THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

May 2004:

Week Three

 

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)

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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,