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
2001
December 2001
- December:
Bush's foreign policies
North Korea issues the first of a series of threats directed at the US, warning it that it would take severe action if any military actions were detected near the Korean peninsula. "[T]hings will be different in the second Korean War," the warning reads. (CCR) - December: Ahmad Chalabi provides the Bush administration with an updated invasion plan for Iraq,
Iraq war and occupation
which calls not only for US air strikes but for the deployment of thousands of Special Forces troops on the ground. Chalabi also plans to include Iran in the planl he feels that the government of President Mohammed Khatami, the US's new partner in the war against the Taliban, would permit INC forces to cross the Iranian border into southern Iraq. The INC has already been given permission to open a liason office in Tehran as of April 2001. "We did it with US government money, and that's what conviced them in Tehran," says an INC official. "They took it as a sign from the United States of a common interest -- getting rid of Saddam. The way to get to him is through Iran." - The plan calls for the establishment of a firebase inside southern Iraq and the announcement of the formation of a provisional government, which would be quickly recognized by the US. The plan assumes that thousands of Shi'ite Iraqis would flock to the new government and take up arms against Hussein. Massive US bombing and Special Forces deployments through southern Iraq would dovetail with the INC's announcement in northern Iraq that they were ready to move, prompting Iraqi Kurds to join in the insurrection. According to the scenario, dissent would rive the Iraqi military, and Hussein would be presented with a dilemma: whether to send his elite forces south to engage the Americans or, for his own protection, to keep his forces nearby to guard against an invasion from the north. The attack plan was worked out with the assistance of retired Army general Wayne Downing and former CIA official Dwayne "Dewey" Clarridge, both of whom serve as unpaid consultants to the INC. Downing was appointed as deputy national security advisor for combatting terrorism in October 2001.
- Chalabi's plan, revised and augmented by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, wends its way through channels to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for evaluation. Many officials are dismissive of the plan, and say that though taking down Hussein would be easy enough, they aren't sure that the plan provides the manpower necessary to do the job efficiently. Airpower and a relatively small deployment of Special Forces troops won't be enough, many fear, and point to the lessons of Afghanistan, noting that Iraq doesn't already have a heavily armed opposition such as the Northern Alliance already in place. A former senior State Department official recalls that the plan is quite risky, because it makes two critical assumptions that are out of US control: there has to be a general uprising throughout Iraq, and that US allies have to join in the fighting. The Joint Chiefs, unimpressed with the plan, orders a counterproposal to be developed that won't include the INC.
- Generals and admirals take the lead in criticizing the plan, spearheaded by Marine General Anthony Zinni. Zinni maintains that all the plans he saw during his years at CENTCOM involved the participation of at least two corps -- at least six combat divisions, totalling around 150,000 troops, as well as heavy air support. In a 2000 essay, Zinni, who is preparing to retire, wrote that to "drive a stake" through the heart of Saddam, "You must have the political will -- and that means the will of the administration, the Congress, and the American people. All must be united in a desire for action. Instead, however, we try to get results on the cheap. There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London [Chalabi's INC] gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with $97 million worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely." One of the officials involved in the planning says that he, too, has doubts about the efficacy of an INC-based armed insurrection, even one backed by US Special Forces and airpower: "If you go to war and don't address the root political problem, why bother? All we're going to get is another tyrant in five years. If this is the war to end all jihads, it's got to have a broad-based political agenda behind it." One of Zinni's close aides says, "Our question was, 'What about the day after?' How do you deal with the long-term security aspects of Iraq? For example, do you take the Republican Guard [Saddam's most loyal troops] and disarm it? Or is it preferable to turn it from having a capability to protect Saddam to a capability to protect Iraq? You've got Kurds in the north, Arab Shia in the south, and the Baath Party in the middle, with great internal tribal divisions. There's potential for civil war. Layer on external opposition and you've got a potential for great instability. I'm a military planner and plan for the worst case. As bad as this guy is, a stable Iraq is better than instability." A former senior Defense Department official says, "The issue is not how nice it would be to get rid of Saddam. Everybody in the Middle East would be delighted to see him go. The problem is feasibility." (Seymour Hersh)
- December:
Secrecy of Bush administration
Bush grants the Health and Human Services department the right to classify its information as secret. (Stephen Pizzo/Daily Misleader) - December: In a controversial decision, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld cancels the Army's multi-billion dollar "Crusader" artillery vehicle program, winning praise for saving the taxpayers from a military boondoggle and apparently costing Rumsfeld's old Princeton buddy Frank Carlucci, the head of United Defense, fat profits.
Military-industrial complex
It isn't noticed until later that Rumsfeld made the decision to cancel UD's Crusader program months before, and by waiting until December to make the announcement, allowed Carlucci to take UD public in the first days of December. The company's stock, bolstered by the Crusader program, sells quickly, and Carlucci pockets nearly $200 million in windfall profits. Later, Rumsfeld will give Carlucci's company a $475 million defense contract to revamp the Crusader as a cannon. Carlucci, a former member of the Reagan administration, is also a senior member of the Carlyle Group. (Joe Conason) - Early December: The battle for Tora Bora continues;
War in Afghanistan
the British press reports later that "[i]n retrospect, and with the benefit of dozens of accounts from the participants, the battle for Tora Bora looks more like a grand charade." Eyewitnesses express shock that the US pinned in Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, thought to contain many high leaders, on three sides only, leaving the route to Pakistan open. An intelligence chief in Afghanistan's new government says: "The border with Pakistan was the key, but no one paid any attention to it. And there were plenty of landing areas for helicopters had the Americans acted decisively. Al-Qaeda escaped right out from under their feet." It is believed up to 2,000 were in the area when the battle began. The vast majority successfully flee, and only 21 al-Qaeda fighters are captured in the end. The US relies on local forces "whose loyalty and enthusiasm were suspect from the start" to do most of the fighting. Some of the local commanders drafted to help the US had ties to bin Laden going back to the 1980s. These forces actually help al-Qaeda escape. An Afghan intelligence officer says he is astounded that Pentagon planners didn't consider the most obvious exit routes and put down light US infantry to block them. It is later widely believed that bin Laden escapes along one of these routes on November 30 or December 1, walking out with about four loyal followers. Al-Qaeda's number-two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also escapes the area. It is almost as if the US wanted bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders to escape. The Washington Post's Susas Glasser covered the Tora Bora attack, and later says, "[T]he Americans and the Pentagon were bragging about this great victory, which it wasn't. They had paid huge amounts of money to corrupt local fighters, who were engaging in side deals to let some of bin Laden's men pay their out into Pakistan." (CCR, Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson) - December 2: Texas energy corporation Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the biggest bankruptcy to date.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
However, Enron reorganizes as a pipeline company, and may yet complete its Dabhol power plant. Enron's stock lost $26 billion in market value in seven weeks after admitting that it had inflated its profits report by $600 million over five years and lost $638 million in the third quarter of 2002, as well as admitting it paid no income taxes in four of the past five years due to hundreds of offshore tax havens and creative accounting tricks, many overseen and approved by scandal-plagued accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Thousands of Enron employees have lost their jobs, and thousands more have lost their pensions after Enron refused to allow them to sell the Enron stock in their portfolios -- while company executives dumped billions of dollars' worth of stock and made tremendous profits. Enron CEO even advised employees to buy more Enron stock while the price was tanking, claiming the low price made it a great buy. Lay himself had by that point made $50 million in selling off his own stock just before the stock price collapsed. (CCR, David Corn) - Kevin Phillips writes that "[T]he insistence by the president and his supporters that the Enron debacle, with all of its ramifications, was 'a business scandal and not a political scandal' smacks of farce.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
No mere marketplace nurtured Enron from a company with $6.4 billion revunes in 1992 to a company boasting $20 billion in 1997, $40 billion in 1999, and $101 billion in 2000. That degree of growth required four or five episodes of political engineering to turn the trick: the two-decade long collaboration of the Bushes; the bipartisan crony capitalism represented by OPIC and the Export-Import Bank, without which Enron never could have expanded globally; the venality of the Clinton Commerce Department under corporation-cultivating secretary Ron Brown; the legislative and regulatory chicanery of Senator and Mrs. Gramm (described by Barron's, the financial weekly, as 'Mr. and Mrs. Enron'), which created a black hole for run-amok energy futures trading; and the huge 1997-2000 flood of pro-deregulation Enron money into federal and state-level politics and lobbying. The politics involved on so many fronts had no twentieth-century precedent. ...While the comment made in June 2000 by Ken Lay that 'no member of the Bush family has ever been on the Enron payroll' is almost certainly true, it is also irrelevant. Much larger amounts of money than ever changed hands in Teapot Dome reached the Bush family and their close political associates through multiple nonpayroll routes: hard-dollar political campaign contributions, soft-dollar party contributions, consulting fees, joint investment agreements, funding for presidential libraries, contributions to the cost of inaugurals, hypothesized Enron purchases of Bush-owned gas production, oil-well partnerships, and possibly even some of those off-the-books arrangements scattered around the world's many tax havens." In fact, the Bush administration does facilitate an Enron bailout of sorts: by refusing to seize control of all the documents in the case, Enron and its accounting firm Arthur Andersen were able to shred and destroy thousands of documents pertinent to the investigation of Enron wrongdoing. It also allows the January 2002 sale of EnronOnline, the company's trading vehicle, to the Union Bank of Switzerland, a major Enron creditor. That sale allows much of the information needed to detail key portions of Enron's illegal business and practices to be withheld under Switzerland's restrictive banking laws. Lack of EnronOnline, bank, and accountancy records have made it all but impossible to prove who did what, and where most of Enron's money went. (Kevin Phillips) - December 3:
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge tells the nation, "the quantity and level of threats have reached a threshold where we should once again place the public on general alert." Of the terrorists, he says, "These are shadow soldiers. This is a shadow enemy." No specific information is ever released to explain the alert. (White House/Mother Jones) - December 3: Newsweek's Howard Fineman and Martha Brandt write a gushing profile of Bush that,
Conservative media slant
in Paul Waldman's words, reads "more like a profile in Tiger Beat than the product of a national newsweekly...." Fineman and Brandt say of Bush, "He has been a model of unblinking, eyes-on-the-prize decisiveness.... He has been eloquent in public, commanding in private.... Where does this optimism, the defiant confidence come from? His family to begin with.... Another source of strength is physical conditioning. For Bush it's a concern bordering on obsession, and it's paid off in self-confidence.... He feels determined to win -- and to serve." (Newsweek/Paul Waldman) - December 4:
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the largest Islamic charity in the US, has its assets frozen by the Treasury Department. Foundation offices in San Diego, California; Paterson, New Jersey; and Bridgeview, Illinois are also raided. Holy Land is represented by the powerful law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. Three partners at Akin, Gump are very close to President Bush: George R. Salem chaired Bush's 2000 campaign outreach to Arab-Americans; Barnett A. "sandy" Kress was appointed by Bush as an "unpaid consultant" on education reform (he has an office in the White House); and James C. Langdon is one of Bush's closest Texas friends. The firm has also represented Khalid bin Mahfouz and his business partner Mohammed Hussain Al-Amoudi. (CCR) - December 5: The Bush administration has named Angela Williams to an Interior Department position where she would help oversee business dealings and legal compliance in the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI), a small South Pacific territory with a lucrative garment-manufacturing industry.
Jack Abramoff scandal
Powerful GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff doesn't trust Williams to look the other way while his business clients of the NMI enforce slave-labor conditions on their workers. So Abramoff asks his religious-right crony, Ralph Reed, to intervene with White House political guru Karl Rove. "Any ideas on how we can make sure she does not get it?" Abramoff asks Reed in an e-mail. "Can you ping Karl on this?" Reed replies, "I am seing him tomorrow at the White House to discuss it with him as well." Williams does not get the post; Rove claims he has no knowledge of the entire incident. (James Moore and Wayne Slater)
"I don't agree that you need an enormous number of American troops. Saddam's army is down to one-third than it was before, and I think it would be a cakewalk." -- Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board, to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, December 6, quoted by Brandi Mills
- December 6:
Attack on civil liberties
Attorney General John Ashcroft tells a Senate committee, "To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil." (CCR) - December 9: Sixteen men, including three "unofficial" representatives from the Bush administration, meet in Rome to discuss finding ways for the US to use the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq, and possibly to plan for a future invasion of Iran.
Iraq war and occupation
The meeting was organized by neoconservative Michael Ledeen, an influential scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who has written about the need for the "creative destruction" of the Middle East in the name of American hegemony, and a go-between for the US in the arms-for-hostages negotiations with the Iranians in the Reagan years. Although he is a well-known writer and political commentator, his role as an operative of American intelligence is a closely guarded secret. At this time, Ledeen is a consultant for Douglas Feith, the ideologically hardline undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon and one of the main proponents of the invasion of Iraq (Ledeen will deny working for Feith). Ledeen will later claim that the meetings were authorized by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, saying, "Hadley authorized it and he could not have done so without reporting it to his direct superior," Rice. Of the discussion, Ledeen will assert, "The Rome meetings had nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq, but with Iran and Afghanistan. I don't think a single word was pronounced, by anyone, on Iraq." However, "They were very good meetings, by the way. They produced information that saved American lives in Afghanistan." - Ledeen is accompanied by two of his associates, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin. Rhode, who considers himself a protege of Ledeen, works in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house think tank. Well-versed in the languages and the affairs of the Middle East, Rhode, like other Pentagon neoconservatives, is a loud proponent of the anti-Iraq, pro-Israel policies that have suffused the Department of Defense since the installation of Bush in the White House and Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rhode is remembered for shoving his finger into the chest of a diminutive Arab diplomat and barking that there will be "no bartering in the bazaar anymore. You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so." Rhode is an "enforcer" in the Pentagon, clearing out nonbelievers and employees who aren't sufficiently on board behind the plans to invade Iraq and promote closer ties with Israel. Rhode replaces the unbelievers with, as one senior staffer who works with Rhode at this time later recalls, people "from conservative think tanks and pro-Likud operations." Another analyst later tells Mother Jones magazine, "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there."
- Rhode will eventually become the "handler" for Ahmad Chalabi, the smoothly corrupt Lebanese-Iraqi exile whose Iraqi National Congress will provide scores of defectors who, in turn, provide reams of thoroughly wrong and falsified intelligence to the Pentagon and to the American intelligence community, all designed to push the US towards war with Iraq. One US intelligence official recalls that Rhode virtually lived out of Chalabi's Baghdad offices after the March 2003 invasion, and could regularly be heard talking on his cell phone with Israeli officials. According to the intelligence source, the amount of classified information about deployments, policies, and other material Rhode gives to the Israelis is "mind-boggling." Rhode's security clearances will later be revoked for his sharing of secret information with Israel. When asked in 2004 about his work with Ledeen and Franklin, Rhode refuses to discuss anything, saying, "Those who speak, pay."
- Franklin is the third American at the conference. Franklin, whose colleagues at the Defense Intelligence Agency contemptuously remember him as a self-styled James Bond figure, is an Iran specialist at the DIA on loan to the Near East and South Asia bureau at the Pentagon -- Rhode's bailiwick. Franklin is also a close friend of Ledeen's. He has strong and deep connections with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of Washington's most powerful lobbying groups ahd historically an echo of the expansionist, hard-right ideology of Israel's Likud Party. Like Ledeen, Franklin is passionately committed to promoting Israel's position as the biggest beneficiary of America's foreign policies.
- Ledeen is not formally an intelligence operative for the Pentagon, though he had been one in the past. He, Rhode, and Franklin report to Feith, another Israel hardliner and closely affiliated with the radical neocons at Ledeen's AEI; he is well known as a writer and a speaker who is harshly opposed to virtually every peace treaty ever signed by the US, including the Oslo Peace Accords, every single Middle East agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Chemical Weapons Convention. As noted above, Feith, at the direction of Rumsfeld, worked with Abram Shulsky to create the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a rogue counterintelligence operation designed to circumvent and undercut the findings produced by the CIA on the topic of Iraq. Shulsky is a veteran of the Project for the New American Century, which is also well documented in these pages. Feith, Shulsky, and operations director William Luti, one of the earliest voices advocating the occupation of Iraq (who "makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says one former Defense Department official), run the OSP from the fourth-floor D ring of the Pentagon. Joining them is rabid neoconservative David Wurmser, who will later leap from the Pentagon to Dick Cheney's office. Wurmser, a friend of Ledeen's from the AEI, will help craft the OSP; his position on Iraq can be summed up by the headline of an editorial he writes for the Wall Street Journal entitled "Iraq Needs a Revolution." Like Rhode and Ledeen, Wurmser is an advocate of Ahmad Chalabi and a co-author of several strikingly imperialistic screeds for the Project for the New American Century.
- The OSP's mission -- to find evidence supporting the Bush administration's drive to invade Iraq -- isn't daunted by the fact that there is virtually no evidence to find. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq," recalls former NSC chief David Benjamin. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right. There was no noteworthy relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." But Wurmser, Ledeen, and the OSP have little interest in facts. The OSP's Luti is the direct connection (before Wurmser) into Cheney's office, recalls Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Air Force colonel who works closely with the OSP from her desk at NESA, the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau before retiring in disgust and speaking out about her time at the Pentagon. "Luti was permanently locked into the idea that he was an aide to Cheney," Kwiatkowski recalls. "He came over from active duty on Cheney's staff, and it seems clear that he was playing that role, just closely coordinating things. He was a very imperious, insecure, weird guy who was constantly publicly degrading staff people at meetings."
- Kwiatkowski is deeply disturbed by how intelligence is being gathered and processed by the OSP, calling it unorthodox and troubling. The OSP constantly vets intelligence, and develops talking points based on that intelligence, after it has already been cast aside as false and unsupported. The intelligence used by OSP is deliberately taken out of context and considered not credible by the military professionals on staff. The OSP analysts are busily reinterpreting and rewriting old, long-discredited intelligence reports on Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to build a picture of collusion between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. She recalls being astonished that OSP's garbage collection ends up directly quoted in speeches by Bush and Cheney. "Yes, they were cherry-picking," she recalls during a November 2005 interview. "But it's not like they were picking the good cherries. They were picking the rotten cherries, the absolutely rotten stuff that the CIA had pulled out and thrown away. I mean these were the nasty cherries that were down on the floor, and they picked them up and used them because they fit what they wanted to hear."
- The bureaucratic protocols at OSP mystify and trouble Kwiatkowski as well. It is obvious that civilian ideologues like Ledeen are using the military to promote their narrow, rigid political agenda against Iraq in spite of the overwhelming body of evidence proving their conclusions about Iraq's WMDs and the Iraq-al-Qaeda connections dead wrong. Intelligence is obviously being "cooked" by people like Rhode to fit the lust for war in the Bush administration.
- The first time she realizes just how high OSP's reach is in a meeting with Luti, when she hears the name "Scooter." Luti is referring to Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the ideological hardline chief of staff for Dick Cheney. It astonishes her that Luti is talking about going completely out of the chain of command to hand-carry intelligence information directly to Libby, who will give it directly to Cheney, without going through anyone at Defense. "I asked somebody later, 'Who's this Scooter? He must be an important guy.' I thought he was a general or something. They were giving him propaganda, though, not intelligence."
- One of the most intense operations mounted by the OSP is attempting to legitimize the claims about Iraq's attempt to buy Nigeran uranium. The report by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, that Niger had never attempted to sell Iraq uranium, was vetted as reliable by the CIA and sent through the usual channels, but never made it to Cheney's desk -- obviously shelved by someone in the bureaucracy, and most likely someone in the OSP.
- Ledeen, as documented by his many books and writings for the National Review and other hardline publications, has long been an advocate of overthrowing Arab regimes such as Iraq and Iran, and "stabilizing" the Middle East with American military forces. He insists to this day (as of the writing of James Moore and Wayne Slater's 2006 book The Architect) that the invasion of Iraq makes Bush a historically great US president; he doesn't understand why the US isn't invading Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria as well. 24 minutes after the south tower of the World Trade Center was hit on 9/11, at 9:26 AM, Ledeen posted on the radical conservative Free Republic blog the two-word message, "Saddam's revenge."
- Ledeen brings to the conference the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who himself brings along several of his countrymen. Ghorbanifar, a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal, is a double agent for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and Iran's SAVAK intelligence organization who helped put together the disastrous arms-for-hostages deal brokered for the Reagan administration by William Casey and Oliver North; North believed that Ghorbanifar and Ledeen illicitly sold arms to Iran during Ledeen's tenure at the NSC under Reagan. Joining the group is Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's intelligence service SISMI, and Italy's minister of defense, Antonio Martino. The Iranian delegation includes a former member of that country's Revolutionary Guard who has information on dissidents in Iran.
- Ledeen, like many of his cohorts, is bent on revenge against Iraq for the 9/11 bombings. He has just posted what Moore and Slater call "a venomous editorial" on the Review's Web site, "which might have been dismissed as a silly rant had it not been written by a man who was working in international politics and was getting checks from the taxpayers of the United States through his DOD consulting agreement." Ledeen wrote in part, "We need to sustain our game face. We must keep our fangs bared, we must remind them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle." Ledeen is known by intelligence operatives as "Rove's brain" for his advice and input to Bush's political guru, Karl Rove, in guiding the White House's Middle East policies.
- Moore and Slater write that Ledeen appears to be trying to "reprise...a failed scheme from his years assisting the Reagan administration." Ledeen has always trusted Ghorbanifar, calling him "one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known." The CIA has a different opinion, having found him so unreliable that the agency ossued a rare "burn notice" on the use of any intelligence or information he provided, and labeled him a "serial fabricator."
- Ledeen has assembled this company of liars and rabid ideologues for a purpose whose details remain unclear, though it is certain that the topic of invading Iraq was central to the discussion. Iranian politics and the strength of the radical Shi'ite government of that country is most likely discussed as well, but no one has come forward to tell what happened during the conference. Ledeen later says he has written about the meeting, and testified as to its contents, and won't talk about it any longer; he calls the reports of the meeting filled with what he calls "fool's gold." However, his writings about the meeting reveal nothing and, in Moore and Slater's words, is "doggedly vague," leaving one to speculate on the reasons for the usually voluble Ledeen's shyness about revealing any details about the meeting. He has portrayed the meeting as nothing more than some general discussions about the state of Iranian politics and speculation about Iran's future relations with the West. But this explanation seems simplistic and almost insultingly naive. Ledeen, as a insider in Feith's office, is undoubtedly aware of the intelligence being falsified and manipulated around the already-developed policy of Saddam Hussein's overthrow and the occupation of Iraq. Moore and Slater speculate, "The preordained conclusions of that debate might have given him the freedom to pursue the next step in his grander dream of transforming the Mideast, which was to overthrow Iran's government."
- However, the presence of the heads of Italy's intelligence and defense departments remains a mystery. Neither the CIA's station chief in Rome nor the US embassy there were ever notified about the meeting, so nothing official was ever recorded (though US ambassador Mel Sembler, a hardline conservative, has dinner with Ledeen the next night and may know of Ledeen's meeting on an unofficial basis). To have American private citizens meeting with Iranian arms dealers and government officials, and two of the most powerful figures in the Italian government, is unusual to say the least, and in violation of US protocols requiring the CIA to facilitate and oversee official contacts with foreign governments. (Sembler later informs the State Department about the meeting.)
- When Newsday asks Ledeen about the meeting in August 2003, he tells the reporter that "It's nobody's business." Interestingly, Ledeen has a close relationship with former Rome station chief Duane Clarridge, himself a convicted conspirator in the Iran-Contra scandal who escaped prison through a presidential pardon. Clarridge became a consultant for Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, as did Alan Wolf, who had succeeded Clarridge as the Rome station chief. "The connection to all of these people -- Clarridge, Wolf, Chalabi, Ghorbanifar, and SISMI -- is Ledeen," says veteran CIA agent and counterterrorism expert Philip Giraldi. On the subject of the forged documents alleging Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, documents which Ledeen may have helped channel to the CIA, Giraldi says, "It's clear to me that he was one of the likely implementers of this case, this process. There are a number of ways those phony documents could have been fed back into the system."
- A week after the meeting, however, Ledeen writes an op-ed for the National Review called "Iran-Contra Revisited," where he portrays the meeting as, in Moore and Slater's words, "a group of innocents convening to talk about the mutual interests of their respective countries." His op-ed also promotes his new book about his radical solutions to global terrorism, and tries to redirect any questions about the meeting with criticisms of journalistic failures to "ask our diplomats the obvious questions: is it not correct that al-Qaeda terrorists have been operating out of Iran?"
- The meeting may have had something to do with the October 2001 reports to the CIA about Iraq's purported attempts to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, allegations that were proven fraudulent within hours of their receipt but will be used for years to justify the US invasion of Iraq. That information came from Italy's SISMI; the French, who control Niger's uranium output, dismissed the allegations out of hand, but British intelligence rolled the allegations into a dossier that would be infamously referred to in Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.
- Ledeen has had a long and murky relationship with both Mossad and SISMI. With the knowledge of Ledeen's connections with those countries' intelligence agencies, and his ties to Ghorbanifar, and the timing of the Rome meeting, many journalists and government investigators begin looking into the details of the meeting as best they can. Ledeen denies CIA allegations that he is receiving payments from SISMI as late as 2004, and insists he isn't a SISMI agent. Those denials are suspect at best. It is known that when national security advisor Stephen Hadley learns of the unofficial meetings conducted by Ledeen and other members of the OSP, he orders them to stop. Ledeen will ignore Hadley's admonishment, and even flaunts Hadley by informing the US embassy in Rome that he will hold future meetings. He will ignore further warnings and orders from Hadley; Moore and Slater believe that Hadley's warnings to Ledeen may have been nothing but pro forma admonishments designed to give the Bush administration plausible deniability about the meetings.
- After the meeting, Rhode exchanges numerous faxes with Ghorbanifar, and by June 2002, arranges another meeting for an unnamed high-level American government official, an Iraqi, and an Iranian, whose identities are not known. A month later, Ledeen tells Sembler that he is coming back to Rome to begin working with the Iranians again. Sembler tells Washington, and Hadley orders Ledeen to cancel any plans to resume colluding with the Iranians. Again, this order may well be nothing more than protective camouflage; weeks later, Sembler's office funnels the Iraq-Niger forgeries to Washington.
- Soon after that, Hadley arranges a secret meeting with SISMI head Pollari for September 9, 2002. A spokesman later calls the meeting nothing more than an innocuous "courtesy call," and Hadley says he doesn't recall discussing anything regarding the Iraq-Niger connection. (James Moore and Wayne Slater, Raw Story, Raw Story)
- December 9: On NBC's Meet the Press, Dick Cheney makes the assertion that Iraq and al-Qaeda have close connections.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
He says it has been "pretty well confirmed that [9/11 planner Mohammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack." Moderator Tim Russert carries water for Cheney by chiming, "What we do know is they -- Iraq -- is harboring terrorists." The claim of the Atta-Iraq connection originates with an Iraqi defector from Ahmad Chalabi's INC, code-named "Curveball," who made his claims to German intelligence officials. The Germans informed the US of the claims, but noted that they did not feel Curveball was reliable. The CIA has long noted that both Chalabi and the INC are unreliable. The claim is thorougly disproven by both FBI and CIA agents, and contradicted by Czech intelligence analysts. Cheney will continue to make the claim for years to come, even after the 9/11 commission completely debunks it in 2004. (Mother Jones) - December 9-24:
Islamist terrorism
Singaporean police break up a Jamaah Islamiya cell and arrest 15 Islamists, 14 Singaporeans, and one Malaysian. 13 of the 15 were JI members, and eight of those received training in Malaysia and Afghanistan. The cell had planned six truck bomb attacks against US, British, Israeli, and Australian diplomatic and military targets, along with US businesses. (Michael Scheuer) - December 10:
9/11 attacks
Zacarias Moussaoui becomes the first person charged with crimes stemming from the 9/11 attacks. (CCR)
"I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah." --George W. Bush, at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, December 10, 2001
- December 11:
Republican corruption
The list of Bush administration officials, and administration cronies in private industry, with connections to the Saudi Arabian oil industry is long. Here's a partial list and summation as provided by the Boston Herald and Vision TV:- George H.W. Bush: Although the current President's father is not an official member of the administration, the elder Bush is one of his son's closest advisors. Bush Sr. is a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group, which maintains deep connections with the Saudi oil industry. In 2001, Bush visited Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, and reportely discussed Carlyle business affairs (the Carlyle Group denies this). Bush makes between $80,000 and $100,000 for each Carlyle speech he delivers. Carlyle was also a paid advisor to the Saudi government on the "Economic Offset Program," a program that requires US arms manufacturers selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to give back a portion of their revenues in the form of contracts to Saudi businesses (many of which are directly connected to the Saudi royal family. Carlyle claims that arrangement has been terminated. Carlyle also holds a major stake in the large defense contractor BDM, which has lucrative contracts to train and manage the Saudi National Guard and the Saudi air force. In 1998, Carlyle sold its controlling interest in BDM to defense giant TRW International
- Dick Cheney: Currently the Vice-President, Cheney, who served under the elder Bush as Secretary of Defense, went to work with Halliburton Oil after Bush failed to get re-elected. He received $34 million when he left the company, and still receives a $1 million annual stipend from the company. Halliburton has received huge, no-bid contracts from the US government to supply the US military as well as to operate in post-invasion Iraq.
- Condoleezza Rice: The current National Security Advisor served for years on the board of directors of Chevron, who has deep, longterm connections to the Saudi oil industry. Rice even has a Chevron oil tanker named for her. When she was a board director of Chevron, she served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron holds the largest concession of any of the international oil companies.
- Frank Carlucci: Head of the Carlyle Group, Carlucci was Reagan's national security advisor and Deputy Director of the CIA. Carlucci also was chairman of BDM for most of the 1990s.
- George W. Bush: Currently the President, Bush was a director of a Carlyle subsidiary, Caterair, until 1994. In 2000, while Bush was governor of Texas, the board of directors of Texas's school pension fund, many of whom were Bush appointees, voted to invest $100 million in the Carlyle Group.
- Philip Odeen: Currently the president of BDM, Odeen is a former senior Pentagon official under Richard Nixon. Under the Clinton administration, Odeen chaired the Pentagon task force that planned the restructuring of the U.S. military for the 21st century. He is also the vice-chair of the Defense Science Board, which advises the Pentagon on emerging threats.
- Robert Gates: Currently a member of the board of directors of BDM, Gates is a former director of the CIA. In late 2006, he will succeed Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.
- Michael Armacost: Currently a member of the board of directors of BDM, Armacost served as Undersecretary of State under Reagan, and former Ambassador to Japan under the elder Bush.
- Nicholas Brady: Former Bush Secretary of the Treasury, he is now a member of the board of directors of Amerada Hess, an American oil company working with several Saudi families to develop oil fields in Azerbaijan.
- Edith Holiday: A former Bush assistant, Holiday is also on the board of Amerada Hess.
- Ronald Evans: Formerly with Colorado Oil and appointed Bush's Secretary of Commerce.
- Zalmay Khalilzad: Formerly an official with Unocal who drew up the risk analysis for Unocal's proposal on a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. Khalilzad will be appointed Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan.
- Hamid Karzai: The Bush administration's hand-picked new leader of Afghanistan, Karzai is a former Unocal consultant.
- December 12: General Tommy Franks tells Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that he has a plan for "softening up" Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
As Franks later reveals in his book American Soldier, published in August 2004, his plan was to employ "spurts of activity followed by periods of inactivity. We want the Iraqis to become accustomed to military expansion, and then apparent contraction." The Downing Street Memos (referenced later in this site) prove that this strategy is, indeed, implemented. In July 2002, British Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon says that the US "had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." In October 2002, Bush will tell the nation, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." (Mother Jones)
Bush announces US withdrawal from ABM treaty and its intent to deploy banned anti-missile satellite defense systems (Star Wars)
- December 13: Bush pulls out of the 1972 US-Russian ABM nuclear treaty, giving Russia six months' notice of withdrawal.
US nuclear program
He states that the US needs all of its military options open in its attempt to root out terrorism; the real reason is to allow the US to revive the fantastically expensive satellite defense system commonly known as "star Wars." An aghast Vladimir Putin, premier of Russia, calls Bush's decision "a mistake." Senate Democrat Joseph Biden warns that the decision will spur an arms buildup in Russia, India, and Pakistan, leading to increased tensions in Southeast Asia. Bush insists that a prime threat to US security is the possibility of an ICBM attack by terrorists, a possibility that most experts believe barely credible. (CCR, CNN) - December 13:
Domestic terrorism
The US Army and confirms that it has been making weapons grade anthrax in recent years, in violation of an international treaty. The US offensive biological weapons program was supposedly closed in 1969 when the US signed a biological weapons treaty. In 1998 scientists at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah turned small quantities of wet anthrax into powder. This weaponized anthrax appears to be very similar or identical to the anthrax used in the recent attacks. (CCR)
"Winter Hill" Mob investigation hindered by Bush executive order invoking secrecy
- December 13: Bush invokes executive privilege to derail a Congressional investigation into corruption and Mob ties at a Boston FBI office,
Secrecy of Bush administration
prompting a harsh reaction from the Republican chairman of the House Judicial Reform Committee; Bush writes without explanation, "I believe congressional access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest." (It is later proven that White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, who is later promoted to Attorney General, sparked the claim of executive privilege.) Dan Burton tells Justice Department official Carl Thorsen, "You tell the president there's going to be war between the president and this committee. His dad was at a 90 percent approval rating and he lost, and the same thing can happen to him. We've got a dictatorial president and a Justice Department that does not want Congress involved. ...Your guy's acting like he's king." Burton, along with other congressmen from both parties, rail against Bush's executive order, which stops the White House from turning over documents involved in the FBI probe along with a campaign-finance abuse investigation. Committee members say the order's sweeping language created a shift in presidential policy and practices dating back to the Harding administration. They complain that it follows a pattern in which the Bush administration has limited access to presidential historical records, refused to give Congress documents about the vice president's energy task force, and unilaterally announced plans for military commissions that would try suspected terrorists in secret. - Democratic congressman William Delahunt says, "This is the beginning of a constitutional confrontation. In a short period of time, this Department of Justice has manifested tendencies that were of concern to Senate members during the confirmation hearings for John Ashcroft as attorney general." And the committee's ranking Democrat, Henry Waxman, adds, "An imperial presidency or an imperial justice department conflicts with the democratic principles of our nation." Burton later tells Justice Department lawyers, "Everyone is in agreement you guys are making a big mistake. ...We might be able to go to the [House] floor and take this thing to court. ...If this unprecedented policy is permitted to stand, Congress will not be able to exercise meaningful oversight of the executive branch."
- Burton's Government Reform Committee is trying to investigate the FBI's use of confidential informants while the bureau investigated New England organized crime activities. The committee seeks information on deals FBI officials struck with suspected murderers Stephen "the Rifleman" Flemmi and James "Whitey" Bulger. Flemmi and Bulger are the former co-leaders of Boston's "Winter Hill" crime family. It is also exploring what FBI officials, including former director J. Edgar Hoover, knew about the innocence of Joseph Salvati of Massachusetts. Salvati spent 30 years in prison for the 1965 murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan in Chelsea, but the Governor's Council commuted his sentence in 1997. His conviction was overturned in January after a judge concluded that FBI agents hid testimony that would have cleared Salvati because they wanted to protect an informant. "The federal government wanted Joe Salvati to die in jail because dead men don't tell tales," says Salvati's lawyer, Victor Garo. The Justice Department's criminal division's chief of staff, Michael Horowitz, justifies the executive order on the grounds that the DOJ's in-house prosecutorial decision-making process might be inhibited. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says Ronald Reagan invoked such a privilege three times, while Bill Clinton did so on four occasions (though all four were over Congressional inquiries into presidential pardons). Forms of privilege were also claimed in the Nixon administration during the Watergate investigation to conceal evidence that Nixon and his officials had broken the law. Fleischer says the Justice Department has already turned over 3,500 pages to Burton's committee, although members complained that many were heavily redacted. The Justice Department has offered to provide summaries of 20 documents it believes would be covered by the subpoena. Democratic representative Barney Frank asks why the Bush administration might cover up mistakes made in a previous administration. "I don't know what bureaucratic reflex drives people to do this," the congressman remarks.
- In testimony over the case to the committee in early February 2002, former Connecticut chief prosecutor Austin McGuigan stuns the lawmakers with a sordid tale of how the FBI's investigation into organized crime was sabotaged by rogue FBI agents. McGuigan, chief state's attorney from 1978 to 1985, will describe how gangsters penetrated Connecticut's fledgling parimutuel gambling industry in the 1970s and '80s, then murdered potential witnesses to throw investigators off the track. McGuigan's most compelling testimony concerns his belief that corrupt FBI agents working in Boston deliberately withheld evidence from state and local authorities around the country in an effort to destroy investigations associated with the jai alai industry -- and protect the killers, who were their informants.
- "It is clear that major organized crime figures operating as informants were permitted to engage in racketeering activities with a wink from, if not the tacit approval of, federal agents," McGuigan says. One such agent, Paul Rico, later retired from the bureau to become vice president of World Jai Alai, where he hired mobsters; Rico repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment when he testifies in front of the committee. Committee chairman Burton, who will continue to demand documents from the Department of Justice, later says he will be allowed to the committee to review some of the DOJ documents relating to the corruption investigation of the Boston FBI office. "Violent crimes, including murders by so-called informants, were ignored at the whim of law enforcement agents who were, apparently, accountable to no one," McGuigan testifies. "In the name of intelligence-gathering, state and local prosecutions of violent criminals were undermined and investigations were betrayed." The murders, and the subsequent investigations, might never have been seriously investigated had Flemmi not been arrested in 1995 and used his status as an FBI informant as a defense. "These are murders that seemed unsolvable, and it seemed the coverup had succeeded," McGuigan said, "until...Flemmi decided to claim that he had a free pass on the crime train, because of his status as an FBI informant."
- In that same session, the committee unanimously finds no merit whatsoever in Bush's claim of executive privilege to keep from disclosing documents related to the Winter Hill and other cases. Representative Steven Latourette calls Bush's arguments "crap," and several conservative members make disparaging comparisons with what they have called "Clinton-Gore stonewalling." The reasons for Bush's invocation of executive privilege remain murky; although some believe Bush is attempting to protect the FBI and its director, Robert Mueller, others believe it is an early salvo in the administration's attempt to secure unprecedented executive power at the expense of Congressional oversight -- an early attempt by Bush and Gonzalez to lock down what some call the "unitary executive" principle of presidential authority. "This is a test of Congress to see how much the Administration can get away with," says Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "It is not at all surprising the executive branch would want to operate in secret. The question is, How much will Congress accept?" Significantly, Burton will later withdraw his objections and become a staunch defender of Bush's claims of executive privilege. (Boston Globe/CommonDreams, Hartford Courant/Make Them Accountable, AP/Truthout, CBS, Accuracy in Media [cached Google copy], Daily Kos)
- December 14:
War in Afghanistan
US forces enter the Afghan city of Kandahar, the center of Taliban control, ending the Afghani offensive's first major battle and ensures the eviction of the Taliban from most of Afghanistan's major cities. (Michael Scheuer) - December 17: Northern Alliance forces declare that the battle of Tora Bora,
War in Afghanistan
with a ground assault begun on December 5, has been won. However, in retrospect, the battle is considered a failure because most of the enemy escapes. The Afghan war ends with the elimination of the last major pocket of Taliban/al-Qaeda resistance. (CCR) - December 18: American intelligence operatives participate in the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who were claiming asylum in Sweden.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
Believed to be linked to Islamic militant groups, the two are forcibly seized and flown from Sweden to Cairo on a US government-leased Gulfstream 5 private jet, where they are brutally interrogated and tortured. "Both were dirty," says a former senior intelligence official, "but it was pretty blatant." The story receives little attention outside the human rights activist community until May 2004, when a Swedish television station reveals that the Swedish government cooperated with the US in the kidnapping -- after receiving assurances that the two would not be tortured, brutalized, or harmed once they were returned to Egypt. Instead, according to the report, the two were taken into custody at planeside in the Swedish airport by Americans wearing plain clothes; the two, who are already handcuffed and shackled, have their clothes ripped off of them with scissors, suppositories of unknown kinds are inserted into their anuses, diapers are put on them, they are forcibly dressed in dark overalls, their hands and feet are harnessed, and, once on the plane, they are blindfolded and hooded. Once in Egyptian custody, Agiza and Zery, according to their own statements made through Swedish diplomats, their family members, and their attorneys, are tortured by having their genitalia and other sensitive areas shocked with electrodes. The Egyptians finally conclude Zery has few ties to any terrorist organizations and he is released in October 2003, though he is still under official surveillance. Agiza is later found to be a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group outlawed in Egypt, and once was close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda. He will be sentenced in October 2004 to 25 years in prison. Agiza's attorneys insist that Agiza cut his ties with Zawahiri over ten years ago, and has publicly denouced the use of violence by Islamic radicals, including al-Qaeda. No evidence linking Agiza to a specific act of terrorism has ever been made public. - Swedish journalist Fredrik Laurin traces the Gulfstream jet used to ferry the two to Egypt; he finds that it made landings in Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, Germany, England, Ireland, Morocco, and Washington, DC. It also made several visits to the Guantanamo detention facility. Though the proof is lacking, it is easily concluded that the jet is used to ferry prisoners from US custody to a number of countries where torture is acceptable practice. Swedish lawyer Kjell Jonsson insists that his government failed to follow its own laws in turning Agiza and Zery over to US authories. In May 2004, Human Rights Watch will ask the UN to investigate the role of Sweden, Egypt, and the US in the kidnappings. "There must be a full accounting," says Rachel Denber of HRW. "Otherwise, these cases will send yet another signal that when it comes to the 'war on terror,' anything goes -- including torture." As of the summer of 2004, no such inquiry has been convened, though international law specifically precludes the rendition, or forced return, of any person, no matter what his status or suspected crime, to a foreign locale where he or she would be at risk of torture or mistreatment. The CIA has admitted to Congress that before 2001 it engaged in about 70 "extraordinary renditions" of this sort; after 9/11, the Bush administration has refused to disclose how many more such forced returns it has participated in, though public reports document dozens of such incidents. (Seymour Hersh)
- December 19: Speaking in Kazakhstan,
Bush's foreign policies
US Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones states: "We will not leave Central Asia after resolving the conflict [in Afghanistan]. We want to support the Central Asian countries in their desire to reform their societies as they supported us in the war against terrorism. These are not only new but long-term relations." This important change in official US policy is not actually reported in the US itself. (CCR) - December 19: Republican Rep. Dan Burton asks for a Congressional investigation into the Justice Department's figures on convicted terrorists.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
He cites reports that drunks and the mentally imbalanced had been labeled as terrorists, and says, "An iron veil is descending over the executive branch that will keep information away from the Congress and the public." (Truthout)
Bush administration begins stonewalling investigations into 9/11 intelligence investigations
- December 21: The FBI reveals that it knows what's on the Flight 93 black boxes, but won't release the transcript or audio recording.
9/11 attacks
Families of the victims had requested to hear the cockpit voice recording, but the FBI says, "we do not believe that the horror captured on the cockpit voice recording will console them in any way." Accuracy in Media immediately submits a Freedom of Information Act request to have the transcript released, but the FBI turns it down because a release "could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings." The Philadelphia Daily News asks, "What enforcement proceedings?" and suggests the FBI may be covering up a shoot down of the plane. (CCR) - December 22:
War in Afghanistan
Afghani Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and his transitional government takes power in Afghanistan. It was revealed a few weeks before that he had been a paid consultant for Unocal, as well as Deputy Foreign Minister for the Taliban. (CCR) - December 22: British citizen Richard Reid is arrested in Paris for allegedly trying to blow up a Miami-bound jet using explosives hidden in his shoe after being overheard talking about the explosives before the flight took off.
Islamist terrorism
Passengers overpower Reid, who is promptly arrested. Interestingly enough, evidence tying Reid to the plot is found on the hard drive of a computer he used in a cybercafe; investigators had little trouble finding the computer, as Reid had a business card from the cafe in his pocket. He later pleads guilty to all charges, and declares himself a follower of Osama bin Laden. It is later believed that Reid and others in the shoe bomb plot reported directly to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who himself has ties to Pakistan's ISI. It is also later suggested that Reid is a follower of Ali Gilani, a religious leader believed to be working with the ISI. (CCR, Guardian) - December 24, 2001-January 23, 2002: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl writes stories about the ISI that will lead to his kidnapping.
Islamist terrorism
On December 24, 2001, he reports about ties between the ISI and a Pakistani organization that was working on giving bin Laden nuclear secrets before 9/11. A few days later, he reports that the ISI-supported terrorist organization Jaish-e-Mohammad still has its office running and bank accounts working, even though President Musharraf claims to have banned the group. He begins investigating links between shoe bomber Richard Reid and Pakistani militants, and comes across connections to the ISI and a mysterious religious group called Al-Fuqra. He also may be looking into the US training and backing of the ISI. He's writing another story on Dawood Ibrahim, a powerful terrorist and gangster protected by the ISI, and other Pakistani organized crime figures. Former CIA agent Robert Baer later claims to be working with Pearl on investigating 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It is later suggested that Mohammed masterminds both Reid's shoe bomb attempt and the Pearl kidnapping, and has connections to Pakistani gangsters and the ISI, so some of these explanations could fit together. One kidnapper will later say of Pearl, "because of his hyperactivity he caught our interest." (CCR) - December 24: Afghanistan intelligence reports say former top Taliban officials are living openly in villas in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
War in Afghanistan
At least four top leaders who had been caught have been simply released. One intelligence source claims to know the exact location of many, and says they could be rounded up within hours. A former Taliban minister now working with the Northern Alliance also claims, "some are living in luxury in fine houses, they are not hiding in holes. They could be in jail by tonight if the political will existed." The US claims it is working hard to find and catch these leaders, yet 18 months later no more leaders have been caught in Afghanistan. (CCR) - December 24: Pat Robertson steps down as the leader of the Christian Coalition, leading the Washington Post to write,
Religious conservatives
"Pat Robertson's resignation this month as President of the Christian Coalition confirmed the ascendance of a new leader of the religious right in America: George W. Bush." Gary Bauer, the anti-abortion evangelical who had briefly challenged Bush in 2000 and later became one of his staunchest supporters, says, "I think that Robertson stepped down because the position has already been filled. [Bush] is that leader right now. There was already a great deal of identification with the president before 9/11 in the world of the Christian Right, and the nature of this war is such that it has heightened the sense that a man of God is in the White House." Former coalition president Ralph Reed adds, "I've heard a lot of 'God knew something we didn't.' In the evangelical mind, the notion of an omniscient God is central to their theology. He had a knowledge nobody else had. He knew George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way." And Katherine Yurica writes, "[Evangelicals] believed Robertson had stepped down to allow the ascendance of the President of the United States of America to take his rightful place as the head of the true American Holy Christian Church. ...It was the signal that the Bush administration was a government under God that was led by an anointed President who would be the first regent in a dynasty of regents awaiting the return of Jesus to earth. The President would now be the minister through whom God would execute His will in the nation. George W. Bush accepted his scepter and his sword with humility, grace and a sense of exultation." Bush's public protestations of his faith, his self-description as "born again," his public reliance on the power of prayer, and his steady use of Biblical terms and phrasings in his public pronouncements all works to keep his standing as a rock-ribbed Christian evangelical going strong. Most of the phrasings, including the use of the terms "whirlwind" (from the Books of Job and Ezekiel), "work of mercy" (a Catholic reference to the "seven corporal works of mercy"), and "safely home" and "wonder-working power" (borrowed from gospel songs) raises no eyebrows among secular voters but resonates among evangelicals. Bush's October 7, 2001 speech announcing the US invasion of Afghanistan contained a half dozen veiled references to the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah. To evangelical listeners, the speech defined America's adversaries as the enemies of God, and current events were posited as confirmation of scripture. Bush's speechwriters deliberately employ what Biblical scholar Bruce Lincoln calls "strategies of double-coding" to deliver one message to secular listeners and quite another to evangelicals. (Kevin Phillips, Yurica Report) - December 28:
Iraq war and occupation
General Tommy Franks briefs Bush on the Iraq war plans during one of Bush's vacations at his Crawford ranch. Bush had directed the start of planning five weeks before. Bush later lies to reporters, telling them that he and Franks spoke about Afghanistan. (Mother Jones) - December 30:
Osama bin Laden
The new Afghan Interior Minister Younis Qanooni claims that the ISI helped Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan: "Undoubtedly they (ISI) knew what was going on." He claims that the ISI is still supporting bin Laden even if Pakistani president Musharraf isn't. (BBC)
Late 2001
- Late 2001: Expert intelligence agents and analysts question Iraqi intelligence, but are derailed by high-level officials in the Bush administration.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
They "were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House because the Bush ddministration had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime ...." David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), will say in March 2003 that the Bush administration willfully embellished and misinterpreted intelligence data to compel Congress and the American public to back the war. Albright speculates that the administration "deliberately misled the public and other governments in playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen public support for war." Albright says when he tried to voice his concerns about the intelligence information to White House officials, he was told to keep quiet. "I first learned of this case a year and a half ago [late 2001] when I was asked for information about past Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the disagreement reflected the typical in-fighting between US experts that often afflicts the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised when the administration latched onto one side of this debate in September 2002. I was told that this dispute had not been mediated by a competent, impartial technical committee, as it should have been, according to accepted practice. I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet." (Institute for Science and International Security, Dissident Voice) - Late 2001: Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root wins a 10-year contract from the US government to be the sole supplier of logistical support for American military units around the world, particularly in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Halliburton
KBR is also contracted to run Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey, build cells an ground for "detainees" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and build support bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. "Private military contractors" (PMCs) such as KBR are not accountable to the US government, and many observers fear that such companies might militarize confrontations in foreign countries that the Pentagon would not wish to promulgate. In addition, by using privately controlled troops -- in essence, mercenaries -- the Bush administration through these PMCs can, and do, evade congressional limitations on troops deployment and use. Essentially, these PMCs gave the Bush administration private armies not under the control of the US government. (Boston Herald, New York Times/Bernie Sanders, Online Journal, Kevin Phillips) - Late 2001: A trillion-dollar lawsuit is filed against Saudi Arabia by family members and survivors of the World Trade Center bombings,
9/11 attacks
alleging that Saudi Arabia harbored and aided the 9/11 attackers. The Saudis retain the Houston law firm of Baker, Botts to defend them in court. The Baker in Baker, Botts is James Baker III, former Bush I Secretary of State and prime legal representative of G.W. Bush's efforts to stop the recounts in the 2000 Florida elections. Baker is also a senior member of the Carlyle Group. (CCR) - At year's end, war between India and Pakistan seems imminent,
Middle East unrest
as many al-Qaeda and other terrorists are active in the disputed Kashmir region, apparently with Pakistani support. War between the two countries never breaks out, but tensions remain high. (CCR) - As the year ends, a rattled Saddam Hussein hints that Iraq might be willing to join the US in hunting down al-Qaeda terrorists.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Iraq's refusal to accept UN inspectors continues, and the Bush administration continues to resist UN intervention and inspections as well. At this point, the administration's approach seems to be focused on deterrence: "We have to make sure that Saddam knows that if he sticks his head up he'll get whacked," says a now-retired flag officer. (Seymour Hersh) - By the end of Bush's first year in office, most observers marvel at Bush's ability to undermine almost every US foreign policy and diplomatic initiative from the last quarter-century.
Bush's foreign policies
Bush has angered countries all over the world, has inflamed global "hot spots" from the Middle East to Korea, has peremptorily withdrawn from five major international treaties, all done in what the moderately conservative editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, calls "a language and diplomatic style that seemed calculated to offend the world." Even Bush biographer and cheerleader David Frum will write, "Bush was extraordinarily responsive to international criticism -- but his response was to tuck back his ears and repeat his offense." Neither Bush nor Cheney deigned to leave the confines of the US borders any more than absolutely necessary, in direct contrast to the globetrotting of his predecessors. (Cheney will only leave the US once in the first two years of the Bush presidency, and that single visit, to the Middle East to whip up support for the US invasion of Iraq, will be considered a complete failure, with regional leaders taking offense at Cheney's high-handed and condescending approach.) Bush hosted virtually no state dinners for foreign leaders, and makes a policy of refusing to consult with or even inform allies before taking major initiatives that directly affect them. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - By year's end,
Corporate - friendly deregulation
the percentage of US taxes paid by corporations has dropped to a record low of 7%, putting the US 28th of 29 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. Only Iceland has lower corporate taxes. In 1945, corporations paid a third of all US taxes, and 25% in the 1950s. The IRS estimates that American corporations dodge $75 billion in taxes each year by using offshore tax shelters and other stratagems. In light of this information, the 2003 Bush budget will call for a $142 billion reduction in corporate taxes. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
