has been assigned by the Pentagon to investigate the role of military intelligence in the abuse at the Iraq prison. Fay started his probe on April 23, but Provance says when Fay interviewed him, the general seemed interested only in the military police, not the interrogators, and seemed to discourage him from testifying. Provance said Fay threatened to take action against him for failing to report what he saw sooner, and the sergeant fears he will be ostracized for speaking out. "I feel like I'm being punished for being honest," he says. "You know, it was almost as if I actually felt if all my statements were shredded and I said, like most everybody else, 'I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything. I don't know what you're talking about,' then my life would be just fine right now." Provance believes many involved may not be as forthcoming with information as he has been: "I would say many people are probably hiding and wishing to God that this storm passes without them having to be investigated [or] personally looked at." (ABC News)
May 18: Fewer than 25,000 Iraqis are working on reconstruction efforts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, countering US expectations that the $18 billion pumped into Iraqi reconstruction efforts will jump-start Iraq's economy and trigger a surge of goodwill towards the United States. US officials blame bureaucratic delays in contracting and the recent increase in violence for the low employment numbers, which represent less than 1 percent of Iraq's work force of more than 7 million. The Bush administration is aiming to more than double the number of Iraqi workers to 50,000 in less than two months, when Washington expects to hand over limited authority to a caretaker Iraqi government. Iraqis are reluctant to work for the Americans because of the latest violence, which has targeted not only US troops but also Iraqis working with them. Violence earlier this spring "had an impact on the numbers of workers showing up," says Navy Captain Bruce Cole, spokesman for the Pentagon's Iraq Program Management Office. "some were probably afraid to be seen working with us on those projects. Our numbers are starting to come back up, though."
Conversely, military commanders have cited frustration over the continuing lack of jobs as one reason for the spike in violence, which left at least 136 Americans dead in April alone. The violence puts the United States in a tough spot: More reconstruction is difficult without better security, while employing more Iraqis is one surefire way to increase security by calming the population. The latest fighting not only prevented work on current projects but hampered future efforts by delaying the arrival of coalition equipment and manpower. Members of Congress from both parties have criticized the Bush administration for the slow pace of reconstruction. So far, only about $1.9 billion in construction projects are under way from the $18.4 billion Congress approved in November. "At a time when more and more of the Iraqi people are losing faith in our good intentions, this is a good indication of how few average Iraqis are seeing the benefits of reconstruction," says Democratic representative Nita Lowey, the top Democrat on the House appropriations foreign operations subcommittee. "More Iraqis clearly should be benefiting from the reconstruction efforts," she says.
Administration officials say they're trying to speed the hiring of Iraqis. More than $10 billion in contracts are expected to be awarded by July 1. "We haven't had a problem with recruiting" Iraqis, says Cole. "In the areas we've been in, they're very willing to do the work, very eager to have jobs." This week, the Pentagon's Program Management Office in Baghdad reported 24,179 Iraqis working on rebuilding projects funded by the $18.4 billion approved by Congress in November. That's up from 21,808 last week and just 3,517 the week before. During April, Iraqis worked on only four projects -- all of them rehabilitating military bases for the new Iraqi security forces. The four base rehabilitation projects, now nearing completion, once employed as many as 8,800 Iraqis. Other reconstruction projects overseen by the military or State Department have created an estimated 400,000 jobs in Iraq, according to Major Joe Yoswa, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority governing Iraq. Those projects are not part of the emergency rebuilding package Congress approved in November; most are paid for with seized Iraqi funds or oil revenues. More than 6,000 Iraqis -- in a total work force of more than 24,000 -- are working for Halliburton, which has contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure and supply US troops. US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer and other officials told Congress last fall the $18.4 billion was needed urgently to reverse instability and poverty and keep Iraq from becoming a fertile ground for terrorists. Seven months later, US officials say the needs are just as pressing. "Of course we're not satisfied," says Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. "We've got a lot of reasons why some things aren't where we want them to be, and security probably chief among them."
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says "fairly lengthy contracting procedures" were another major holdup. Part of the delay has arisen from a squabble between the Pentagon and State Department over which agency would oversee the spending. The Pentagon won and created the Program Management Office, which awarded several reconstruction contracts in March. Those contracts call for hiring as many Iraqi companies and workers as possible, Cole says. Bechtel National Inc., which has a more than $1 billion contract to manage Iraq reconstruction, has hired 147 Iraqi firms out of 215 subcontractors, company spokeswoman Valerie Kazanjian says. California-based Parsons Corp., which has several construction and management contracts in Iraq, has not hired many Iraqis because most of the projects are still being planned, company spokeswoman Erin Kuhlman says. "Part of the goal of these programs is to put some life back into the economy, to hire local subcontractors as well as provide jobs," Kuhlman says. "We definitely are mindful of that. Besides, we don't have the labor force ourselves to send over there. That would be too expensive." (AP/Nieuwe Oorlog)
May 18: One of the first comprehensive polls of Iraqi civilians gives the lie to Bush administration claims that a "silent majority" of Iraqis regard coalition forces as liberators, want those forces to stay for a prolonged period, oppose insurgent attacks on coalition troops, and are enthusiastic about creating a Western-style democracy for their country. The poll results contradict every one of those assumptions. Only 19 percent of respondents consider US occupation forces as liberators. The results are even more dismal when sentiment in the Kurdish region is excluded. 97% of Kurds view those forces as liberators. In the Sunni and Shi'ite regions that sentiment is 10 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Even at the beginning of the occupation, when Saddam Hussein was fleeing Baghdad, only 43% of Iraqis saw American forces as liberators. The poll results also belie the notion that a majority of Iraqis want U.S. and British troops to stay on for an extended period. Instead, 57% want those troops to leave "immediately." Again, the contrast between the opinion of Kurds and Arabs is striking. Only 3 percent of Kurds want the forces to depart immediately. In the Shi'ite areas, the sentiment is 61%; in Sunni areas, it is 65%. In Baghdad itself, 75% of the civilians want the US to leave now. Also worth noting is that Iraqi support for armed attacks on coalition forces is not confined to a tiny minority of extremists as the Bush administration has insisted. 22% of respondents state that attacks were justified "sometimes," and another 29% endorse attacks without any qualification.
Nor is there any indication of a vast reservoir of support for democracy. Only 40% advocate the creation of a multiparty parliamentary democracy for Iraq. The rest advocate systems ranging from the traditional "Islamic concept of mutual consultation," to a conservative Islamic kingdom like Saudi Arabia, to an Islamic theocracy like Iran. Once again, strong support for democracy in the Kurdish north contrasts with anemic support in the Sunni and Shiite regions (31% and 27% respectively.) Finally, overall attitudes toward the United States and the Coalition Provisional Authority are extremely negative. Only 27% have a favorable opinion of the CPA, and just 23% have a favorable opinion of the United States. It is evident that US policy in Iraq has been based on faulty assumptions about Iraqi attitudes. There is no silent majority of pro-American Iraqis. Instead, most Iraqis regard the US-led mission as an occupation, not a liberation, and they want that occupation to end immediately. A majority of Iraqis endorse attacks on coalition forces, at least under some circumstances, and they do not want a Western-style democracy for their country. There has been a marked upsurge of opposition to the Iraq mission since a similar poll was taken in mid-March by ABC News and other organizations. The Cato Institute writes, "Time is not on Washington's side. To the extent that we ever had a welcome in Iraq, we have overstayed that welcome. The first step in developing a new policy -- and a badly needed exit strategy -- is to abandon all of the myths that supporters of the Iraq mission have cherished for so long." (Cato Institute)
May 18: New York City police officials have issued terror prevention tips to patrol cops, including suspecting people who "express hatred for America." Cards giving possible indicators of terrorist activity were issued last week to police officers. The cards advise them to call counter-terrorism investigators when they have suspicions over anyone who is, among other things, carrying driver's licenses from different states, videotaping utilities and tunnels or wearing fake uniforms. New York City police were also told to take note of "overtly hostile" people who "express hatred for America and advocate violence against America and/or Americans," or who "support terrorists and their goals." The guidelines stress that the indicators are general. They caution officers not to interfere with free speech, or target anyone based on race or religion. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, calls the directive so broad that it invites civil rights abuses. Lieberman notes that criticism of our country is protected by the First Amendment. (AP/WINS-FM)
May 18: While US gasoline prices soar and US oil companies pocket the record-breaking profits, the Bush administration is resisting calls from Democrats to tap into the country's strategic oil reserves to help assuage consumers' paying record prices at the pumps. Instead, the administration is buying more and more of the high-priced oil to feed into the reserves. A large, bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for the administration to stop buying the oil until prices come down, a move equally resisted by the administration. The Energy Information Administration reports that the average price for regular gasoline climbed above $2 a gallon for the first time last week. Crude oil prices hovered above $41 a barrel, near the record high reached last week. But administration officials remain opposed to any change in policy, saying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was never intended to be used to move oil prices. Administration officials say that selling reserves would have a minuscule effect on gasoline prices and that the government stockpiles were intended for true emergencies rather than simply high prices. What is certain is that the administration's purchasing of oil at a time of such spiraling prices is funnelling millions of tax dollars into the oil companies' coffers. Industry analysts say tapping into the strategic reserve would have little influence on world supplies, but it could have a significant short-term effect. Douglas McIntyre, a senior oil market analyst at the Energy Information Administration, a nonpartisan statistical arm of the Department of Energy, says a "rule of thumb" is that an increase in supply of 1 million barrels a day translates into a decline in oil prices of $3 to $5 a barrel. That in turn would lead to a drop in gasoline prices of 7 cents to 12 cents a gallon.
Senator John Kerry, the presumptive presidential nominee, has called for a temporary halt to filling the reserve, but he has not called for actually selling any of the stockpile. "'John Kerry believes this is a serious situation, which is why he has called for a temporary halt to filling the SPR and truly standing up to OPEC," says Phil Singer, a spokesman for Kerry. "When is George Bush going to come up with a plan that helps these Americans cope with a gas crisis that is occurring on his watch? America is waiting." In 2000 the Clinton administration tried to push down oil prices by lending out 30 million barrels of oil between the end of September and the end of December of that year. The results were mixed. According to McIntyre, crude oil prices dropped from about $37 a barrel to $30 in the first few days of the program. But prices bounced back to $36 shortly afterward and then began to decline again as the nation had a much warmer winter than had been expected. By the end of December 2000, oil was down to about $32 a barrel. Oil companies are adamantly opposed to any use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. John Felmy, chief economist with the American Petroleum Institute, the industry trade association, says oil freed up from the strategic reserve would be tiny in comparison with global supply and demand. "You've got extraordinarily strong demand for petroleum and very limited ability to expand output," Felmy says. The Bush administration has given the contract for supplying the oil for the strategic reserve to Koch Supply & Trading, LP, owned by some of the primary funders of the far right. By purchasing oil for the reserve, the Bush administration is helping fund right-wing causes that pump millions upon millions into his campaign. (Tennessean, See the Forest)
May 18: In an unusual campaign strategy, the Bush campaign is trumpeting the success of government programs that it opposed and, in some cases, tried to cut or eliminate. For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million. The administration has been particularly energetic in publicizing health programs, even ones that had been scheduled for cuts or elimination. Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Bush has proposed ending the program in each of the last three years. The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million. (New York Times/Ventura For Democracy)
May 18: The Village Voice obtains a secret e-mail citing evidence that White House staffers, including senior Bush advisor Elliot Abrams, met with a delegation of radical evangelical Christians before making key decisions on the administration's dealings with Israel. The March 25 memo shows Abrams and other officials meeting with a group led by Pentecostal minister Robert Upton. The group includes a woman who represents their interests in Israel and is noted for her belief that she has been the victim of attacks by witchcraft caused by her proximity to a Harry Potter book. "Everything that you're discussing is information you're not supposed to have," Upton tells the Voice when contacted to confirm the contents of the memo. Abrams, the Bush administration's senior advisor on Middle East policy, met with the Apostolic Congress in part to assuage their theological concerns and reassure them that their views on the Middle East were strongly reflected in the Bush administration's policies. The group claims to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state, and fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable such a state. They object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth. In other words, the Apostolic Congress is another evangelical Christian group that intends to use US foreign policy to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ. Abrams reassured them by saying that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace." Three weeks after the meeting, Bush reversed long-standing US policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
Upton denies having written the document, though it was sent out from an e-mail account of one of his staffers and bears the organization's seal, which is nearly identical to the Great Seal of the United States. Its poor grammar and punctuation closely match those of texts on the Apostolic Congress's website, and Upton does verify key details it recounted, including the number of participants in the meeting ("45 ministers including wives") and its conclusion "with a heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter." The Apostolic Congress is part of an important and disciplined political constituency courted by recent Republican administrations; as a subset of the broader Christian Zionist movement, it has a lengthy history of opposition to any proposal that will not result in what it calls a "one-state solution" in Israel. The White House's association with the congress, which has just posted a new staffer in Israel who may be running afoul of Israel's strict anti-missionary laws, also raises diplomatic concerns. The staffer, Kim Hadassah Johnson, wrote in a report, "We are establishing the Meet the Need Fund in Israel—'MNFI.' ...The fund will be an Interest Free Loan Fund that will enable us to loan funds to new believers (others upon application) who need assistance. They will have the opportunity to repay the loan (although it will not be mandatory)." When that language was read to Moshe Fox, minister for public and interreligious affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, he responded, "It sounds against the law which prohibits any kind of money or material [inducement] to make people convert to another religion. That's what it sounds like."
The Apostolic Congress dates its origins to 1981, when, according to its website, "Brother Stan Wachtstetter was able to open the door to Apostolic Christians into the White House." Apostolics, a sect of Pentecostals, claim legitimacy as the heirs of the original church because they, as the 12 apostles supposedly did, baptize converts in the name of Jesus, not in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ronald Reagan bore theological affinities with such Christians because of his belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. Reagan himself referenced this belief explicitly numerous times during his presidency. Upton boasts of his access to the White House: "We're in constant contact with the White House," he says. "I'm briefed at least once a week via telephone briefings.... I was there about two weeks ago.... At that time we met with the president." The Apostolic Congress has been quite successful in derailing support for the "Road Map for Peace" within the administration, and claims to have been one of the deciding factors in Bush's decision to back away from implementing the peace plan. When Upton was asked to explain why the group's website describes the Apostolic Congress as "the Christian Voice in the nation's capital," instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation's capital, he responded, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective." When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a "theocratical" perspective, not a "theological" perspective, he said, "Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue." (Village Voice)
May 18: American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky writes that, despite the evangelical and strict morality imposed on themselves and others by the evangelicals currently in control of the White House and the Republican Party, these end-times evangelicals are actually bringing about the end of conservative morality in America. Tomasky writes, "Liberals believe in public morality and in adherence to democratic process, while conservatives value personal morality and positive, efficiently achieved results. What has happened at Abu Ghraib specifically and in Iraq generally are, in fact, direct expressions of conservative morality unchecked. And it's clearer every week that conservative morality is a contradiction in terms, and that the American people are coming around to that view. I think this theory explains, well, basically everything. For example: How many conversations have you had with a fellow liberal, discussing the latest administration effrontery, that concluded with one of you asking the other some version of, 'How can it possibly be that this isn't considered a scandal?!' Indeed, liberals have watched this administration in a state of perpetual disbelief about the number of stories that should have blown up into scandals but never did. From Harken Energy to Thomas White and Enron to the Tom Scully-Richard Foster-Medicare story to the more general rancid politicization of every agency of government, the potential scandals have been nonstop. And liberals, who care about public integrity and process, can't comprehend that these things haven't become full-fledged scandals. There are particular reasons they haven't -- no smoking gun was found on Harken, for instance. But the big historical reason they haven't is that we live in an age in which conservative morality is dominant. Public morality and adherence to democratic process just aren't as important."
Tomasky notes that with the advent of Ronald Reagan, the conservative paradigm of personal morality and personal responsibility supposedly took center stage among Republicans, while paradoxically, the personal morality and ethics of the people touting these standards were demonstrably lacking. And these lacks -- Iran-Contra, Iraqgate, the October Surprise of 1980, the hundreds of Reagan and Bush administration officials charged with crimes and ethical lapses, the illegal collusion of Reagan/Bush administration policies with US corporate policies, and so on -- were not only ignored, they were often defended by the same people who made, and still make, such a noise about personal ethics and responsibilities. These same ethical expectations were used by these same people, Tomasky notes, to successfully challenge the personal ethics of Bill Clinton, often by spokesmen like Dan Burton and Newt Gingrich who were guilty of far worse ethical and personal lapses than Clinton. "The packaging of George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000 was nothing less than a conservative morality play,"
Tomasky continues. "He was a 'good man;' he'd gotten himself off the sauce and found Jesus; he didn't, as far as anyone knew, play around on his wife. Meanwhile, as governor of Texas, he'd squelched an investigation into a funeral-home chain run by a friend; he'd stacked the board of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, a huge deal that no major national media ever took a close, sustained look at; he kept starting failing businesses, losing money, and somehow getting richer and richer. But none of these issues, all having directly to do with public morality, mattered. He was a good, strong man who 'got results' for Texas and would do the same for America. Bush used such language often early in his administration to describe his appointees: They were good people, and the rest of us should trust them. His famous remark that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin 'looked into each other's souls' provided another case in point: The policies Putin was pursuing -- his public morality, from undemocratic (the Russia media) to disastrous (Chechnya) -- weren't important. What was important was that Putin, too, was a good, strong man who has certainly, after a fashion, gotten 'results.' What's this got to do with Iraq? Everything. Rumsfeld was another one who was sold to us as a good, strong man. He reveled in the image, and the press, especially after September 11, went right along ('You're America's stud!' Tim Russert once gushed to him). Paul Wolfowitz, the neocons in general -- strong men who knew exactly what the United States needed to do in the world and who didn't have time for all this sissified diplo-speak with the United Nations and the French, all fit into this process.
"They would eliminate al-Qaeda. They'd corral Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. And they'd do it all as a function of their personal morality, their intense will. If they bent a few rules, well, they were on the side of good versus evil, and they were making one of history's grandest omelettes. Eggs would be broken. That's the way it is. Read Hersh's piece in this context. Adherence to process was treated with contempt, never regarded as anything other than a roadblock to be circumvented. 'Since 9-11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism,' a Pentagon consultant told Hersh, 'and created conditions where the ends justify the means.' And now, at Abu Ghraib, that 'end' stands revealed as America's greatest disgrace before the rest of the world in decades -- to say nothing of the fact that al-Qaeda has been far more, not far less, active since 9-11, and that Iraq in general is in tatters. Their personal morality, to the extent they possessed it in the first place, is irrelevant. The results are calamitous. I'm not prepared to say that the American people are going to wake up tomorrow and say collectively, 'Golly, we need to go back to an era of liberal morality.' Liberal morality had its shortcomings, too, and liberal and Democratic politicians have to learn how to be comfortable again talking about issues in moral terms. But it is clear that conservative moral arguments -- chiefly about Iraq, but on other fronts as well -- are losing their hold on people. It's a shame it took this much mayhem, and a set of photographs, for this to happen. But it is happening, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people." (The American Prospect)
May 18: The New York Times's Paul Krugman says that while American allies around the world have long since given up on dealing productively with the Bush administration, the same cannot be said for his domestic allies and even his opponents. Bush recently asked Congress for $25 billion in additional monies for the so-called "Iraq Freedom Fund," and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz acknowledges that the actual monies required will be over $50 billion, perhaps well over. At this juncture, Congress is poised to grant Bush's request.
Krugman writes, "Before the war, officials refused to discuss costs, except to insist that they would be minimal. It was only after the shooting started, and Congress was in no position to balk, that the administration demanded $75 billion for the Iraq Freedom Fund. Then, after declaring 'mission accomplished' and pushing through a big tax cut -- and after several months when administration officials played down the need for more funds -- Mr. Bush told Congress that he needed an additional $87 billion. Assured that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, and warned that American soldiers would suffer if the money wasn't forthcoming, Congress gave Mr. Bush another blank check. Now Mr. Bush is back for more. Given this history, one might have expected him to show some contrition -- to promise to change his ways and to offer at least a pretense that Congress would henceforth have some say in how money was spent. But the tone of the cover letter Mr. Bush sent with last week's budget request can best be described as contemptuous: it's up to Congress to 'ensure that our men and women in uniform continue to have the resources they need when they need them.' This from an administration that, by rejecting warnings from military professionals, ensured that our men and women in uniform didn't have remotely enough resources to do the job. The budget request itself was almost a caricature of the administration's 'just trust us' approach to governing. It ran to less than a page, with no supporting information. Of the $25 billion, $5 billion is purely a slush fund, to be used at the secretary of defense's discretion. The rest is allocated to specific branches of the military, but with the proviso that the administration can reallocate the money at will as long as it notifies the appropriate committees. Senators are balking for the moment, but everyone knows that they'll give in, after demanding, at most, cosmetic changes. Once again, Mr. Bush has put Congress in a bind: it was his decision to put American forces in harm's way, but if members of Congress fail to give him the money he demands, he'll blame them for letting down the troops. As long as political figures aren't willing to disown Mr. Bush's debt -- the impossible situation in which he has placed America's soldiers -- there isn't much they can do. So how will it all end? The cries of 'stay the course' are getting fainter, while the calls for a quick exit are growing. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that the nation will end up disowning Mr. Bush and his debts. That will mean settling for an outcome in Iraq that, however we spin it, will look a lot like defeat -- and the nation's prestige will be damaged by that outcome. But lost prestige is better than ruin." (New York Times)
May 18: Liberal columnist Joe Conason wryly deconstructs the New York Times' fawning profile of Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. Aptly titled "scratching Behind Ears of Bush's 'Pit Bull,'" the profile by Rick Lyman contains little information not available from an equally fawning profile published in 2003 on the right-wing news site Newsmax, and paints him as a friendly fellow well-liked by Republicans and Democrats alike. The article fails to mention Gillespie's extensive career as a corporate lobbyist except to note that he took a big pay cut to come work for the RNC. The article completely fails to note Gillespie's career as a lobbyist for Enron, and fails to note Gillespie's harsh attacks on presidential candidate John Kerry, particularly Gillespie's mantra that Kerry "looks French" and that Kerry has "imaginary friends" with "French accents." Conason writes, "Thanks to friendly press coverage, Gillespie has moved back and forth, with unimpeded smoothness, from politics to government to lobbying to politics again. He oversaw the Bush transition team at the Commerce Department, where he installed one of his Quinn Gillespie employees in an influential position -- then turned around to lobby the department for his clients. He collected money from clients like Daimler Chrysler and Enron to pay for ads attacking environmentalists and promoting the Bush energy plan. He collected still more money from companies like Pfizer and Microsoft (another client) to promote the Bush education bill. He pushed the Republican Medicare bill that also happened to be the most important legislative priority of another major Quinn Gillespie client, the Health Insurance Association of America. It's hard to imagine the Times publishing such an utterly sycophantic profile about any important Democrat. In fact, the Times and the Boston Globe (which is owned by the New York Times Company) seem determined to take down Kerry, much the way Times reporters did their worst in denigrating Al Gore four years ago. But as party chairman, Gillespie controls vast amounts of funding for members of Congress who will vote on issues affecting Quinn Gillespie clients. As a key figure in the Bush-Cheney campaign, he has access to inside information about every issue, budget item, and political tactic that might affect those clients. The 'potential for corruption,' as Public Citizen noted, is enormous. Yet the supposedly liberal press, so indignant over Kerry's tenuous ties to lobbyists, looks at Gillespie and sees nothing worse than a cute conservative attack puppy they can scratch behind the ears." (Salon, New York Times)
May 18: The upcoming release of an updated film version of Richard Condon's Manchurian Candidate raises many of the same questions that the 1959 novel and the 1962 film raised (United Artists did not want to produce the original film, feeling it was too controversial, but after John F. Kennedy personally contacted the head of UA, it was made; the film was taken out of circulation for years following Kennedy's assassination). The film is not just fiction, but based on a compendium of facts that numerous American administrations, not to mention the military and the intelligence community, did not wish brought up in public. The novel, and the films, are, as Maureen Farrell writes, "based upon actual cases of government-sponsored brainwashing, torture, Nazi collaboration, bizarre interrogation tactics, biological warfare and cover-ups. And though such an assessment sounds like paranoid lunacy, a quick study of CIA operations like MK-ULTRA (mind control), Operation ARTICHOKE (extreme interrogation) and Operation Paperclip (the Nazis' role in exporting both), along with their connection to the murder of Dr. Frank Olson, reveals otherwise.
In 1950, the US government established the first program to develop human mind control techniques. Known under a variety of codenames (most notably MK-ULTRA) throughout its 23 year history, this program was designed to exert such control, according to declassified documents, that an individual would do another's bidding, 'against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation.' 25 years later, the Rockefeller Commission uncovered CIA plans for 'programmed assassins' and said that MK-ULTRA led to American citizens being drugged, kidnapped and tortured on American soil. In 1975, as this information was exposed, the government paid $750,000 restitution to Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson's family, after admitting the CIA slipped Dr. Olson LSD days before his 1953 fall from a New York City building. When the Ford administration finally came clean, they promised they'd revealed everything. Yet key officials, including White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, pushed to continue to conceal information. 'The family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family,' the Baltimore Sun reported in 2002. 'Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library.'"
Only in 2002 did the Olson family learn that Frank Olson had been in charge of Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, which, in addition to dealing with anthrax and mind control research, was involved in "assassinations materials research," "biological warfare experiments in populated areas" and "terminal interrogations." Farrell writes, "Dr. Olson did not commit suicide due to a nervous breakdown, as the family was originally told, nor did he commit suicide because of a reaction to LSD, as they were told in 1975. Dr. Olson, who was posthumously outed as a CIA agent, was simply a man who knew too much." In August 2002, the family made three stunning revelations concerning the death of Dr. Olson and the circumstances surrounding it. First, Olson was murdered on November 28, 1953 by government agents; his death was made to look like a drug-induced suicide. Secondly, his death was caused by governmental concerns that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called "ARTICHOKE" in the early 1950's, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War. Thirdly, an additional element of the cover-up of Olson's death was added in 1975 by officials from the Ford administration, most notably Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, when the family was given restitution. "These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth," Eric Olson said, regarding memos that uncovered Cheney and Rumsfeld's role in perpetuating the deceit. "For 22 years there was a cover-up. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new cover-up." The British media covered the story extensively; the American media ignored it.
The question of whether Rumsfeld and Cheney helped cover up a CIA assassination of an American citizen has never been asked by mainstream American media outlets. British journalist Jon Ronson wrote, "This story is clearly less fun, and a lot more scary, than a CIA-LSD suicide, and it hasn't received nearly as much coverage. Few of the journalists who attended yesterday's press conference [the August 2002 conference with the Olson family] are following up the evidence Olson presented. Instead they've written about Olson's 'healing process' and his 'closure.'" The US media may be continuing to ignore Olson's assassination, but countries such as Israel are not: Olson's case is reportedly included in the assassination curriculum of the Israeli Mossad as "a successful instance of disguising a murder as a suicide." What was it that Olson did that prompted him to consider going public before his murder? In late 1950, his department decided to assess the efficacy of certain bacterial strains on human beings by releasing live bacteria over San Francisco. Several people were rushed to the hospital complaning of flu-like symptoms, and a number of delayed deaths were reported. Experiments on US citizens with biological warfare weren't the only games being played. The CIA was aware that the North Koreans did perform medical, psychological and drug experiments on 900 American prisoners of war, according to documents declassified in 1996. After the tests, the prisoners were reportedly executed. The CIA responded by seeking new methods of interrogation. In 149 separate mind-control experiments, researchers used hypnosis, electroshock treatments and drugs, including marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine and mescaline. Test subjects were usually people who could not easily object -- prisoners, mental patients and members of minority groups -- but the agency also performed many experiments on other people without their knowledge or consent.
The story is pertinent now because of the questions it raises about current policies and activities. How closely do the illegal interrogation methods used at Abu Ghraib parallel the methods created under Operation Artichoke? What connection, if any, does the infamous, and never-caught, anthrax mail bomber have to these supposedly defunct programs? Did secret knowledge of the anthrax terrorist prompt George W. Bush and other White House officials to take Cipro on September 11, weeks before the anthrax attacks? Is there a connection between these programs and the supposed suicide of Dr. David Kelly? Is there a deliberate effort to kill scientists, intellectuals, and human rights activists in Iraq, as reported by the Christian Science Monitor, and if so, by whom? Farrell writes, "Certainly, after studying Olson's case it's clear: What was once the province of kooky conspiracy buffs has been proven to be grounded in fact." (Buzzflash, Frank Olson Legacy Project)

Wolfowitz admits key errors in planning and says US forces will remain in Iraq indefinitely

May 19: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architect of the Iraqi invasion and occupation planning, admits to "key errors" in his planning, saying that he and his department severely underestimated the amount and intensity of resistance to American occupation forces, and that he now cannot predict how long US forces will have to stay in Iraq. Wolfowitz testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a hearing called by lawmakers worried about the Bush administration's handling of the war and reconstruction and about its plans for the future. Answering a question about miscalculations made in the year-old campaign, Wolfowitz says: "I would say of all the things that were underestimated, the one that almost no one that I know of predicted...was to properly estimate the resilience of the regime that had abused this country for 35 years." He says that included the failure "to properly estimate that Saddam Hussein would still be out there funding attacks on Americans until he was captured; that one of his principal deputies, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, would still be out there funding operations against us; that they would have hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts in neighboring countries to support those operations," and that the old intelligence service would keep fighting. Wolfowitz also says US officials were wrong to impose so severe a policy purging members of Hussein's Baath Party from the government. The move threw out of work thousands of teachers, military men and others, many of whom had been required to join the party for employment, and was blamed by some for not only boosting joblessness but helping fuel the insurgency. The ban on former party members in public-sector jobs was eased last month. Pressed by Democrat Russ Feingold on how long substantial numbers of US troops will have to remain, Wolfowitz says he could not predict. Feingold asks whether the current US force of 135,000 troops will have to stay through 2005. "We don't know what it'll be," Wolfowitz responds. "We've had changes, as you know, month by month. We have several different plans to be able to deal with the different levels that might be required. Our current level is higher than we had planned for this time this year."
Lawmakers challenge Wolfowitz on whether the US-led coalition has a viable plan in place for the transition. "A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy and that we are committed to making it work," says Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, a Republican. Lugar urges the administration to accelerate negotiations for a UN Security Council resolution. That resolution, expected before June 30, would give international legitimacy to the new Iraqi government, he says. Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, assures senators that "we're all on the same page" on the issue of giving other nations a say in Iraq. Armitage says UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is working hard to produce a list of 30 people that Iraqis could agree on to head an interim government that would serve until elections are held. He says he hopes the selection would be done by the end of this month or the first week of June. Wolfowitz also tells senators that Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile once favored by senior Bush administration officials to lead postwar Iraq, is losing his Pentagon funding. For months, congressional critics have complained about the $340,000 a month that the Pentagon has been paying Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress, even after US intelligence agencies found that prewar intelligence provided by the INC was a tissue of lies. Wolfowitz's explanation for the move is terse. It was, he said, "a decision that was made in light of the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. We felt it was no longer appropriate for us to continue funding in that fashion." At the same time, Wolfowitz praises the INC's efforts in Iraq. "There's been some very valuable intelligence that's been gathered through that process that's been very valuable for our forces," he says. A spokesman for the INC says the payments are expected to end June 30. (Chicago Tribune/OSU Homeland Security)
May 19: President Bush says that a decision about the makeup of the Iraqi interim government will be made within two weeks. The handover of power from the US Coalition Provisional Authority to a Iraqi interim government is slated for June 30. Bush administration officials say that UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will choose the members of the interim government, which will run Iraq until elections can be held in 2005. "I anticipate in the next couple of weeks, decisions will be made toward who will be the president and the vice presidents, as well as the prime minister and other ministers," says Bush. He says that Secretary of State Colin Powell is consulting with UN Security Council members to build support for a UN resolution supporting the interim government, which also would authorize the presence of US troops at the head of a multinational force that would retain control over Iraqi security forces. Currently, about 138,000 U.S. troops and another 20,000 allied troops are based in Iraq. General John Abizaid, the chief of US Central Command which includes troops in Iraq, tells a Senate committee earlier in the day that more troops might be needed to secure the country after the handover -- but he said a new UN resolution could encourage other countries to contribute to the force. However, he warned that conditions in Iraq could deteriorate further in the days after an Iraqi government takes power, "because it will remain unclear what's going to happen between the interim government and elections. ...Moving through the election period will be violent," Abizaid tells the Senate Armed Services Committee. "And it could very well be more violent than we're seeing today, so it's possible that we might need more forces." (CNN)

Memos reveal legal steps taken to protect Bush officials from being charged with war crimes

May 19: Chief White House counsel Alberto Gonzales warned Bush administration officials over two years ago that US officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue. The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes -- and that it might even apply to Bush adminstration officials themselves -- is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. It urges President George Bush declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention. In the memo, Gonzales focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes -- defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "US officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions -- such as that outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners -- was "undefined." One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote. "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," he continued. The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges" would be for President Bush to stick to his decision -- then being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell -- to exempt the treatment of captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention provisions. "Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that [the War Crimes Act] does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales concluded.
The memo, along withand strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV, are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by Newsweek. Some of them are available online. The memos provide fresh insights into a fierce internal administration debate over whether the United States should conform to international treaty obligations in pursuing the war on terror. Administration critics have charged that key legal decisions made in the months after September 11, 2001, including the White House's February 2002 declaration not to grant any al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters prisoners of war status under the Geneva Convention, laid the groundwork for the interrogation abuses that have recently been revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Gonzales memo urged Bush to declare all aspects of the war in Afghanistan -- including the detention of both al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters -- exempt from the strictures of the Geneva Convention. In the memo, Gonzales described the war against terorrism as a "new kind of war" and then added: "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians." But while top White House officials publicly talked about trying al-Qaeda leaders for war crimes, the internal memos show that administration lawyers were privately concerned that they could tried for war crimes themselves based on actions the administration were taking, and might have to take in the future, to combat the terrorist threat.
The issue first arises in a January 9, 2002, draft memorandum written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) concluding that "neither the War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions"would apply to the detention conditions of al-Qaeda or Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The memo includes a lengthy discussion of the War Crimes Act, which it concludes has no binding effect on the president because it would interfere with his Commander in Chief powers to determine "how best to deploy troops in the field." The memo, by Justice lawyers John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, also concludes that US soldiers could not be tried for violations of the laws of war in Afghanistan because such international laws have "no binding legal effect on either the President or the military." But while the discussion in the Justice memo revolves around the possible application of the War Crimes Act to members of the US military, there is reason to believe that administration lawyers were worried that the law could even be used in the future against senior administration officials. One lawyer involved in the interagency debates over the Geneva Conventions issue recalls a meeting in early 2002 in which participants challenged Yoo, a primary architect of the administration's legal strategy, when he raised the possibility of Justice Department war crimes prosecutions unless there was a clear presidential direction proclaiming the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. The concern seemed misplaced, Yoo was told, given that loyal Bush appointees were in charge of the Justice Department. "Well, the political climate could change," Yoo replied, according to the lawyer who attended the meeting. "The implication was that a new president would come into office and start potential prosecutions of a bunch of ex-Bush officials," the lawyer recalls.
This appears to be precisely the concern in Gonzales's memo dated January 25, 2002, in which he strongly urges Bush to stick to his decision to exempt the treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from the provisons of the Geneva Conventions. Powell and the State Department had wanted the US to at least have individual reviews of Taliban fighters before concluding that they did not qualify for Geneva Convention provisions. One reason to do so, Gonzales wrote, is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." He added that "it is difficult to predict with confidence what actions might be deemed to constitute violations" of the War Crimes Act just as it was "difficult to predict the needs and circumstances that could arise in the course of the war on terrorism." Such uncertainties, Gonzales wrote, argued for Bush to uphold his exclusion of Geneva Convention provisions to the Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees who, he concluded, would still be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessarity, in a manner consistst with the principles" of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. After strong protests from Powell, the White House retreated slightly. In February 2002, it proclaimed that, while the United States would adhere to the Geneva Conventions in the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters would not be given prisoner of war status under the conventions. It is a rendering that administration lawyers believed would protect US interrogators or their superiors in Washington from being subjected to prosecutions under the War Crimes Act based on their treatment of the prisoners. (MSNBC)
May 19: US Army officials in Iraq tried to curtail Red Cross spot inspections at Abu Ghraib prison late last year after a report by the aid group detailing prisoner abuse was presented to military headquarters in Baghdad, it is revealed. After the International Committee of the Red Cross presented its report complaining of prisoner abuse in one cellblock in November based on two surprise inspections, the military told ICRC inspectors they should make appointments before visiting the cellblock. That cellblock was the site of the worst abuse. Red Cross inspectors witnessed or heard about such practices as holding prisoners naked in dark concrete cells for days and forcing them to wear women's underwear on their heads while being paraded and photographed. The November Red Cross report is the earliest known formal evidence given to military officials in Baghdad before criminal investigators were given pictures in January showing the abuse. According to a senior Army officer, the military did not start a criminal investigation before its reply to the Red Cross on December 24. Until now, the Army has described its response to the Red Cross on December 24 as evidence that it was prompt in confronting the its report of prisoner abuse. The Senate Armed Services Committee will hear testimony from General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, deputy commander for detainee operations in Iraq. Other officials, including the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, may also be called to testify. The Pentagon has strongly disputed a report this week that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners grew out of a secret plan approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to toughen interrogation methods to fight the growing insurgency in Iraq. (Reuters/MSNBC)

More photos, of soldiers posing over an Iraqi beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators, released

May 19: More photos are provided to ABC News showing US soldiers Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman posing over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner. The prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was beaten to death either by CIA or civilian interrogators in the Abu Ghraib showers. According to testimony from Specialist Jason Kenner, Jamadi was brought to the prison by US Navy Seals in good health. Kenner says he saw extensive bruising on the detainee's body when he was brought out of the showers, dead. Kenner says the body was packed in ice during a "battle" between CIA and military interrogators over who should dispose of the body. The Justice Department has opened an investigation into this death and four others today following a referral from the CIA. The photos were taken by Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, who in e-mails to his family has asked why the people responsible for the prisoner's death were not being prosecuted in the same manner that he is. (Frederick wrote in his diary of November 2003 that CIA and paramilitary -- "OGA," or "other governmental agency" -- employees "stressed him [Jamadi] out so bad that he died. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours in the shower. ...The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away." Jamadi was never entered into the prison's inmate control system, Frederick recounts, and therefore never had a number.
Another witness, Specialist Bruce Brown, tells of spraying "air freshener to cover the scent" of Jamadi's decaying body. Other witnesses tell of CIA agents delivering the hooded Jamadi to the prison, where he was interrogated and killed by either CIA officers or CIA and military intelligence officials. The senior intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Colonel Thomas Pappas, was part of the discussion of what to do with the body; witness Captain Donald Reese testifies that he heard Pappas say, "I'm not going down for this alone.") Frederick, Graner, and Harman are among six reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company who are facing charges in the abuse scandal. A lawyer for Graner, Guy Womack, says the photo of his client represents inappropriate "gallows humor." Womack questions why US officials have not opened a criminal investigation into alleged murders at Abu Ghraib, while the investigation of his client has proceeded at a rapid pace. (ABC News/Information Clearinghouse, Seymour Hersh)
May 19: Four Iraqis have been arrested over the beheading of American civilian Nicholas Berg. Few details were released about the detainees, but it is known that none of them are Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who US authorities believe carried out the killing of Berg along with other atrocities in Iraq. (Agence France-Presse/The Age)
May 19: Specialist Jeremy Sivits is sentenced for his role in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses. Sivits, who pled guilty to four charges, receives the maximum penalty for the crimes: one year in prison, reduction in rank and a bad conduct discharge from the Army. Sivits breaks down in tears as he expresses remorse for taking pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners being humiliated. "I'd like to apologize to the Iraqi people and those detainees," he tells the military court. "I should have protected those detainees, not taken the photos." During the hearing, Sivits told the court he saw one US soldier punch an Iraqi in the head and other guards stomp on the hands and feet of detainees. He also recounted that prisoners were stripped and forced to form a human pyramid. As part of a plea agreement, Sivits has agreed to testify in other cases in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. Three others from Sivit's Reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, have already appeared for arraignment in the courtroom at the Baghdad Convention Center, located in the heavily guarded Green Zone. Later, in Washington, the two top military commanders of US forces in Iraq, General John Abizaid and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, appear before a US Senate committee to testify. Sanchez says the mistreatment will be investigated thoroughly up the chain of command, "and that includes me."
Sivits is found guilty of two counts of mistreating detainees; dereliction of duty for failing to protect them from abuse and cruelty; and forcing a prisoner "to be positioned in a pile on the floor to be assaulted by other soldiers." His lawyer had asked the court for leniency, and Sivits pleaded with the judge, Colonel James Pohl, to allow him to remain in the Army, which he said had been his life's goal. "I have learned huge lessons, sir," he says. "You can't let people abuse people like they have done." Sivits had been expected to get a relatively light sentence, but prosecutors asked for the harshest penalty, despite Sivits' willingness to testify against others, saying Sivits knew abuse was banned by the Geneva Conventions. Arab television stations appeared deeply skeptical of the proceedings, with reporters from the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite networks questioning why audio and video recordings were not permitted. Others demanded that higher ranking American officials be punished. "Those who are executing the laws and the orders are not the problem. ...Punishment of the officials who gave the orders is what matters,"' Samer al-Ubedi, who claims his brother died in US custody, told al-Jazeera. "The punishment must be as severe as the crime." Human Rights Watch also complained about the controlled hearings, saying US occupation authorities refused to allow Iraqi and international human rights groups to attend the court-martial. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, says a fair trial "will go a far way in demonstrating to people that, yes, these pictures did happen, yes, these acts did happen, but we're taking the right corrective action to investigate prosecute and bring to trial those accused of these crimes."
While Sivits faced what the Army calls a special court-martial, similar to a misdemeanor trial, the six others who have been charged will probably face general courts-martial, which can yield more severe punishments. The three in court Wednesday - Sergeant Javal Davis, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick and Specialist Charles Graner Jr. - waived their rights to have charges read aloud, and their pleas were deferred pending another hearing June 21. The defense complained it was denied access to two victims of abuse who were government witnesses, and the judge asked prosecutors for an explanation. In an emotional description of events on the evening of Nov. 8, Sivits said he was asked by Frederick to accompany him to the prison. Sivits said he agreed, and took a detainee with him. When he arrived at the scene where the crimes took place, there were seven other detainees. "I heard Cpl. Graner yelling in Arabic at the detainees," Sivits told the judge. "I saw one of the detainees lying on the floor. They were laying there on the floor, sandbags over their heads." Davis and another soldier, Private Lynndie England, were "stamping on their toes and hands. ...Graner punched the detainee in the head or temple area. I said. 'I think you might have knocked him out.'" Sivits added: "Graner complained that he had injured his hand and said, 'Damn, that hurt.'" Sivits said all prisoners were then stripped and forced to form a human pyramid. He quoted one of the other six accused soldiers, whom he did not identify, as saying guards were "told to keep doing what they were doing by military intelligence." He added, however, that he did not believe the soldier.
Graner's lawyer, Guy Womack, said Wednesday his client was following orders, and that US military intelligence, the CIA and civilian contractors were directing the abuse. "The photographs were being staged and created by these intelligence officers and, of course, we have the two photographs that prove that they were present and supervising," Womack says. He adds that Graner sought clarification of his orders and complained to his superiors and to military intelligence officers about what he was being asked to do. "All of them consistently said that he was to follow the order and not question it. So he didn't," Womack says. Warner added that Sivits also was simply following orders. "specialist Sivits...should have gone to trial and been acquitted like the others," the lawyer says. "I feel sorry for the young specialist pleading guilty." US military officials say Sivits will be taken to an undisclosed facility to serve his sentence, but added that Lieutenant General Thomas Metz, commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, can approve, reduce or dismiss the sentence. The conviction and sentence also will be automatically reviewed by the US military appeals court. The US military allowed news coverage of the proceedings in the hope it will demonstrate American resolve to determine who was responsible for the abuse and punish the guilty. Nine Arab newspapers and the prominent Arab television networks Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya are among 34 news organizations allowed into the courtroom. (AP/Guardian)
May 19: Three witnesses called to testify in the court-martial of Specialist Charles Graner have refused to testify on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves, it has just been learned. The witnesses include Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, who oversaw the military intelligence operations at the prison; Captain Donald Reese, Graner's supervisor (recommended by the Taguba report to be relieved from duty and reprimanded); and Adel Nakhla, a civilian contractor working as a translator. Specialist Joseph Darby, who first alerted authorities to the abuses, was called as a defense witness, but the military judge presiding over the April 26 hearing in Baghdad said Darby was "unavailable." Jordan's testimony was important to Graner's defense, because Jordan could confirm Graner's statements that he was following the orders of military intelligence officers when he beat and abused Iraqi prisoners. Nakhla gave damning testimony to the investigators who compiled the Taguba report. (Los Angeles Times/San Francisco Chronicle)
May 19: At least five Iraqi detainees died under what is described as brutal torture in Abu Ghraib; the deaths are being investigated by the US Army. The deaths include the killing in November 2003 of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping bag and suffocated, according to a Pentagon report. The documents contradict an earlier Defense Department statement that said the general died "of natural causes" during an interrogation. Another Iraqi military officer, records show, was asphyxiated after being gagged, his hands tied to the top of his cell door. Another detainee died "while undergoing stress technique interrogation," involving smothering and "chest compressions," according to the documents. Details of the death investigations, involving at least four different detention facilities including the Abu Ghraib prison, provide the clearest view yet into war-zone interrogation rooms, where intelligence soldiers and other personnel have sometimes used lethal tactics to try to coax secrets from prisoners, including choking off detainees' airways. Other abusive strategies involve sitting on prisoners or bending them into uncomfortable positions, records show. "Torture is the only thing you can call this," says a Pentagon source with knowledge of internal investigations into prisoner abuses. "There is a lot about our country's interrogation techniques that is very troubling. These are violations of military law."
Internal military records point to wider problems beyond the Abu Ghraib prison and demonstrate that some coercive tactics used at Abu Ghraib have shown up in interrogations elsewhere in the war effort. The documents also show more than twice as many allegations of detainee abuse -- 75 -- are being investigated by the military than previously known. Twenty-seven of the abuse cases involve deaths; at least eight are believed to be homicides. No criminal punishments have been announced in the interrogation deaths, even though three deaths occurred last year. Beyond the interrogation deaths, the military documents show that investigators are examining other abuse cases involving soldiers using choking techniques during interrogations, including the handling of prisoners at a detention facility in Samarra, Iraq, where soldiers allegedly "forced into asphyxiation numerous detainees." Also under investigation are reports that soldiers in Iraq abused women and children. One April 2003 case, which is awaiting trial, involves a reservist who pointed a loaded pistol at an Iraqi child in front of witnesses, saying he should kill the youngster to "send a message" to other Iraqis. In the case of Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who headed Saddam Hussein's air force, intelligence officers' role was documented in abuse that soon turned fatal, documents show. Mowhoush, considered a "high-priority target," turned himself in for questioning in November, according to documents. After two weeks in custody at an Al Qaim detention facility, northwest of Baghdad, two soldiers with the 66th Military Intelligence Company, slid a sleeping bag over his body, except for his feet, and began questioning him as they rolled him repeatedly from his back to his stomach, the documents show. Then, one of the soldiers, an interrogator, sat on Mowhoush's chest and placed his hands over the prisoner's mouth, according to the report: "During this interrogation, the [general] became non-responsive, medics were called and he was later pronounced dead." According to the documents, "The preliminary report lists the cause of death as asphyxia due to smothering and chest compressions."
Immediately after Mowhoush's death was reported, US military officials released a statement acknowledging he died during an interview. "Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness," read the press statement, which is still posted on a Pentagon website. "The soldier questioning him found no pulse, then conducted CPR and called for medical authorities. According to the on-site surgeon, it appeared Mowhouse died of natural causes." An investigative report was finalized in late January, and the interrogating soldiers received reprimands, in addition to being barred from further interviews, documents show. Military commanders have not taken criminal action against the soldiers, citing an ongoing investigation. Criminal punishments apparently have not been pursued in the other interrogation-death cases, which also are ongoing. Another Iraqi prisoner was assaulted by interrogators on two occasions in early January of this year at the FOB Rifles Base in Asad, Iraq, documents state. US forces arrested him for allegedly possessing explosive devices, and he was later placed in an isolation cell for questioning by special-forces soldiers with the Operational Detachment Alpha, where he was shackled to a pipe that ran along the ceiling. After he was allowed to sit, he lunged at one of the soldiers, grabbing his shirt. "The three ODA members punched and kicked [the prisoner] in the stomach and ribs for approximately one to two minutes," documents show. Three days later, the prisoner escaped from his cell and was recaptured. During questioning, the detainee refused to follow instructions. When he refused orders to remain quiet in his cell, his hands were tied to the top of his cell door, the report shows. When he still refused, he was gagged, the report notes, and five minutes later, a soldier "noticed that he was slumped down and hanging from his shackles" dead. According to the investigative report, special forces commanders are reviewing "consideration of misconduct" in the case.
Other prisoner deaths under homicide investigation include the beating in early April of a detainee at the LSA Diamondback facility in Mosul, Iraq, who was found dead in his sleep. A death report showed "blunt-force trauma to the torso and positional asphyxia." He had gone to sleep immediately after questioning by members of the Naval Special Warfare Team. No disciplinary action was noted in the report, but the investigation continues, the report states. In June, at a "classified interrogation facility" in Baghdad, an Iraqi detainee was found dead after being restrained in a chair for questioning. "While in custody the detainee was subjected to both physical and psychological stress," the report shows. An autopsy determined that he died of a "hard, fast blow" to the head. The investigation continues. No disciplinary action was noted. On November 4, an Iraqi died at Abu Ghraib during an interview by special forces and Navy SEAL soldiers. "An autopsy revealed the cause of death was blunt force trauma as complicated by compromised respiration." The report notes that Navy investigators concluded Navy personnel did not commit a crime leading to the detainee's death. But the investigation, including by CIA officials, is still ongoing. No disciplinary action was noted.
Amid a storm of controversy over prisoner handling in recent weeks, US military officials have launched eight separate internal investigations into abuse cases, administrative procedures and interrogation techniques. They also have acknowledged that reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib violate the Geneva Conventions and other treaties. According to Human Rights Watch, which monitors prisoner maltreatment around the world, the patterns of interrogation tactics known as "stress techniques" in the death cases is tantamount to torture and should be investigated by an "independent" body or government. "It sounds as though the Iraqi general and others were being subjected to extreme techniques we are only just now learning about, and it's clearly cruel and degrading treatment," says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "This highlights the need for independent scrutiny at a minimum by Congress or possibly an independent commission of inquiry." Of the detainee cases that were not homicides, commanders typically handed down lenient job-related punishments to the accused, instead of seeking criminal convictions. Of 47 punishments given to those accused of prisoner abuse, according to the report, only 15 involved court-martial. Criminal penalties ranged from reprimands to 60 days' confinement. Unlike civilian practices, in the military, commanders decide whether to send accused soldiers to trial. A number of other allegations are being investigated, including a detainee being kicked and punched; a detainee found dead while shackled and gagged; a detainee beaten with a rifle butt and then having the rifle muzzle placed in his mouth and the trigger pulled on an empty chamber; a detainee shot to death for throwing rocks; and a detainee being beaten while his squad leader was present. The sergeant who conducted the beating was punished by a reduction in rank and 60 days' confinement; the squad leader, who also beat detainees, was charged with dereliction of duty, given a reprimand and fined $2,000. (Denver Post)
May 19: Mohammed Maddy is one of a number of Muslim-American prisoners who were tortured and sexually abused while in detention, but this took place in the US, not overseas. Maddy was held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where 84 of the 762 Muslim immigrants who were detained after Sept. 11 were imprisoned. He tells of being stripped naked, beaten, thrown against walls, and forced to sleep in cells where the lights were on 24 hours a day. He was strip-searched several times a day, sometimes in public. An official report concludes that these abuses were practiced on Maddy and other Muslim-American prisoners for the purposes of punishment and humiliation, and had nothing to do with safety or extracting information. At least 300 hours of videotapes exist that document the abuses at the Brooklyn prison; these tapes have not yet been made public. Other detention facilities practiced similar abuses, many of which parallel abuses documented at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: prisoners were kicked and beaten, menaced with dogs, placed in solitary confinement for weeks or months, denied access to lawyers or family visitors, and so forth. Most were never charged with a crime. An official reports paint a picture of mass roundups conducted without probable cause, followed by "prolonged confinement for many detainees, sometimes under extremely harsh conditions." It lists some of the rather specious justifications given for classifying people as 9/11 detainees. One man was "arrested, detained on immigration charges, and treated as a September 11 detainee because a person called the FBI to report that the [redacted] grocery store in which the alien worked, is operated by numerous Middle Eastern men, 24 hrs -- 7 days a week. Each shift daily has 2 or 3 men.... Store was closed day after crash, reopened days and evenings. Then later on opened during midnight hours. Too many people to run a small store."
Something similar seems to have happened in Iraq, where the Red Cross estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were innocent. On May 5, a UN working group on arbitrary detention issued a statement saying, "According to the information received by the Working Group, the majority of persons in detention in Iraq have been arrested during public demonstrations, at checkpoints and in house raids. They are being considered 'security detainees' or 'suspected of anti-Coalition activities'. The Working Group's Chairperson-Rapporteur is seriously disturbed by the fact that these persons have not been granted access to a court to be able to challenge the lawfulness of their detention, as required by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." Policies of arbitrary detention often lead to coercive interrogation and abuse, says David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. In both America and Iraq, he says, "the approach was to sweep broadly, to pick people up on little or no evidence other than their religious or ethnic identity. That process puts a premium on interrogation because the whole idea is that we don't know who the bad guys are, so your job as an interrogator is to find out who they are through interrogation. When they say we don't know anything about it, it's going to put pressure on interrogators to use coercive methods. Anytime you abandon the presumption of innocence and adopt a broad, sweeping detention policy, it's going to lead to questionable interrogation tactics." It's not clear whether the guards in Brooklyn and those in Baghdad adopted similar tactics independently, or whether they were acting under similar orders.
The Defense Department authorized policies in Guantanamo and Iraq that were designed to enable interrogations, including sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in 'stress positions' for agonizing lengths of time. Milder versions of these methods were employed at MDC, but there's no evidence that guards there were acting under orders from federal officials. Still, says Cole, "[R]eports of [abuse] are so consistent among domestic detainees that it seems it must have been a policy choice. Assuming the best of the policy makers, would assume they're doing it for interrogation purposes." Regardless of who ordered the abuse, prison officials were operating under loosened legal constraints that encouraged mistreatment. "There was a perception of guilt imposed in both cases," says Nancy Chang, senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Those detained in America, like those in Guantanamo and Iraq, "were abused as enemy combatants or potential enemy combatants. They were treated quite differently from regular prisoners. They were placed under the most extreme conditions of confinement without any prior determination that they posed a danger." In both the United States and Iraq, the tactics were similar, even if the severity was not. "I can see that it is almost the same," Maddy says from Cairo, where he has lived since his deportation in May 2002. "[W]e were all pushed viciously against the wall, hands tied behind back, chains on both legs, lots of hits on the face and the rest of the body, severe humiliation like I never saw before, they were cursing us almost every minute of the day and prevented us from sleeping. In brief, the treatment was very inhuman and against all human rights and ethics."
The inspector general's report confirms Maddy's charges: "[W]e concluded that it was inappropriate for staff members in the ADMAX SHU [Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit] to routinely film strip searches showing the detainees naked, and that on occasion staff members inappropriately used strip searches to intimidate and punish detainees." It cites videotapes of the strip searches in which the voices of female officers can clearly be heard, confirming detainees' reports that they were stripped in front of women, a situation that Muslim men find highly offensive. On some tapes, the report says, "staff members laughed, exchanged suggestive looks and made funny noises before and during strip searches." The report also found evidence of routine physical abuse. "[W]e concluded, based on videotape evidence, detainees' statements, witnesses' observations, and staff members who corroborated some allegations of abuse, that some MDC staff members slammed and bounced detainees into the walls at the MDC and inappropriately pressed detainees' heads against walls," the report says. "We also found that some officers inappropriately twisted and bent detainees' arms, hands, wrists, and fingers, and caused them unnecessary physical pain; inappropriately carried or lifted detainees; and raised or pulled detainees' arms in painful ways. In addition, we believe some officers improperly used handcuffs, occasionally stepped on compliant detainees' leg restraint chains, and were needlessly forceful and rough with the detainees -- all conduct that violates [Bureau of Prisons] policy."
There were also numerous reports that, in addition to the lights being left on in the cell for 24 hours a day, officers went out of their way to keep detainees awake. "For example, one detainee claimed that officers kicked the doors non-stop in order to keep the detainees from sleeping," the inspector general's report says. "He stated that for the first two or three weeks he was at the MDC, one of the officers walked by about every 15 minutes throughout the night, kicked the doors to wake up the detainees, and yelled things such as, 'Motherf*ckers,' 'A**holes,' and 'Welcome to America.' ...Another detainee said that officers would not let the detainees sleep during the day or night from the time he arrived at the MDC in the beginning of October through mid-November 2001." Almost all the 9/11 prisoners at MDC were being held for interrogation, not because police had any evidence connecting them to terrorism. Maddy was one of the few in the unit who had actually committed a crime -- while working for a passenger services company at JFK airport, he had smuggled his wife and sons into the country. In prison, Maddy was questioned "six, seven or eight times," he says, usually about how often he went to the mosque and whether he knows any "bad people in the USA." Maddy could tell them nothing of use. "I tell them the truth, but they say, 'You are liar,'" he says. Maddy and other detainees say it was their professions of innocence that led to weeks of solitary confinement and other torments.
Khaled Betar, an agnostic from Jordan, was detained for nine months in the Passaic County Jail because his visa had expired. He was held as a material witness to the 9/11 attacks, though he had no connections to the terrorists and knew nothing of the attacks. "He was never charged with terrorism, never charged with being a threat to national security," says his attorney, Sin Yen Ling of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "There were never any formal charges." But there were many interrogations. Seven of the 19 hijackers spent time in Hamburg, a city with a Muslim population of 130,000. Betar had lived there, too, and investigators were convinced there was a connection. During his first interview, there were four FBI agents. They showed him pictures of some of the hijackers, and asked if he knew them. "They told me one of the hijackers was in Germany," he says. "They said, 'How come you are Muslim and you don't know this guy?' That's what they told me! I told them, man, I can't know every Muslim!" A few weeks later, the agents asked him if he would take a polygraph. He readily agreed, but after hours of questioning, he was told that he failed (he's never seen the transcript, and it wasn't given to his attorney). Several days later, he was given a second polygraph. Again, he was told that he failed, and he was taken to the hole. The guard told Betar he was acting on the FBI's orders. "I was in a small cell. It's closed. There was an iron bed and mattress and blanket, that's all that you have. I stayed there 24 days. All the time, they keep the light on. Every day they came with dogs. The dogs made noise. Every day they took me from the room to search me. I'm in the room, how can I get anything?" When he returned to the prison's general population after 24 days, "It was like a paradise for me," he says. "You can't imagine. The hole is terrible. It was the worst 24 days of my life. They make you crazy, really." He says he was pressured to admit to a role in the 9/11 attacks. "They just want me to say I know one of these people," he says. "They want anybody. If you are innocent, it doesn't matter for them. They just want to put anybody in the jail, to show people that they are working. If this happened in Syria, Iraq, it's normal, but in America it's different, really." Eventually, though, the FBI cleared Betar of any terrorist ties, and he was deported back to Jordan.
Maddy, who suffers from post-traumatic memory lapses, says, "sometimes at my job, it goes in my mind, everything that happened in the USA. I get nervous and have to leave what I'm doing. Never I forget. Everything's like videotape. I remember even when I'm sleeping. I don't feel safe when I'm sleeping. I don't feel good about my life." He wants to sue the Justice Department, but knows little about the American legal system, and isn't sure where to look for a lawyer to represent him pro bono. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, something further seemed to break in him. Shortly after the first pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqis were published, he fired off an uncharacteristic message full of profanity and rage. "How much the American people hate the Muslim people!" he writes. "[W]e hate the stupid Bush and I will be happy when he go to the hell in November and I want tell him go, not come back. F*ck you Bush and your government." Two days later, he was mortified by his outburst. "I would like to express my apology for using an inappropriate language," he says, "but I have bitter feelings that squeeze my heart and soul. It sounds like it is a policy for the American government to treat Arabs, especially Muslims, as bad as they can, and it is totally untrue that the behavior was individual incidents carried [out] by several guards. What I have saw with the Iraqi people made me feel very sick. It was really disgusting and made me review all that happened to me." Maddy wasn't terribly religious before, but in prison he moved closer to God, he says. Now, he fantasizes about suing the United States for what it put him through, and using the money to build a big mosque, white, with a green light shining from the minaret. But first, he says, "I will give some money to my sons, so they don't need to go to the USA." (Salon)
May 19: According to an Arab linguist with the US Air Force, Air Force lawyers were "overzealous" in compiling evidence against Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, an Air Force translator at Guantanamo Bay accused of spying. Suzan Sultan, who left the military in December, calls the Air Force's efforts at gathering evidence "unorganized, at best," and says investigators only wanted to hear what fit into their preconception of al-Halabi's guilt. "Justice is supposed to work. It's supposed to be fair," Sultan said during a deposition to defense lawyers April 27. "People conducting the investigation are supposed to be there to...bring out the truth." Instead, Air Force investigators at Travis Air Force Base only heard what they wanted to hear, Sultan said.
Al-Halabi is a Syrian-born US citizen accused of attempting to deliver more than 180 e-mail messages to Syria from detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Halabi also is charged with mishandling classified material and repeatedly lying to Air Force investigators. If convicted of spying, the most serious of the charges, al-Halabi could be sentenced to life in prison. He has not yet entered a plea during his court-martial pretrial hearings. Sultan, who grew up in Egypt and is a native Arabic speaker, was called up from Lackland Air Force Base in Texas in September 2003 to translate letters, documents, e-mails and music CDs connected to al-Halabi's case. "They wanted me to try to find things that were, like al-Qaeda-related, that were terrorist-related," she told al-Halabi's lawyers. "And I was trying to tell them, 'Well, you know, it seems like very moderate things and this is something that I would listen to, that...an average Muslim person would listen to, and there's really nothing...out of the ordinary here.' They didn't want to really hear that." Donald Rehkopf, al-Halabi's civilian lawyer, last week asked a judge to dismiss all charges against his client, accusing prosecutors of mishandling evidence and an investigator of lying on the stand. That investigator, Lance Wega, with the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, was making a case against al-Halabi, in part, to advance his career, Sultan said. Another investigator told Sultan that Wega was "really pressing this because he wants to have...a high priority case," Sultan said. "If he were to find something that would...prove that...al-Halabi was in some kind of conspiracy then that would be very good for his career." Rehkopf says that Sultan's revelations "put everything about this case in a different perspective." He blames ambition and lack of supervision for the wrongful prosecution of his client, calling the case against him "garbage." Sultan said she found Rehkopf's phone number on the Internet and called him because her conscience was bothering her. "I saw things that I knew weren't right," she said. (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune)

Bush campaign accepts money from India, and outsources fundraising efforts to Indian call centers

May 19: Information about how the Bush campaign is receiving financial and other assistance is slowly seeping out. Until recently, when the practice was discontinued due to bad publicity, the campaign was outsourcing campaign fundraising phone calls to over 100 Indians in call centers outside Bombay. Over $10 million was raised for the campaign by the Indian call centers. The calls involved a high degree of automation to limit the amount of time callers with foreign accents were actually speaking to potential donors. And Indian funds have been channeled into the campaign as well. Although it was Bill Clinton who first reached out to Indian-Americans inside the United States, the Bush campaign has gone to Indian citizens in that country for direct donations, almost certainly a violation of campaign law and an irony considering the firestorm of Republican criticism leveled at Al Gore in 2000 for his campaign's acceptance of Asian-American funds from Buddhist temples inside the US. At least half a million in Indian money has been donated to the Bush campaign, and other Republican candidates, such as Louisiana congressional candidate Bobby Jindal, have received money from Indian sources. The Bush campaign has targeted both Indian-American fundraising as well as solicited money from Indian citizens. (Asia Times)
May 19: Congress' General Accounting Office confirms that Bush administration videos promoting the new Medicare legislation violate laws against using public monies to fund propaganda. The videos are made to look like news features, were aired on over 40 television stations in March 2004, and do not identify themselves as government productions. The story packages violated the law because the government "did not identify itself as the source of the news report," says the GAO, Congress' investigative arm. Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg, who asked for the GAO inquiry, says President Bush's re-election campaign should repay the government for the cost of the videos. Lautenberg said he will introduce legislation to force the reimbursement. "These funds were meant to help our seniors, not the President's re-election campaign," he says. The Department of Health and Human Services admits it spent about $43,000 to produce the materials. Kevin Keane, a department spokesman, has said that the videos should have identified who made them. When officials, including Secretary Tommy Thompson, addressed the issue with reporters in March, they played similar videos made by the Clinton administration in an effort to show how common video news releases are. The principal difference, however, was a clear disclaimer in the Clinton administration product identifying HHS as the producer. The promotional materials were produced under a contract with Ketchum Inc., a Washington-based public relations firm. Ketchum hired a company named Home Front Communications, which specializes in video news releases, the GAO report said. Congressional investigators previously examined a television ad about changes in Medicare that the administration aired in the winter. They found that the ad was legal, but contained "notable omissions and errors." Critics contend that the ad was a thinly disguised Bush campaign commercial. National Media Inc., a media firm also working for Bush's campaign, had a share of the publicly funded $12.6 million contract. National Media has since withdrawn from the Medicare ad contract. A second ad, touting the new discount drug card, is now running. Video news releases are widely used both in and out of the government. As a result of the Medicare controversy, local television news and public relations experts have said they will re-examine how the videos are made and distributed. (AP/Guardian)
May 19: Almost two years later, it is revealed that former Guantanamo Bay detention facility commander Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002 after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates. Baccus was perceived by some in the Pentagon as being "too soft" on detainees. Baccus refutes the claim: "I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally." Baccus has not yet been reassigned nearly eighteen months later. Baccus's successor, Major General Geoffrey Miller, is charged with implementing new rules at Guantanamo's Camp Delta that encouraged torture and abuse of prisoners. Baccus insists that he did his job honorably. "In no way did I ever interfere in interrogations, but also at that time the interrogations never forced anyone to be treated inhumanely, certainly not when I was there." Although the detainees at Guantánamo were not given the protections of the Geneva Convention, Baccus says he took steps to ensure they were not subjected to abuse: "We had instances of individuals that used verbal abuse, and any time that that was reported we took action immediately and removed the individual from contact with detainees." Baccus said there were fewer than 10 instances of abuse during his seven months in command. After his departure, the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, gave military intelligence control over all aspects of Guantanamo, including the MPs, and Miller was appointed commander. Under his watch, Guantanamo instituted a "72-point matrix for stress and duress," which set out a guide for the levels of force that could be applied to detainees. These included hooding or keeping prisoners naked for more than 30 days, threatening by dogs, shackling detainees in positions designed to cause pain, and extreme temperatures.
Human rights organizations say the directive shows that practices exposed at Abu Ghraib took place on a far wider scale than the Pentagon is willing to admit. "The pattern of abuse and disregard for fundamental human rights has been set by the continuing indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and at other undisclosed locations around the world," says Sarah Green of Amnesty International. "Detainees are already denied their basic rights in these locations, and the context has been set for abuse at Abu Ghraib." Former inmates at Guantanamo have levelled the same charge. Last week, two British men who were held at Guantanamo claimed their US guards had inflicted abuse similar to that perpetrated at Abu Ghraib. In an open letter to President George Bush, Britons Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal described a prison regime that included assaults, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, strobe lights, loud music and being threatened with dogs. Guantanamo formally came to Abu Ghraib last August, shortly before the abuse reportedly began, when the Pentagon dispatched Miller to Iraq on a mission to improve the intelligence being extracted from prisoners held by the US military. He recommended that prison guards, not trained in interrogation tactics or intelligence gathering, become "actively engaged" in helping to gather intelligence from detainees at Abu Ghraib. Major General Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib said Miller's instructions to military police to "set the conditions" for interrogation "would appear to be in conflict" with army regulations. In the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal, Baccus is loth to criticise the entire corps of military police at Abu Ghraib. "They were in a war zone," he says. "They were under constant attack so I hesitate to make comments as to what or did not happen over there, but there were military police involved, and they were trained not to do the kind of things that we have seen." (Guardian)
May 19: As early as the autumn of 2003, conscientious Army officers in the Judge Advocate General Corps quietly sought help from members of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, because they feared the disastrous consequences of such radical departures from international law concerning the US military's treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other US detention centers. The JAG officers told Scott Horton, a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler who chaired the bar's human-rights committee, that the Geneva standards had been compromised by the highest-ranking civilians in the Defense Department. Further evidence that the crimes at Abu Ghraib were not necessarily isolated incidents that occurred outside the chain of command will soon be brought forward in the defense of an Army staff sergeant charged with desertion. Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, charged with going AWOL from his National Guard post in Iraq, filed an application for conscientous objector status which included anecdotes about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Al Assad airbase northwest of Baghdad, where his unit was stationed. Arriving at the end of official hostilities in early May 2003, Mejia wrote, his platoon "was given the mission to run a Prisoner of War (POW) camp. Later they told us we could not call it that [POW camp], because the facility did not comply with the international rules set by the Geneva Convention on how to run a POW camp. ...Some of the things that kept our camp from gaining POW status included that we were not the type of soldiers that should be running such a camp. ...At one point, our platoon leader thought of reporting the site to the International Red Cross, as he thought the site was in clear violation of the Geneva Convention rules. ...But the matter did not go anywhere because our platoon sergeant told the platoon leader his effort would not change a thing, other than to end his military career."
Mejia and his Guard comrades received scant training from the officers of the cavalry regiment they replaced. As his commendation papers note, "while assigned to Al Assad EPW/detainee site, [he] eagerly assumed the responsibilities normally performed by military police and/or military intelligence." But the Guard wasn't prepared for those duties. Mejia later wrote in his C.O. application that, under orders from "three mysterious interrogators" who dressed in civilian garb and were known only by nicknames, members of his unit mistreated prisoners to prepare them for questioning. The Guard soldiers kept the prisoners in sleep deprivation for periods of 24 to 48 hours, often by banging on the walls and loading pistols next to their ears. They were treated "with great cruelty," he wrote. (New York Observer/Working for Change)
May 19: A federal judge throws out all charges brought by the Justice Department against Greenpeace for boarding a cargo ship carring 70 tons of Amazonian mahogany and carrying out a protest. The charges, the first time in US history that federal charges have been brought against a protest group, were based on an obscure 1872 law preventing prostitutes from boarding ships to lure sailors to come ashore. The law has not been used since 1890. Greenpeace says that the protest was triggered by Bush administration refusals to enforce laws concerning the importation of mahogany. Of the dismissal, Greenpeace general counsel Tom Wetterer says, "It's a message that the government can't just throw any charge at an organization to silence them." The US attorney's office, which has denied the indictment was politically motivated, is not allowed to appeal. Critics of the indictment included former Vice President Al Gore, the Sierra Club and the American Civil Liberties Union. David Bookbinder, Washington legal director of the Sierra Club, says, "It goes to show what an incredible stretch this was for the Bush administration to even try using this obscure 19th century statute, let alone using it to persecute political speech." Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU in Florida, says, "The fact they get bounced out of court within 2 1/2 days, does that indicate at all that the case was ill-conceived from the start?" The Bush administration's position on logging in the United States and abroad still rankles Greenpeace two years after the boarding. "Illegally logged mahogany is moving into the country as if there was no law stopping it," says Greenpeace executive director John Passacantando. "Greenpeace will never let up in its defense of our planet." (AP/The State)
May 19: Presidential candidates John Kerry and Ralph Nader have agreed to meet to discuss issues. It is unlikely Kerry will ask Nader to bow out of the race, nor will Nader offer to leave, but the discussion is likely to focus on Kerry's insistence that Nader understand they have a common goal: to oust George W. Bush, and Kerry's desire for Nader to stop working in ways that undermines Kerry's candidacy. "I think that's for the good of our country and for the benefit of the American people that are being ignored or repudiated by the Bush regime," Nader says. Some Kerry aides believe that Nader will eventually come around and either drop out of the race or minimize his participation. The Kerry campaign has mounted efforts to stop Nader from being included on a number of state ballots; conversely, the Nader campaign has accepted large amounts of funding and assistance from Republicans who believe a Nader candidacy will siphon crucial votes from Kerry. The national Reform Party endorsed Nader last week, a move that gives him access to the ballot in at least seven states, including the battlegrounds of Florida and Michigan. Nader is a far more outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq than is Kerry, an issue that will prove to be a catalyst of discussion between the two. Nader has been critical of both Bush and Kerry for not outlining a plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq. Kerry has been campaigning with former rival Howard Dean, who made opposition to the war central to his campaign. Dean has warned that a vote for Nader only helps Bush. While Kerry voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, he has been critical of Bush's prosecution of the war. The relationship between the two camps is delicate, with some fearing heavy pressure to exit could stiffen Nader to stay in the race. Kerry's advisers argue that the liberal Nader drains votes mainly from Democrats and could end up tipping the balance to Bush. Many Democrats argue that Nader cost Al Gore the White House in 2000, draining just enough votes from Gore to give Bush the closest presidential election in history. Nader dismisses that suggestion, saying Gore was a poor candidate. Kerry has said he plans to reach out to Nader backers. "I respect him. I'm not going to attack him in any way," Kerry said last month. "I'm just going to try to talk to his people and point out that we've got to beat George Bush. ...And I hope that by the end of this race I can make it unnecessary for people to feel they need to vote for someone else." (AP/Guardian)
May 19: A recent campaign visit by Dick Cheney to a Bentonville, Arkansas Wal-Mart is drawing scrutiny from Washington lawmakers. The speech, in which Cheney attacked John Kerry and campaigned for his administration, was understood by Wal-Mart and local officials to be an official visit, not connected with the Bush/Cheney campaign. However, the trip was later found to have been arranged by the campaign. Official visits are financed by tax dollars, not campaign funds; it is unclear at the moment whether the campaign or the American taxpayer paid for the Cheney visit. In a May 11 letter, Democratic representative John Olver warned against the use of official government resources for political activities. Olver is the top Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees White House spending. "Press accounts indicate that a recent trip by the vice president to Bentonville, Arkansas, was designated 'official' and therefore fully paid for out of appropriated funds," he wrote to Tim Campen, special assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Administration. "If these accounts are accurate, and in light of the remarks the vice president made at the event, I would like an explanation as to why taxpayers should bear the full cost of this trip," Olver said. Responding to a press inquiry after the Bentonville event, Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems said the visit was a campaign event "from day one. Anybody indicating otherwise has just got it wrong," Kellems said. Olver cautioned the White House to draw a clear line between official and campaign events. "It is my expectation that you will take every step necessary to ensure taxpayer-funded resources are properly guarded from political use," he wrote. "Furthermore, it is my hope that you will err on the side of caution and avoid using any official resources for activities that even potentially could be perceived as being political in nature." Olver spokeswoman Nicole Letourneau said Tuesday the White House has not responded to the letter. (Arkansas News Bureau)

May 20: While the Bush administration continues to paint a determinedly positive picture of the US's handling of the Iraqi insurgency, more and more senior military and civilian officials see the situation as deteriorating into absolute chaos. Some, including General John Abizaid, believe that violence from the insurgents will only get worse after the June 30 handover of power, and warns that more troops may be needed. In Najaf and Fallujah and at other flashpoints, US forces appear to have been time and again sucked in by the insurgents' strategy: fighting back, killing civilians and in turn strengthening the rebels' support base. "I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The apocalyptic language is becoming increasingly common among normally moderate and cautious politicians and observers. Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, says: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq. We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction. There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire."
The growing fear is that the US will able neither to defeat the insurgents in Iraq nor to find an honorable means of withdrawal, while every week there will be a hemorrhaging of US credibility in the Arab world and far beyond. "With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?" says Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the foreign relations committee. Meanwhile, traditional conservatives who see American interests in the Middle East as focused on a regular supply of oil are anxious because it has pulled its troops out of one big producer, Saudi Arabia, without establishing a sustainable military presence in another, Iraq. "Anyway you look at this, outside the most extreme optimistic assessments, we end up weaker," a senior Republican international strategist says. The conservatives' growing awareness that failure may be imminent has generated a backlash against the more radical neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, who are blamed for persuading President Bush that an invasion would be relatively easy. Anthony Cordesman, a military scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the most serious problem in US government was "the fact that a small group of neoconservative ideologues were able to substitute their illusions for an effective planning effort by professionals." (Guardian, AP/Fox News)

Stories of children being tortured in Abu Ghraib surface

May 20: Confirming earlier reports of children being held, and sometimes abused, in Abu Ghraib, a US military intelligence analyst confirms that he saw a 16-year old boy being abused in order to force his father, also in detention, to talk to interrogators. The analyst, Sergeant Samuel Provance, says the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the ongoing scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees. Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, Provance says. Provance, who maintained the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion's top secret computer system at Abu Ghraib prison, related his story to a German news magazine, Der Spiegel. He says he also has described the incident to army investigators. Provance is now stationed in Germany. His account of mistreatment of a prisoner's son is consistent with concerns raised by the International Red Cross. The Red Cross notes it had received reports that interrogators were making threats of reprisals against detainees' family members. Provance already has been deemed a credible witness by Major General Antonio Taguba, who included the army sergeant in a list of witnesses whose statements he relied on to make his findings of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib. Although Defense Department officials have portrayed the abuses at the prison as the isolated conduct of a few out-of-control guards, Provance's account offers fresh evidence of broader participation in abuses, encompassing at least military and civilian interrogators at Abu Ghraib. In fact, Provance said members of the military intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib were well aware that prisoners were subjected to sexual humiliation and abusive behavior.
One female interrogator told him of forcing detainees to wear nothing but women's underwear and questioning a male prisoner who was kept naked during interrogation, Provance says. He says he overheard colleagues in the military intelligence battalion laughing as a soldier in the unit described watching MPs use two detainees as "practice dummies," first knocking one prisoner unconscious with a blow and then doing the same to the other. Provance says he was not present for the mistreatment of the detainee's son, which he said occurred in December or possibly January. But he says an interrogator described the incident to him shortly afterward. That soldier has declined to discuss the incident with the media. Provance says he escorted the boy from the interrogation cell block to the prison's general population immediately after the encounter between the teenager and his father. "This kid was so frail. He was shaking like a leaf," Provance says. "He said he was glad we had come there (to topple Saddam Hussein's government) but he didn't understand all these raids, all that we were doing to him." Provance adds that he urged the interrogators not to put the teenager in among the prison's unruly, poorly supervised general population, which included many hardened criminals. But Provance sats he was rebuffed. "I even went inside and said 'This kid is scared for his life. He's probably going to be raped. He can't be put in general population,'" Provance says. Provance says he did not know the identity of either the father or son but said the father was described to him as a "high-level individual" who had not provided any useful intelligence in previous rounds of questioning.
The US Army denies any knowledge of the incident. Provance says he described the abuse of the prisoner's son and other incidents he learned of to investigators, mostly recently in an interview earlier this month with Major General George Fay, who is overseeing the army's investigation of military intelligence officials' involvement in prisoner abuse. Provance says that he became concerned that military officials were trying to cover up the role of military intelligence officials in prisoner mistreatment after receiving written instructions shortly after the interview with Fay telling him not to discuss anything that happened at Abu Ghraib. In addition, Provance says, Fay warned him that the general would likely recommend administrative action against him for not reporting abuses before his first sworn statement, made in January after criminal investigators opened a case against MPs at the prison. The administrative action would effectively bar future promotions for Provance. "I felt like I was being punished for being honest," Provance says. An Army official said it was routine procedure for military investigators to instruct witnesses not to discuss events that are under examination. Provance says he questioned treatment of prisoners several times last fall without effect. "I would voice my opinion...and they would say 'What do you know. You're a system administrator,'" Provance says. Among the interrogators, "there's a certain cockiness," he adds. (Knight-Ridder/CommonDreams)

Confirmation that military intelligence officials directed the Abu Ghraib abuses

May 20: Sergeant Samuel Provance, a former military intelligence soldier, confirms that military intelligence officials directed the abuses at Abu Ghraib, including ordering prison guards to take clothes from prisoners, leave detainees naked in their cells and make them wear women's underwear. The tactics, known by intelligence officials to be particularly effective against Muslim men, were considered acceptable because, says Provance, military intelligence dictated that all Iraqis were to be considered "the enemy." Provance confirms that the highest MI officials were directly involved in the abuses, and that he feels the Army is trying to deflect investigations into MI's role in the prisoner abuse scandals. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander of US detention facilities in Iraq at the time of the abuses, claims that military intelligence imposed its authority so fully that she eventually had limited access to the interrogation facilities. And an attorney for one of the soldiers accused of abuse now says that the Army has rejected his request for an independent inquiry, which could block potentially crucial information about involvement of military intelligence, the CIA and the FBI from being revealed. Provance was part of that military intelligence operation but was not an interrogator. He says he administered a secret computer network at Abu Ghraib for about six months and did not witness abuse. But Provance says he had numerous discussions with members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade about their tactics in the prison. He also maintains he voiced his disapproval as early as last October. "Military intelligence was in control," Provance says. "setting the conditions for interrogations was strictly dictated by military intelligence. They weren't the ones carrying it out, but they were the ones telling the MPs to wake the detainees up every hour on the hour" or limiting their food.
Provance was interviewed by Major General George Fay -- who is looking into the military intelligence community's role in the abuse -- and testified at an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a pretrial hearing, for one of the MPs this month. But Provance says Fay was interested only in what military police had done, asking no questions about military intelligence. Gary Myers, a civilian lawyer representing one of seven MPs charged in the alleged abuse, Ivan Frederick, says his client does not claim he was ordered to abuse detainees, just that military intelligence outlined what should be done and then left it up to the MPs. "My guy is simply saying that these activities were encouraged" by military intelligence, Myers says. "The story is not necessarily that there was a direct order. Everybody is far too subtle and smart for that.... Realistically, there is a description of an activity, a suggestion that it may be helpful and encouragement that this is exactly what we needed." Myers says he fears that officials are covering up the involvement of senior military officers, and that military officials have dissected the investigation into several separate inquiries run by people who have potential conflicts of interest. Earlier this month Myers asked Lieutenant Generall Thomas Metz, commander of the Army's III Corps in Iraq, to order a special "court of inquiry" to offer an outside, unbiased look at the scandal, as was done when a US Navy submarine collided with a Japanese fishing boat near Hawaii in 2001. Metz refused the request.
Provance says when he arrived at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, the place was bordering on chaos. Soldiers did not wear their uniforms, instead just donning brown shirts. They were all on a first-name basis. People came and went. Within days -- about the time Major General Geoffrey Miller paid a visit to the facility and told Karpinski, the commanding officer, that he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" the place -- money began pouring in, and many more interrogators streamed to the site. More prisoners were also funneled to the facility. Provance says officials from "Gitmo," the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, arrived to increase the pressure on detainees and streamline interrogation efforts. "The operation was snowballing," Provance says. "There were more and more interrogations. The chain of command was putting a lot of resources into the facility." Even Karpinski, who commanded the facility as the head of the 800th MP Brigade, had to knock on a plywood door to gain access to the interrogation wing. She said that she had no idea what was going on there, and that the MPs who were handpicked to "enhance the interrogation effort" were essentially beyond her reach and unable to discuss their mission. It was about that same time that Karpinski felt that high-ranking generals were trying to separate military intelligence away from Abu Ghraib and the military police operation, so it would be even more secluded and secret. Karpinski said in a recent interview that she visited three sites in and around Baghdad with military intelligence officials who were scouting a new compound. "They continued to move me farther and farther away from it," Karpinski says. "They weren't extremely happy with Abu Ghraib. They wanted their own compound." (Washington Post)

Delta Force soldiers accused of prisoner abuse

May 20: Allegations of Iraqi prisoner abuse at the hands of Delta Force soldiers have surfaced. The soldiers, who are under investigation by a Pentagon inspector general's investigation, allegedly perpetrated their abuses on prisoners held at a "battlefield interrogation facility" near the Baghdad airport. According to two senior government sources, the BIF is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq's prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don't apply, Delta Force's BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists. These sources say the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF's six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he's drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation. While the BIF allegations are being investigated by the Pentagon, a senior Pentagon official has denied allegations of prisoner abuse at Battlefield Interrogation Facilities operated by Delta Force in Iraq, and says the tactics described in the inspector general's report are not used in those facilities. Top governmental and military sources contradict the official's denials, saying that not only are these and other objectionable interrogation tactics are routinely used at the BIF, but that they are done with the knowledge and approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (MSNBC)
May 20: 14 House Democrats write a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft requesting that he appoint a special counsel to investigate whether White House officials violated international law and the Geneva Conventions, and committed war crimes related to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other US-administered detention facilities. As of this writing, Ashcroft has failed to respond to the request. (House Democrats)
May 20: An orchestrated attempt by Republican lawmakers to defend Donald Rumsfeld over criticism surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison scandals is countered by two maverick Republican senators, John McCain and John Warner. After Rumsfeld's name began to be closely tied to press inquiries into the prison abuses, and Congress opened an investigation into the scandal, GOP lawmakers circle the wagons and begin to fire back at the critics, a tactic McCain and Warner refuse to emulate. The two quickly become targets of criticism from their fellow Republicans. Representative John Cormyn questions McCain and Warner's patriotism, and suggests that their "collective hand-wringing could be "a distraction from fighting and winning the war." (Cormyn did not serve in the military; McCain spent five years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, and Warner served in the Marines during the Korean War.) Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert ups the ante even further by claiming McCain did not understand the concept of sacrifice for one's country: "John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There is sacrifice in this country." Hastert, too, is not a former member of the military, and is at best disingenuous in daring to remind McCain of the idea of sacrifice. When asked about Hastert's criticism, McCain replies, "My, they certainly are angry. There has been some obvious resentment because of my 'independence' for a long time." He continues, "The Speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops. All we are called upon to do is not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. Apparently those days are long gone for some in our party." (New York Times/Falls Church News Press, CNN)
May 20: US military personnel and Iraqi police raid the compound of the Iraqi National Congress and the nearby home of Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi, formerly a close adviser to the Pentagon. Chalabi aides said the raids are part of a "smear campaign by the CIA" and US Administrator Paul Bremer is trying to intimidate Chalabi because of his call for full Iraqi sovereignty and his insistence that the United Nations Food for Oil program be investigated. Chalabi's nephew, Salim Chalabi, says the forces entered his uncle's home, put a gun to Chalabi's head and threatened him. Iraqi National Congress spokesman Entifadh Qanbar says the compound was raided "in a very savage way. ...Doors were smashed despite the offer to unlock it. Computers were smashed. Even pictures on the wall were smashed. Even his holy Koran, his personal holy Koran was taken as a document." Qanbar says Bremer ordered the raid in retaliation because Chalibi -- who is head of finance for the Iraqi Governing Council -- is pushing for an investigation of billions of dollars missing from the Oil for Food program administered by the UN before the Iraq war and because of his insistence on full soveriegnty for Iraq. "This is an act of aggression, politically motivated against a person who's an Iraqi national, an Iraqi patriot, who's defending the rights of the Iraqi people, who's standing in the face of occupation to have full sovereignty to Iraqis," says Qanbar. "He's defending the issue of pursuing the Oil for Food program investigation. He's defending the full sovereignty. There are attempts to undermine sovereignty in Iraq. He's defending the issue of not accepting any ruling by any foreign entity inside Iraq. And he's been targeted for doing some things good for the Iraqi people." Qanbar claims that Chalabi, who is accused of numerous charges of fraud and providing false information to US intelligence, has been targeted as part of a "smear campaign by the CIA," and the raids are not related to any investigation into what happened with money the Pentagon has given to the INC. "The funding of the Iraqi National Congress was audited many, many times and the auditing came in our favor," he says. The Pentagon made a final monthly payment of $340,000 to Chalabi's INC party in May, a senior Pentagon official said. No more payments will be made after June 30. (CNN)
May 20: A US air strike in Iraq near the border of Syria kills around 40 civilians in the village of Makr al-Deeb. US military spokespersons say the air strike targeted a suspected safehouse for Syrian terrorists, but local officials and residents say the attack killed 40 members of a wedding party. Lieutenant Colonel Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, says 42 to 45 people were killed in the attack. He says the dead include 15 children and 10 women. Mourners at the Baghdad funeral of a well-known wedding singer and his musician brother say that the two men are among the dead. And a member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council says he finds it hard to believe the US version of events. "Their story does not look very convincing," says Mahmoud Othman. "I think they have made a mistake." People who say they are guests said the wedding party was in full swing -- with dinner just finished and the band playing tribal Arab music -- when US fighter jets roared overhead and US vehicles started shining their highbeams. Worried, the hosts ended the party; men stayed in the wedding tent, and women and children went inside the house nearby, the witnesses say. About five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., the first shell hit the tent. Panicked, women clutching their children ran out of the house. "Mothers died with their children in their arms," says Madhi Nawaf, a shepherd. "One of them was my daughter. I found her a few steps from the house, her 2-year-old Raad in her arm. Her 1-year-old son, Ra'ed, was lying nearby, his head missing," he adds. "Where are the foreign fighters they claim were hiding there?" he asks. "Everything they said is a lie." "The U.S. planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," adds an unidentified man who said he was from the village. "They hit two homes where the wedding was being held, and then they leveled the whole village. No bullets were fired by us. Nothing was happening."
Associated Press Television News footage from the area shows a truck containing bloodied bodies, many wrapped in blankets, piled one atop the other. Several are children, one of whom is decapitated. The body of a girl who appears to be less than 5 years of age lays in a white sheet, her legs riddled with wounds and her dress soaked in blood. The area, a desolate region populated only by shepherds, is popular with smugglers, including weapons smugglers, and the US military suspects militants use it as a route to slip in from Syria to fight the Americans. It is under constant surveillance by American forces. Military officials in Washington refuse to address the question of whether anyone from a wedding party was among the people killed. In a statement, the US Central Command says coalition forces conducted a military operation against a "suspected foreign fighter safe house" in the open desert, about 50 miles southwest of Husaybah and 15 miles from the Syrian border. The coalition troops came under hostile fire and "close air support was provided," the statement says. The troops recovered weapons, Iraqi and Syrian currency, some passports and some satellite communications gear, it continues. APTN video footage showed mourners with shovels digging graves over a wide dusty area in Ramadi, the provincial capital where bodies of the dead had been taken to obtain death certificates. A group of men crouched and wept around one coffin. Iraqis interviewed on the videotape say revelers had fired volleys of gunfire into the air in a traditional wedding celebration before the attack took place. American troops have sometimes mistaken celebratory gunfire for hostile fire. An Iraqi doctor says American troops came to investigate the gunfire and left. However, he says, helicopters later arrived and attacked the area. Two houses were destroyed, he says. "This was a wedding and the [U.S.] planes came and attacked the people at a house," says one resident. "Is this the democracy and freedom that Bush has brought us? There was no reason." Another resident says the victims were at a wedding party "and the US military planes came...and started killing everyone in the house."
Lieutenant Colonel Dan Williams, a US military spokesman, says that the military is investigating. Marine commander Major General James Mattis is adamant about the strike targeting insurgents: "How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" he says. "These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive." Asked about witness testimony and footage of children killed or wounded, Mattis says: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men." The strike, widely reported in Iraq and the Middle East as an attack on a wedding party, comes at a time when American prestige is under fire as the United States tries to stabilize this country before the June 30 transfer of sovereignty. Anti-American sentiment has risen following last month's bloody Marine siege of Fallujah, a Shiite Muslim uprising and the scandal over treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. (AP/Guardian, MSNBC [cached Google copy])
May 20: The US House of Representatives votes to destroy Abu Ghraib prison as part of an overall defense spending bill. "This prison was a symbol of terrorism under Saddam, and it was an institution that the Iraqi people despised," says the co-sponsor of the amendment, Republican Curt Weldon. The abuse that happened at the prison "really created a bad perception in Iraq," Weldon adds. "so my feeling is, tear it down. Get rid of it. Not just because of what a few soldiers did, but because of also because of what that symbol meant to Saddam, and show the Iraqi people, 'Hey, we don't want that kind of torture anymore.'" During a short debate, Republican Thaddeus McCotter said that destroying the prison "is the sovereign Iraqis' decision to make." But Weldon notes that the demolition plan calls for the consent of the new Iraqi government since "by the time this bill passes, they'll be in charge." The House votes 308-114 to include the prison provision in the defense bill. A similar proposal is pending in the Senate. (AP/Guardian)
May 20: Military intelligence analyst Samuel Provance, who served at Abu Ghraib prison, says that he was told of the torture of a 16-year old son of a detainee there in order to break the resistance of the boy's father. (See above item for similar information.) Provance says the boy was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees. Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, says Provance. Provance, who maintained the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion's top-secret computer system at Abu Ghraib prison, says he has described the incident to Army investigators. Provance's account of mistreatment of a prisoner's son is consistent with concerns raised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had received reports that interrogators were threatening reprisals against detainees' family members. Provance already has been deemed a credible witness by Major General Antonio Taguba, who included the Army sergeant in a list of witnesses whose statements he relied on to make his findings of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib.
Although Pentagon officials have portrayed the abuses at the prison as the isolated conduct of a few out-of-control guards, Provance's account offers fresh evidence of broader participation. He said members of Abu Ghraib's military intelligence unit were well aware that prisoners were subjected to sexual humiliation and other abuse. One female interrogator told him of forcing detainees to wear nothing but women's underwear and questioning a male prisoner who was kept naked during interrogation, Provance says. He recalls overhearing colleagues in the military intelligence battalion laughing as a soldier in the unit described watching MPs use two detainees as "practice dummies," first knocking one prisoner unconscious with a blow and then doing the same to the other. Provance says he was not present for the mistreatment of the detainee's son, which he said occurred in December or possibly January of 2004. But he said an interrogator described the incident to him shortly afterward. Provance says he escorted the boy from the interrogation cellblock to the prison's general population immediately after the encounter between the teenager and his father. "This kid was so frail. He was shaking like a leaf," he recalls. He urged the interrogators not to put the teenager in the prison's unruly, poorly supervised general population, but was rebuffed. "I even went inside and said, 'This kid is scared for his life. He's probably going to be raped. He can't be put in general population,'" Provance says. He says he does not know the identity of either the father or son but says the father was described to him as a "high-level individual" who had not provided useful intelligence in previous questioning.
Major Paul Karnaze, a spokesman for the Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, says Army policy forbids any abuse or threats of abuse against family members during interrogations. "That's just so far from the Army values we train," Karnaze says. Provance says he described the incidents to investigators, most recently in an interview this month with Major General George Fay, who is overseeing the Army's investigation of military intelligence officials' involvement in prisoner abuse. Provance says he became concerned about a possible cover-up of the role of military intelligence officials after receiving written instructions shortly after the interview telling him not to discuss Abu Ghraib. In addition, Fay warned him that he likely would recommend administrative action against Provance for not reporting abuses before his first sworn statement, made in January. The administrative action would effectively bar promotions for Provance. "I felt like I was being punished for being honest," Provance says. An Army official says it is routine procedure for military investigators to instruct witnesses not to discuss events that are under examination. Provance says he questioned treatment of prisoners several times last fall without effect. "I would voice my opinion...and they would say, 'What do you know? You're a system administrator,'" he recalls. Among the interrogators "there's a certain cockiness," he adds. Provance says his duties recently were switched from a computer systems administrator to a military intelligence analyst but he remains on duty with his unit, which returned from Iraq in February. He is now stationed in Heidelberg, Germany. (Chicago Tribune/Information Clearinghouse)
May 20: In an astonishing display of chutzpah, and signaling an unprecedented amount of disunity among congressional Republicans, House Speaker Dennis Hastert lectures Senator John McCain on the value of sacrifice and war. McCain is a decorated Vietnam veteran who spent five years as a POW. Hastert managed to avoid service in the military during Vietnam. The row was triggered by McCain's remarks criticizing the Bush administration for cutting taxes during a time of war: "Throughout our history, wartime has been a time of sacrifice. ...What have we sacrificed?" McCain said. "As mind-boggling as expanding Medicare has been, nothing tops my confusion for cutting taxes during wartime. I don't remember ever in the history of warfare when we cut taxes." Hastert replies, "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda [two area hospitals harboring soldiers wounded in Iraq]. There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure that they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong not only militarily but economically. We want to be able to have the flexibility to do it. That's my reply to John McCain." McCain answers Hastert's remarks, "The speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops. All we're called upon to do is not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility." The conflict erupted as Hastert proposed a budget making it easier to pass future tax cuts regardless of their impact on the federal deficit. McCain and a group of GOP moderates in the Senate want to rein in deficits by making tax cuts harder. Later, Hastert spokesman John Feehery tries to defuse the outrage caused by Hastert's remarks by saying that Hastert "values Senator McCain's military service, but he disagrees with him on tax relief." (AP/Guardian)
May 20: The solid support that Bush previously enjoyed from the right wing over his Iraqi invasion is corroding. David Brooks now admits that he was gripped with a "childish fantasy" about Iraq. Tucker Carlson is "ashamed" and "enraged" at himself. Tom Friedman, admitting to being "a little slow," has finally made his disgust with Iraq clear. Die-hard Republican publicist William Kristol admits of Bush, "He did drive us into a ditch," and calls Bush's foreign policy "incompetent." Neoconservative and GOP speechwriter Mark Helprin complains on the Wall Street Journal editorial page of "the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership." Columnist George Will has accused the Bush administration of being unable to think clearly about Iraq. Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, has complained of "growing US messianic instincts." Columnist Eric Alterman is surprised that it took so long for the less ideologically fanatical on the right wing to figure all of this out.
Of the neocons driving the Iraq occupation in the Bush administration -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bush himself -- Alterman writes, "These are the men not just the neocons but self-described progressives and human-rights advocates believed capable of carrying out the delicate and difficult mission of bringing democracy and modernism to the Arab world, while safeguarding the security and good name of the United States. Excuse me, but just what was so hard to understand about this bunch? We knew they were dishonest. We knew they were fanatical. We knew they were purposely ignorant and bragged about not reading newspapers. We knew they were vindictive. We knew they were lawless. We knew they were obsessively secretive. We knew they had no time or patience for those who raised difficult questions. We knew they were driven by fantasies of religious warfare, personal vengeance and ideological triumph. We knew they had no respect for civil liberties. And we knew they took no responsibility for the consequences of their incompetence. Just what is surprising about the manner in which they've conducted the war?" (The Nation, The Nation)

"Future historians studying the decline and fall of America will mark this as the time the tide began to turn -- toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon. ...We are no longer the world's leaders on matters of international law and peace.... A nation without credibility and moral authority cannot lead, because no one will follow." -- Ted Sorenson, May 21, quoted by Buzzflash

Proof that Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and White House lawyers authorized the abandonment of Geneva Conventions in regard to Iraqi and terrorist detainees

May 21: A series of Justice Department memorandums written in late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international laws and treaties on handling prisoners. The confidential memorandums, several of which were written or co-written by John Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. They were endorsed by top lawyers in the White House, the Pentagon and the vice president's office but drew dissents from the State Department. The memorandums provide legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war. They also suggested how officials could inoculate themselves from liability by claiming that abused prisoners were in some other nation's custody. The methods of detention and interrogation used in the Afghanistan conflict, in which the United States operated outside the Geneva Conventions, is at the heart of an investigation into prisoner abuse in Iraq in recent months. Human rights lawyers have said that in showing disrespect for international law in the Afghanistan conflict, the stage was set for harsh treatment in Iraq.
One of the memorandums written by Yoo along with Robert Delahunty, another Justice Department lawyer, was prepared on January 9, 2002, four months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The 42-page memorandum, entitled, "Application of treaties and laws to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees," provided several legal arguments for avoiding the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. A lawyer and a former government official who saw the memorandum says it anticipated the possibility that United States officials could be charged with war crimes, defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The document said a way to avoid that is to declare that the conventions do not apply. The memorandum, addressed to William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel, said that President Bush could argue that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was a "failed state" and therefore its soldiers were not entitled to protections accorded in the conventions. If Bush did not want to do that, the memorandum gave other grounds, like asserting that the Taliban was a terrorist group. It also noted that the president could just say that he was suspending the Geneva Conventions for a particular conflict.
Professor Detlev Vagts, an authority on international law and treaties at Harvard Law School, says the arguments in the memorandums as described to him "sound like an effort to find loopholes that could be used to avoid responsibility." On January 25, 2002, Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice was sound and that Bush should declare the Taliban as well as al-Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law, which, as Gonzales noted, carries the death penalty. The Gonzales memorandum to Bush said that accepting the recommendations of the Justice Department would preserve flexibility in the global war against terrorism. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians," said the memorandum. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism, "in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." Gonzales also says in the memorandum that another benefit of declaring the conventions inapplicable would be that United States officials could not be prosecuted for war crimes in the future by prosecutors and independent counsels who might see the fighting in a different light. He observed, however, that the disadvantages included "widespread condemnation among our allies" and that other countries would also try to avoid jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. It also meant that the United States might have difficulty in invoking the conventions in protecting its own personnel who might be captured by an enemy. Another memorandum from the Justice Department advises officials to create a situation in which they could plausibly claim that abused prisoners were never in United States custody.
That memorandum, whose existence was acknowledged by two former officials, noted that it would be hard to ward off an allegation of torture or inhuman treatment if the prisoner had been transferred to another country from American custody. International law prohibits the "rendition" of prisoners to countries if the possibility of mistreatment can be anticipated. The former officials said that memorandum was explicit in advising that if someone were involved in interrogating detainees in a manner that could cross the line into torture or other prohibited treatment, that person could claim immunity only if he or she contended that the prisoner was never in United States custody. The Gonzales memorandum provoked a response from Secretary of State Colin Powell on January 26 in which he strongly suggested that the advantages of applying the Geneva Conventions far outweighed their rejection. He said bluntly that declaring the conventions inapplicable would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." He also said he would "undermine public support among critical allies." (New York Times/CommonDreams)
May 21: A draft memo written four months after the 9/11 bombings by Justice Department lawyers advises that the president and the US military do not have to comply with any international laws in the handling of detainees in the war on terrorism. It was that conclusion, say some critics, that laid the groundwork for aggressive interrogation techniques that led to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The memo, which drew sharp protest from the State Department, argued that the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to any Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters being flown to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because Afghanistan was a "failed state" whose militia did not have any status under international treaties. But the January 9, 2002 memo, written by Justice lawyers John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, went far beyond that conclusion, explicitly arguing that no international laws, including the normally observed laws of war, applied to the United States at all because they did not have any status under federal law. "As a result, any customary international law of armed conflict in no way binds, as a legal matter, the President or the US Armed Forces concerning the detention or trial of members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban," the memo reads. (Newsweek has posted the memo on its Web site.) At the same time, the memo explicitly proposed a de facto double standard in the war on terror in which the United States would hold others accountable for international laws it said it was not itself obligated to follow. After concluding that the laws of war did not apply to the conduct of the US military, the memo argued that President Bush could still put al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters on trial as war criminals for violating those same laws. While acknowledging that this may seem "at first glance, counter-intuitive," the memo states this is a product of the president's constitutional authority "to prosecute the war effectively."
The lead author, John Yoo, a conservative law professor and expert on international law who was at the time deputy assistant attorney general in the office, also crafted a series of related memos -- including one putting a highly restrictive interpretation on an international torture convention -- that became the legal framework for many of the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies. Yoo also coauthored another OLC memo entitled "Possible Habeas Jurisdiction Over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," that concluded that US courts could not review the treatment of prisoners at the base. Critics say the memos' disregard for the United States' treaty obligations and international law paved the way for the Pentagon to use increasingly aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, including sleep deprivation, use of forced stress positions and environmental manipulation, that eventually were applied to detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The customary laws of war, as articulated in multiple international treaties and conventions dating back centuries, also prohibit a wide range of conduct such as attacks on civilians or the murder of captured prisoners. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, describes the memo as a "maliciously ideological or deceptive" document that simply ignores US obligations under multiple international agreements. "You can't pick or choose what laws you're going to follow," says Roth. "These political lawyers set the nation on a course that permitted the abusive interrogation techniques" that have been recently disclosed.
When you read the memo, "the first thing that comes to mind is that this is not a lofty statement of policy on behalf of the United States," says Scott Horton, president of the International League for Human Rights. "You get the impression very quickly that it is some very clever criminal defense lawyers trying to figure out how to weave and bob around the law and avoid its applications." At the time it was written, the memo also prompted a strong rebuttal from the State Department's Legal Advisor's office headed by William Howard Taft IV. In its own January 11, 2002, response to the Justice draft, Taft's office warned that any presidential actions that violated international law would "constitute a breach of an international legal obligation of the United States" and "subject the United States to adverse international consequences in political and legal fora and potentially in the domestic courts of foreign countries." "The United States has long accepted that customary international law imposes binding obligations as a matter of international law," reads the State Department memo. "In domestic as well as international fora, we often invoke customary international law in articulating the rights and obligations of States, including the United States. We frequently appeal to customary international law." The memo then cites numerous examples, ranging from the US Army Field Manual on the Law of Land Warfare ("The unwritten or customary law of war is binding upon all nations," it reads) to US positions in international issues such as the Law of the Sea. But the memo also singles out the potential problems the Justice Department position would have for the military tribunals that President Bush had recently authorized to try al-Qaeda members and suspected terrorists.
Noting that White House counsel Alberto Gonzales had publicly declared that the persons tried in such commissions would be charged with "offenses against the international laws of war," the State Department argued that the Justice position would undercut the basis for the trials. "We are concerned that arguments by the United States to the effect that customary international law is not binding will be used by defendants before military commissions [or in proceedings in federal court] to argue that the commissions cannot properly try them for crimes under international law," the State memo reads. "Although we can imagine distinctions that might be offered, our attempts to gain convictions before military commissions may be undermined by arguments which call into question the very corpus of law under which offenses are prosecuted." The memo was addressed to William Haynes, then general counsel to the Defense Department. But administration officials say it was the primary basis for a January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Gonzales that urged the president to stick to his decision not to apply prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions to captured al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters. The president's decision not to apply such status to the detainees was announced the following month, but the White House never publicly referred to the Justice conclusion that no international laws, including the usual laws of war, applied to the conflict. One international legal scholar, Peter Spiro of Hofstra University, says that the conclusions in the memo related to international law "may be defensible" because most international laws are not binding in US courts. But Spiro says that "technical" and "legalistic" argument does not change the effect that the United States still has obligations in international courts and under international treaties. "The United States is still bound by customary international law," he says.
One former official involved in formulating Bush administration policy on the detainees acknowledges that there was a double standard built into the Justice Department position, which the official said was embraced, if not publicly endorsed, by the White House counsel's office. The essence of the argument was, the official said, "it applies to them, but it doesn't apply to us." But the official says this was an eminently defensible position because there were many categories of international law, some of which clearly could not be interpreted to be binding on the president. In any case, the general administration position of not applying any international standards to the treatment of detainees was driven by the paramount needs of preventing another terrorist attack. "The Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and the CIA were all in alignment that we had to have the flexibility to handle the detainees -- and yes, interrogate them -- in ways that would be effective," the official says. (MSNBC)

Former Centcom commander General Anthony Zinni harshly criticizes Iraq invasion, and says Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should resign

May 21: Retired General Anthony Zinni gives an interview to CBS's 60 Minutes that lambasts the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. From 1997 to 2000, Zinni, a Marine, was commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East, the same job held by General Norman Schwarzkopf before him and General Tommy Franks after. Following his retirement from the Marine Corps, the Bush administration thought so highly of Zinni that it appointed him to one of its highest diplomatic posts, special envoy to the Middle East. Zinni tells correspondent Steve Kroft that "There has been poor strategic thinking in this [the Iraqi invasion and occupation]. There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure." In a new book about his career, co-written with Tom Clancy, called Battle Ready, Zinni pens a scathing indictment of the Pentagon and its conduct of the war in Iraq. In his book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption." He expands on this statement in the interview: "I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning. The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. ...He got the latter. He didn't get the first two."
Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong strategy. He has said this since he was Middle East envoy, well before the invasion begun. He told Congress before the invasion, "This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don't feel it needs to be done now." (Zinni is joined in his criticism of the war by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.) Zinni believes this was a war the generals didn't want -– but it was a war the civilians wanted. "I can't speak for all generals, certainly," he says. "But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained. The no-fly, no-drive zones. The sanctions that were imposed on him. Now, at the same time, we had this war on terrorism. We were fighting al-Qaeda. We were engaged in Afghanistan. We were looking at 'cells' in 60 countries. We were looking at threats that we were receiving information on and intelligence on. And I think most of the generals felt, let's deal with this one at a time. Let's deal with this threat from terrorism, from al-Qaeda." As commander-in-chief of Centcom, Zinni drew up a plan for invasion that was shunted aside by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who thought the job could be done with fewer troops and high-tech weapons. How many troops did Zinni's plan call for? "We were much in line with Gen. Shinseki's view," says Zinni. "We were talking about, you know, 300,000, in that neighborhood."
Zinni believes that the situation in Iraq would have been far different if his plan, or one similar to it, had been adopted instead of Rumsfeld's plan: "I think it's critical in the aftermath, if you're gonna go to resolve a conflict through the use of force, and then to rebuild the country. The first requirement is to freeze the situation, is to gain control of the security. To patrol the streets. To prevent the looting. To prevent the 'revenge' killings that might occur. To prevent bands or gangs or militias that might not have your best interests at heart from growing or developing." Last month, Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that he hadn't anticipated the level of violence that would continue in Iraq a year after the war began. When asked if he should have been surprised, Zinni responds, "He should not have been surprised. You know, there were a number of people, before we even engaged in this conflict, that felt strongly we were underestimating the problems and the scope of the problems we would have in there. Not just generals, but others -- diplomats, those in the international community that understood the situation. Friends of ours in the region that were cautioning us to be careful out there. I think he should have known that." Instead, Zinni says the Pentagon relied on inflated intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi exiles, like Ahmed Chalabi and others, whose credibility was in doubt.
Zinni says there was no viable plan or strategy in place for governing post-invasion Iraq. "As best I could see, I saw a pickup team, very small, insufficient in the Pentagon with no detailed plans that walked onto the battlefield after the major fighting stopped and tried to work it out in the huddle -- in effect to create a seat-of-the-pants operation on reconstructing a country," he says. "I give all the credit in the world to Ambassador Bremer as a great American who's serving his country, I think, with all the kind of sacrifice and spirit you could expect. But he has made mistake after mistake after mistake." Some of those mistakes include "Disbanding the army. De-Baathifying, down to a level where we removed people that were competent and didn't have blood on their hands that you needed in the aftermath of reconstruction -– alienating certain elements of that society." Zinni blames the Pentagon for what happened. "I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it -- certain elements in there certainly -- even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility," he says. "But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most." He continues, "If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go." He is asked who he is talking about, and he replies, "Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility. Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced."
Zinni is talking about a group of neoconservative policymakers within the administration who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "scooter" Libby. Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq. "I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody -- everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do," says Zinni. "And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested." Adds Zinni: "I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don't believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn't know where it came from."
Zinni says he believed their strategy was to change the Middle East and bring it into the 21st century. "All sounds very good, all very noble. The trouble is the way they saw to go about this is unilateral aggressive intervention by the United States -- the take down of Iraq as a priority. And what we have become now in the United States, how we're viewed in this region is not an entity that's promising positive change. We are now being viewed as the modern crusaders, as the modern colonial power in this part of the world." Of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he says, "I believe that they should accept responsibility for that. If I were the commander of a military organization that delivered this kind of performance to the president, I certainly would tender my resignation. I certainly would expect to be gone. Kroft asks, "You say we need to change course -- that the current course is taking us over Niagara Falls. What course do you think ought to be set?" Zinni replies, "Well, it's been evident from the beginning what the course is. We should have gotten this UN resolution from the beginning. What does it take to sit down with the members of the Security Council, the permanent members, and find out what it takes? What is it they want to get this resolution? Do they want a say in political reconstruction? Do they want a piece of the pie economically? If that's the cost, fine. What they're gonna pay for up front is boots on the ground and involvement in sharing the burden."
Kroft asks if there are enough troops on the ground in Iraq now, and Zinni replies, "Do I think there are other missions that should be taken on which would cause the number of troops to go up, not just US, but international participants? Yes. We should be sealing off the borders, we should be protecting the road networks. We're not only asking for combat troops, we're looking for trainers; we're looking for engineers. We are looking for those who can provide services in there." But has the time come to develop an exit strategy? Kroft asks. Zinni replies, "There is a limit. I think it's important to understand what the limit is. Now do I think we are there yet? No, it is salvageable if you can convince the Iraqis that what we're trying to do is in their benefit in the long run. Unless we change our communication and demonstrate a different image to the people on the street, then we're gonna get to the point where we are going to be looking for quick exits. I don't believe we're there now. And I wouldn't want to see us fail here." Zinni says it is his duty to the military and to his country to speak out. "It is part of your duty. Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result. I can't think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up. Well, what's the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that's getting just as many troops killed? It's leading down a path where we're not succeeding and accomplishing the missions we've set out to do." (CBS)
May 21: The militia commanded by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has promised to withdraw from Najaf and Kerbala if the US will do the same. "We are prepared to end our armed presence the moment the occupation forces leave the holy cities and give guarantees of that," says Sadr aide Qais al-Khazali. "There are no guarantees up to now that the occupying forces will not go back to the holy shrines." US troops have pulled back from the center of Kerbala after days of heavy fighting with militiamen. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said afterwards that the troops were repositioning and not withdrawing. Dan Senor, spokesman for the US-led administration, says there had been no contact with Sadr. "There is not any...truce to my knowledge," he says. "If he is prepared to submit himself to justice and if he is prepared to disband and disarm his illegal militia, we are prepared to reach a peaceful resolution to this," Senor adds. Earlier in the week Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on both US forces and Sadr's Mehdi Army to withdraw from the holy cities. The US military has repeatedly said it will not negotiate with Sadr. (Reuters/Al-Jazeerah)

Investigation proves Bush administration errors led to North Korean nuclear capabilities; described as one of history's biggest diplomatic blunders

May 21: An intensive investigation into the North Korean acquisition of nuclear weapons under the watch of the Bush administration lays the blame squarely at the feet of Bush officials, whose incompetence and arrogance paved the way for North Korea to finally create the nukes it has long coveted. Investigative journalist Fred Kaplan writes, "The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle -- as described to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who participated in the events -- will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything the way the Clinton administration did it."
The story begins with a fact not well known to the American public -- that in 1994, the Clinton administration almost went to war with North Korea over the rogue nation's attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. In 1989, during the first Bush administration, the CIA learned that North Korea was building a reprocessing facility near its nuclear power plant at Yongbyon. The facility could, in time, convert the power plant's spent fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium. By 1994, North Korea was preparing to remove the fuel rods from their storage site, expel the international weapons inspectors, and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it had signed in 1985. In response, Clinton pushed the UN Security Council to consider sanctions. North Korea's spokesmen proclaimed that sanctions would trigger war. Clinton's generals drew up plans to send 50,000 troops to South Korea -- bolstering the 37,000 that had been there for decades -- as well as over 400 combat jets, 50 ships, and additional battalions of Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, multiple-launch rockets, and Patriot air-defense missiles. Beyond mere plans, Clinton ordered in an advance team of 250 soldiers to set up logistical headquarters that could manage this massive influx of firepower. These moves sent a signal to the North Koreans that the US was willing to go to war to keep the fuel rods under international control. And, several former officials insist, he would have. At the very least, they say, he was prepared to launch an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor, even though he knew that doing so could provoke war. At the same time, Clinton set up a diplomatic back-channel to end the crisis peacefully. The vehicle for this channel was former President Jimmy Carter, who in June 1994 was sent to Pyongyang to talk with Kim Il Sung, then the leader of North Korea. Carter's trip was widely portrayed at the time as a private venture, unapproved by President Clinton. However, a new book about the '94 North Korean crisis, Going Critical, written by three former officials who played key roles in the events' unfolding, reveals that Clinton recruited Carter to go. Carter was an ideal choice. As president, he had once announced that he would withdraw all US troops from South Korea. He retracted the idea after it met fierce opposition, even from liberal Democrats. But it endeared him to Kim Il Sung, who, after Carter left office, issued him a standing invitation to come visit.
Clinton's cabinet was divided over whether to let Carter go. Officials who had served under Carter -- Clinton's secretary of state, Warren Christopher, and national security adviser, Anthony Lake -- opposed the trip. Carter, they warned, was a loose cannon who would ignore his orders and free-lance a deal. Vice President Al Gore favored the trip, seeing no other way out of the crisis. Clinton sided with Gore. As Clinton saw it, Kim Il Sung had painted himself into a corner and needed an escape hatch -- a clear path to back away from the brink without losing face, without appearing to buckle under pressure from the US government. Carter might offer that hatch. Both sides in this internal debate turned out to be right. Kim agreed to back down. And Carter went way beyond his instructions, negotiating the outlines of a treaty and announcing the terms live on CNN, notifying Clinton only minutes in advance. Four months later, on Oct. 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea signed a formal accord based on those outlines, called the Agreed Framework. Under its terms, North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea. The accord also specified that, upon delivery of the first light-water reactor (the target date was 2003), intrusive inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites would begin. After the second reactor arrived, North Korea would ship its fuel rods out of the country. It would essentially give up the ability to build nuclear weapons. Other sections of the accord pledged both sides to "move toward full normalization of political and economic relations." Within three months of its signing, the two countries were to lower trade barriers and install ambassadors in each other's capitals. The United States was also to "provide full assurances" that it would never use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against North Korea.
Initially, North Korea kept to its side of the bargain. The US did not. Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment. So did South Korea. The light-water reactors were never funded. Steps toward normalization were never taken. In 1996, one of Pyongyang's spy submarines landed on South Korean shores; in reaction, Seoul suspended its share of energy assistance; Pyongyang retaliated with typically inflammatory rhetoric. Somewhere around this time, we now know, the regime also secretly started to export missile technology to Pakistan in exchange for Pakistani centrifuges. A 2000 meeting between North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong-Il, and Clinton secretary of state Madeline Albright went far better than expected. Kim, already known as an eccentric, was very serious and sober during the meetings, and the beginnings of a wideranging accord were being hammered out as Clinton's term as president was coming to an end. The fuel rods were still under lock and key.
Unfortunately, Clinton's attempt to bring about an accord were not furthered by the new incoming administration. A few days before Bush took office in January 2001, a half-dozen members of Clinton's national-security team met with incoming secretary of state Colin Powell at his Virginia home. The Clinton team briefed Powell for two hours on the status of the North Korean talks. Halfway into the briefing, Condoleezza Rice, the new national security adviser, who had just flown in from meeting with Bush in Texas, showed up. One participant remembers Powell listening to the briefing with enthusiasm. Rice, however, was clearly skeptical. "The body language was striking," he says. "Powell was leaning forward. Rice was very much leaning backward. Powell thought that what we had been doing formed an interesting basis for progress. He was disabused very quickly." In early March, Kim Dae Jung, South Korea's president, made a state visit to Washington. On the eve of the visit, Powell told reporters that, on Korean policy, Bush would pick up where Clinton had left off. The White House instantly rebuked him; Bush made it clear he would do no such thing. Powell had to eat his words, publicly admitting that he had leaned "too forward in my skis." Kaplan observes, "It was the first of many instances when Powell would find himself out of step with the rest of the Bush team -- the lone diplomat in a sea of hardliners." Kim Dae Jung was humiliated. KDJ, as some Korea-watchers called him, was a new kind of South Korean leader, a democratic activist who had spent years in prison for his political beliefs and had run for president promising a "sunshine policy" of opening up relations with the North.
During the Clinton years, South Korea's ruling party had been implacably hostile to North Korea. Efforts to hold serious disarmament talks were obstructed at least as much by Seoul's sabotage as by Pyongyang's maneuverings. Now South Korea had a leader who could be a partner in negotiating strategy, but the US had a new president uninterested in negotiations. In Bush's view, to negotiate with an evil regime would be to recognize that regime, legitimize it, and -- if the negotiations led to a treaty or a trade -- prolong it. To Bush, North Korea's dictator was the personification of evil. He told one reporter, on the record, that he "loathed" Kim Jong-il. Bush not only distrusted Kim Dae Jung but viewed him with startling contempt. Charles "Jack" Pritchard, who had been director of the National Security Council's Asia desk under Clinton and was now the State Department's special North Korean envoy under Bush, recalls, "Bush's attitude toward KDJ was, 'Who is this naive, old guy?'" Kim Dae Jung had also committed what Bush regarded as a personal snub. Shortly before his Washington trip, the South Korean president met Russian president Vladimir Putin, and issued a joint statement endorsing the preservation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Everyone knew that Bush placed a high priority on scuttling the ABM Treaty. So when Kim Dae Jung arrived in Washington, Bush publicly criticized him and his sunshine policy. Bush and his advisers, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, decided not only to isolate North Korea, in the hopes that its regime would crumble, but also to ignore South Korea, in hopes that its next election would restore a conservative.
Bush's hopes were quickly dashed. Kim Jong-il survived US pressures, and Kim Dae Jung was replaced by Roh Moo Hyun, a populist who ran on a campaign that was not only pro-sunshine but also anti-American. Relations were soured further by Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address, in which he tagged North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as an "axis of evil." A month later, in February, Bush made his first trip to Seoul. James Kelly, his assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, went in advance to set up the meeting. Pritchard, who accompanied Kelly, recalls, "The conversation in the streets of Seoul was, 'Is there going to be a war? What will these crazy Americans do?' Roh said to us, 'I wake up in a sweat every morning, wondering if Bush has done something unilaterally to affect the [Korean] peninsula.'" By now, North Korea was running out of patience. Clinton's Agreed Framework was unraveling. North Korea wasn't going to get its reactors, and the US was not going to make any attempt at normalization of relations. The CIA told the administration that North Korea had gotten centrifuges for enriching uranium, most likely from Pakistan. By September 2002, this had been confirmed, a clear violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and an end-run around the Agreed Framework. On October 4, Kelly flew to Pyongyang to confront North Korean officials with the evidence. The North Koreans admitted it was true. For almost two weeks, the Bush administration kept this meeting a secret. The US Senate was debating a resolution to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. The public rationale for war was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. If it was known that North Korea was also making WMDs -- and nuclear weapons, at that -- it would have muddied the debate over Iraq, most administration officials felt. They did not want questions on whether Iraq or North Korea was the more compelling danger, nor did they want to discuss why Bush saw a need for war against Iraq but not against North Korea. The Senate passed the Iraqi war resolution on October 11. The Bush administration publicly revealed what it had known for weeks about North Korea's enriched-uranium program on Oct. 17. On October 20, Bush announced that it was formally withdrawing from the 1994 Agreed Framework. It halted oil supplies to North Korea and urged other countries to cut off all economic relations with Pyongyang.
The North Koreans, perhaps realizing that they had once again boxed themselves into a diplomatic corner, decided to replay the crisis of 1994: In late December, they expelled the international weapons inspectors, restarted the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, and unlocked the container holding the fuel rods. On January 10, 2003, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, they also said they would reverse their actions and retract their declarations if the United States resumed its obligations under the Agreed Framework and signed a non-aggression pledge. Another sign that Pyongyang was looking for a diplomatic way out came on that same day, when delegates from North Korea's UN mission paid a visit to Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a former UN ambassador in the Clinton administration. Richardson had bargained with North Korea before. As a congressman, he once traveled to Pyongyang to retrieve the body of a constituent whose Army helicopter had been shot down after drifting across the DMZ. He later negotiated the return of an American hiker who was arrested as a spy after inadvertently crossing the North Korean border. Since President Clinton had used Jimmy Carter as an "unofficial" intermediary to jump-start nuclear talks in '94, North Korean officials may have inferred that this was the Americans' way of "saving face" in dealing with out-of-favor regimes -- to have middlemen do behind the scenes what presidents could not do publicly. But the Bush administration was having none of it. Pritchard recalls, "The North Koreans were grasping for straws, looking for any friendly face. But they forgot to do the math. Richardson was a Democrat, a Clinton guy. No way would Bush have anything to do with him."
Einhorn agrees. In the Bush administration, as he delicately puts it, "The default mode was skepticism about anything involving Clinton." A quiet overture by James Kelly that opened the possibility of negotiated settlements was not followed up by action from Washington. Instead, Bush hardliners, particularly Cheney and Rumsfeld, refused to negotiate. Bush agreed. His stance: his administration would refuse to negotiate with North Korea to preserve "moral clarity." Predictably, with its attempts to negotiate an accord rebuffed, North Korea escalated tensions again. Over the next two weeks, US spy satellites detected trucks pulling up to the site where the fuel rods were stored, then driving away toward the reprocessing facility. When Kim Il Sung threatened to take this step back in 1994, Clinton warned that it would cross a "red line." When Kim Jong-il actually did it in 2003, Bush did nothing. Specialists inside the US government were flabbergasted. Once those fuel rods left the storage site, once reprocessing began, once plutonium was manufactured, the strategic situation changed: even if the US could get the North Koreans back to the bargaining table, even if they would agree to drive the fuel rods back, the US could never be certain that they'd totally disarmed; it could never know if they still had some undeclared plutonium hidden in an underground chamber. (Even before this crisis, the CIA estimated that the North Koreans might have built one or two bombs from the plutonium it had reprocessed between 1989 and 1994.) In March 2003, Bush ordered several attack planes, as well as some B-1 and B-52 bombers, to the US Air Force base in Guam, well within range of North Korea. The clear intent was to signal a possible impending air strike on the reactor.
Kaplan observes, "It was a feeble threat, a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horses escaped: By this time, the fuel rods were gone and possibly hidden away." The administration made no moves to support, or otherwise prepare for, an air strike; there were no movements of ground or naval forces to deter or beat back a possible North Korean retaliatory strike or invasion. Nor was the movement of air forces accompanied by any diplomatic moves. In May, Bush ordered the aircraft back to their home bases, having achieved nothing by his saber-rattling. Kaplan believes that the administration's all-consuming focus on Iraq had an effect on its dealings with North Korea; with an invasion being readied, a concurrent mobilization in Asia would have strained the US military past the breaking point. In January 2003, one senior administration official told the press, "President Bush does not want to distract international attention from Iraq." So, Bush not only couldn't take serious military action against North Korea, neither did he want to. In April 2003, flush with the removal of Saddam Hussein, Bush agreed with Rumsfeld that the US should take a stance of "regime change" in its dealings with North Korea. The simple fact is, North Korea isn't Iraq. Kim Jong-il is quite secure in his position as North Korea's leader, and can't easily be toppled without serious military intervention. Kim Jong-il's father, Kim Il Sung, had risen to power through guerrilla warfare -- and conducted governance in the same manner. As an ancient national proverb has it, Korea is "a shrimp among whales," and both Kims -- the only two leaders in North Korea's history -- have long since mastered the art of playing the large countries around them off one another. Their approach to diplomacy is to foster an atmosphere of "drama and catastrophe" as the scholar Scott Snyder puts it in his book Negotiating on the Edge: a prolonged cycle of crisis, intimidation, and brinkmanship.
By April 2003, Bush realized he had to convey at the least the appearance of talking with the North Koreans. It is not entirely clear what brought this on: a brief bureaucratic victory for Colin Powell or diplomatic pressure from the major powers in the region -- Japan, China, and South Korea. Either way, Kelly was sent to Beijing to engage in preparatory talks. However, according to Pritchard, who also attended, Kelly was under strict instructions not to hold even informal chats with the North Korean delegate unless the other countries' delegates were present. During this meeting, Li Gun, North Korea's veteran deputy foreign minister, announced that his country now had nuclear weapons -- he referred to them as a "deterrent" -- and said the weapons would not be given up unless the United States dropped its "hostile attitude" toward the regime. Kelly returned from this trip saying the North Koreans had offered a "bold, new proposal." Its gist: North Korea would drop its nuclear weapons program if Washington signed a non-aggression pact. But President Bush reacted dismissively, telling one reporter, "They're back to the old blackmail game." This was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line: As long as the North Koreans were pursuing nuclear weapons, even to sit down with them would be "appeasement," succumbing to "blackmail," and "rewarding bad behavior."
By August, it was becoming clear that efforts to destabilize North Korea were not succeeding. Nor were North Korea's efforts to lure the United States into bilateral negotiations. In a compromise, both sides agreed to attend "six-party" talks in Beijing, involving the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas. Pritchard says that at these talks, Kelly was permitted for the first time to meet one-on-one with his North Korean counterpart -- but only for 20 minutes and only as long as delegates from the other four powers were in the same room. Kelly was also forbidden from making any offers or suggesting even the possibility of direct negotiations. Pritchard recalls that Kelly was under instructions to start the private chat by saying, "This is not a negotiating session. This is not an official meeting." For the previous year-and-a-half, the State Department had favored a diplomatic solution to the Korea crisis while the Pentagon and key players in the NSC opposed it. The August meeting in Beijing was Bush's idea of a compromise -- a middle path that constituted no path at all. He let Kelly talk, but didn't let him say anything meaningful; he went to the table but put nothing on it. Even so, the bureaucratic warring persisted. Just before the talks took place, Undersecretary of State John Bolton -- who, throughout the administration, has served as a sort of hawks' mole inside Foggy Bottom -- gave a speech in which he called North Korea "a hellish nightmare" and Kim Jong-il "a tyrannical dictator." True enough, writes Kaplan, but not the sort of invective that senior officials generally issue on the eve of a diplomatic session.
Around this time, Pritchard resigned in protest from the Bush administration. "My position was the State Department's envoy for North Korean negotiations, yet we were prohibited from having negotiations," Pritchard recalls. "I asked myself, 'What am I doing in government?'" He also got word that key officials in the White House and the Pentagon did not want him involved in the talks, lest he take them too seriously. Pritchard was told that they referred to him as "the Clinton guy." Powell, Pritchard's sole high-level backer, asked him not to quit -- or at least not to do so publicly. Pritchard helped set up the six-party talks, left at the end of August, and went to work at the Brookings Institution. He did nothing to keep secret his reasons for quitting. Conservatives today portray Bush's unwillingness to negotiate with Kim as a virtue that will make the world safer, and Clinton's '94 framework as something that rewarded evil and therefore undermined our security.
Kaplan observes, "But the simple fact is that if Clinton hadn't signed it, North Korea could have built dozens of nuclear bombs by now -- to store as a deterrent, rattle as weapons of intimidation, sell to the highest bidder for much-needed hard currency, or all three. And if steps aren't taken to ward North Korea off its current course, Kim Jong-il could build dozens of bombs over the next few years. This is why, ultimately, Bush's no-negotiations policy is not merely puzzling but irresponsible. Kim may be playing the nuclear card as a bargaining chip, but if the United States declines to bargain, he will gladly keep his chips and stack them high. The worry isn't merely that this strange, totalitarian power will have nuclear weapons -- it's also what other powers may do as a result. If North Korea gets a handful or more of atom bombs, many believe that Japan will drop its historical restraints and build atom bombs, too, as a deterrent. A nuclear Japan could galvanize China to restart its long-dormant nuclear weapons program. China's buildup could trigger escalation by India, which would compel Pakistan to match warhead for warhead. All Asia could find itself embroiled in a nuclear arms race. Nor does Bush, at this point, have a plausible military option for thwarting Pyongyang's ambitions before they spiral out of hand. A preemptive strike would be less effective than it might have been in Clinton's day. Bush could destroy the Yongbyon reactor, but the strike probably wouldn't destroy the plutonium or the enriched uranium, which intelligence officials assume is stored underground -- precisely where, they don't know.
"Then there is the possibility of North Korean retaliation, if not with the one or two nukes that they may already have, then with the thousands of artillery shells on the South Korean border, many of them loaded with chemical munitions, most of them within range of Seoul. In short, we have little leverage; the North Koreans have a lot; yet Bush refuses to take the North Koreans up on their offers to trade their weapons away. Even now, though Kelly is allowed to talk with North Koreans routinely, he is still forbidden from holding out any negotiating positions, any incentives for the North Koreans to give up their weapons program -- which is after all their sole instrument of power, the only thing that is making the United States talk with them, not bomb them, in the first place. As recently as last month, Dick Cheney traveled to Asia to talk with US allies about how to deal with North Korea's nukes. His campaign amounted to a one-note sonata -- a renewal of Bush's earlier pleas for a unified campaign to isolate North Korea in order to topple Kim Jong-il. The allies -- South Korea, Japan, and China -- have no interest in such a policy. They fear the possible consequences: an onslaught of refugees, a vacuum of power, or -- the worst case -- a ferocious lashing-out by Kim Jong-il in his final spasms of decline. China has become so agitated about the dangers -- and America's refusal to deal with them -- that it has opened up an independent avenue of diplomacy, urging Kim Jong-il personally to break all precedents and take the first step in backing down.
"Meanwhile, the catastrophe continues to unfold. Last October, the North Koreans announced they had reprocessed all 8,000 of their fuel rods and solved the technical problems of converting the plutonium into nuclear bombs. Last January, a (genuinely) private delegation -- which included Jack Pritchard and Sig Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab -- flew to North Korea for a tour of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. It was the first time since the crisis began that any Westerner had been inside. Hecker came away convinced that the North Koreans had indeed reprocessed the fuel rods; he saw the plutonium. But he saw no sign that they had actually converted the stuff into weapons. In hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hecker made clear: This doesn't mean they don't have any bombs -- just that he was shown no evidence that they do. Nobody knows precisely what North Korea has. This is what makes negotiations both difficult and necessary. Bush's failure to make a deal, while the fuel rods were still locked up, constitutes one of the great diplomatic blunders of our time. It may not be too late to avert the coming disaster. The question is whether the president -- whoever he might be -- recognizes that a disaster is coming, decides to deal with it, and does so fairly soon. The time is already late; at some point, it will run out." (Washington Monthly)

Chalabi on the run

May 21: Ahmad Chalabi, the former darling of American right-wing policymakers in the Bush administration, is on the run. His house, and his offices of the Iraqi National Congress, have been raided by US and Iraqi troops, and his $340,000 monthtly stipend from the Pentagon has been cut off. Hours after the raid, Chalabi, who had been groomed to become the new leader of Iraq by his American sponsors, repudiates the American occupation authority and declares himself a leader of the new Iraq. "My relationship with the Coalition Provisional Authority doesn't exist," he tells a crowd at "Chinese House," in the wealthy Mansur neighborhood of Baghdad. "And together with the governing council, we are still seeking to form a stable government." The CPA has issued warrants for Chalabi and up to 14 others on charges of "fraud, kidnapping, and associated matters." An Iraqi National Congress (INC) spokesman, interviewed on the Arabic language Al Jazeera satellite TV channel, says troops accused Chalabi of harboring terrorists. Chalabi has been accused for months of providing fraudulent intelligence to the US, some of which was used to justify the US invasion of Iraq. More recently, American officials have hinted that Chalabi was impeding US investigations into funds allegedly skimmed from the United Nations oil-for-food program during the time of Saddam Hussein. And perhaps most distressingly, allegations that Chalabi has been serving as a spy for Iranian intelligence are surfacing. Chalabi has openly maintained close ties with Iranian officials for years, and recently told the head of Iranian intelligence that the Americans had cracked their secret codes. Condoleezza Rice promises a full inquiry into Chalabi's dealings with the Iranians, an inquiry that never fully materializes.
Chalabi claims that one of the reasons for the raid was his leading role in opening the investigation, and protests his fugitive status, claiming the raid on his compound is nothing more than retaliation for his recent criticisms of the American management of the occupation. "I call to liberate the Iraqi people and get back our complete sovereignty," he says, "and I am raising these issues in a way that the Americans don't like.." Chalabi's neoconservative backers in Washington, most prominently Richard Perle and James Woolsey, loudly defend Chalabi, and join him in claiming that the allegations are politically motivated; Perle insists that the CIA and DIA are mounting a "smear campaign" against his favorite Iraqi. Meanwhile, Chalabi's deputy in the INC, Aras Habib, disappears entirely, most likely receiving sanctuary with the Iranians. Habib is almost certainly an Iranian spy; Chalabi's own collusion with Iranian intelligence is less certain. Habib is later proven to have slipped bogus intelligence regarding Iraqi WMDs to the Americans, intelligence that was prominently used to justify the Iraq invasion; it now seems certain that Habib did so at the behest of Iran. The question is, was the entire WMD debacle manipulated on behalf of Iran? No one in US intelligence ever dares ask the question.
Last year, Chalabi was one of 25 Iraqis handpicked by US authorities for Iraq's governing council. His name was originally floated as a possible finance minister, though that idea was eventually scrapped, in large part because of his 1992 conviction for embezzlement in the neighboring country of Jordan. In Iraq, Chalabi is so widely despised that people blame him for everything from kidnapping and assassinations to electrical outages. But he continued to wield influence with American authorities, in large part, through his long-standing relationship with the Pentagon. American neoconservatives have long insisted that Chalabi was well-liked in Iraq and would be an excellent candidate for a top leadership position, perhaps even president. Chalabi has spent most of his adult life in well-heeled exile in the US and London, departing Iraq in 1956 and not returning except for a brief period in the 1990s when he attempted to organize an uprising among Iraqi Kurds that ended with hundreds of Kurds dying at the hands of Saddam Hussein's forces and Chalabi fleeing the country. He has never been popular among the Iraqi populace, and has always been seen as "an American stooge." As more and more evidence of Chalabi's duplicity and unreliability has begun to surface, his name has been dropped from any consideration for high office. Chalabi will not be part of the government to be formed when American authorities hand over power to an interim Iraqi government who will shepherd the country through national elections scheduled for January 2005.
As plans for the transitional government progressed, Chalabi grew increasingly critical of US and UN authorities. In recent weeks, he began to press for an increased role for the political parties represented on the governing council, and began launching bitter attacks at UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. "The dirty UN employees are double agents: they were spies for the Americans and also received bribes from the former regime," fumed a columnist in Al Mutamar, the INC's daily newspaper. Striking an anti-American note, the writer accused "Brahimi and his American masters" of trying to prevent Iraqi national elections. Chalabi's objections were no surprise. As a political appointee viewed as illegitimate by most Iraqis, he stood to lose his influence once Brahimi's plan came into being. Desperate to keep its place the US appointed government, Chalabi's party has accused the UN special envoy of everything from "impudence" to leading a "white coup" in conspiracy with the Jordanian government. But in Baghdad, few were convinced by Chalabi's reincarnation from the Pentagon's man in Baghdad to Arab nationalist hero. "People see them as opportunistic attacks, in order to divert people's attention to events which took place long ago," says Saad Jawad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. "Had he attacked something and provided something better, people would have accepted it." In fact, Chalabi is so distrusted that immediately after the raid, a rumor circulated in Baghdad: The American authorities in a last ditch attempt to salvage their man's reputation had staged the raid to increase his stature among the people as an anti-American figure. "I think that he will try to improve his popularity and tell the Iraqis 'Look, you have a nationalist leader now, and he's against the Americans. I don't think people are so naive as to accept it," says Jawad. (Christian Science Monitor, BBC)
May 21: Further evidence that Ahmad Chalabi served as a spy for Iran surfaces. Chalabi, once the hand-picked future leader of Iraq by White House and Pentagon officials, personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, "get Americans killed." Senior Pentagon officials describe the evidence of Chalabi's spying as "rock solid." Additionally, one of Chalabi's most senior aides is believed to have been recruited by Iran's intelligence agency, the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) and is on their payroll. Chalabi's home and offices have been raided by US and Iraqi forces, and a number of Chalabi associates have been arrested. Chalabi supporters suggest that the raid is a politically motivated bid to intimidate the former exile, who has become extremely vocal in his criticism of Washington. At a press conference after the raid, Chalabi lashes out at the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority, complaining it was coddling former members of Saddam's Baath Party and treating Iraqis badly. "I am America's best friend in Iraq," Chalabi says. "If the CPA finds it necessary to direct an armed attack against my home, you can see the state of relations between the CPA and the Iraqi people."
From exile, Chalabi's US-financed Iraqi National Congress provided intelligence information on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Chalabi produced a string of defectors whose stories suggested that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States because of his weapons of mass destruction. A key claim came from a Chalabi-sponsored defector who told US intelligence that in order to evade UN inspectors, Saddam put his biological weapons labs in trucks. The assertion that Saddam had mobile weapons labs was a major feature of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN on why military action needed to be taken against Iraq. "We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories," Powell told the UN in February 2003. "Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. In fact, they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people." No weapons of mass destruction, or mobile weapons labs, were found. A postwar analysis by the government of Chalabi's defectors has found that many of them exaggerated -- and that their information about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's links to al-Qaeda was wrong. Chalabi minimizes the importance of the defector who told of the mobile weapons labs. "What he said is that these are mobile biological labs. He did not say that they are weapons factories. There's a big difference," Chalabi says. Chalabi, who had returned to Iraq with a private army of 700 "freedom fighters" following the invasion, began to lose favor with US officials as it became increasingly clear that much of information he supplied was suspect. Chalabi still holds a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council, but he has been unable to build a base of popular support with the Iraqi people. Chalabi has been feuding with Paul Bremer, the American civilian administrator in Iraq. Chalabi aides say that Chalabi's relationship with Bremer was so bad that he skipped Governing Council meetings that Bremer attended. (CBS)
May 21: The truth behind Ahmad Chalabi's downfall is far more unsavory than is being acknowledged by US officials or the mainstream media, according to several journalistic investigations. Behind the scenes, Chalabi has been attempting to engineer a "coup" against the US-installed, UN-facilitated interim government even before it takes power, attempting to build a Shia political coalition to challenge the Brahimi-US government. "He has been mobilizing forces to make sure the UN initiative fails," says one well-connected Iraqi political observer who knows Chalabi well. "He has been tellling these people that Brahimi is part of a Sunni conspiracy against the Shia." Chalabi has already recruited significant Shia support, including Ayatollah Mohammed Bahr al Uloom, a leading member of the Governing Council, and two other lesser known Council members. Significantly, his support also includes a faction of the Dawa Party that has been excluded from the political process by the occupation authority and which also supports rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Other recently recruited allies include Iraqi Hezbollah members. All are joined in a Chalabi-dominated Supreme Shia Council, similar to a sectarian Lebanese model. "sooner rather than later," the Iraqi observer says, "Moqtada al Sadr is going to be killed. That willl leave tens, hundreds of thousands of his supporters looking for a new leader. If Ahmed plays the role of victim, he can take on that role. His dream has always been to be a sectarian Shia leader." Chalabi is well placed to interfere with the US plans for handing over power. "People realize that Ahmed is a gambler, prepared to bring it all down," says the observer, "and this raid may not be at all to his detriment." Formerly the US's "golden boy" in Iraq, described by one Bush official as "Iraq's George Washington," Chalabi is now in extreme disfavor with the Americans. "You can piss on Chalabi," Bush remarked to Jordan's King Abdullah some months ago.
Chalabi is particularly at odds with venerable Iraqi politician Adnan Pachachi, foreign minister forty years ago in the revolutionary government of General Abdul Karim Qassim, and now a hot tip for post-June 30 president. "He should go home and play bridge," Chalabi snaps at mention of the rival's name. Pachachi indulgently dismisses Chalabi as "articulate, but not wise -- I've told him to his face, 'Ahmed, you're too clever by half.'" But regardless of his status with the Americans, Chalabi has built a power base in Iraq, partially funded with the $27 million given to him by the US, that will stand him in good stead for years. His power base extends through Iraq's business and political sectors; Chalabi was able to seize many of Hussein's intelligence files shortly after the March 2003 invasion, which will prove useful in controlling opponents. He has established himself as a power broker among the Shia, as well as maintaining his foreign connections with a few diehard neoconservatives in the Pentagon and in right-wing think tanks, who are still insisting that he should have been installed in power in Baghdad by the US a year ago, as well as in Tehran.
As head of the Iraqi Governing Council's economic and finance committee, Chalabi has been able to install his relatives or friends as the minister of oil, the minister of finance, the central bank governor, the trade minister, the head of the trade bank and the managing director of Iraq's largest commercial bank. These connections reportedly have allowed firms controlled by his allies to make millions in government contracts. He was given control of the entire archive of the Hussein regime's secret documents, as well as the so-called de-Baathification process. The powers of the De-Baathification Commission, which Chalabi chairs, are so wide-ranging that it is often called a government within the government. The commission singled out tens of thousands of former Baath Party members to be fired from their government jobs and has allowed Chalabi to replace them with his followers. It oversees educational reform, tracks down Hussein's funds stashed in foreign banks and compiles lists of pro-Hussein businessmen who are then blacklisted and banned from government contracting. His nephew Salem Chalabi is in charge of the war-crimes tribunal that is planning to try Hussein and other top former regime officials. His personal militia, paid for almost entirely with US funds, has become the best-financed and best-armed Iraqi force in Baghdad. His US allies -- ranging from Vice President Dick Cheney to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, State Department official John Bolton and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle -- relied heavily on Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress to produce evidence about Hussein's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. This information formed the central justification behind the US invasion of Iraq. Much of the evidence eventually proved false, and some U.S. officials now conclude that it was fabricated, presumably by Chalabi's US-funded organization of spies, exiles and hangers-on.
Chalabi's connections to the most hardline elements in Iran, particularly the intelligence officers of the Revolutionary Guards, are longstanding and still flourish today. Chalabi's fusion of business and politics is very much in the family tradition. Until the 1958 military coup swept away the monarchy that had ruled Iraq under British direction since the 1920s, the Chalabis were probably the richest family in the country. The founder of the family fortunes, Ahmed's great-grandfather, had been the tax "farmer" (i.e. he collected taxes at a profit) of Kadimiah, a town near Baghdad. The Iraqi historian Hanna Batatu describes him as "a very harsh man, [who] kept a bodyguard of armed slaves and had a special prison at his disposal. When he died the people of Kadimiah heaved a sigh of relief." His son flourished in the good graces of the British, while the next in line, Ahmed's father, prospered by bailing out the racing debts of a powerful member of the royal family, earning high political office thereby, and leveraging that position into lucrative business arrangements. Ahmed's uncle meanwhile rose to be the most powerful banker in the country. As Batatu notes: "...by translating economic power into political influence, and political influence into economic power, the Chalabis climbed from one level of wealth to another." However, when the 1958 revolution swept their Iraqi wealth away, the Chalabis quickly put down roots in Lebanon. Ahmed and his brothers married into powerful families in the Lebanese Shia community. "They become so Lebanese that they started pronouncing their name Shalabi instead of Chalabi," says another former Iraqi exile. "Lebanese don't pronounce a hard Ch sound."
By 1970 he had graduated from MIT, collected a Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and returned to teach at the renowned American University of Beirut, where he attracted attention as "a walking encyclopedia." In 1977 he moved to Jordan and founded the Petra Bank. A decade later, Petra had grown to be the second largest bank in the country, with links to other Chalabi family banks and investment companies in Beirut, Geneva and Washington. The bank introduced Visa cards to Jordan, along with ATMs and other innovative technology. Ahmed himself was one of the most influential businessmen in the country, esteemed by local entrepreneurs for his readiness to issue credit, and enjoying close links to powerful members of the royal family. As long as no outsider got to look at the books, everything was fine. On August 2, 1989, however the Jordanian banking authorities took over Petra on the grounds that when all Jordanian banks were told to deposit 30% of their foreign exchange with the central bank, Petra had failed to come up with the money. Ahmed left the country two weeks later, announcing that he was going "on holiday," although rumors persist in the middle east that he had crossed the Syrian border in the trunk of his friend Tamara Daghistani's car. Meanwhile his brothers' banks in Geneva and Beirut had already gone under. In April, 1992, Chalabi was tried in his absence along with 47 associates, found guilty, and sentenced to 22 years jail on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation. However, because the trial had been in front of a military court under Jordan's martial law, international law prevented his extradition.
Chalabi's explanation of the Petra Bank debacle is that the bank was destroyed by Jordanian officials working with Saddam Hussein, who feared Chalabi as a possible rival for power. The prosecution, conviction and sentencing of Ahmed Chalabi was an act of political spite. Jordanian officials wax furious at Chalabi's claim that he was framed. "The collapse was due to Chalabi's mismanagement of the bank and the misuse of its assets," says one senior banking official. "He ran it as his private piggy bank." There may be a particle of truth in Chalabi's claim -- the prime minister at the time of the takeover was known for his deep and profitable relationship with Saddam, and Chalabi was indeed a critic of the Iraqi dictator -- but it is also beside the point, according to the Counterpunch investigation. Despite Chalabi's claims that Petra was "solvent and growing," an Arthur Andersen audit of Petra's finances show that, in Andrew Cockburn's words, "Petra was rotten to the core in large part because of 'transactions with parties related to the former management of the Bank' (i.e. the Lebanese and Swiss banks managed by Chalabi's brothers, which had already gone broke). Overall, instead of the $40 million or so net balance depicted in Chalabi's version of the books, Petra had a deficit of over $215 million, which the accountants indicated had 'the potential' to grow to $350 million." Jordan could ill afford to pay for Petra's mismanagement and theft; one Jordanian diplomat says it took all the aid that country received from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries for two years to settle the Petra financial mess. Chalabi insists that "after the takeover, all depositors were paid in full," a statement of amazing chutzpah given that he skipped town and left others to clean up the mess and pay the bills. Petra's finances included $72 million in fictitious accounts with banks, accounts that didn't exist. Elsewhere, money had been diverted to private Chalabi accounts, or had evaporated in bad loans to other Chalabi- owned companies, such as the $15 million that disappeared with the Rimal company, or the roughly $14 million that had been spent on "personal expenses" for Chalabi and various members of his family. Jordanian investigators believe that, in all, Chalabi managed to steal or divert nearly $1.5 billion. "Ahmed thought he would never be tried and convicted," one former associate recalls. "I remember him saying 'they don't dare sentence me, I've got members of the royal family on the payroll.'" Chalabi still faces incarceration if he sets foot inside Jordan.
Chalabi took partial revenge on his Jordanian tormentors by fomenting a December 1991 60 Minutes story accusing King Hussein of colluding with Saddam, but by then he was immersed in politics carving out a leading role in the anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition. "Ahmed once said to me 'I built up an empire of 44 companies around the world with my brain,'" recalls an associate from that period. "He said 'that was very difficult. Politics is very easy.' He believes that politics is about money, that politics is a business." Chalabi found ready support in the first Bush administration. "The United States is prepared to allocate substantial sums for the Iraqi opposition," he confided to an opposition activist soon after the 1991 war. "We should go for that money." Before long, he had secured CIA funding for a new opposition group: the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC was in theory an umbrella organization with a collective leadership, but Chalabi, those who have worked with him agree, is not a team player. "He always has to be in charge," one Iraqi politician says. "I remember a meeting in London where Hani Fekaki [one of the founders of the Baath party who later fled into exile and opposition] told Chalabi: 'Ahmed, in your heart, there is a little Saddam.'" The Bush officials liked Chalabi's talents as an organizer, and they especially liked the fact that he had no power base inside or outside Iraq. Hence, as Frank Anderson, then head of the CIA's operations directorate's near east division, once said, Chalabi "was not a threat to anybody. He was acceptable as an office manager. So his weakness was a benefit."
Another benefit was his money. One former covert operator happily recalled the inaugural meeting of the Iraqi National Congress in Vienna, Austria in June 1992, which was wholly, if secretly, funded by the CIA: "There wasn't a single person there who didn't believe he was paying for it all out of money he had embezzled from the Petra Bank!" Cockburn asked one investigator who had spent years probing the Petra wreckage if anyone from the US government had ever queried him on the true facts of the fraud. "No, not once," he answered, adding that journalists had also steered clear of the ugly truths about Chalabi's banking career. "He doesn't want colleagues, only employees," says one former INC associate. "And he prefers to bring in outsiders who can't work independently of him." As an example, this Iraqi opposition veteran cites INC official Zaab Sethna, an American of Pakistani origin, and Francis Brooke, Chalabi's Washington lobbyist. During last year's war, Brooke, a fundamentalist Christian, told Harper's Magazine that he would support the elimination of Saddam, "the human Satan," even if every single Iraqi were killed in the process. It took a few years for the CIA high command at Langley to grasp the fact that their "office manager" was not so easy to control. Funded by the agency, Chalabi ensconced himself in the segment of northern Iraq that was controlled by the Kurds, together with a small staff and recruited an armed militia. In March 1995 he concocted an elaborate scheme to bribe tribal leaders in and around the northern city of Mosul into rebelling against Saddam. "That's the way Lebanese politics works -- through bribery and corruption," says Bob Baer, who, as CIA station chief in northern Iraq at the time, supported the plan. "People forget that Ahmed's really a Levantine, he learned business and politics in Beirut." The plan fizzled. The tribal leaders pocketed Chalabi's money and stayed home. His friends in Iranian intelligence, whom he was hosting in Kurdistan, had promised a simultaneous offensive in southern Iraq, but they stayed home too. A military offensive by Chalabi's small militia and some Kurdish allies petered out after a couple of days.
Back in Washington, the CIA was furious that Chalabi had acted without orders, and spitefully leaked the news that he was on their payroll, causing a furor in northern Iraq. The following year, a quarrel between the two main Kurdish parties led to an appeal by one side to Hussein for help. As Iraqi forces entered the Kurdish city of Irbil, they hunted down and massacred INC supporters who had been left in the city. Those who managed to escape were eventually brought to the US. Discarded by his old patrons at the CIA, Chalabi found new allies among the right-wing neoconservatives, for whom the destruction of Hussein and the co-option of Iraq in a reordered Middle East emerged as a major objective in the mid-1990s. "Of course they liked him," says another veteran of the Iraqi opposition who now, in Baghdad, nervously entreat interviewers not to quote them by name. "He is the quintessential anti-Arab, anti-anything that the Arab world believes in." Chalabi's willingness, unique among Arab politicians, to seek Israeli support -- further bolstered his position on Capitol Hill. Last year, Chalabi's Petra associate Abdul Huda Farouki's newly founded security firm Erinys won a plum $80 million contract to guard Iraqi oil installations, employing members of Chalabi's private militia for the purpose, as well as the son of a close Chalabi confidante as chief executive and his nephew Salem Chalabi as firm's counsel. Erinys' sister concern Nour USA meanwhile garnered $327 million deal to equip the new Iraqi army -- at least one Kuwaiti businessman anxious to get an army contract was told by an American official at the CPA that he would have to go through Ahmed Chalabi -- but outraged protests from the losing bidders, coupled with the odor of the Chalabi connection, eventually forced cancellation of the deal.
Last November he demonstrated his influence and connections by orchestrating the removal of Mohammed Jibouri, executive director of the state oil marketing agency (SOMO), a key position that controls Iraq's oil sales. Jibouri's offense had been to inform the giant oil trading firm Glencore that it could not trade Iraqi oil due to its behavior while trading oil with the former regime. Within days, the official had been placed on an enforced year's leave of absence and ordered to vacate both his office and his apartment in the oil ministry complex. "Chalabi was absolutely responsible for getting rid of Jibouri," says a well-connected oil trader. "Now Nabil (Mousawi, Chalabi's proxy on the Governing Council) travels with the minister to OPEC conferences and is trying to make oil deals." "I asked Ibrahim Bahr Uloom [the oil minister] why he was taking Mousawi to OPEC," says an old friend of Uloom. "He said, 'Ahmed forced me.'" Several well placed oil industry sources have confirmed that Mousawi has approached at least two international oil companies with offers to represent them in Iraq (the offers were rebuffed) and has himself been trading Iraqi oil. Chalabi insists that he is not presently engaged in any private business dealings in Iraq. Many in the region have a different impression, including oil traders using unofficial ports that have sprung up down the Shatt al-Arab from Basra. Oil minister Ibrahim Bahr Uloom is considered a close ally of Chalabi's, but he is only one of a number of key officials widely regarded by Iraqis to be in the INC chief's pocket. Finance minister Kamil Gailani, formerly a waiter in the Sinjan restaurant in downtown Amman, is viewed as another Chalabi acolyte, as is the head of the central bank and the bosses of the two leading commercial banks. Nephew Salem Chalabi, who has nworked closely with free market fundamentalist fanatics from the CPA on framing crucial occupation edicts, is now overseeing preparations for the trial of Saddam Hussein. These connections, together with Chalabi's own chairmanship of the Governing Council's finance committee, facilitate such maneuvers as Gailani's current efforts to recruit a western law firm to advise on renegotiating Iraq's overseas debt.
British and American lawyers mulling a bid for the contract are in no doubt that it is Chalabi who will be supervising the renegotiation, nor are they unaware of the moneymaking potential of the process. Some officials in Washington are no less perturbed by his efforts to get what one calls "his grubby little hands" on pools of cash secretly stashed abroad by Saddam Hussein. "That money belongs to the Iraqi people," says the official, "not Ahmed Chalabi." Chalabi is also recruiting law firms to investigate the UN oil-for-food scandal, which, like Saddam's intelligence files, should provide him with a trove of useful information. This is not the first time that Chalabi's sources of finance have attracted attention in Washington. In 2002, US State Department auditors probing what had happened to a US subsidy of Chalabi's INC queried the lack of accounting for the large sums spent on an "Intelligence Collection Program." Chalabi refused a more precise accounting on the grounds that his agents' lives were at stake. But according to one former Chalabi associate, at least some of the intelligence money had actually been spent in Iran, which would have been a good reason for keeping the accounts a little fuzzy. This former associate recalls, that, in the late '90s, "Ahmed opened an INC office in Tehran, spending the Americans' money, and he joked to me that 'the Americans are breaching their embargo on Iran.'" At the time, Chalabi let it be known just who his friends were in Tehran. "When I met him in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence," recalls Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector. "He said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence." Had Ritter made the trip (the CIA refused him permission), he would have been dealing with Chalabi's chums in Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence, a faction which regarded Saddam Hussein with a venomous hatred spawned both by the bloody war of the 1980s and the Iraqi dictator's continuing support of the terrorist Mojaheddin Khalq group.
They had a clear interest in fomenting American paranoia about Hussein, which makes them the most likely authors of at least one carefully crafted piece of forged intelligence regarding Hussein's nuclear program -- an operation in which a Chalabi-sponsored defector played a central role. Early in 1995, an "Action Team" of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency descended on the offices of the Iraqi nuclear program in Baghdad. They had with them a 20 page document that apparently originated from inside "Group 4," the department that had been responsible for designing the Iraqi bomb. The stationary, page numbering, and stamps all appeared authentic, according to one senior member of the Iraqi bomb team. "It was a 'progress report,'" he recalls, "about 20 pages, on the work in Group 4 departments on the results of their continued work after 1991. It referred to results of experiments on the casting of the hemispheres (ie the bomb core of enriched uranium) with some crude diagrams." As evidence that Iraq was successfully pursuing a nuclear bomb in defiance of sanctions and the inspectors, it was damning. The document was almost faultless, but not quite. The scientists noticed that some of the technical descriptions used terms that would only be used by an Iranian. "Most notable," says one scientist, "was the use of the term 'dome'--'Qubba' in Iranian, instead of 'hemisphere'--'Nisuf Kura' in Arabic." In other words, the document had to have been originally written in Farsi by an Iranian scientist and then translated into Arabic.
Tom Killeen, of the Iraq Nuclear Verification Office at IAEA headquarters in Vienna, confirms this account of the incident. "After a thorough investigation the documents were determined not to be authentic and the matter was closed." Asked how the IAEA obtained the document in the first place, Killeen replied, "Khidir Hamza." Hamza was the former member of the Iraqi weapons team who briefly headed the bomb design group before being relegated to a sinecure posting (his effectiveness as a nuclear engineer was limited by his pathological fear of radioactivity and consequent refusal to enter any building where experiments were underway.) In 1994 he made his way to Ahmed Chalabi's headquarters in Iraqi Kurdistan, and eventually arrived in Washington. where he carved out a career based on an imaginative claim to have been "Saddam's Bombmaker." As late as the summer of 2002 Hamza was being escorted by Chalabi's Washington representative Francis Brooke to the Pentagon to brief Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on details of Saddam's allegedly burgeoning nuclear weapons program. There is no indication that he himself ever visited Iran. Asked whether he had been receiving intelligence from the Iranians, Chalabi, despite his 1997 assertion to Scott Ritter, rejects the charge as "an absolute falsehood." Judging by his frequent visits to Iran, and the warm manner in which his underlings discuss the ayatollahs' regime, Chalabi links with Tehran are still strong. No less important are his ties with the neocons in Washington, who still maintain that the big mistake of the occupation was not putting Ahmed in charge right away. Simultaneously, his championship of Shi'ite groups in Iraq becomes ever more assertive -- his newspaper has recently been campaigning against Adnan Pachachi for allegedly excluding Moqtada al-Sadr from the Governing Council. One well-connected Iraqi says that Chalabi "will play the Shia extremist card for all it is worth. He's quite prepared to break Iraq apart if it serves his purpose. He's really dangerous now." (Counterpunch, San Francisco Chronicle)
May 21: The Washingtonian investigates whether the Washington Post played a role in creating Ahmad Chalabi's veneer of credibility. In November 2003, the Post's Style section printed a long, flattering portrait of the "passionate and relentless" Chalabi by influential DC maven Sally Quinn, focusing on his relationship with Washington Republicans and the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz. While other news outlets, most prominently Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, ran articles exposing Chalabi's darker side, the Post was relentless in printing op-ends in support of Chalabi. Many op-eds for the Post were written by Jim Hoagland, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a close friend of Chalabi since 1972. The Post denies any sympathy for Chalabi, but the op-ed pages prove otherwise. (Washingtonian)
May 21: Four suspects have been arrested in connection with the beheading of American Nicholas Berg; two are later released. The four were taken during a raid in Baghdad. "Coalition forces conducted a raid to capture four individuals suspected of involvement in the Nicholas Berg assassination," says military spokesman General Mark Kimmitt. "Four persons were detained and questioned. Two personnel were released and the other two are still being questioned. We may find out that they have no association with the murder but we will continue to question them for some period of time until we are convinced they are innocent." American officials have said they believe Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on US troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaeda, personally carried out Berg's killing, though evidence of al-Zarqawi's participation is inconclusive at best. Kimmitt says he does not know who the latest suspects were or where they came from. "I don't know their prior affiliations or prior organizations," he says. "We have some intelligence that would suggest they have knowledge, perhaps some culpability." Earlier, an Iraqi security official said four people were arrested one week ago in the killing of Berg, and that the group that killed him was led by a relative of Saddam Hussein. It was unclear whether Kimmitt and the Iraqi security official, who requested anonymity, were referring to different groups of suspects. The Iraqi official said the suspects were former members of Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen paramilitary organization. Iraqi police arrested them on May 14 in a house in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad, he said. The province includes Tikrit, Saddam's hometown. Another Iraqi official confirmed there were arrests in the Berg case, but would not comment further. The official also declined to be named. The group that was involved in the killing of Berg was led by Yasser al-Sabawi, a nephew of Saddam Hussein, according to the Iraqi security official. He said American intelligence had asked Iraqi authorities to hand over the suspects, but they were still in Iraqi hands. Al-Sabawi was not among those arrested, the Iraqi official said. (Chicago Sun-Times [cached Google copy])
May 21: New reports surface detailing prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. According to the report, some prisoners were ridden like animals, fondled by female soldiers, forced to curse their religion and required to retrieve their food from toilets. More photos and shots from a video also surface, all in articles printed originally in the Washington Post. The Post says the material, including secret sworn statements from prisoners, comes from evidence being assembled from investigations into possible criminal charges against US soldiers. The photographs depict a soldier apparently preparing to strike a shackled detainee, a hooded inmate collapsed with his wrists handcuffed to the railing and a baton-wielding soldier appearing to order a naked detainee covered in a brown substance to walk a straight line, though his ankles are shackled. Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick is the soldier in the photo of a naked man covered with a brown substance standing with his arms outstretched and his ankles shackled. Frederick is also shown in a video clip on the Post Web site, watching while another soldier apparently hits a detainee in the face and then forces a second detainee to take a position on all fours. The Post has obtained hundreds more pictures and several digital videos of the abuse. In one photo, a cornered inmate is cowering as a soldier tries to restrain a large black dog with both hands. In another, a soldier appears to be kneeling on naked detainees. In secret testimony to military investigators in mid-January, detainees said they were beaten and humiliated by American soldiers working the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Detainees told investigators they were forced to denounce Islam or be force-fed pork or liquor, required to masturbate in front of female soldiers, threatened with rape, and made to walk on all their hands and knees and bark like dogs. "They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen," says one detainee. (AP/Akron Beacon-Journal)
May 21: Sergeant Samuel Provance, who has recently spoken to the American media concerning the abuses he witnessed at Abu Ghraib, has been punished for speaking out by the military. Provance has had his security clearance stripped, his record flagged (meaning he cannot be promoted or singled out for awards), and has been warned he may be prosecuted because his comments were "not in the national interest." Provance says he was told he will face administrative action for failing to report what he knew at the time and for failing to take steps to stop the abuse. "I see it as an effort to intimidate Sgt. Provance and any other soldier whose conscience is bothering him, and who wants to come forward and tell what really happened at Abu Ghraib," says his attorney Scott Horton. Provance says that the military has taken steps to cover up the extent of the prison abuses. "There's definitely a cover-up," Provance said earlier. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet. ...What I was surprised at was the silence," Provance continued. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something." (ABC News [cached Google copy])
May 21: A US official confirms that a previously undisclosed US military interrogation facility near Baghdad International Airport does indeed exist, contradicting earlier denials from Pentagon officials. The official insists that the site was run in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and all detainees were afforded their rights under that international document. "That's not to say somebody didn't get their head dunked in the water," he adds. US Special Forces participated in running the site, he adds. It is not clear if this facility is still being used, the senior official says. The Pentagon is investigating allegations of prisoner abuses at this and other similar facilities. Iraqis interrogated at the site were in a broad category of "more senior than the average security detainee," but none were in the deck of cards that depicted the most senior members of Saddam Hussein's regime. The existence of such a facility has long been rumored and has been the subject of recent media reports. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the coalition spokesman in Baghdad, denies reports of abusive interrogation techniques being used at the site, saying that "any suggestion that torture is used is false and offensive." He also adds that "coalition forces inside Iraq adhere to the Geneva Conventions in the conduct of detention and interrogation operations." (CNN)
May 21: Busloads of Iraqi prisoners Friday have left Abu Ghraib prison as part of a planned release, a U.S.-led coalition official says. General Mark Kimmitt says that 454 inmates have already left and 394 are to be released in a week. The new US commander of detention operations in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, said he plans to reduce the number of prisoners in Abu Ghraib to about 2,500, according to a coalition spokesman. Miller took over for Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was relieved her of duty January 17, 2004, a day after the coalition military announced an investigation into allegations of abuse in the prison. Since February, about 3,000 Iraqis have been recommended for release and are going through the process. (CNN)
May 21: The bodies of at least five Iraqi prisoners who died under mysterious circumstances at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention camps were not autopsied to determine the cause of death, a direct violation of Geneva Convention standards. Among the cases is a prisoner who died, the records show, after "gasping for air." Another detainee who had "prior head injuries" fell out of a hospital bed and struck his head on the floor. One prisoner began having "chest pains and collapsed." The deaths, all characterized as having "undetermined" causes, raise more serious questions about the treatment of detainees in the custody of US soldiers at Abu Ghraib and other combat-zone facilities, say US lawmakers and human-rights organizations. Harsh interrogation techniques by US soldiers are being investigated in the deaths of five other prisoners. Autopsies were done on those deaths; three of the prisoners died after being suffocated, the autopsies show. One case involved the November killing of an Iraqi general who was smothered in a sleeping bag after a military-intelligence officer sat on his chest, records show. In the wake of the newspaper's article, members of Congress are calling on the Pentagon to provide more information about the handling of prisoner deaths -- and whether the accused will ever face criminal proceedings. Top military officials might be pressed for responses as early as today in a meeting of the House Armed Services Committee. "These are horrendous allegations," says Democratic representative Vic Snyder. "These are different issues than what have been the focus so far of public discussion."
Democrat Loretta Sanchez, another committee member, is seeking hearings while rounding up signatures for a letter to the Pentagon, she says, requesting more answers about "these awful issues" involving detainee deaths. Republican senator Ben Nelson, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says he will be demanding answers from the Pentagon: "I want to get to the bottom of this issue or the top of it. If autopsies were waived or not considered, it raises further questions about how high this goes." The five deaths in which autopsies were not performed are among at least 27 detainee fatalities under internal Pentagon review, records show. Four of the prisoners died last year, two at Abu Ghraib. The fifth death occurred this year at the Camp Cropper detention facility near Baghdad, records show. The earliest known death involving no forensic investigation occurred August 3, 2003, at Camp Cropper, but no details were provided. "since no forensic examination of the body was conducted, no greater clarity as to the cause of death is expected," the report notes. On August 20 at Abu Ghraib, a prisoner was taken to medical personnel, "gasping for air," a document shows. Emergency medical treatment was administered, according to the document, but medics could not save the prisoner: "The investigation was closed." A November case involved a detainee who was rushed to medical personnel after complaining of chest pain and then went into cardiac arrest: "No autopsy was conducted." In December at a detention facility in Mosul, an inmate was found "unresponsive by guards conducting routine marking wake-up calls. The body did not exhibit any signs of abuse or foul play," according to the document. "Investigation was closed." In January at Camp Cropper, an Iraqi being treated for chest pains "fell out of his bed, struck his head on the floor and lapsed into a coma. A CT scan and surgery revealed inter-cranial bleeding and signs of prior head injuries." Six prisoner deaths that did undergo autopsies were classified as involving "natural causes." Most were listed as heart attacks. One of the cases mentioned the cause of death as "inflammation of the abdomen."
A veteran military lawyer said the incidents without autopsies raise many issues. "What were the exigencies this organization was operating under that prevented them from conducting autopsies?"asks Pat Gallaher, a retired Marine prosecutor who says military law-enforcement personnel typically order forensic examinations in such cases. "What law-enforcement and medical personnel were available?" United Nations and Geneva Convention standards for handling war prisoners call for official inquiries into prisoner deaths. United Nations rules mandate that autopsies be performed in suspicious deaths. "That would seem to be covered under international law," says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "The investigative files reveal deeply disturbing practices, which we hope the Pentagon will explain promptly and criminally pursue those responsible," he says. Amnesty International released a statement Thursday, saying: "We have written to the US government on numerous cases of deaths of detainees held by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The official response has been inadequate, and the evidence now uncovered by the Denver Post has greatly heightened our concern." (Denver Post)
May 21: Senior military lawyers began objecting to the use of interrogation techniques on prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as early as 2002, according to the Pentagon. The lawyers objected to the use of techniques that were harsher than permitted under standard military doctrine. As their protests "became more apparent" in late 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ended the use of such tactics pending the outcome of a comprehensive review that stretched from mid-January 2003 to mid-April. In April 2003, Rumsfeld approved new guidelines that met with the lawyers' approval. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard says his government is pressing the Pentagon to respond to allegations that two Australian terror suspects, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, were abused while in US detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The two men have been held without charge for more than two years at Guantanamo Bay. Larry Di Rita, chief spokesman for Rumsfeld, confirms the basic timeline of the Guantanamo Bay interrogation policy but said he could not reveal specifics about the interrogation techniques used there. "It's highly sensitive information," he says. "Everybody [was] mindful of the uniqueness -- it was new, it was complicated, and it was balancing the need for intelligence versus the need to do it right. It was a hard darn problem because we did have known al-Qaeda [members] down there, and known al-Qaeda who were believed to have information involving attacks on the United States." Di Rita described the interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay earlier in 2002 as "non-doctrinal," a slippery term meaning that the tactics were not in accordance with the military doctrine written to apply to interrogations of prisoners of war, not terrorists. The military lawyers believed that some of those techniques went too far, other officials confirm. They also questioned the policy of not applying the Geneva Conventions at Guantanamo. Di Rita stresses that military commanders at Guantanamo Bay faced a difficult situation because the individuals held there -- mostly Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured during the war in Afghanistan in 2001 -- were considered terrorists and could have time-sensitive information. "You had intelligence officials that were tugging in a direction that might have been different from lawyers, and that's fair," Di Rita says. "This is a process that involves, by definition, some tension."
Adding urgency was the suspicion by US intelligence officials that one prisoner at Guantanamo may have had information about a planned future attack on the United States. The prisoner has been identified as Mohamed al-Qahtani, who US officials believe may have planned to be the 20th September 11 hijacker. Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay wanted to use harsher methods against that prisoner in late 2002. Military lawyers objected to at least some of those proposed methods. "As that anxiety became more apparent," Rumsfeld ordered the Pentagon's top civilian lawyer, Jim Haynes, to create an internal working group to examine the issues more fully, a senior Pentagon lawyer says. Officials refuse to say whether the prisoner believed to have information about a pending attack on the United States ultimately provided information used to pre-empt the attack. The senior official said "no extraordinary" interrogation techniques were used against al-Qahtani. Di Rita says the Rumsfeld guidelines approved for Guantanamo Bay in April 2003 are secret and will not be made public. The Pentagon has not been clear in public statements about events related to interrogation policies and practices at Guantanamo Bay, Di Rita says, because it has not fully recreated a timeline that reaches back to January 2002, when interrogations started at Guantanamo Bay. Rumsfeld has ordered Pentagon officials to systematically review how detainee and interrogation guidelines evolved, he adds. (Chicago Sun-Times [cached Google copy])
May 21: Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni tells 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft that staying the Bush administration's course in Iraq is not a reasonable option: "The course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course." Zinni goes on to accuse top Pentagon officials of "dereliction of duty." The current situation in Iraq was destined to happen, says Zinni, because planning for the war and its aftermath has been flawed all along. "There has been poor strategic thinking in this...poor operational planning and execution on the ground," says Zinni, who served as commander-in-chief of the US Central Command from 1997 to 2000. He blames the poor planning on the civilian policymakers in the administration known as neoconservatives who saw the invasion as a way to stabilize the region and support Israel. He believes these people, who include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, have hijacked US foreign policy. "They promoted it and pushed [the war]...even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs. Then they should bear the responsibility," Zinni says. Zinni writes in his new book, Battle Ready, co-written with Tom Clancy, that the planning for the Iraq invasion was negligent: "In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility; at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption," he writes.
Zinni explains to Kroft, "I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and [in not] fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan." He still believes the situation is salvageable if the US can communicate more effectively with the Iraqi people and demonstrate a better image to them. The enlistment of the UN and other countries to participate in the mission is also crucial, he says. Without these things, says Zinni, "We are going to be looking for quick exits. I don't believe we're there now, and I wouldn't want to see us fail here." Also central to success in Iraq is more troops, from the U.S. and especially other countries, to control violence and patrol borders, he says. Zinni feels that undertaking the war with the minimum of troops paved the way for the security problems the US faces there now -- the violence Rumsfeld recently admitted he hadn't anticipated. "He should not have been surprised," says Zinni. "There were a number of people who before we even engaged in this conflict that felt strongly that we underestimated...the scope of the problems we would have in [Iraq]." The fact that no one in the administration has paid for the blunder irks Zinni. "But regardless of whose responsibility...it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up, and whose heads are rolling on this?" The interview is scheduled to air on May 23. (CBS/Talking Points Memo)
May 21: Presidential candidate John Kerry is weighing whether or not to delay accepting the Democratic Party's official nomination; such an action would allow Kerry to continue raising money in an attempt to offset the Bush campaign's huge monetary advantage. "We are looking at this and many other options very seriously because we won't fight with one hand behind our back," says Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. Both Kerry and Bush skipped public financing for the primaries, preferring to raise money for themselves outside the federal guidelines. Within the week, Kerry will bow to pressure from fellow Democrats and agree to accept the nomination at the Democratic convention in Boston on July 28 as planned. (MSNBC, MSNBC)
May 21: Michael Berg, whose son Nicholas was beheaded by Arabs, writes a heartbreaking op-ed for Britain's Guardian newspaper in which he blames the Bush administration and the Arabs who killed his son equally for his son's death. He writes, in part, "People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: 'Don't you blame the five men who killed him?' I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as in to it as they might have been. I am sure that they came to admire him. I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath on his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing. George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son, and he is the worse for it. George Bush, though a father himself, cannot feel my pain, or that of my family, or of the world that grieves for Nick, because he is a policymaker, and he doesn't have to bear the consequences of his acts. George Bush can see neither the heart of Nick nor that of the American people, let alone that of the Iraqi people his policies are killing daily. ...Even more than those murderers who took my son's life, I can't stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living.
"...George Bush's ineffective leadership is a weapon of mass destruction, and it has allowed a chain reaction of events that led to the unlawful detention of my son which immersed him in a world of escalated violence. Were it not for Nick's detention, I would have had him in my arms again. That detention held him in Iraq not only until the atrocities that led to the siege of Fallujah, but also the revelation of the atrocities committed in the jails in Iraq, in retaliation for which my son's wonderful life was put to an end. My son's work still goes on. Where there was one peacemaker before, I now see and have heard from thousands of peacemakers. Nick was a man who acted on his beliefs. We, the people of this world, now need to act on our beliefs. We need to let the evildoers on both sides of the Atlantic know that we are fed up with war. We are fed up with the killing and bombing and maiming of innocent people. We are fed up with the lies. Yes, we are fed up with the suicide bombers, and with the failure of the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to stop killing each other. We are fed up with negotiations and peace conferences that are entered into on both sides with preset conditions that preclude the outcome of peace. We want world peace now. Many have offered to pray for Nick and my family. I appreciate their thoughts, but I ask them to include in their prayers a prayer for peace. And I ask them to do more than pray. I ask them to demand peace now." (Guardian)
May 21: The Environmental Protection Agency ignores scientific data and accepted standards to endorse an air pollution regulation that will save the wood products industry hundreds of millions of dollars and add tremendous amounts of pollutants to the atmosphere. Citing a "balanced" approach to regulation that weighs costs to industry against environmental benefits, the EPA accepts a risk assessment generated by a chemical industry-funded think tank, and a novel legal approach recommended by a timber industry lawyer. The regulation is ushered through the agency by senior officials with previous ties to the timber and chemical industries. Environmental watchdog agencies say that the EPA is favoring industry profits and failing to protect the environment. "This rulemaking veers radically from standard scientific and regulatory practices," says David Michaels, an epidemiologist who was assistant Energy Secretary for environment, safety and health in the Clinton administration. Others say it may violate the Clean Air Act. The regulation addresses emissions of formaldehyde, a chemical used by plywood manufacturers and other industries. Exposure to formaldehyde may cause cancer and lead to nausea and eye, throat and skin irritation.
At the time the regulation was being drafted, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health disclosed new studies showing that exposure to formaldehyde might also cause leukemia in humans. The EPA rule, signed in February, did not mention the possible link to leukemia. Instead, it adopted a standard for exposure based on a cancer risk model developed by the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology. That assessment is about 10,000 times less stringent than the level previously used by the EPA in setting general standards for formaldehyde exposure. Many scientists consider the earlier EPA risk level to be outdated; Canada, for example, used the chemical institute model to help set its formaldehyde standard in 2000. The new EPA rule also breaks legal ground in the application of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. At that time, Congress required industry to reduce emissions of toxic pollutants to levels that could be achieved by the best available technology. But it permitted the EPA to spare entire categories of pollution sources from tough controls if all posed less than a one-in-a-million cancer risk. As the wood products regulation was being considered, it was clear the industry could not meet that test. Instead, the EPA created a new category of "low-risk" plants, putting the agency in the role of overseeing, plant by plant, which facilities endangered the public. The rule initially exempts eight wood products plants from controls on formaldehyde and other emissions. Ultimately, 147 or more of the 223 facilities nationwide could avoid the pollution-control requirements. The exemptions will save the industry as much as $66 million annually for about 10 years in potential emission control costs.
The idea of identifying low-risk plants was suggested to the EPA by a lawyer at the firm of Latham & Watkins, which represents timber interests. The EPA's top air pollution regulator, Jeffrey R. Holmstead, embraced the concept. He was already familiar with it. A former lawyer at Latham & Watkins himself, he had represented one of the nation's largest plywood producers and other companies seeking to limit pollution regulation. At the White House, Holmstead found an ally in John D. Graham, regulatory chief of the Office of Management and Budget. Graham had established the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which received funding from some of the companies that pushed the new EPA regulation. Graham came to OMB vowing to set new standards for cost-benefit analysis, transparency and reliance on sound science in regulatory decisions. "Public health should be the regulator's first priority," Graham writes. "However, when the health risks are speculative, it is OMB's job to ask whether the regulation will be good for consumers, workers and businesses. Consumers pay for burdensome regulations in the form of higher prices for homes and products while American jobs are placed at risk." Some agency veterans say the EPA's approach departs from past practices under both political parties.
"EPA decisions now have a consistent pattern: disregard for inconvenient facts, a tilt toward industry, and a penchant for secrecy," says Eric Schaeffer, a longtime EPA enforcement official who resigned in protest in 2002 and now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group. The proposal originally took shape during a February 2002 conference with Holmstead, EPA officials, and timber industry lobbyists. Environmental advocates were conspicuously absent. Holmstead has, throughout his career, sought to scale back environmental regulation of business and represented corporate clients seeking to minimize the effect of air pollution laws. As an associate White House counsel during the George H.W. Bush administration, he worked with Vice President Dan Quayle's Competitiveness Council, which pushed to reduce environmental and other regulation. After leaving government, he joined Latham & Watkins, where he represented chemical, semiconductor and other clients on environmental policy issues. In 1996, he worked with colleagues representing Georgia Pacific in a $35-million settlement with the EPA and Justice Department over alleged Clean Air Act violations. The firm later was among those backing the proposal to exempt low-risk timber-product plants from formaldehyde controls. Federal conflict-of-interest rules bar appointees from working on particular matters, such as contracts, grants or claims, that will have a financial effect on the appointee or his family. This also applies to matters involving a former employer for one year from the appointee's departure date. But rule-making, which has a broad effect, is exempted from this prohibition. "I meet with hundreds of outside groups representing a wide variety of interests, and it hardly seems right to penalize" past associates "by not allowing them to meet with me," Holmstead says. "It would be very hard to get people who are knowledgeable and qualified to do these jobs if they are unable to talk to people with whom they had affiliations in the private sector."
Graham, too, has past connections to the industries seeking to limit the regulation of formaldehyde. His office at OMB reviews and approves all new federal regulations. He had testified on behalf of an association of paper companies, including Georgia Pacific, before the Maine Board of Environmental Protection in a 1992 hearing on setting a risk level for carcinogenic pollutants. In addition, the timber company donated to Graham's Harvard Center for Risk Analysis in 1991, 1992, 1995 and 1998. The chemical industry's trade association contributed annually to Graham's risk center from 1994 to 1997, and in 1999 and 2001. The center relies on government and foundations as well as a wide range of industry for its funding. As the proposed rule worked its way through the EPA, career attorneys advised Holmstead that the exemption ran counter to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. A confidential March 2003 memo from a lawyer in the general counsel's office highlighted its legal vulnerability. The proposal "results in a regulatory approach equivalent to the one Congress specifically rejected" in 1990, reads the memo. "EPA would have a difficult time articulating any rational basis to defend such a ... scheme."
Holmstead concluded that the EPA did have the authority to take such an approach, but lawmakers disagree. "I don't have any doubt but that is a way to get around the policy which we worked hard to achieve," says former senator David Durenberger, a Republican. Democratic representative Henry Waxman declares the timber products exemption "directly contrary to our intent." The rule has also prompted objections from state regulators. "It's a serious concern," says Bill Becker, executive director of two national organizations of state and local air pollution control officials. "We learned between 1970 and 1990 that a risk-based approach is totally ineffective in regulating toxics. The analytical tools are not sophisticated enough today to make that determination with confidence." The EPA also chose to ignore several new studies indicating that formaldehyde is strongly linked to leukemia in humans. An internal EPA calculation showed that taking the new studies into consideration would keep the formaldehyde risk assessment close to the long-standing EPA level. Some staffers contended the agency should wait before finalizing a rule. By using the old standards, the EPA could allow 147 plants to qualify for the exemption; under standards using the new studies, only about 90 plants would qualify. The EPA decided that the new studies would be ignored. "The question is: Are you going to effectively throw away all the work that's been done...and say we always have to err on the side of any possible uncertainty?" Holmstead asks. "At the end of the day, we have to make decisions based on the best available science." Many scientists, regulatory law experts and environmentalists insist the EPA should have taken the new human research studies into account when it did its risk assessment. The industry and others counter that unresolved questions about the studies made it premature to use them as the basis for regulation. "The public should not assume a cause-and-effect relationship when only an association is suggested," says Betsy Natz, executive director of the Formaldehyde Council Inc., a trade group. In editing the new rule, Graham's office and senior EPA officials made only passing reference to the new scientific studies and rejected any specific discussion of them. The 503-page document contains no mention of a link to leukemia. (Los Angeles Times)
May 21: Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, wins a 20- to 25-minute standing ovation after its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the longest such ovation in Cannes history. The film is predicted to win numerous awards at the festival. (Chicago Sun-Times/Left Coaster)

"[T]he definition of a conspiracy nut is someone who reports the news a year before the New York Times." -- Greg Palast, May 21, 2004, quoted in Buzzflash

Back to May 2004 | On to May 2004: Week Four

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 2004:

Week Three

Powell says US will leave Iraq if asked

Three Army divsions officially unready for combat

Rumsfeld's SAP at heart of Abu Ghraib scandal; Copper Green

Investigation documents the AARP's seduction by the GOP into supporting devastating Medicare legislation

Abuse documented at Guantanamo Bay prison facility

Rumsfeld proven to have authorized torture during interrogations

US and Britain block investigation into finances of arms runner Victor Bout

Powell says CIA misled about Iraqi WMDs

White House believes a terrorist attack on Washington will happen before the elections

HAVA exposed

Calls for investigation of links between Riggs Bank, the Bush family, and Riggs' laundering of terrorist funds

NBC refuses to allow footage of Bush to be used in a documentary because "unofficially, we don't think it makes the President look good"

Army may recall 6,500 retired soldiers to duty

Wolfowitz admits key errors in planning and says US forces will remain in Iraq indefinitely

Memos reveal legal steps taken to protect Bush officials from being charged with war crimes

More photos, of soldiers posing over an Iraqi beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators, released

Bush campaign accepts money from India, and outsources fundraising efforts to Indian call centers

Stories of children being tortured in Abu Ghraib surface

Confirmation that military intelligence officials directed the Abu Ghraib abuses

Delta Force soldiers accused of prisoner abuse

Proof that Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and White House lawyers authorized the abandonment of Geneva Conventions in regard to Iraqi and terrorist detainees

Former Centcom commander General Anthony Zinni harshly criticizes Iraq invasion, and says Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should resign

Investigation proves Bush administration errors led to North Korean nuclear capabilities; described as one of history's biggest diplomatic blunders

Chalabi on the run

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