October 2006: Week One: This Far and No Further

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Secret Joint Chiefs report predicts more violence, chaos in Iraq

October 1: A secret report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, compiled in late May 2006 but just now being revealed to the public, stands in stark contrast to the Bush administration's relentlessly upbeat characterizations of Iraq. Bush said on May 22, for example, "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat." However, the JCS report paints a much bleaker and more realistic portrait of the realities in Iraq. Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year." The report shows a relatively steady gain in attacks on US and coalition forces from May 2003 through May 2006, peaking at 3,500 a month in May (June 2006 saw over 4,500 attacks.) The report also predicts increasing problems with crude oil production, electricity production, and political progress. To counter the secret JCS report, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, as required by law, that contradicted the JCS assessment. The Pentagon's report confidently predicted that "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007." It is now clear that the Pentagon, and the Bush administration, has been consistently lying about Iraq. This is borne out not only by the two wildly contradictory reports, but from privately circulated memos, reports and internal debates that have consistently voiced grave concerns about the US's ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation. The recently released NIE from April 2006 presents a similar contrast to Bush's rosy lies.
On June 18, 2003, General Jay Garner told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "We've made three tragic decisions" concerning Iraq. "three terrible mistakes." The first, says Garner, was his successor Paul Bremer's decision to ban up to 50,000 Ba'athists from government jobs. The second was the forced dismantling of the Iraqi military. Hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis were now at ends. Third, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the US administer the country in the short term. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people," Garner said. "You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people. There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around." Rumsfeld glared at Garner and said, "Well, I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are." Garner said again, "They're all reversible." But Rumsfeld was adamant. "We're not going to go back," he said. Later that day, Garner joined Rumsfeld in a meeting with Bush and other officials, including Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. Instead of discussing any mistakes, Garner simply told colorful tales of his time in Baghdad. Bush seemed satisfied. In December, 2005, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings. "You know, I don't know if I had that moment to live over again, I don't know if I'd do that or not," he replied. "But if I had done that -- and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn't have had a problem doing that -- but in my thinking, the door's closed. I mean, there's nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, 'Boy, I wonder why we didn't get rid of this guy sooner?'" Garner added, "They didn't see it coming. As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid."
By early 2004, National Security Council officials were privately expressing their concerns about the ability of the US military to counter the growing insurgency in Iraq. Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review. "If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one." Rice had made it clear that she had no authority over either Rumsfeld or the military, so Blackwill did not press the point. Still, he wondered why Bush had never asked for an explanation from the military. He wondered why he hadn't said to, say, General John Abizaid, "John, let's have another of these on Thursday and what I really want from you is please explain to me, let's take an hour and a half, your military strategy for victory." At the beginning of Bush's second term, Hadley, now Bush's national security advisor, said of the problems with the first term, "I give us a B-minus for policy development, and a D-minus for policy execution." Rice, now Secretary of State, sent her old friend Philip Zelikow to Iraq for a full report. On February 15, 2005, Zelikow gave Rice a 15-page memo. He said in part, "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change." The insurgency was "being contained militarily," but it was "quite active," leaving Iraqi civilians feeling "very insecure." US officials seemed locked down in the fortified Green Zone. "Mobility of coalition officials is extremely limited, and productive government activity is constrained." Zelikow was critical of the Baghdad-centered effort, noting that "the war can certainly be lost in Baghdad, but the war can only be won in the cities and provinces outside Baghdad." He summed up by saying that the US effort suffered because it lacked an articulated, comprehensive, unified policy.
Unbeknownst to many outside the highest echelons of power in the White House was the fact that Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and globetrotting powerbroker, wielded great influence on Bush's Iraq policy. "Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Cheney told Woodward in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him." Bush also met with Kissinger every couple of months, making Kissinger the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs. Kissinger brought the same impulse to the Iraq situation as he brought to the Vietnam War -- stay the course no matter what. Kissinger has always claimed that the US had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress. "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy," he wrote in a Post op-ed in August 2005. He regularly gave the same advice directly to Bush, Cheney, and Hadley. In Woodward's words, Kissinger told them, "Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back. He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere." Kissinger also told Rice that a political solution in America was essential. Get the politics right and Iraq would follow. No withdrawal of troops could be countenanced, or the public demand for a quick exit would overwhelm any chance of victory in Iraq. "The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," he told Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in 2005. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis." He gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had given Nixon on September 10, 1969, that read in part, "Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded." Two months later, the administration issued a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." "It was right out of the Kissinger playbook," Woodward writes. "The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory."
Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, was also mulling over Vietnam. He had a different take on the situation -- he worried that, like Vietnam, Iraq was turning into a quagmire, either winding down prematurely or becoming an entirely unwinnable war. In a 2005 meeting with several confidants, Abizaid, writes Woodward, "held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The US military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men. 'We've got to get the [expletive] out,' he said. Abizaid's old friends were worried sick that another Vietnam or anything that looked like Vietnam would be the end of the volunteer army. What's the strategy for winning? they pressed him. 'That's not my job,' Abizaid said. No, it is part of your job, they insisted. No, Abizaid said. Articulating strategy belonged to others. Who? 'The president and Condi Rice, because Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore,' he said. In March 2006, Abizaid presented a quite different picture of the Iraq situation in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, giving a "careful but upbeat" assessment. Abizaid then discussed the situation privately with John Murtha, the crusty old House Democrat who has made a career out of supporting the military. Murtha had introduced a resolution calling for American troops to be withdrawn "at the earliest practicable date." Murtha said, "The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion." According to Murtha, Abizaid replied by holding his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and saying, "We're that far apart."
In March 2006, Bush chief of staff Andrew Card was preparing to leave the White House after submitting his resignation. He considered Iraq unfinished business. "It's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," Card had told his replacement, Joshua Bolten. "Then comes the economy." Card did not want Iraq to be thought of by history as another Vietnam. As Woodward writes, "One of Kissinger's private criticisms of Bush was that he had no mechanism in place, or even an inclination, to consider the downsides of impending decisions. Alternative courses of action were rarely considered. As best as Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of 'What could we do differently?' But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying 'Let's examine alternatives,' as had surfaced after the Vietnam era." Card blamed the generals at the Pentagon and Iraq. Had they come forward and said that the mission could not be accomplished for the price that had to be paid, Bush would have agreed to begin a withdrawal. Woodward writes, "Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush's public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush's chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant. But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card's opinion, but there it was. He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying." (Washington Post [from Woodward's book State of Denial])
October 1: Bob Woodward, author of State of Denial, has his interview with Mike Wallace aired on CBS's 60 Minutes. While much of the interview is covered elsewhere in this site, the highlights of his interview include the failure of the Bush administration to admit to the huge level of violence in Iraq -- over 100 attacks a day on US forces and untold numbers of attacks on Iraqi civilians -- the inability of US forces to rely on Iraqi military and police forces, the attempts to force the resignation or firing of Donald Rumsfeld, the utter lack of any coherent strategy on dealing with Iraq, and the reliance of Bush and Cheney on Henry Kissinger for advice on foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. (CBS, CBS/Crooks and Liars [full transcript, link to video])
October 1: The White House releases a memo entitled "Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward's Book," designed to refute Woodward's new book State of Denial. The memo cites speeches over the years in which Bush acknowledged problems, and it quotes officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defending troop levels. Woodward reports that then-chief of staff Andrew Card twice tried to talk Bush into firing Rumsfeld, a report that Card has somewhat confirmed, and that Rumsfeld personally blocked repeated requests for increases in troop levels in Iraq.
According to the memo, the five myths are: the refutation of Bush's claims by the May 24 NIE that Iraq was steadily, if slowly, improving; the administration's refusal to honor requests for more troops by Paul Bremer; Condoleezza Rice brushed off a specific, urgent warning from George Tenet and Cofer Black about an imminent al-Qaeda attack on July 10, 2001; General John Abizaid told Woodward that Donald Rumsfeld "doesn't have any credibility anymore;" and that Andrew Card tried to convince Bush to ask for Rumsfeld's resignation. The memo goes on to provide details refuting each "myth." Unfortunately, as dissected by various bloggers on the Daily Kos, the refutations from the White House are deliberately misleading, half-truths, and in some instances outright lies, with the best refutations merely denials of what Woodward reports that the sources told him for his book. (Washington Post, White House, Daily Kos)
October 1: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledges that Bush's war on terror will not be "won on George W. Bush's watch." This dovetails with recent declarations by Bush that "the next president" will have to decide what to do about Iraq, and predictions by military experts and retired generals that US forces will be in Iraq through at least 2010. Liberal commentator Rob Kall writes, "[M]aybe the detached Bush-Rice approach is part of a systematic strategy to 'stay the course,' to stay in a state of war, to stay in Iraq, to keep the orange and red alerts going because that's what keeps the base in line. Drop the fear, drop the threat and where's the reason to support the party that is supposedly better fighting terrorism? Maybe that's why the Wall Street Journal says, 'Thus, implicit in much of what Ms. Rice says is the idea that the U.S. has the luxury of time.' Ask the families of the half million plus GIs who have rotated through Iraq and Afghanistan how they feel about the 'luxury of time.'" (Wall Street Journal/OpEd News)

British make secret truce with Taliban

October 1: In a secret truce leaked to the British press, British forces in Afghanistan have cut a secret truce with the Taliban, ceding authority in a portion of the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan to Taliban forces and agreeing to withdraw entirely from the region. The region centers around the town of Musa Qala, where British forces have sustained heavy losses attempting to defend a government outpost. Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British Army, has recently warned that British troops in Afghanistan were stretched to their capacity and can only "just" cope with the demands placed on them. The truce was opposed by Lieutenant General David Richards, the NATO commander in Afghanistan. Richards says the four remote British bases now under Taliban control will become "magnets" for Taliban forces. According to the truce, both Taliban and British forces will withdraw from the region, but few believe the Taliban will adhere to the agreement. "There is always a risk," says a British officer. "But if it works, it will provide a good template for the rest of Helmand. The people of Sangin are already saying they want a similar deal." One British officer sent a recent e-mail, published days earlier, saying in frustration, "We are not having an effect on the average Afghan. At the moment we are no better than the Taliban in their eyes, as all they can see is us moving into an area, blowing things up and leaving, which is very sad." (Sunday Times)
October 1: US intelligence analysts have told Bush officials that the US may not be able to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and instead of planning to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities, it will have to find a way to live with it diplomatically. Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is rejected on the grounds that the intelligence needed for successful air strikes is lacking. "We only have an imperfect understanding of the extent and location of the Iranian program," says one source with knowledge of the meeting. "Even if we got the order to blow it up, we wouldn't know how to."
The White House has backed away from earlier attempts to whip up war fever among the American citizenry against Iran, largely because of media reports of misleading, cherry-picked, and outright false intelligence being used to manipulate public opinion, and because of revelations such as the assessment that Iran is at least ten years away from being able to deploy a nuclear weapon. Adding to the problem for the White House is the Pentagon's warnings that it would be virtually impossible to accurately target and eliminate Iranian nuclear facilities, and the subsequent cost in innocent Iranian lives. "Unless you can be 100% effective and set the program back by two decades, you'll just get a short-term delay and you may not produce a result that is better than the current one," says an intelligence analyst. Such a military strike would undoubtedly subject the US to a wave of global outrage that would make the outcry over Iraq seem tame, say intelligence analysts. And worse, the effect among the world's Muslims would be potentially catastrophic. The commander of US forces in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, has warned that striking Iran could cripple oil supplies, unleash a "surrogate" terrorist army, and lead to missile attacks on America's regional allies. The army is particularly concerned about Iran’s ability to destabilize an already chaotic Iraq.
The director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has warned Bush personally that he should slow down in his rush to strike Iraq. "He has been saying, 'Slow down, it's not an immediate problem'" says Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has taken the lead in trying, however ineffectually, to negotiate a settlement with Iraq with the help of Britain, France, and Germany, known informally as the EU3. "President Bush is not going to take military action against the advice of the secretary of state, US generals and the director of national intelligence," Clawson opines. "There are clear signs that the White House is keener on following a political approach," says a senior British source. "There's never been an appetite in the Pentagon for taking Iran on and the EU3 might get a deal that would bring the Iranians to the negotiating table in a reasonable fashion."
"The conclusion is that America is going to have to live with the bomb unless there’s some miracle, such as a major accident, a major defector or an orange revolution," an unidentified source says, referring to the people's protests that brought reformers to power in Ukraine. None of these scenarios is considered likely. However, the Israelis continue to signal their willingness to strike Iran themselves if they feel sufficiently threatened. "The Israelis are going to have to make a decision earlier than we do," Clawson says. "That's a real problem for us." (Sunday Times)
October 1: A secret memorandum is revealed, disclosing the deep conflicts among adminstration officials over the topic of the policy towards detainees. In June 2005, two senior national security officials, Gordon England and Philip Zelikow, wrote a nine-page memo proposing a sweeping new approach to the problem of detaining, interrogating, and prosecuting terror suspects, and urging the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies. England is the acting deputy secretary of defense and Zelikow, of 9/11 Commission fame, is the counselor for the State Department and close colleague of Condoleezza Rice. The two recommended a return to the the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they wrote, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.
Reportedly, the document so enraged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the memo and shredded them. Says one Defense Department official who chooses to remain anonymous, "It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president. It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy."
The long-simmering debate has come into sharp focus with the June 29 Supreme Court decision of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which threw out much of the Bush administration's unconstitutional treatment of detainees and demanded legislation delineating exactly what the US's policy towards detainees will be, and the responding legislation, passed in late September and currently awaiting Bush's signature, that guts detainees' rights to habeas corpus and denies them the right of being treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. The two sides were clearly divided. One side, usually led by Dick Cheney, demanded that the president (and, by default, Cheney also) should have the power to decide who would be held and how they were treated. On the other side were pragmatists, centered in the State Department, who insisted that the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts. While it seemed at first, particularly after Bush's September 6 public revelation of the CIA's secret detention program and the new Pentagon directives of the same day that renounced military use of interrogation techniques that bordered on torture, that the pragmatists had won out over the extremists. But as the White House negotiated over the legislation with the Senate, Cheney's forces gained ground. Cheney's staff and its bureaucratic allies, after reluctantly agreeing to the disclosure of the CIA operation, were closely involved in guiding the talks with Republican senators. The moderates were kept almost completely out of the loop. In the end, the opposition led by Republican senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham collapsed, and the Senate passed legislation that allows the president to define whoever he wants as an "unlawful enemy combatant," hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, deny them access to lawyers, have them abused and tortured, and allow evidence against them to be presented during their tribunals without the defendants or any legal representatives to see, much less rebut, that evidence. The legislation also grants legal immunity to any administration officials over the abuse, torture, or mistreatment of any detainees before the end of 2005.
Still, some officials say that the legislation in and of itself isn't enough to stop the outcry over the shredding of fundamental civil liberties, nor will it stop the rash of lawsuits that have tied up parts of the detention apparatus since 2002. "There have been so many times when we thought we had broken through and turned things around, and then the forces on the other side kept charging back," says one administration lawyer who has supported such changes. Now, the official adds, "even after what was supposed to be this major legislation to resolve these issues, we are going to be back at it."
At the time the England-Zelikow memorandum was written, in mid-June 2005, several officials said they saw little enthusiasm for reconsidering the detention system that had been set up after 9/11, primarily by a small group of lawyers in the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department. That system had begun to come under increasing attack. An item in Newsweek magazine, about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, led to violent demonstrations overseas. Criticism of the detention camp grew sharper in Europe. Some influential Republicans in Congress began to voice complaints as well. Zelikow and England came at the problem from a more pragmatic, less zealously tyrannical viewpoint. Zelikow joined State in 2005 and almost immediately began pushing for the high-level CIA captives being held in connection with the 9/11 attacks be given their day in court. England took over as Rumsfeld's acting deputy in April 2005 while continuing to serve as secretary of the Navy; he was confirmed as deputy secretary in April 2006. He, too, had experience with the detainee issue, having spent months working to overhaul what many military officers saw as a flawed screening process for prisoners at Guantanamo.
The proposals were not particularly new. What was new was the attempt to persuade the administration to adopt a comprehensive approach to the detention problems that would satisfy the requirements of Bush's war on terror, mollify civil libertarians, and survive court challenges. The memo urged a return to the minimum standards as outlined by the Geneva Conventions, abandoned three years earlier by Bush, including the ban on "humiliating and degrading treatment" contained in the provision known as Common Article 3. The authors advocated that move not because they believed it was required by international law, officials said, but to win broader support from American allies and make court intervention less likely. The paper did not advocate abandoning the covert interrogation program, but restricting it to the shorter-term questioning of more important suspects. After repatriating many of the Guantanamo detainees, the authors argued, the detention center could be shut down and the remaining prisoners transferred to a long-term detention facility in the United States. The paper also argued that efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks must produce more than the chaotic trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born militant who remains the only person to have been charged in an American court with involvement in the attacks. The paper specifically called for taking Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others held by the CIA before military commissions, arguing that much of the information that would be disclosed by their trials was already widely known.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reacted favorably to the memo, and forwarded it to the members of the National Security Council. But Rumsfeld quashed it. Besides his personal objections to having the powers of the presidency, and of himself, limited by the proposals advanced in the memo, he objected to the military taking responsibility for CIA detainees, and didn't want to close Guantanamo without a viable alternative already lined up. He was particularly angry at England's unauthorized participation. "England's wings got clipped after that," says one Defense Department aide.
In early August 2005, after a long internal debate, new rules for the Guantanamo military tribunals were published which did not include changes that many military lawyers had advocated. David Addington, who was then Cheney's counsel and is now his chief of staff, was prominent among those who opposed modifications like an explicit ban on evidence obtained by torture, contending that it would wrongly hint that the government had sanctioned torture at all. At the Pentagon, England continued to pursue the idea of adopting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in a directive that would set guidelines for prisoner treatment and interrogations. In late August, he called a meeting with some of the vice chiefs of staff of the armed forces and senior uniformed and civilian lawyers to consider the matter. Everyone but two in the meeting endorsed the Geneva provision, but the two were among the most powerful in the roome -- the department's undersecretary for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, and its general counsel, William Haynes. Plans to once again abide by Common Article 3 were dropped.
As for alternatives to Guantanamo, that was barely discussed. But the issue of the CIA's secret prisons was discussed, quite heavily, when senior agency officials indicated their unease and Supreme Court rulings made it known that such detainees would be allowed to challenge their detention in US courts. By late 2005, as stories about the CIA's secret prisons became headline news, the agency began moving some of its captives into custody of US and foreign governments. Military lawyers also began reviewing the files of the captives, looking for the means to conduct actual prosecution of some of the detainees. Ultimately, military officials concluded that they could make solid cases against the CIA prisoners without unduly exposing the agency's covert program or even having to depend heavily on statements that had been obtained during highly coercive interrogations. And several foreign governments were expressing public outrage over being used to detain CIA prisoners outside of their own, US, or international law. But several senior administration officials, including Cheney and Addington, continued to resist the idea of going public with the CIA's secret prisons, and fought the idea of prosecuting the detainees before military tribunals. They preferred to keep them detained secretly, with no recourse to any law, and keep the interrogations, and the torture, coming.
With resistance from Cheney making the process more difficult, it was not until the late spring of 2006 that national security advisor Stephen Hadley began pushing senior officials to agree on options they could present to Bush. And, of course, the June 2006 Supreme Court ruling against the administration's policies lit the entire procedure up. Rumsfeld and his aides finally dropped their concerns about taking responsibility for the CIA detainees, and Hadley approved the arrangements for their transfer to Guantanamo. Cheney only dropped his opposition to the idea when, in late August, Bush decided to go ahead. As for the destruction of habeas corpus, the source of some of the most outrage and criticism of the new legislation -- that element was barely discussed. (New York Times/Global Issues)

Powell says he was fired, describes Bush as hell-bent on invading Iraq

October 1: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says in an upcoming biography of him that he was fired by Chief of Staff Andrew Card, on Bush's orders, before Bush's second term. Powell and other Bush officials have previously asserted that Powell chose to leave his post. According to an MSNBC report, Powell expected to return for Bush's second term even though his relationship with many White House officials was rocky, but his belief in Bush's loyalty did not pan out. The book is entitled Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, and is written by Washington Post associate editor Karen deYoung. Powell also says in the book that in his last days as Secretary of State, he tried to give Bush a final warning over the meltdown in Iraq. The insurgency was growing and the country was spiraling into sectarian bloodshed, he warned. Elections in Iraq would not solve the problems, and the president's ability to act decisively was being crippled by divisions within his own administration. According to Powell, Bush appeared disengaged and brushed off Powell's complaints about dysfunction in his government. The book adds credence to Post reporter Bob Woodward's assertions in his just-published book, State of Denial, that the Bush administration is in deep disarray over the handling of Iraq and the war on terror, and Woodward's accounts of the tremendous infighting between Powell and his prime opponents in the White House, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Additionally, Powell gives details about the preparation for his infamous February 6, 2003 address to the United Nations, which convinced many holdouts that the war was indeed necessary. Powell says he spent the days before the speech "trimming the garbage" that Cheney's staff had provided by way of evidence of Iraq's weapons programs and ties to al-Qaeda. Powell admits that the UN speech was full of falsehoods and distorted intelligence and is a "blot" on his record. The book also details many of the "defeats and humiliations" he suffered as part of the Bush administration.
The Post prints a lengthy excerpt from the biography, accessible through the link below. As detailed in the excerpt, Powell received a phone call from Card on November 10, 2004, eight days after Bush secured his re-election. Card informed Powell that Bush wanted to "make a change," avoiding the terms "firing" or "resignation." Bush wanted Powell's resignation in two days, though he expected him to remain at his post until a new Secretary of State was confirmed by the Senate. A staunch loyalist, Powell did not tell anyone of his firing except his deputy at State, Richard Armitage; he dropped off his letter of resignation with the White House, which was returned with a demand to correct a typographical error. Though he had stated his reluctance to return for a second term, Powell was surprised and insulted at his summary firing; but, out of loyalty and an unwillingness to stir public debate, he maintained publicly that he had chosen to step down and refused to discuss his leaving to any extent.
Though Powell privately battled against the handling of war in Iraq, which he considered a horrendous mistake and a distraction from the war against Islamic terrorism, after his firing, he refused to criticize Bush officials for their conduct of the war except to say that he wished more troops had been deployed, and planning for the post-invasion occupation had been more thorough.
Powell's selection as Secretary of State was considered Bush's most successful appointment, instantly giving the inexperienced and inarticulate former governor credibility in the arena of foreign policy. But behind the scenes, Powell found himself increasingly on the losing end of battle after battle, losing to the civilian ideologues in the White House and the Pentagon. Not only was Powell losing the battles, he found himself the target of increasing mockery and belittling from those who won the ideological and policy battles. But Powell saw himself as a soldier first and foremost, and to Powell, soldiers do not question their commanding officers. He remained publicly quiet and accepted the abuse.
Powell was being used by the Bush campaign even before the 2000 election. Powell hardly knew the younger Bush, considered him a novice in foreign policy affairs, and said he would rather see Bush name John McCain as Secretary of State rather than himself. While the Bush campaign publicly announced that Powell was part of the Bush foreign policy "brain trust," giving the candidate invaluable advice and boosting Bush's credibility among skeptical voters, in reality Powell had almost no contact with Bush or the campaign. The campaign even claimed that Powell would accompany Bush on "fact-finding" trips overseas, but the campaign never asked Powell to meet with the candidate and never approached him to consider a Cabinet position. In Powell's recollection, the decision to name him as Secretary of State was never a formal or deliberate one: "It just sort of happened as it was assumed to happen." Powell became Bush's first designee for his Cabinet in December 2000.
In early meetings with the new president, Powell found Bush less rough-hewn and more intelligent than his campaign demeanor suggested, though he was irritated by Bush's impatience and habit of constantly interrupting other speakers, often to insert trivialities or irrelevancies into complex discussions. Powell was disturbed that, in the first months of the adminstration, Cheney and other White House officials successfully pushed Bush away from diplomacy over various issues and towards confrontation and belligerence, usually against Powell's advice. After 9/11, any impulses towards diplomacy seemed forgotten. Powell was aghast that Bush was so focused, so early, on going to war with Iraq; Powell never believed the assertions from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others that Iraq was at least partially responsible for the attacks, but had little success in steering Bush away from his path towards war. Powell did succeed in persuading a reluctant Bush to try to form a multinational coalition to invade Iraq instead of going it completely alone, as Cheney and others preferred. He also insisted, with some success, that Bush would be more credible in the eyes of the international community if he tried to work diplomatically against Saddam Hussein instead of just attacking outright.
After five months of shadowboxing and pretend diplomatic efforts, in January 2003, Bush informed Powell that the case against Hussein still remained shaky, and support among Americans and other nations for an invasion needed shoring up. "We've really got to make the case" against Hussein, Bush told Powell in an Oval Office meeting in late January, "and I want you to make it." Only Powell had the "credibility to do this," Bush said. "Maybe they'll believe you." Powell did as he was told. He was told that the case against Hussein had already been put together, and he assumed that he could deliver the information to the United Nations with only a bit of tweaking and stylistic changes. He was appalled when, on January 28, he received a 48-page, single-spaced document compiling information about Iraq's alleged WMD stockpiles, "replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations," according to the book, including "[t]he most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein[. T]he document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who shared all of his boss's hard-line views and then some." The UN speech had originally been slated for February 5, and would be announced during Bush's State of the Union speech. Powell called national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and pleaded for more time. Powell was given 24 hours. Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, agreed that the White House document "read more like a badly written novel than something designed to persuade the world." Wilkerson put together an ad hoc team to clean up the document, working out of CIA headquarters and consulting with agency analysts.
Powell was not unwilling to criticize the UN himself, nor was he unwilling to make limited allegations against Iraq, but the presentation the White House wanted him to make would, he knew, destroy his own credibility as well as be a farrago of lies and badly sourced allegations. Powell knew his job was to present a "prosecution, designed to convince a skeptical jury that capital punishment, in the form of decapitating the Iraqi regime, was warranted." He and Wilkerson set about to make it happen. Powell and Wilkerson knew that Powell's credibility and integrity were no concern at all of either Cheney or Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor. According to Wilkerson, Cheney's idea of Powell's UN mission was to "go up there and sell it, and we'll have moved forward a peg or two. Fall on your damn sword and kill yourself, and I'll be happy, too." Wilkerson and his team put their CIA colleagues through their paces to find original source material for the document's allegations. Overall, Wilkerson was unimpressed. Much of the "evidence" was found in official intelligence reports, but as unconfirmed information that did not appear in the reports' conclusions. "They had left out all the caveats, all the qualifiers," Wilkerson recalls. In a few instances, he thought, they had even changed the meaning of the intelligence. Much of the worst of the allegations were eliminated entirely. However, both Powell and Wilkerson knew that the idea was for Powell to convince the world of Hussein's WMDs; to that end, Wilkerson tailored Powell's presentation around Adlai Stevenson's historic presentation to the Security Council at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Stevenson convinced the Council through his use of poster-sized photos of Soviet missiles based in Cuba that the USSR had deployed such missiles. Wilkerson wanted a similar "Stevenson moment" for Powell.
When Powell, Libby, and Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley joined the process of vetting and shaping the presentation, Cheney pressured Powell to "take a good look at Scooter's stuff." Libby also pled with Powell to include his material. Powell resisted. The process became a tug-of-war between Powell and Wilkerson, and Cheney, Rice, and Libby. Powell insisted on the removal of any intelligence from Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, a favorite of Cheney and Rumsfeld, but widely distrusted at State. CIA director George Tenet opposed Powell on the issue of mobile biological laboratories, information provided by a Chalabi defector but which Tenet insisted had been confirmed as "totally reliable." The information later proved to be complete fiction. Wilkerson wanted photos for graphic aids, but Powell rejected many satellite images provided by CIA analysts as being unclear and open to interpretation. Instead, he approved a UN photograph of a generic Iraqi UAV, taken years earlier, to illustrate charges that Hussein was developing drones that could spray deadly weapons of mass destruction on population centers. The CIA refused to allow the use of some photographs, deeming them classified. As for the infamous aluminum tubes that supposedly proved Iraq's burgeoning nuclear program, they were the subject of hours of debate. Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin had brought one of the tubes to the table, and, while rolling it back and forth, insisted the tubes were concrete evidence of Iraq's nuclear program. Powell later recalls that the agency "pulled in their experts and swore on a stack of Bibles that they'd done every analysis imaginable, and [the tubes] simply were not for rockets, but for [uranium] centrifuges." Powell let the tubes stay in the speech; they were later proven to be obtained for conventional rocket manufacture.
Though Bush, Cheney, and others would continue to insist that Hussein had attempted to obtain uranium from Niger for his nuclear program, no one asked Powell to include that allegation in his speech.
Powell and Wilkerson found themselves even less convinced by the administration's allegations of ties between Hussein and Islamic terror groups such as al-Qaeda. Again, Tenet fought to keep those allegations in the speech, at one point hauling Powell into his office to discuss the matter between themselves.
Tempers began to fray as the sessions continued into the weekend. Even Tenet and McLaughlin found themselves becoming angry at Hadley, who continued to fight for the reinsertion of even the most wildly unsupported White House allegations into the speech. Powell lambasted McLaughlin for his wordy, rambling answers to the simplest of questions. But Powell became more and more reliant upon Tenet, whose short, brusque answers to Powell's questions and concerns appealed to him. "George would give the kind of answers the secretary liked," says Wilkerson. "Whether you liked that 'slam-dunk' language or not, George, to his credit, would say, 'Absolutely, Mr. Secretary, I stand by that.'" Finally, the presentation was more or less complete.
Powell was as nervous as Wilkerson had ever seen him as the day of the speech approached. He continued to revise and tweak the speech through the final "dress rehearsal" and even during the hours before he was to present the speech to the UN. Powell insisted that Tenet sit with him, in view of the television cameras, during the speech; Tenet replied that he, not Powell, would face a grilling by the Congressional intelligence committees if the speech contained any mistakes. He even picked up Tenet on his way to the UN building the morning of the speech.
NO tension or nervousness was displayed by Powell during the presentation himself. He played it with cool, calm deliberation, using his photos and graphical aids to their maximum effect. "My colleagues," he said to the assemblage, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Powell was magnificent. Opinion polls across America shifted dramatically in favor of an Iraqi invasion. Powell's wife, Alma, was less convinced; she believed her husband was being used by the White House. Wilkerson took a nap after the speech, and awoke depressed. The book says, "Later, when it became clear that much of the speech on which he had worked so hard was based on lies, he would come to think of that week as 'the lowest moment of my life.' Back in Washington, he ordered special plaques with Powell's signature made up for the State Department aides who had worked so hard to make the presentation happen. When they were handed out, Powell asked Wilkerson why he hadn't ordered one for himself. Wilkerson replied that he didn't want one."
In 2004, Powell continued to publicly stand behind the particulars of his speech, even though many of the assertions he made that morning had been disproven. But he was floored when the head of the Iraq Survey Group responsible for finding Iraqi WMDs, David Kay, told reporters on January 23 that he doubted any such weapons resisted. Kay told Congress the same thing. Powell was almost immediately asked if he could reconcile his UN speech with Kay's conclusions. "You said a year ago that you thought there was between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons [in Iraq]," one reporter said. "Who's right?" Powell responded, "I think the answer to the question is I don't know yet." His was the first doubt any Bush official had expressed in public about the existence of WMDs, and the media reaction was fierce. He was reprimanded over the phone by Rice, who, according to Powell, was usually the one to upbraid him when the White House was upset with him over what he considered honest comment. On this issue, he said, there was little to be done. "The fact of the matter is, you can't ignore the possibility, since the guy we sent there for eight months as our guy says there's nothing there," he told Rice. "So, to say there's got to be something there when he, who has been there for eight months, says there's nothing there.... You can't do that. You've got to at least accept the possibility." He advised the White House to "just be quiet" for now. After spending the weekend comparing Kay's congressional testimony with his own UN speech, Powell gave an interview to the Washington Post that reaffirmed his public conviction that invading Iraq had been the proper course of action; he did say that, had he known no stockpiles of WMDs actually existed, he wasn't sure that he would have recommended the invasion. "[I]t was the stockpiles that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world," he replied, but since the CIA and British intelligence had "suggested the stockpiles were there," the question was now moot. However, "The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus. It changes the answer you get with the little formula I laid out." To the White House, Powell's remarks were almost treasonous. "I think the whole White House operation was mad...the NSC, the president -- everybody was annoyed," Powell recalled. "White Houses do not respond well to immediate problems in the morning...all the white corpuscles race to the source of the infection, so all the white corpuscles raced to me." Another irate phone call from Rice ensued, and White House aides began contradicting Powell to reporters. Powell attempted to quell the dissension by backing down somewhat from his earlier equivocations, asserting that even if Hussein had no WMDs, he had the "capability and intent" to produce them, and that alone justified the invasion.
Privately, Powell was furious at the White House's "machismo" that attacked anything that "suggests any weakness in the [administration's] position," regardless of common sense. He is also sick of the never-ending attempts to humble and belittle him. "There are people who would like to take me down," he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the White House. "It's been the case since I was appointed. By take down, I mean 'keep him in his place'.... And there are those who, whether it was me or anyone else, just love somebody getting in trouble, because it's usually to the detriment of the person getting in trouble and to the advantage of someone else." Powell was also becoming increasingly angry with the CIA. Whether or not he agreed with the decision, at least Bush had taken the responsibility for ordering the invasion. Powell felt he had done his duty by privately expressing his doubts but publicly supporting the decision to invade. But the intelligence community had played fast and loose with the truth, thereby misleading the administration and the American people, and damanging Powell's own credibility. The first Powell knew that the CIA was finally backing off its assertions of Iraqi WMDs was when on February 5, Tenet admitted that errors and misjudgments may have been made. He had not been warned in advance, and listened stonily to a broadcast of Tenet's remarks. Afterwards, Wilkerson tried to lighten the atmosphere. "But the question is," he said, "are you still friends?" Powell replied, "I don't think so."
Privately, Powell was outraged that he was the one being asked to back off of his prewar assertions of WMDs. "Is everyone else going to apologize?" he railed within the four walls of his office. "It's not [just] me getting had. I'm not the only one who was using that intelligence...they all stood up in the Senate. The president stood up on this material. Tony Blair stood up on this material.... The whole global intelligence community bears responsibility." But he knew that, because of his role as the war's most visible and effective salesman, he would forever be branded as the chief enabler of a massive deception. "I'm the guy who will always be known as the 'Powell Briefing'," he said. "I'm not being defensive, because I did it. But Powell wasn't the only one."
At the end, Powell wanted to leave office with grace and dignity, and with some control over the circumstances. His plan was to submit his resignation on Friday, November 12, 2004, inform his staff that following Monday morning, e-mail his friends and family later that morning, and only then would the White House announce his resignation. It did not happen that way. Instead, the White House released five separate statements under Bush's name, announcing the resignations of the secretaries of agriculture, energy, education and state, and the head of the Republican National Committee. Each statement was three paragraphs long and titled "President Thanks [official's name]." When White House spokesman Scott McClellan briefed the media shortly after noon, all but one of the resignation questions were about Powell. Had Bush tried to persuade him to stay? Had Powell offered? If so, had the president turned him down? McClellan avoided a direct answer: "I think you saw from Secretary Powell's letter that this is a discussion that they've had for some months now, or over recent months at least.... And Secretary Powell made a decision for his own reasons that this was now the time to leave." Bush nominated Rice to replace Powell the next day. Powell saw Bush regularly over the next two months, passing through the Oval Office for routine meetings that took place as if nothing had transpired. Eventually, the White House contacted his office to schedule what it described as a "farewell call" with the president. Such calls were being arranged for each departing Cabinet secretary. When Powell saw the January 13 appointment on his calendar, his staff told him they assumed it was a goodbye photo opportunity with Bush. They suggested that perhaps he should bring his family. "We've got a houseful of pictures," Powell said. He had no idea how the visit would go, and was told it would be nothing more than a formal goodbye visit. As the meeting approached, the White House -- which had scheduled it in the first place -- inexplicably called the State Department to ask for "talking points" that aides could use to brief the president. Apparently Bush officials were worried that Powell would take the opportunity to sandbag Bush during this last meeting.
The book reads, "The appointed time found Powell already in the Oval Office for a routine meeting; when it concluded, he lingered as the others left. As Powell later remembered it, Bush seemed puzzled and called after his departing chief of staff, 'Where you going, Andy?' 'Mr. President, I think this is supposed to be our farewell call,' Powell prompted. 'Is that why Condi ain't here?' he recalled the president asking. That was probably the reason, Powell replied. Card walked back inside, and the three men sat down. Powell had already decided to use the opportunity -- likely his last as secretary of state -- to unload. The war in Iraq was going south, he said after a few moments of small talk, and the president had little time left to turn it around. The administration's hope was that the upcoming election there would change the dynamics on the ground, and the Iraqi people would finally be ready and able to begin standing up to the insurgents on their own. But the administration, he pointed out, had entertained such hopes before over the past two years -- when it had set up a new legal framework for Iraq, when it had first turned a modicum of government power over to handpicked Iraqis and when ousted dictator Saddam Hussein had been captured -- and those hopes had been dashed every time. There would be a window of about two months after the election 'to start to see progress,' he told Bush. 'If by the first of April this insurgency is not starting to ameliorate in some way, then I think you really have a problem.' Elections, and talking about democracy, were unlikely to stop the insurgency, he said. Only the fledgling Iraqi army could do that, and it was unclear whether it would ever succeed. Its competence was not just a matter of training, Powell said; it was a question of whether the troops believed in what they were fighting for. Powell warned about serious internal problems in Bush's own administration, saying that the power he had given the Pentagon to meddle in diplomacy on issues as widespread as North Korea, Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict, along with poisoned personal relations between his State and Defense departments, were seriously undermining the president's diplomacy. Bush dismissed his concern. It wasn't any worse, he said, than the legendary battles between State and Defense during the Reagan administration. The session ended with a cordial handshake, and the secretary returned to the State Department. 'That was really strange,' he reported to Wilkerson. 'The president didn't know why I was there.'" (MSNBC/Daily Kos, New York Times, Washington Post)

Pages, House members and staffers knew about Foley's pedophilia for years before it was revealed

October 1: Former House page Matthew Loraditch says he and his fellow pages have known about former Republican representative Mark Foley's pedophilia and Internet stalking "for several years." Loraditch, who runs the US House Page Alumni Association's Internet message board, says he knows of at least three other pages who have received sexually graphic messages from Foley besides the one who alerted Congressional staff members to Foley's proclivities in August 2005. "I've known about them [the messages] for several years now," says Loraditch. "It was more like, 'Hey, look at this. I don't think the people in question felt that uncomfortable. It was more, 'Ooh, look at that creepy guy.'" Loraditch served as a page in 2001-2002. He adds, "It was definitely crossing-the-line stuff. The instant message stuff, and stuff I've seen and heard about, definitely couldn't be misconstrued" as merely "friendly" or innocent. At the time he served, Loraditch says he and his fellow pages thought that Foley was a gregarious, if "flaky," Congressman who was taking a sincere interest in the pages. Foley liked to visit the areas where the pages congregated in the corner of the House of Representatives and chat or offer advice. Foley offered a number of pages his e-mail address. Loraditch says that after he returned home and began attending college, he learned from several former male pages that Foley was sending them Internet messages similar to those revealed last week by ABC. (See the September 29 item on Foley on this site for more details.) Loraditch says his friends all thought the messages were disturbing, but they did not report them, either because they did not think the messages posed a serious threat or because they might have worried about career consequences. He adds that all his friends received the questionable messages only after they had graduated and left the program, when, theoretically, that would not raise the same in-house sexual harassment issues as if they had been sent when the former pages still worked for Congress. "This all happened after we were outside the protective umbrella of all our supervisors, not when we were there," says Loraditch. "To me, that indicates some sort of thought process going on in Foley's mind." Loraditch does not believe any of the supervisors who run the page program were aware of any of Foley's exchanges with the former pages. "The supervisors I worked with, if any of them had been told, it would have been dealt with at the time promptly," he says. "All of our supervisors were great people. They love pages. Half of them were former pages, and they've got kids of their own. If they had known about it, it would have been dealt with."
According to a largely ignored story in Foley's hometown paper, the Palm Beach Post, "Congressional staff members who asked not to be identified said it was widely known among Hill staffers and some House leaders that Foley had been engaging in inappropriate conduct and language with young aides. One highly placed staff member said Foley's abrupt resignation may have been demanded by Republican leaders who have been aware for some time about allegations of inappropriate behavior." The article does not identify the "Hill staffers and some House leaders." And Loraditch has confirmed for ABC News that he and other pages were warned in 2001 about Foley's tendencies by a staff member in the office of the House Clerk, Jeff Trandahl. Loraditch says they were told, "don't get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff." Pages working for Democratic representatives during those years say they never received any warnings about Foley. Loraditch says that some of the pages who "interacted" with Foley were hesitant to report his behavior because "members of Congress, they've got the power." Many of the pages were hoping for careers in politics and feared Foley might seek retribution.
Some observers are confused as to the involvement of Thomas Reynolds, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, whose job is to oversee House races nationwide. Why he would be involved in a controversy over a Congressman's e-mail exchanges with a teenager is difficult to fathom, particularly when the full House page board was never informed, but one possible explanation is that Reynolds's chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, worked for Mark Foley for ten years. During the last few days, Fordham has returned to work informally with Foley. The connection between Foley, Reynolds, and Fordham may be perfectly innocuous, but as the Talking Points Memo blog observes, "it is a little odd that the head of the NRCC would loan out his chief of staff to the disgraced former congressman in the midst of what is shaping up as a political crisis for the GOP." (Scripps Howard/Treasure Coast Palm, Palm Beach Post, The New Republic, Talking Points Memo, ABC News)
October 1: Former representative Mark Foley checks himself into an alcohol rehabilitation facility. "I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and other behavioral problems," Foley says in a statement released by his attorney, David Roth. (AP/Yahoo! News)
October 1: In a belated move, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert calls on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to open an investigation into the Foley scandal. The FBI has already announced a preliminary investigation earlier the same day. In his letter to Gonzales, Hastert asks the Justice Department to investigate "who had specific knowledge of the content of any sexually explicit communications between Mr. Foley and any former or current House pages and what actions such individuals took, if any, to provide them to law enforcement." The scope of the investigation, writes Hastert, should include "any and all individuals who may have been aware of this matter -- be they members of Congress, employees of the House of Representatives or anyone outside the Congress." Hastert also sends a letter to Florida governor Jeb Bush asking that Bush "direct the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to conduct an investigation of Mr. Foley's conduct."
Interestingly, Hastert's letter to Gonzales also asks that the Justice Department also investigate who possessed the e-mails and how they were released to the press: "Since the communications appear to have existed for three years, there should be an investigation into the extent there are persons who knew or had possession of these messages but did not report them to the appropriate authorities." Some observers interpret this as an attempt to try to pin some of the blame for leaking the story on either Democrats or on specific reporters. Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall writes, "Let's try to make one thing clear about Speaker Hastert's call for an investigation. The way he specifically worded it. It's an attempt to get the spotlight and investigation off of him and his key subordinates and on to someone outside the institution or someone who works for it in some junior capacity who may have had knowledge or possession of the IMs and emails prior to last Friday. In all likelihood some of the ex-pages or staffers."
Jennifer Crider, press secretary to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, questions Hastert's efforts, saying he "seems more concerned by who revealed the Republican leadership's cover-up of Mr. Foley's internet stalking of an underage child than he was about ensuring the children entrusted to the House were protected." Pelosi is demanding that the House Ethics Committee question Republican House leaders under oath about the matter, and notes that the Republican leadership's call for an internal investigation is not enough: "Since that resolution unanimously passed, Republican leaders have admitted to knowing about Mr. Foley's outrageous behavior for six months to a year, and they chose to cover it up rather than to protect these children." In the Senate, minority leader Harry Reid has demanded all day that Gonzales open just such an investigation, writing in his own letter to Gonzales, "The American people have a right to feel confident that their Congressional leaders are committed not just to the best interest of the nation as a whole, but also to the safety of the young people who every year travel to Washington to work on Capitol Hill. The allegations against Congressman Foley are repugnant, but equally as bad is the possibility that Republican leaders in the House of Representatives knew there was a problem and ignored it to preserve a Congressional seat this election year. Under laws that Congressman Foley helped write, soliciting sex from a minor online is a federal crime. The American people expect and deserve a full accounting for this despicable episode. The alleged crimes here are far outside the scope of any Congressional Committee, and the Attorney General should open a full-scale investigation immediately. We have a responsibility to the long-term safety of every child who will work in Congress that must not be sacrificed to the short-term interest of any one political [p]arty."
Marshall writes that, in a sense, the scandal of Foley's pedophilia has mostly run its course -- Foley has apologized, resigned, and will likely face criminal charges. The scandal that is just getting started is, in Marshall's words, "the mix of cover-up and enabling that reached its way through the highest reaches of the House Republican leadership." Marshall, a veteran political blogger and consultant, writes, "I'm not sure I've ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It's mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time." The chain of events is startling and revealing, especially when one focuses on Hastert's tremendous mendacity. Hastert has continually insisted that he knew nothing about Foley's transgressions until September 28. Two of Hastert's Republican colleagues, John Boehner and Thomas Reynolds, have said they warned Hastert months ago about problems with Foley. Hastert has managed to get Boehner to recant; Reynolds is, so far, sticking to his story. Rodney Alexander brought the matter to Hastert's office, and Hastert's staff released what they call a "detailed internal review" that shows no member of the House leadership, including Hastert, John Shimkus, or the House Clerk, Jeff Trandahl, ever saw the e-mails in question. Except that Shimkus was at that moment telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he and the Clerk had, indeed, read the e-mails. The AP even reports that Shimkus had worked out the details of his statement with Hastert's office beforehand. "Didn't seem to help," Marshall observes. "So the centerpiece point of the Hastert statement this evening appears to have been a fabrication. It stood up for maybe three or four hours."
Marshall writes, "At present, the Speaker is committed to portraying himself as a sort of Speaker Magoo. We're supposed to believe that pretty much everyone in the House GOP leadership knew about this but him. These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he's in a fight for his life."
One person who has yet to shed any light on the matter is Trandahl, who left his position around the time the Foley e-mails were under review by Hastert, Shimkus, Reynolds, Alexander, and whoever else was involved. Some of the suspect e-mails were sent by Foley on or around August 2005. The page reported the inappropriate contact to Alexander on August 31, 2005. Hastert publicly mentioned Trandahl's leaving in September 2005. Trandahl actually left the position on November 18, 2005, to become executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The connection between the Foley coverup and Trandahl's departure is unknown; there may be no connection at all. But Trandahl has yet to discuss his role in the matter. (Talking Points Memo, Talking Points Memo, Talking Points Memo, AP/New York Times, New York Times)
October 1: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi writes to House Ethics Committee Chairman Doc Hastings and Ranking Member Howard Berman regarding the Foley matter: "On Friday, I offered and the House unanimously passed a resolution directing the Ethics Committee to begin an immediate investigation and provide the House with a preliminary report in 10 days concerning allegations about Congressman Mark Foley's highly inappropriate and explicit communications with a former underage Page. The resolution called for an investigation of 'when the Republican leadership was notified, and what corrective action was taken once officials learned of any improper activity.' Since that resolution unanimously passed, Republican Leaders have admitted to knowing about Mr. Foley's outrageous behavior for six months to a year, and they chose to cover it up rather than to protect these children. As the author of the resolution that the House unanimously passed, I am writing to insist that the Ethics Committee act as directed and immediately form the investigative Subcommittee and begin work on the preliminary report in 10 days. Central to the investigation is immediately questioning, under oath, the House Republican Leadership. It is a nightmare for every child, parent and grandparent to learn that a child is being stalked on the Internet by an adult in a position of authority. The fact that Mr. Foley was engaging in this behavior with underage children, that the Republican Leadership knew about it for six months to a year and has characterized the inappropriate behavior as 'overly friendly' and 'acting as a mentor,' and that apparently no action was taken to protect these underage children, is abhorrent. The children, their parents, the public, and our colleagues must be assured that such abhorrent behavior is not tolerated and will never happen again." (Nancy Pelosi)
October 1: Democrats are calling for an independent investigation into what is becoming known as "Foleygate," the scandal surrounding Mark Foley's Internet stalking of a number of former House pages and its apparent coverup by House Republican leaders, but Republicans in Congress and the White House continue to insist that an "internal investigation" -- led by Republicans -- will suffice. "This should be investigated objectively. I think the Democratic leadership should have been told 10 months ago," says Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "I gather that basically nothing was done except that Foley was warned." White House spokesman Dan Bartlett says there is no need for an outside investigation: "The leadership appear to be very aggressive in pursuing this investigation. I think that's the best place for this investigation to go forward." The biggest problem with Bartlett's soothing reassurances is that the House leadership seems to be the ones needing investigation. "I am not comfortable with where we're leaving this," says Harman. "It's not my call what we do next, but more needs to be done. There's been a Republican investigation for 24 hours of Republican activity, I just don't think that that is adequate." Democrat John Murtha says it is "outrageous" that the House GOP leadership failed to act sooner. "We have an obligation to protect these young pages. ...It really makes me nervous that they might have tried to cover this up." Unlike some Democrats, Murtha says that the House Ethics Committee can handle any investigation. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, says it is not enough for the House Republican leadership to essentially investigate itself, which is what has up till now been all that is underway (see next paragraph for an update). Calling the Foley case "repugnant," Reid says, "equally as bad is the possibility that Republican leaders in the House of Representatives knew there was a problem and ignored it to preserve a congressional seat this election year." Reid says the case should be handled outside Congress. "'Under laws that Congressman Foley helped write, soliciting sex from a minor online is a federal crime," he says. "The alleged crimes here are far outside the scope of any congressional committee, and the attorney general should open a full-scale investigation immediately."
Shortly after the events reported in this item, the FBI, on the evening of October 1, announces that it will open what it calls a "preliminary investigation" into the Foley scandal. Agents in the FBI's Cyber Division have already begun to examine the texts of some of the messages. They intend to find out how many messages were sent, from what computers, and whether any of the pages will cooperate in the investigation. Only after the FBI announces its investigation does Hastert issue his own call for one. (AP/My Way News, ABC News, AP/New York Times)
October 1: Congressman John Shimkus, the head of the House Page Board, allowed pedophile Mark Foley to spend "a lot of time" with underage pages, even going so far as to allow Foley to have a private dinner with one page, months after learning of Foley's inappropriate e-mail contacts with several pages. On June 6, 2002, well after the pages were warned to stay away from Foley, Shimkus praised Foley for spending a great deal of time with the pages during their goodbye ceremony. At the ceremony, Foley told of taking one male page to a private dinner, saying he put the page in his BMW and "cruised" to dinner at Morton's Steakhouse. In order to take the child to dinner, Foley notified the Clerk of the House, Jeff Trandahl, who worked for Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert. AmericaBlog's John Aravosis writes, "Why did Shimkus let Foley spend so much time with the pages after GOP staff already knew Foley had a 'page problem?' Did the Clerk of the House approve of this dinner? Did Shimkus? Clearly Foley had no fear in the kid going to Clerk and asking for permission -- so Foley seemed to think the Clerk wouldn't mind. And clearly Foley had no fear in telling the story in front of Shimkus, so he obviously didn't think Shimkus would mind either. ...[W]hat in God's name were Shimkus and the Clerk doing approving of Foley taking a kid in his BMW to a private dinner in downtown Washington? The GOP staff already knew that Foley was trouble. They had already warned the kids. Yet Shimkus let Foley spend lots of time with the kids, by Shimkus' own admission. And then they let Foley cruise the kid to dinner in his beamer." (AmericaBlog)

"If the GOP can't even keep a bunch of 15 year olds safe, how can they keep America safe?" -- Talking Points Memo reader "JA"

October 1: US intelligence pressured the British to arrest a key al-Qaeda suspect, warning British intelligence that if they did not immediately arrest Rashid Rauf, a British citizen suspected in plotting to detonate explosives on up to 10 transatlantic jetliners, that US intelligence agents would pick up Rauf and "render" him to a secret detention center for interrogation. The jetliner plot created sensational headlines in August, but is now considered dubious. The story is only now coming out in the British press. British intelligence is reported to have been dismayed, and worried that Rauf's arrest could prompt other terrorist cells in the UK to either go underground or trigger their own plots. British agents from MI5 and MI6 wanted more time to monitor Rauf and learn more about his connections, but American agents, apparently wanting a splashy headline arrest to bolster Bush's sagging polls in the US, insisted on Rauf's immediate arrest. Rauf was arrested in Pakistan by agents of Pakistani intelligence (ISI), forcing British police to arrest several suspected colleagues of Rauf's. Rauf remains in custody in Pakistan, awaiting extradition on an unrelated charge of murdering his uncle in Birmingham in 2002. British intelligence worries that more terror suspects escaped because of the premature arrest than they were able to catch. Immediately following the US's veiled ultimatum that MI6 should 'lift' Rauf, which was communicated to ISI, he was arrested by Pakistani intelligence officials, a move that forced the British police to carry out a series of arrests as they looked to pick up those allegedly linked to him. Rauf's father, Abdel, was arrested in Pakistan. Rauf's brother, Tayib, from Birmingham, was arrested and later released without charge. (Guardian)

Billion-dollar education program does little more than channel tax dollars to favored providers and GOP donors

October 1: A centerpiece of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, a billion-dollar program called Reading First, has been proven with five years of evidence to be a boondoggle, primarily working to funnel billions to programs sponsored by Republican and corporate associates.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is premised on three goals: to focus on low-performing students and schools, to beef up the federal role in enforcing testing standards, and to bring facts and evidence to education policy, promoting teaching methods backed by "scientifically based research." While the least publicized of the three goals, it is arguably the most vital. The centerpiece of the new research-based approach is Reading First, a $1 billion-a-year effort to help low-income schools adopt strategies "that have been proven to prevent or remediate reading failure" through rigorous peer-reviewed studies. "Quite simply, Reading First focuses on what works, and will support proven methods of early reading instruction," the Education Department promised in 2001. Five years' worth of evidence shows, however, that Reading First has little scientific basis, has achieved virtually none of the lofty goals set for it in NCLB, and has become a funnel for channeling billions into pilot projects that themselves do little aside from enriching corporate fatcats and Republican cronies and campaign donors.
Education Department officials and a small group of influential contractors have strong-armed states and local districts into adopting a small group of unproved textbooks and reading programs with almost no peer-reviewed research behind them. The commercial interests behind those textbooks and programs have paid royalties and consulting fees to the key Reading First contractors, who also served as consultants for states seeking grants and chaired the panels approving the grants. Both the architect of Reading First and former education secretary Rod Paige have gone to work for the owner of one of those programs, who is also a top Bush fundraiser.
The department's inspector general released a report on September 22 that exposed Reading First as a fraud and a haven for favoritism. Then-program director Chris Doherty set the tone of the program's dealings with programs that weren't part of the favored (i.e. Republican donors and cronies) crowd: "They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the sh*t out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags." Though Doherty has since resigned, and education secretary Margaret Spellings has promised to review Reading First (emphasizing that the "individual mistakes" detailed in the report happened on Paige's watch, not hers), she continues to express her confidence in the program, saying, "Thanks to Reading First, struggling students are far more likely to get the help they need from teachers using scientifically based classroom reading instruction."
Yet the report barely scratches the surface. It does not deeply explore the incestuous process that led to the program's creation. It doesn't hold to any scientifically based reading standards, nor does it promote scientifically based reading instruction. It does not attempt to meet national standards. Then what does it do, precisely?
Bush administration officials insist that Reading First does not play favorites or intrude on local control, that states and districts are free to choose their own textbooks and programs -- as long as they're backed by sound science. But evidence collected by the newsletter Title I Monitor and reading advocates at the Success for All Foundation have proven this is anything from true, and the inspector general's report officially contradict them. Both accuse the department of breaking the law by promoting its pet programs and squelching others. In his internal e-mails, Doherty frequently admitted using "extralegal" tactics to force states and local districts to do the department's bidding. A report by Success for All documents how state applications for Reading First grants that promoted the preferred programs were the only ones approved. In fact, the vast majority of the 4,800 Reading First schools have now adopted one of the five or six top-selling commercial textbooks, even though none of them has been evaluated in a peer-reviewed study against a control group. Most of the schools also use the same assessment program, the same instructional model, and one of three training programs developed by Reading First insiders with little research backing. "They kept denying it, but everybody knew the department had a list," says Jady Johnson, director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America. "They're forcing schools to spend millions on ineffective programs."
To some extent, the controversy over Reading First reflects an older controversy over reading, pitting "phonics" advocates such as Doherty against "whole language" practitioners such as Johnson. The administration believes in phonics, which emphasizes repetitive drills that teach children to sound out words. Johnson and other phonics skeptics try to teach the meaning and context of words as well. Reading First money has been steered toward states and local districts that go the phonics route, largely because the Reading First panels that oversaw state applications were stacked with department officials and other phonics fans. "Stack the panel?" Doherty cracked in one e-mail. "I have never *heard* of such a thing...." When Reid Lyon, who designed Reading First, complained that a whole-language proponent had received an invitation to participate on an evaluation panel, a top department official replied: "We can't un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types." Doherty bragged to Lyon about pressuring Maine, Mississippi and New Jersey to reverse decisions to allow whole-language programs in their schools: "This is for your FYI, as I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens." Massachusetts and North Dakota were also told to drop whole-language programs such as Rigby Literacy, and districts that didn't do so lost funding. "Ha, ha -- Rigby as a CORE program?" Doherty crowed in one internal e-mail. "When pigs fly!" Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators, says, "It's been obvious all along that the administration knew exactly what it wanted."
So, since phonics is a legitimate teaching methodology, one would think that Doherty and his colleagues would consider using a program called Success For All, the phonics program with the strongest record of scientifically proved results, backed by 31 studies rated "conclusive" by the American Institutes for Research. Instead, it has been shut out of Reading First. The nonprofit Success for All Foundation has shed 60% of its staff since Reading First began; the program had been growing rapidly, but now 300 schools have dropped it. Betsy Ammons, a principal in North Carolina, watched Success for All improve reading scores at her school, but state officials made her switch to traditional textbooks to qualify for the new grants. "You can't afford to turn down the federal money," Ammons says. "But why should we have to give up on something that works?" Because the program centers around forcing states to buy textbooks recommended by "experts" with a staggering array of conflicts of interest, documented in the article. (Washington Post)
October 1: The Bush administration, with the Republicans in Congress, end the states' ability to manage the block grants awarded them as part of the Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF was created as part of the Clinton-era welfare reforms spearheaded by Congressional Republicans; one of the main selling points of the program, which replaced the more well-known federal welfare programs, was the giving of block grants to states with the understanding that the states would manage the money according to their own needs. Author Ron Haskins writes, "The most important characteristic of block grants is that they greatly increase state and local, as opposed to federal, control of social programs." The new regulations are outgrowths of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which changed TANF by mandating that states place half of its adult cases and 90% of its cases involving two-parent families into "work activities," and ordered HHS to "issue regulations to ensure uniform and consistent measurement of work participation rates." The new rulings, atop the old, show that, in reporter Conor Clark's words, the "continuing hypocrisy about states' rights: Republicans are willing to let them go the moment they come into competition with other interests." Haskins writes that "Part of the birthright of Republicans is wariness about big government. ...All the more reason for Republicans to look for ways to subtract authority from the federal government and give it to state and local government." But this new ruling does just the opposite. They create a set of federal rules, and they link acceptance of those rules to federal funding: states risk losing a good deal of their block grants if they resist. Yet conservatives don't seem to mind. And results show that in some cases, flexibility has been good for the states. Two effects seem certain: states will throw up to 50% of their TANF recipients off the rolls, and new federal jobs -- a new bureaucracy -- will be created. (The American Prospect)
October 1: Frameshop's Jeffrey Feldman writes one of the most cogent analyses I've seen about the Foley cover-up. Feldman focuses on Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and says that history will recall Hastert alongside Cardinal Bernard Law, whose distinguished career as a Catholic priest and luminary will forever be overshadowed by his decision to protect a number of sexual predators under his supervision. Feldman writes, "Fifty years from now, when historians write about the social problem of sexual predators in early 21st Century America, they will put a photo of Cardinal Bernard Law next to a photo of Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. These are men who had the chance to protect our children, but chose to protect a predator instead. They did more than just fail as leaders -- they endangered our families. Like Cardinal Law, Hastert was the most powerful man in his Archdiocese -- in this case, the United States Congress. Like Cardinal Law, Hastert learned that a sexual predator was working for him -- in this case a Congressman from Florida, not a parish priest. And like Cardinal Law, Hastert chose to help the predator to protect the image of his organization instead of exposing the predator to protect America's children. Protecting a sexual predator instead of protecting our children is a failure of leadership and a threat to the safety of America's families. For Cardinal Law, this failure led to his resignation. For Dennis Hastert the result must be the same. The Speaker of the House of Representatives -- the third most powerful person in our federal government -- cannot keep his job now that America sees he knowingly protected a sexual predator. Hastert protected his predator. And now that America knows -- America must protect itself from Hastert. The United States House of Representive simply cannot survive with a leader who chose to protect a sexual predator rather than protect our children. No more debate. No more distraction. Dennis Hastert must step down." (Daily Kos)
October 1: In 2004, the best way to characterize the Democrats' response to GOP accusations of weakness and cowardice was "too little too late." As the November 2006 elections approach, that has changed. Democrats are responding with speed and ferocity to challenges to their patriotism and their commitment to protecting Americans from Republican opponents and their mouthpieces. A case in point is the brazen attack on Senator Hillary Clinton by her outgunned Republican opponent, John Spencer: Spencer is running an ad in the New York markets juxtaposing images of Clinton and Osama bin Laden, while Spencer intones, "I won't play politics with our security." Of course he's doing just that. However, Democrats are hitting back. Former president Jimmy Carter recently said Bush has brought "international disgrace" to the US because of the war in Iraq; Hillary Clinton has bemoaned the "incalculable damage" done by Bush's policies over the past six years. This electoral season, Democrats are not ceding the topic of national security to the Republicans.
Republicans, of course, want to fold the Iraq war into a wider debate about the war on terror, a winning strategy in 2002 and 2004. Political guru Karl Rove is running the same kind of "fear and smear" campaign that worked for Republicans two times before. "It's all terrorism, all of the time," says pollster John Zogby.
The kickoff was Bush's highly political, brashly partisan speech "commemorating" the fifth anniversary of the 9.11 attacks. Democrats reacted with outrage and counterattacks. Democrats intend to convince voters that they and not Republicans can protect the country better. To do so, they intend to split the issue of Iraq away from the war on terror. The recently released NIE predicting chaos in Iraq bolsters Democrats' chances to succeed in this arena.
Democrats haven't yet solidified behind a unified message on Iraq, nor have they advanced a coherent alternative to Bush's Iraq policies, a problem for some voters. "There is a cacophony of voices among Democrats, and that is confusing and unattractive to the American public," says Larry Haas, a political commentator and former staffer in Bill Clinton's White House. The defeat of pro-war senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary has sown some confusion in the Democratic ranks, especially since Lieberman, running as an independent, is currently leading Democratic victor Ned Lamont in the polls. That may mean that while an anti-war message is resonating with the left-wing base of the Democrats, it is not yet a clear and powerful message that works among the general public. The GOP message painting Democrats as "the party of cut and run" seems to be working.
Many Democrats believe that a winning strategy may involve attacking Bush himself -- the more they can make the 2006 elections about the president and less about Congress, the more they can succeed. The most effective Democratic TV ads feature attacks on Bush himself, and use footage of GOP candidates with Bush. In return, GOP candidates have shown a strong reluctance to link themselves with the president.
While there is a lot of time and plenty of money to be spent before the November 7 elections, one Democratic advisor sums his party's position succinctly: "If we can't win now, when can we win?" (Observer)
October 1: Author and political analyst Mark Crispin Miller writes that, strictly from a numbers point of view, Republicans have a zero percent chance of winning any election this year. Miller's tongue-in-cheek observation is, however sarcastic, is correct: "As a civic entity responsive to the voters' will, the party's over, there being no American majority that backs it, or that ever would." Liberals despise the GOP as it has degenerated under Bush, traditional conservatives revile it, and not enough moderates support it to make up the difference. "It seems the only citizens who still have any faith in him are those who think God wants us to burn witches and drive SUVs. For all their zeal, such theocratic types are not in the majority, not even close, and thus there's no chance that the GOP can get the necessary votes." (Miller is, of course, aware that he is making tremendous generalizations.) So why are so many races so closely contested, and why are so many Republicans returning to Washington in November?
The situation is worse than many believe, says Miller; in reality, the possibility of another Republican victory on November 7 is quite strong, and Miller goes so far as to make the blunt prediction that "the Democrats are going to lose the contest in November, even though the people will (again) be voting for them. The Bush Republicans are likely to remain in power despite the fact that only a minority will vote to have them there." Why is this? Miller writes, "Even though this election could go either way, neither way will benefit the Democrats. Either the Republicans will steal their 're-election' on Election Day, just as they did two years ago, or they will slime their way to 'victory' through force and fraud and strident propaganda, as they did after Election Day 2000. Whichever strategy they use, the only way to stop it is to face it, and then shout so long and loud about it that the people finally perceive, at last, that their suspicions are entirely just -- and, this time, just say no.
Miller is the author of the 2005 book Fooled Again, which presents solid facts proving that the 2004 election was stolen. (Editor's note: Greg Palast provides similar information about 2004's catastrophic election theft in his book Armed Madhouse. Palast's book has been incorporated into this site; Miller's book awaits inclusion.) The case for the theft of the 2004 presidential election was first made in the House's investigation of the election debacle in Ohio, an investigation boycotted and obstructed by House Republicans. The findings of the House Democrats were released on January 5, 2005, in the so-called Conyers Report, after representative John Conyers, the committee's ranking Democrat. The Republicans attacked it, and the press and leading Democrats ignored it; yet that report was sound, its major findings wholly accurate. In July 2005, the Democratic National Committee released its own study of Ohio, which compiled plenty of evidence to prove election fraud, but the report's authors lacked the backbone to actually follow through on their evidence, instead concluding that rampant "incompetence" marred the election -- all of which helped the GOP. Several months later, three investigative reporters that helped the Democrats conduct their research in Ohio, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld, published their book How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008, reconfirming the Conyers report with reams of documentation. Like the Conyers and the DNC reports, the book went almost unnoticed by the press, as did Miller's own Fooled Again.
Miller's book spanned the entire country, not just Ohio, but documented election fraud in, among other states, Florida, Pennsylvania, Oregon, New York, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. It also detailed the interference of Bush/Cheney with the votes of millions of Americans abroad. Though it was ignored in the mainstream media, books like Miller's, Palast's, the Ohio investigators, and others, including Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss's Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, which proved that the 2004 election day exit polls were actually correct, began making waves on the Internet, C-SPAN, liberal talk radio network Air America, and in some local outlets. Robert Kennedy Jr's review for Rolling Stone, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? drew much more media and political attention, largely because of Kennedy's fame. Much of the attention of Kennedy's article was negative, even from Democratic and liberal sources. Miller is obviously disgusted with the failure of Democrats and liberal media representatives to deal with the reality of the 2004 election fraud, writing, "Such denials have been persuasive not because they are well argued but because the truth is terrifying, and a lot of people (including those reporters) very badly need a reason to believe that all is well. Such wishful thinking has kept 'the liberal media' from dealing with the direst threat that our democracy has ever faced." Now further information has been revealed, in a follow-up article of Kennedy's entitled Will The Next Election Be Hacked?, that a Diebold official inserted a surreptitious and illicit patch into Georgia's election machines just before the 2002 midterm election. (See the 2002 page of this site for further information.) And Miller details other fraudulent election results as well.
Miller concludes, "We must delve into the recent past, not to quibble over ancient numbers but to find out where we really are today. For what happened in some states four years ago, and in most states two years ago, is still happening now, and in more states than ever: a vast, complex and incremental process of mass disenfranchisement -- which is, in fact, the only way the Bush Republicans could ever get 'elected,' as their program is not conservative but radical, irrational, apocalyptic: i.e., unacceptable to most Americans, liberals and true conservatives alike. This is why they've gerrymandered Texas and (less visibly) Virginia -- and also why they've packed the Supreme Court with comrades disinclined to outlaw gerrymandering (unless it's Democrats who try it). This is why they are dead-set against repealing state laws disenfranchising ex-felons -- and also why they've used the 'war on drugs' to jail as many likely Democrats as possible. (This would also help explain the post-Katrina diaspora, and especially the out-of-state internment of over 70,000 Louisianans.) And this is why the Bush Republicans push e-voting machines in every state, and program them to flip votes cast by Democrats into votes 'cast' for Republicans, and systematically provide too few machines to Democratic precincts, and keep on arbitrarily removing Democrats from voter rolls, and 'challenge'would-be voters at the polls, and simply throw out countless ballots of all kinds, and spread disinformation on Election Day. These are just some of the devices that were used not only in Ohio to ensure Bush/Cheney's 're-election,' but in every state where they could pull it off -- on both coasts, in the Midwest, and throughout the South. ...If we get millions out to vote, without informing them they may well 'lose' anyway, the blow will devastate them, just as Kerry's abrupt concession did in 2004. It took two years to get Americans mobilized again. If Bush and his allies steal the next election, we won't have years to start resisting. The resistance must start on Day One, just as in Ukraine and Mexico; and so the people must be ready for the fight -- and so they need to know enough to wage it, and to win it." (Washington Spectator)
October 1: Republican-backed attempts to "Swift Boat" Democratic congressman John Murtha are being strongly countered by a raft of military veterans and Democratic military brass who gather in Johnstown's Central Park to support Murtha and challenge the "Veterans for the Truth" organization. The VFT organization, a 527 group that is not officially backed by the Republican party but is working on behalf of Murtha's GOP challenger Diana Irey, is trying to smear Murtha with accusations of cowardice and a desire to "aid and abet" terrorism. Murtha, a former Marine with 37 years of service, is one of Congress's most solid backers of the US military. The rally is led by former Democratic senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam vet who lost three limbs in that conflict and was a victim of GOP smear tactics himself in 2002. Other big Democratic names at the rally include former senator Bob Kerrey, retired NATO commander General Wesley Clark, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Ed Rendell, and others. The theme is plain -- Murtha is a longtime and valued ally of the US military, not a foe, as Irey and the VFT claim. "We're tired of swift-boating in America," says Cleland. "And it stops right here today, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania." Murtha drew fire from the GOP when he began publicly calling for a redeployment, or judicious withdrawal, from Iraq. He has also been one of the most powerful critics of White House policies in Iraq, and even critical of his own Marines in one instance, over the slaughter of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha. (Irey accused Murtha of "aiding and comforting the enemy" with his criticisms of the Haditha massacre. Like almost all of her fellow Republican chickenhawks, Irey has no military experience whatsoever, but is quick to accuse others who have honorably served her country of treason.)
Bob Kerrey tells the crowd, "Long before it was cool to wave a flag and support the men and women wearing the military [uniforms] of our Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard, Jack Murtha was waving the flag and supporting the men and women of our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. Until Jack Murtha stood up and began to tell the American people what was going on, there were far too many people [unaware]." Clark adds, "Jack had the courage to stand up and tell the truth. This administration's leadership of the war has been incompetent, inept. We're not going to let any swift-boaters, shrimp-boaters or anybody else take out Jack Murtha." Rendell tells the crowd that Murtha has done more for the American soldier than "any American alive today. ...How dare these outsiders come here to Pennsylvania and impugn the patriotism of one of the greatest sons in this commonwealth's history?" Murtha is last to speak, and, after reiterating his criticism of the war effort, tells of his sympathy for the soldiers who must fight and die in it. (Murtha has visited war wounded every week since the war began in May 2003.) "You know what this war's doing?" he asks. "It's tearing the families apart. I don't appreciate these people sitting on their fat backsides in the White House, sending our young people to war, when they don't understand the circumstances." (Charleston Post-Gazette)
October 1: British architect Seth Stein tells the British newspaper Independent about his being physically attacked on board an American Airlines flight because passengers mistook him for an Islamist terrorist. Stein is Jewish. On May 22, 2006, Stein was returning to London from a business trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands via New York. Less than an hour into the flight, Stein was settling in for the remainder of the flight with a book and a glass of ginger ale when a passenger suddenly attacked Stein from behind, grabbing Stein and placing him in a headlock. "This guy just told me his name was Michael Wilk, that he was with the New York Police Department, that I'd been acting suspiciously and should stay calm. I could barely find my voice and couldn't believe it was happening," says Stein. "He went into my pocket and took out my passport and my iPod. All the other passengers were looking concerned." Eventually, cabin crew explained that the captain had run a security check on Stein after being alerted by the policeman and that this had cleared him. The passenger had been asked to go back to his seat before he had restrained Mr Stein. When the plane arrived in New York, Mr Stein was met by apologetic police officers who offered to fast-track him out of the airport. Stein recalls, "The other passengers looked and me and said, 'What did you do?' It was so humiliating. The fact is he [the police officer] was told I was OK and should have left me alone. The airline had a duty of care." Airline officials apologized to Stein, a native New Yorker, but withdrew an initial offer of $2,000 compensation on the grounds that it would be an admission of liability. The airline claimed in a letter written on May 30 that it had done everything possible to try and protect Stein. The letter read, in part, "Unfortunately, as in any public gathering, there may be occasions when a conflict arises between people or when one individual's actions bother another.... As our crew members may not always be witness to the inappropriate acts of a particular passenger, there may be a limit to what our crews can do to improve behavior that is perceived as a nuisance." Besides having a tan, it is unclear what, if anything, Stein did to be considered a "nuisance."
Stein, still furious and traumatized by his ordeal, has retained a team of US lawyers to act on his behalf. "This man could have garrotted me and what was awful was that one or two of the passengers went up afterwards to thank him," he says. He has since been told by airline staff he was targeted because he was using an iPod, had used the toilet when he got on the plane, and that his tan made him appear "Arab." Stein says, "I was terrified but am fortunate in that I was able to contact a lawyer. Yet someone else who is not assertive could be left completely traumatized." In a twist to the story, Stein has since discovered that there is only one Michael Wilk on the NYPD's official register of officers, but the man retired 25 years ago. Officials have told Stein that his assailant may work for another law enforcement agency but have refused to say which one. (Independent/LibertyPost)

October 2: 9/11 commission members are alarmed and angry that they were never told about the July 10, 2001 White House meeting when then-CIA director George Tenet attempted to warn then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice about an imminent al-Qaeda attack, a warning that Rice brushed off. The meeting was first made public in Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial. The final report from the commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Tenet and Rice, now secretary of state. Rice and other officials initially denied that any such meeting took place -- Rice said it was "incomprehensible" that she would have brushed off such a warning -- but after White House official documents and current and former officials confirm that the meeting indeed did occur, the White House is now saying that Woodward mischaracterized the nature and content of the meeting, and attempted to blame Tenet and Black for not providing a strong enough warning. "It really didn't match Secretary Rice's recollection of the meeting at all," says Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush. "It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don't believe that's an accurate account." Most experts believe that Tenet was the source of Woodward's account of the meeting. The book says that both Tenet and Cofer Black, Tenet's counterterrorism chief, left the meeting frustrated by Rice's refusal to take the warnings seriously. Black is quoted as saying, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head." Neither Black nor Tenet have commented on the report.
According to Woodward, Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting -- calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House -- because he wanted to "shake Rice" into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Woodward writes that Tenet left the meeting frustrated because "they were not getting through to Rice."
Some 9/11 panel members are asking whether information about the meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel. Tenet, Rice, and Black all testified at length before the commission, and were asked specifically to detail how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001. "None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this," says Timothy Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission. "I'm deeply disturbed by this. I'm furious." Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, says that the staff of the commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Woodward's book and agreed that the meeting "was never mentioned to us. ...This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about." He says he attended the commission's private interviews with both Tenet and Rice and had pressed "very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch" about terrorist threats before the 9/11 attacks. Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 commission and now a top aide to Rice at the State Department, agrees that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Woodward's book. "If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing," he says. "Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings."
Liberal columnist and author William Rivers Pitt writes that, by refusing to divulge the meeting to the 9/11 commission during her testimony, Rice may well have committed perjury. According to Pitt, the counsel to the commission, Peter Rundlet, accuses the White House of deliberately hiding the meeting between Tenet, Black, and Rice from the commission. Rundlet is a former associate counsel to Bush, a White House Fellow, and a former member of the office of the chief of staff. Rundlet writes, "Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation, questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the commission been told about this significant meeting. Suspiciously, the commissioners and the staff investigating the administration's actions prior to 9/11 were never informed of the meeting. As Commissioner Jamie Gorelick pointed out, 'We didn't know about the meeting itself. I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.'"
During Rice's sworn testimony in 2004, the commission's vice-chair, Lee Hamilton, directly asked Rice about the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11: "At the end of the day, of course, we were unable to protect our people. And you suggest in your statement -- and I want you to elaborate on this, if you want to -- that in hindsight it would have been -- better information about the threats would have been the single -- the single most important thing for us to have done, from your point of view, prior to 9/11, would have been better intelligence, better information about the threats. Is that right? Are there other things that you think stand out?" Rice responded, "Well, Mr. Chairman, I took an oath of office on the day that I took this job to protect and defend. And like most government officials, I take it very seriously. And so, as you might imagine, I've asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done. I know that, had we thought that there was an attack coming in Washington or New York, we would have moved heaven and earth to try and stop it. And I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack." Rice refuses to divulge the meeting between herself, Tenet, and Black, which, in Tenet and Black's minds, was the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Pitt says that this meeting, combined with the equally ignored August 6, 2001 PDB that explicitly warned of an imminent attack on US territory by al-Qaeda, "the revelation of this meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice indicates that the Bush White House should have and could have made a far greater effort at thwarting the 9/11 attacks. Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission on the matter may rise to the level of perjury. At a minimum, it exposes yet another nest of lies delivered by a member of this administration." Rundlet himself writes, "A mixture of shock, anger, and sadness overcame me when I read about revelations in Bob Woodward's new book about a special surprise visit that George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black made to Condi Rice, also on July 10, 2001. If true, it is shocking that the administration failed to heed such an overwhelming alert from the two officials in the best position to know."
Interestingly enough, Time magazine alluded to the report in August 2002, writing, "In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. 'George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack,' says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart ('They always have wall charts') with dozens of threats." (New York Times, New York Times, Truthout, Time)
October 2: In a related item to the one immediately above, the State Department reveals that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashchroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaeda attack that was given to Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley on July 10. Rumsfeld and Ashcroft received their briefing about a week after Rice's. One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaeda, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again. Apparently Tenet gave the 9/11 commission the same briefing on January 28, 2004, but did not mention that he had given the briefing to Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft. The briefing's information was not contained in the commission's final report. Rice initially tells reporters that she has no memory of what she calls "the supposed meeting," adding, "What I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack and I refused to respond." Ashcroft, who resigned as attorney general on November 9, 2004, says he never received the briefing as well. But later today, Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, issues a statement confirming that she indeed received the briefing and recommended that it be given to Ashcrof

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

October 2006:

Week One

Secret Joint Chiefs report predicts more violence, chaos in Iraq

British make secret truce with Taliban

Powell says he was fired, describes Bush as hell-bent on invading Iraq

Pages, House members and staffers knew about Foley's pedophilia for years before it was revealed

Billion-dollar education program does little more than channel tax dollars to favored providers and GOP donors