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
March 2001
- March:
Iraq war and occupation
A report produced by the British Joint Intelligence Committee concludes that Iraq poses no greater threat to the world than it did after the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The report is suppressed by the Blair administration, who instead claims that hard evidence of Iraq's production of WMDs will be given in two weeks. The evidence was never made public. (CCR) - March: Taliban envoy Rahmatullah Hashimi meets with reporters, State Department bureaucrats, and private Afghanistan experts in Washington.
Islamist terrorism
He carries a gift carpet and a letter from Afghan leader Mullah Omar for Bush. He discusses turning Osama bin Laden over to US custody, but the US wants to be directly handed bin Laden and the Taliban want to turn him over to some third country. A CIA official later says: "We never heard what they were trying to say. ...We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.' ...I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck." Others claim the Taliban were never sincere. About 20 more meetings on giving up bin Laden take place up till 9/11, all fruitless. Hashimi also proposes that the Taliban would hold bin Laden in one location long enough for the US to locate and destroy him. However, this offer is refused. (CCR) - March: Bush declares, "We can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits, even if the economy softens."
Bush's economic policies
His administration issues a prediction of a $125 billion surplus for 2001. In August, the Congressional Budget Office will issue a report showing that the surplus figures are actually zero, and that by year's end, the US government will be running a $9 billion shortfall. The CBO predicts, accurately, that the government will have to raid the Social Security "lockbox" funds to keep the government running. Bush's promise of a trillion-dollar "cushion" is forgotten, as is his promise never to raid Social Security funds, and his promise to pay down the federal debt. Instead, Bush racks up record-breaking deficits, guts Social Security, and increases the national debt. While Bush wins notable political victories in steamrolling Democratic opposition to get his tax cuts enacted, the cost to the American taxpayer is staggering. (David Corn)
EPA rolls back arsenic standards
- March: EPA head Christine Todd Whitman announces that the Bush administration will withdraw a new standard for arsenic levels in drinking water implemented at the end of the Clinton administration.
Global warming and the environment
(Arsenic causes cancer and is particularly a risk for pregnant women and young children.) Whitman states falsely that the new rules have not been fully studied by scientists for their environmental and economic impact. The new standards lowering the permissible amount of arsenic in drinking water from 50 ppb (parts per billion) to 10 ppb; Whitman concedes that no scientists believe the 50 ppb levels are safe, but contends that no one can agree on a level that is safe for people to drink. In reality, the EPA worked for 10 years on establishing the standard of 10 ppb; most EPA officials believe that a level of 3 ppb would be safer, but took economic considerations into account and compromised with a recommendation of 10 ppb. The new EPA standard was identical to standards already adopted by the World Health Organization and the European Union. - When the firestorm of criticism descends on the Bush administration, Whitman attempts to take the criticism upon herself, claiming falsely that she made the decision to cancel the standards herself, and tells the press, "I never talked to the White House about this one." She digs herself in deeper by claiming, "I never read or talked to any of the industry groups. This was purely my decision. In fact, when we told the White House we were going with it, they pushed back. They said, 'Are you sure this is what you want? Is it the right thing?'" Whitman is lying to cover the White House. A March 14 e-mail from the EPA's drinking water protection division is found that notes, "EPA is discussing with White House staff the recommendation for a proposed withdrawal of the arsenic standard." Another e-mail from the same division notes "it was made very clear that" delaying the arsenic rule "was not a science but a policy decision." In David Frum's biography of Bush, The Right Man, Frum reveals that it is Karl Rove who insists on the reversal of the arsenic policy, as an attempt to secure votes in New Mexico, a swing state whose mining industries and utilities would have to allocate lots of money to clean up its arsenic levels. Several months after the EPA's decision to roll back the arsenic standards, the National Academy of Science releases a study showing that the 10 ppb standard was scientifically justified but probably too high -- the standards should be tighter, closer to 3 ppb. Six weeks after the study is released, the EPA announces that its final decision on arsenic standards will be 10 ppb. (David Corn)
- March: The Defense Policy Board chairman,
Iraq war and occupation
neoconservative Richard Perle, tells the Senate Foreign Relations committee, "Does Saddam [Hussein] now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. ...How far he's gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don't think we really know. My guess is it's further than we think. It's always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we're able to prove and demonstrate.... And, unless you believe that we've uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we're able to report." Perle, true to his theme, offers no evidence of the existence of any Iraqi WMDs to the senators. Worse, he fails to offer evidence from the UN inspectors that shows virtually all of Iraq's WMD stockpiles and programs have long since been destroyed. (Seymour Hersh) - March: During a photo op at the Egleston Children's Hospital in Atlanta,
Bush's economic policies
Bush reportedly gets "misty-eyed" during one mother's account of her daughter's battle with cancer. Bush's emotional response is not enough for him to ask that congressional Republicans restore $35 million to a program that trains pediatric physicians at hospitals such as Egleston. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - March 1:
Bush's foreign policies
Taliban forces begin blowing up two ancient stone Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. This sparks international outrage, but the Taliban seems not to care. Even pressure from Pakistan's ISI to leave the Buddhas alone does not work. As for the Bush administration, it makes outraged noises, but continues to cultivate relations with the Taliban. (CCR) - March 1: A blue-ribbon panel makes 35 recommendations for change to Florida's election proceedings.
Election fraud
Most, though not all, of the recommendations are adopted in the Election Reform Act that sails through Florida's legislature in the spring. One major change is the triggering of automatic recounts if a margin of victory in a race is is one-half of 1% or less, and if the margin of victory is less than one-quarter of 1%, a manual recount is mandated of the undervotes and overvotes. Provisional ballots are also mandated for voters who cannot be found in the register or who is denied the right to vote because of, say, appearing on a purported felons list. The board of elections will decide if each provisional ballot is legitimate. Other changes are made, including adopting "convenience voting" for absentee ballots, which allows any voter to vote absentee; for overseas ballots, postmarks will no longer be an issue, with any ballots received within 10 days of an election being counted. Most dramatically, punch-card voting machines are prohibited, making the entire issue of "hanging chads" and so forth moot. Also gone are centralized optiscan machines that hook up to a central county server (thousands of overvotes, mostly from poorer black counties, were rejected in 2000 because centralized county servers did not recognize the votes). 39 counties -- 24 punch-card and 15 central optiscan -- will now need to either adopt precinct-based optiscan machines or go to newer touch-screen machines. (Touch-screen machines had just been legalized in Florida due to a huge push by vendors, and because larger counties wanted to get rid of paper ballots once and for all.) - The commission frowns on touch-screen machines, mostly because that studies show they are less reliable than optiscans; giving a nod to Bush v. Gore, the panel suggests that systems with higher error rates might not treat their counties equally. The panel fails to note that the touch-screen machines don't provide paper receipts, which makes manual recounts impossible. All of the big counties decide to go with the new touch-screen machines, mostly those made by an Omaha-based company called Election Systems and Software (ES&s). The company has strong ties to national Republicans such as US senator Chuck Hagel, the former CEO of the company; additionally, the company hires the services of Sandra Mortham, Florida's former secretary of state and the driving force behind the "felon purge" of 2000. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)
- March 4: A short-lived Fox TV program called The Lone Gunmen,
9/11 attacks
a spin-off of The X Files, airs a pilot episode in which terrorists try to fly an airplane into the WTC. There are no terrorists on board the aircraft; remote control technology is used to steer the plane. Ratings were good for the show, yet the eerie coincidence is barely mentioned after 9/11. Says one media columnist, "This seems to be collective amnesia of the highest order." The heroes avert disaster, and at the end of the show state, "The terrorist group responsible was actually a faction of our own government. These malefactors were seeking to stimulate arms manufacturing in the lean years following the end of the Cold War by bringing down a plane in New York City and fomenting fears of terrorism." (Killtown) - March 7:
Islamist terrorism
The Russian Permanent Mission at the United Nations secretly submits "an unprecedentedly detailed report" to the UN Security Council about Osama bin Laden, his whereabouts, details of his al-Qaeda network, Afghan drug running, and Taliban connections in Pakistan. The report provides "a listing of all bin Laden's bases, his government contacts and foreign advisors," and enough information to make an assassination attempt possible. The US fails to act. Alex Standish, the editor of the highly respected Jane's Intelligence Review, concludes that the attacks of 9/11 were less of an American intelligence failure and more the result of "a political decision not to act against bin Laden." (CCR) - March 7: Bush meets with South Korean president Kim Dae Jung,
Bush's foreign policies
and pointedly snubs Kim in an official press conference, announcing that he has no intention of following the Clinton policy of engaging North Korea in any sort of dialogue regarding North Korea's nuclear buildup. Kim has attempted to implement a "sunshine" policy of open negotiations with the North, including economic trade and nuclear talks, but his efforts are predicated on US support. Secretary of State Colin Powell has been advocating working with Kim to further implement negotiations with North Korea, but loses out to pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who state that they believe Clinton had been doing little more than appeasing a tyrant in negotiating with North Korea's Kim Jong Il. Bush misstates reality in the conference, saying that "we're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," when there has only been a single agreement between the US and North Korea, the 1994 agreement to freeze North Korea's plutonium processing. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill believes that the tremendous gaffe is due to Bush's lack of understanding of the complex situation between the US, North Korea, and the US's allies in Southeast Asia, and Bush's failure to "do his homework" before Kim's arrival in Washington. O'Neill attempts to salvage the situation by lauding South Korea's superb literacy rate among its citizens, earning a look of surprise from Bush. O'Neill privately mulls over the decision-making process in the White House, with Bush destroying ten years of "delicately stitched US policy towards North Korea" in just a few minutes. He determines not to let what is happening to Powell over US foreign policy happen to him over US fiscal policy. (Ron Suskind) - March 9: The Washington Post reports on a memo recently sent out by the head of the National Association of Manufacturers,
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
a business lobbying group, on a strategy worked out with the assistance of Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. The memo asks for Bush supporters to come to a rally in support of Bush's tax cut plan; however, to avoid the attendees looking like the button-downed lobbyists they are, the memo instructs them to dress like construction workers: "The theme involves working Americans," reads the memo. "Visually, this will involve a sea of hard hats, which are construction and contractor and building groups are working very hard to provide. But the Speaker's office was very clear in saying that they do not need people in suits. If people want to participate -- AND WE DO NEED BODIES -- they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKERS types, etc. We plan to have hard hats for people to wear." Journalist Paul Waldman notes that this type of masquerade is typical Bush manipulation; in 2003, White House aides will instruct people standing behind Bush at an event promoting his tax cuts to remove their ties, so they would appear to be ordinary folks. (Washington Post/New York Times/Paul Waldman) - March 12: Fresh evidence shows that former vice president Al Gore would have won the November 2000 elections in Florida if recounts had been allowed to continue.
Election fraud
Gore's efforts to claim the presidency, which he won by the popular vote, were stopped when a Republican-led Supreme Court decision granted the election to George W. Bush in a fatally flawed decision. A comprehensive new survey of "undervotes" in Palm Beach County shows that Gore would have gained 784 more votes than Bush if every excluded ballot bearing some kind of mark next to a candidate's name had been counted. Palm Beach County had well-publicized problems with the so-called "butterfly ballot," which confused thousands of voters and resulted in thousands of probable Gore votes going to Pat Buchanan. By themselves, those votes would have been enough to give Gore the Florida victory. The Palm Beach recount figures came too late to be included in the official tally of votes certified by the Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris 19 days after the November 7 election; Harris also served as co-chairman of the Bush election campaign in Florida, and has been shown to have improperly used her office to assist her candidate. Another vote analysis shows that Gore was unfairly cost 130 votes in Lake County that were simply not counted by the county election officials. (Guardian, Guardian) - March 12: The battle over Bush's proposed tax cuts gains in strength, with liberals, moderates, and some conservative Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad moving towards a proposed tax cut of $800 billion over ten years, with a more progressive blend of rate reductions to assist the middle class.
Bush's economic policies
They also wanted to pay down the federal debt more swiftly than the Bush administration was proposing. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker publicly state that Bush's own proposals were "fiscally unsound." On the other side, Senate and House Republicans are fighting for deeper tax cuts, slanted heavily towards the wealthy. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay calls the Bush proposals "a floor, not a ceiling;" House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott are pushing to add deep capital gains tax cuts to the package. OMB chair Mitch Daniels produces an estimate that the federal budget surpluses will far exceed the administration's current estimate of $5.6 trillion over ten years, itself a fantasy, but useful for waving around in support of Bush's huge tax cut proposals. A proposal for implementing "triggers," fiscal and budgetary conditions which must be met before allowing tax cuts to proceed, introduced by Senate Republican Olympia Snowe and her Democratic counterpart Evan Bayh and supported by four other Republicans and five Democrats -- centrists all -- is quietly supported by Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who, with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, came up with the idea in the first place. But the White House and the conservatives in Congress have no intention of allowing any such measures to be implemented. Bush and the Congressional Republican leadership are adamant: no negotiations, no nothing. (Ron Suskind) - March 15: Jane's Intelligence Review
Islamist terrorism
reports that the US is working with India, Iran and Russia "in a concerted front against Afghanistan's Taliban regime." India supplies the Northern Alliance with military equipment, advisers and helicopter technicians and both India and Russia are using bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for their operations. (Project Censored, From the Wilderness) - March 15: Bush humiliates the president of South Korea, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae Jung, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell,
Bush's foreign policies
when, during Kim's visit to Washington to meet with the new president, Bush publicly repudiates negotiations between North and South Korea that both Kim and Powell have endorsed. (See related item above.) Worse, he accuses North Korea of breaching the single agreement that exists concerning North Korea's nuclear weapons without either providing proof or showing any understanding of the agreement. To justify Bush's diplomatic sabotage, a White House spokesperson says, "That's how the president speaks." Mark Crispin Miller observes, "Bush thus set back the Korean reconciliation effort, pushed the North Koreans to speed up nuclear arms production, and soured US relations with both South Korea and Japan." (Salon/Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Mark Crispin Miller) - March 15: Two weeks after the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency,
Global warming and the environment
Christine Todd Whitman, says, "This president is very sensitive to the issue of global warming.... There's no question that global warming is a real phonomenon...." and just days after Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill compares the threat of global warming to that posed by a nuclear holocaust, Bush announces that he is breaking his campaign pledge to place a cap on carbon dioxide emissions, the most direct cause of global warming (a phrase his administration will refuse to use, preferring instead the more general "climate change"). A White House spokesperson says that "CO2 should not have been included as a pollutant during the campaign. It was a mistake." Bush himself tells the public that he has been presented with "important information" that has led him to change his mind. The "important information" certainly wasn't the report just issued by the National Academy of Sciences, which concludes that carbon dioxide and other emissions from automobiles and factories are indeed being trapped in the atmosphere and are, indeed, causing global warming. It is far more likely that the information that supposedly changed Bush's mind comes directly from the oil and gas industries. Later in the year, the resignation letter of Jane Hughes Turnbull (a member of the National Coal Council) from the Cheney energy task force warns that Bush's turnabout is "profoundly short-sighted [and] an obvious and expedient response to industry interests." Those selfsame industry interests, which had lavished $3 million in contributions to the Bush campaign, are not slow in deluging Bush and Cheney with thank-you letters and other, more tangible, expressions of their gratitude. Bush's new plan to curb the "emissions intensity" of CO2 by 2012 will actually see a 14% rise in emissions over the next decade. And since Bush's new industry standards are voluntary, the raise may be much higher, as most industries will "voluntarily" ignore the standards. "There's no evidence that would convince the administration [voluntary reductions] will work," says Howard Ris of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "We've had a voluntary approach since 1990, and 13 to 15% more carbon emissions since then.... I don't even think the Bush administration believes it. It's a smokescreen." The international press is far more outraged than the compliant American media, a position best summed up by the commentary of the Scottish Sunday Herald: "It was the callousness of his words, the naked self-interest of his sentiment and the disregard he showed for the health and safety of the world, that really shook people." While the Bush administration gives over to the desires of the industry that pollutes, the facts are grim: the decade of the 1990s was the warmest on record in a millennium, and 2001 and 2002 will be proven to be two of the three warmest years since the 1800s. Glaciers in the Arctic and the Andes Mountains are melting at a shocking rate, and ocean levels are beginning to rise, threatening coastal habitats for people and animals all over the world. But Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the source of renaming global warming "climate change," has a uniquely Republican solution: spin the science. He recommends fostering skepticism about global warming among the American electorate, and warns, "should the public come to believe that scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly." (Washington Post/Guardian/Sunday Herald/Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - March 15: Bush is visited in the Oval Office by Bush family friend Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US.
Bush's foreign policies
The only others in attendance are national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and Bandar's trusted aide, Rihab Massoud. Bandar enjoys singular access to Bush, more so than many of his senior White House officials. Bandar and Bush discuss covert action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein; Bandar is impatient with the no-fly zones and economic sanctions, and, like Bush, wants direct action taken against Hussein. Bush also wants to speak with Bandar at least once a month to help keep his thumb on the scales of the world's oil prices. An elated Bandar sends a secret message to Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia: "Many positive signs as far as relations and issues that are of concern to both countries. Loyalty and honesty are sensitive issues for this president. It is important that we invest in this man, in a very positive way." The question, of course, is, to whom is Bush's honesty and loyalty directed? (Bob Woodward) - March 20: The first of the "Anchor Chain" series of "snowflakes," or unsigned memos from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, circulates through the hierarchy of the Pentagon.
US military
The memos, which will undergo several revisions, is annotated and edited by, among others, Rumsfeld's personal assistant Stephen Cambone, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The memo becomes a sprawling, overarching combination of mission statement, fix-it lists, and gripe session, reflective both of Rumsfeld's sincere ambitions to cut through the bloated and unresponsive military bureaucracy, and his more personal desire to run the US military in its entirety from his office. In short, Rumsfeld believes the system is broken. Congressional oversight, he feels, cripples the ability of the military to spend what it needs to on getting buildings built and weapons systems constructed. He complains that talented officers skip from one assignment to another every two years or so, too fast to "learn from their own mistakes." He complains that the military "mindlessly use[s] the failed Soviet model: centralized government systems for housing, commissaries, healthcare and education, rather than using the private sector competitive models that are the envy of the world." This apparently is the origin of the "privitization" of the military's logistical systems that will come to ugly fruition with Halliburton, Bechtel, and other private corporations providing everything from meals to housing for military personnel both in Iraq and in America. Forgetting, or ignoring, the fact that the Defense Department has demonstrated time and again that it will willfully squander billions if left to its own devices, he complains that Congressional oversight so hampers the department's functions that "the DOD no longer has the authority to conduct the business of the Department. The maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late." Without transforming the relationship between the DOD and Congress, he writes, "the transformation of our armed forces is not possible." He says the task is too big for a single presidency: "[O]ur job, therefore, is to work together to sharpen the sword that the next president will wield." (Bob Woodward) - March 21:
Bush's energy policies
An e-mail to the Cheney energy task force from Bob Slaughter of the National Petrochemical Refiners Association recommends that "the EPA's enforcement campaign against US refineries should be halted and re-examined." Slaughter is referring to the EPA's practice of filing suits against refineries that increase production at their dirtiest plants but fail to implement stricter pollution controls. Cheney's task force makes the recommendation to overturn the enforcement policy, and the EPA complies. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - March 25: Former president Bill Clinton visits Pakistan.
Islamist terrorism
He is "begged" by the Secret Service not to make the trip, as US intelligence believes the entire Pakistani government is riddled with ties to al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups. Clinton's security forces take extradordinary measures to ensure his safety; the visit goes off without a hitch. (CCR) - March 26: A new study gives credence to the theory that a shot from an unidentified assassin perched on the "grassy knoll" in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, was responsible for killing President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
Kennedy assassination
Digital analysis of a police dictabelt audio recording shows there was a 90% to 95% chance that such a shot was fired, almost simultaneously with the shots fired from the book depository by Lee Harvey Oswald, who is officially believed to have acted alone in assassinating Kennedy. The study places the unknown gunman behind a picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll, in front of and to the right of the presidential limousine. (Washington Post) - March 28: Bush decides that the US delegation will walk out of meetings discussing the Kyoto Protocols,
Global warming and the environment
a set of overarching international guidelines designed to curb global warming. Since the Bush administration's position is that global warming does not exist, a position incompatible with reality, Bush sees no reason to participate in any discussions of the problem. (Worse, from Bush's point of view, implementation of the Kyoto treaty would cost polluting corporations billions in clean-up and prevention costs.) The US pullout subjects Bush to global criticism and outrage. 178 other countries ratify the protocols in August, but without US participation, the accords are all but meaningless, as the US accounts for about 25% of the world's greenhouse gases. The entire Kyoto situation is classic Bush. In 2000, while campaigning for president, Bush had repeatedly spoken out for the accords, approved by Clinton in 1997 but never ratified by Congress. During the meetings, the ideologically radical US delegation is arrogant and uncooperative with other delegates, and the decision to terminate US participation is handled by Condoleezza Rice, who peremptorily informs European Union delegates over a private lunch that the entire deal is "dead." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer adds, "The president has been unequivocal. He does not support the Kyoto treaty. It is not in the United States' economic best interest." - EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom says in a statement, "It is very worrying if it is true that the US intends to pull out of the protocol. The EU is willing to discuss details and problems -- but not scrap the whole protocol." British Environment Minister Michael Meacher says of the Kyoto treaty, "It was signed up to by every single nation on earth, and if America now tries to walk away...I think this is not just an environmental issue, it's an issue of transatlantic global foreign policy." Australian Environment Minister Robert Hill says the collapse of the Kyoto protocol would be "a major step backwards." The country responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gases "cannot easily walk away from that responsibility. Time is against us, we are already starting to experience the consequences of climate change." A senior environmental official of the tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati says his country is already experiencing coastal erosion, droughts and severe storms as sea levels rose. "It is a terrible economic problem, it is our very survival," he says. Japan says that it will urge the United States, the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, to rethink its plan to abandon the Kyoto treaty. "In terms of the effectiveness of the Kyoto protocol, the US participation is crucial," says a spokesman for the Environmental Ministry.
- After the pullout, Bush informs the Europeans that if they doubt his commitment to a cleaner environment, "all they need to do is look at home and see that we're making good progress on the environment at home. We changed wetland regulations. We will reduce the amount of arsenic in our waters. ...[W]e've got money for our national parks." Bush is, of course, lying; his administration is in the process of undermining arsenic restrictions, national park guidelines, and wetland regulations, going so far as to deny Jeb Bush's request for federal help in preserving Florida's coastlines. The idea "of placing caps on CO2 does not make economic sense for America," he later says, and later brags, "I went to dinner, as Karen [Hughes] would tell you, with fifteen leaders of the EU, and patiently sat there as all fifteen in one form or another told me how wrong I was. And at the end I said, 'I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it's right for America.'" As a sideline, the Kyoto debacle provides another means for administration neocons to humiliate Colin Powell, who in July will promise that the US will come up with its own alternative proposals to replace the Kyoto protocols in the fall. Rice quickly repudiates Powell, telling the public that no plans will be forthcoming, and the alleged deadline is merely a figment of Powell's imagination. (CNN, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
EP-3 spyplane crashes in China; Bush officials allow Chinese to strip plane of sensitive equipment
- March 31 - April 11: An American EP-3 Aries II spyplane collides with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea.
Bush's foreign policies
The fighter crashes, killing the pilot; the EP-3 makes an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island, and 24 American crewmen are captured by the Chinese. Experts note that the Chinese pilot is part of an apparent program to harass American flights in the South China Sea; this is one of many incidents where Chinese fighters have flown too close to American planes in international airspace. Pentagon officials warn the Chinese not to board the plane, as it is full of secret electronic surveillance gear. The Chinese ignore the warning and board the plane anyway. Inexplicably, the crew has not followed standard procedure in destroying the sensitive contents of the plane, and the Chinese make off with an untold amount of high-tech surveillance equipment. Bush demands the immediate return of the 24 crewmen, but the Chinese detain them for 12 days. (The Bush administration is careful not to use the term "hostage." Secretary of State Colin Powell refers to them as "detainees" being held "incommunicado.") Four days lapse before US officials are allowed to meet with the crewmen. Meanwhile, the Chinese government holds the US fully responsible for the crash, and demands a string of apologies from the US before they will release the crew. Bush refuses to apologize. Powell's expression of "regret" over the incident isn't good enough for the Chinese, who continue to press for full apologies from the US government. Bush echoes Powell's expression of regret, and says he does not want the incident to jeopardize relations between the two countries. (Bush's statement during the crisis that the US will do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan was a major gaffe, simultaneously rewriting almost 20 years of Sino-American relations and infuriating the Chinese; Bush officials immediately leapt into the fray to assure the Chinese that Bush didn't mean what he said, and that the "two-China" policies adopted during the Reagan administration were still in force.) Powell eventually apologizes on television for the loss of life (the Chinese pilot); Bush apologizes in passing, without acknowledging that he actually apologizes. On April 11, the crew is released to American officials; the Chinese keep the downed plane. One US official states, "The EP-3E is the jewel in the crown of the US Navy's electronic intelligence gathering capability and the loss of its secrets to a potential unfriendly nation is a grievous loss to the US." - Human rights organizations are angered at the Bush administration, accusing them of allowing China to continue to detain permanent American resident Gao Zhan as part of the deal to release the crewmen. Gao was accused with spying and detained in February, but has yet to be charged. Twenty or so other Chinese-Americans have been held by China for months on a variety of charges. Media pundit Eric Alterman characterizes the response of the US media as "extremely indulgent" towards Bush, with the notable exception of neoconservatives, who complain about "the national humilation [Bush] has brought upon the United States" and Bush's "weakness...and fear." Alterman says that while the incident itself was a foreign policy disaster, the manipulation of an admittedly compliant US media was brilliant. He notes that Bush was able to apologize twice to the Chinese without actually being reported in America as apologizing. Neither was the tremendous intelligence loss of the EP-3 focused upon as the potential disaster that many military and intelligence officials perceived it to be. Washington Post correspondant John Harris will later write: "The truth is, this new president has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton. Take it from someone who made a living writing about these uproars. ...Take the recent emergency landing of a US surveillance plane in China. Imagine how conservatives would have reacted had Clinton insisted that detained military personnel were not actually hostages, and then cut a deal to get the people (but not the plane) home by offering two 'very sorrys' to the Chinese, while also saying that he had not apologized. What is being hailed as Bush's shrewd diplomacy would have been savaged as 'Slick Willie' contortions."
- It is not revealed until years later that Powell actually turns the task of negotiating with the Chinese over to Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar, the ambassador to the US, a senior Saudi intelligence operative, and an intimate Bush family friend. Bandar has a special relationship with the Chinese due to Saudi Arabia's various deals to purchase arms and missiles, and the increasing reliance of China on Saudi oil. Bandar, never a modest man, considers it a personal favor from the Chinese to have them release the 24 American hostages. Bandar also oversees the wording of the American "apology" to the Chinese for the incident, where the US apologizes for entering Chinese airspace to make an emergency landing, but does not apologize for the E-3's legitimate intelligence-gathering mission. Powell finds out about Bandar's negotiations through the NSA's monitoring of Bandar's phone calls to the Chinese; when he calls Bandar to congratulate him on his success, Bandar snaps to the Secretary of State, "How the hell do you know?"
- Again, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld feels that he has deliberately been left out of the loop. He wants to know why the US intelligence community is running such missions so close to Chinese airspace, who authorizes them, and what intelligence is gathered. Rumsfeld demands timelines of events and a top-to-bottom examination of any and all intelligence-gathering missions involving US military airborne platforms. Many in the Pentagon believe that the examinations are worthy -- the missions have been going on for years, virtually on autopilot -- but worries that Rumsfeld is again trying to insert himself into the situation and throw his weight around. Days afterwards, Rumsfeld convenes a meeting with Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and Admiral Dennis Blair, the commander in chief of the Pacific Command. (JCS chairman Hugh Shelton is traveling, so Myers represents him.) Blair wants the missions restarted as soon as possible, and Rumsfeld agrees. He directs Blair to write a brief memo detailing the restart plan and provide it to him so he can share it with Powell and Condoleezza Rice the next morning.
- Blair sends the message, by standard procedure, to Shelton and the JCS, but not to Rumsfeld. According to protocol, Rumsfeld can't see the message until Shelton has signed off on it. Rumsfeld explodes. In the presence of his assistant, J.J. Quinn, Rumsfeld sends for Myers and gives him what Quinn recalls as a "royal *ss chewing," worse than he has ever seen in his 25 years of naval service. Rumsfeld chews Myers up to the moment he has to leave to brief Rice and Powell. Rumsfeld wants to fire someone, and since he can't fire Shelton, he decides to fire Admiral Scott Fry, Shelton's senior assistant. Shelton, back in Washington and appraised of Rumsfeld's fury, is determined to defend Fry. In Fry's office, Shelton finds Fry buried under a drift of "snowflakes" from Rumsfeld, attempting without success to keep up with the blizzard of directives from Rumsfeld's office. Fry says he has often had to dragoon half the JCS staff to keep up with Rumsfeld's edicts, especially after Rumsfeld has ordered that all snowflakes be answered -- no matter how in-depth or complex the issues raised -- within 24 hours. "There aren't enough people in the Pentagon to respond to all the snowflakes that are coming down" from Rumsfeld, Fry explains. Shelton, unwilling to see Fry's career destroyed because of Rumsfeld's pique, storms into Rumsfeld's office and says, "If you're not happy with Scott Fry, he works for me, and if you're not happy with him, it means you're unhappy with me. You can have two for the price of one." Rumsfeld heatedly denies that he has any plans to fire Fry, and Shelton leaves, somewhat mollified. Shelton and Fry are both safe from Rumsfeld's ire; however, Rumsfeld knows that Shelton is to retire soon, and he determines to engineer a replacement for Shelton that won't talk back to him. For the moment, all Rumsfeld is willing to do is to badmouth Fry to anyone who will listen. (CNN, Reuters/Global Security, NewsMax, Capitalism Magazine, About, Eric Alterman, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Bob Woodward)
