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: October
Page Two
- October 10: The US government asks the major US TV networks to refrain from showing unedited video messages taped by Osama bin Laden; they agree.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
A Newsweek article criticizes the decision, and points out that "all but one [of these networks] are controlled by major conglomerates that have important pending business with the government." The article openly questions if the media is "doing too much of the government's bidding" in reporting on 9/11. Says one expert, "I'm not saying that everything is a horrible paranoid fantasy, but my sense is there's an implicit quid pro quo here. The industry seems to be saying to the administration, 'we're patriotic, we're supporting the war, we lost all of this advertising, now free us from [business] constraints.'" (CCR) - October 10-11:
Domestic terrorism
The FBI allows the original batch of the Ames strain of anthrax to be destroyed, making tracing the anthrax type more difficult. Suspicions that the anthrax used in the letters was the Ames strain are confirmed on October 17. (CCR) - October 11:
Iraq war and occupation
Bush writes a letter to Congress requesting the authority to mobilize military forces against Iraq. The letter offers two justifications: first, further diplomacy with Iraq is futile; second, any military usage will be predicated on finding solid evidence of a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - October 11: Paul Bremer, former Reagan-era "ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism,"
Republican corruption
launches a company designed to capitalize on the "new atmosphere of fear" in corporate America. Crisis Consulting Practice, a division of insurance giant Marsh & McLennan, specializes in helping multinationals come up with "integrated and comprehensive crisis solutions" for everything from terror attacks to accounting fraud. CCP allies itself with Versar, a company which specializes in biological and chemical threats; clients of the two companies are treated to "total counterterrorism services." In May 2003 Bremer will be named to head the interim government in Iraq. (The Nation/CommonDreams) - October 11: Bush publicly asks America's schoolchildren to donate $1 each to a White House relief fund for Afghani children.
War in Afghanistan
He promises to bolster the schoolchildren's donations with $320 million in humanitarian aid. (Much of the money is never sent to Afghanistan.) But by December he is backtracking on his commitment, saying he wants the US to be a "limited" partner in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. He will ignore repeated calls from the interim Afghani government which eventually replaces the Taliban for troops to augment an UN-backed international peacekeeping force (troops from 17 countries, but not the US, participate in this force) that patrols Kabul and its immediate environs, leaving the rest of the country to slide into chaos and lawlessness. (David Corn) - October 11: Bush gives his first press conference since the 9/11 attacks,
9/11 attacks
and tells the American people that the best thing they can do to counter terrorism is to spend money shopping. "We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business or people don't shop." When asked what sacrifices the American people might be prepared to make to bring the country together and stand against terrorism, Bush responds, "Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before." After such recommendations, one might think that even a press determined to unite behind the country's president might have some criticisms of such a shallow and commercial set of statements. Instead, the New York Times's coverage of the conference sets the love-letter tone of the nation's media, telling its readers how Bush addressed the nation "in the somber tones of a leader in the midst of war" and proclaiming Bush's "new gravitas." A Times editorial says that Bush's conference was "for the most part a reassuring performance that gave comfort to an uneasy nation." USA Today calls his performance "regal." The Dallas Morning News tells its readers that Bush has been "transformed" by the attacks, into what the Times calls "a mature leader of a nation at war." Editorials compare Bush favorably to Abraham Lincoln and Moses. Paul Waldman explains, "For the media, September 11 created an atmosphere of nationalism that did now allow for the questioning of the commander-in-chief. ...They saw their country attacked and responded by temporarily putting aside the conventions of their professionalism. (New York Times/USA Today/Paul Waldman) - October 12: Attorney General Ashcroft empowers federal agencies to deny requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Secrecy of Bush administration
In a memo to all government departments and agencies, he states, "When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions." This is a dramatic shift from the Clinton administration, which instructed federal officials to grant all information requests unless there was "foreseeable harm" in doing so. While this policy was announced after 9/11, it had been planned well beforehand. The new rule, called "Exemption 2," empowers federal officials to deny requests for information whether or not the information is in the public interest. The exemption reads in part, "Whether there is any public interest in disclosure is legally irrelevant...." (CCR, Stephen Pizzo/Daily Misleader) - October 12: In an example of Bush's use of the 9/11 attacks to justify his own political agenda,
Bush's energy policies
this time on drilling for oil in Alaska, Bush says, "I urge the Senate to listen to the will of the senators and move a bill. ...The less dependent we are on foreign sources of crude oil, the more secure we are at home." (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - October 13: Czech foreign minister Jan Kavan briefs Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington about the alleged trip 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta took to the Czech Republic in April 2001.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Kavan tells Powell that the BIS, the Czech intelligence service, has reason to believe that Mohamed Atta may have met near Prague with Iraqi Counsel Al-Ani. The story is rapidly proven to be false, but it provides the opportunity for Bush officials to tout a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, a connection that they desperately want to establish. One Bush official will tell reporters of "meetings" between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official. In April 2002, according to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, "the Czechs quietly acknowledged that they may have been mistaken about the whole thing. US intelligence and law enforcement officials now believe that Atta wasn't even in Prague at the time the Czechs claimed." Nevertheless, defense advisor Richard Perle will continue to assert, "I am quite confident the meeting took place," Vice President Cheney will continue to tell press members that "we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center," and right-wing commentators refuse to let the assertion go; even as late as 2005, respected conservative commentator William Safire will characterize the Atta meeting as an "undisputed fact." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will meet with FBI officials in an attempt to get the FBI to endorse the story of the Atta meeting. The FBI is reluctant to agree; as they note, the single source of the story is an unidentified and unreliable Czech informant, who says Atta met with Iraqi intelligence on April 9, though no airline or passport records can be found to verify that Atta was in Prague. The entire farrago is laid to rest for most people in October 2002, when Czech president Vaclav Havel tells the White House that he is sure the meeting never took place, and that Atta was last in Prague in June of 2000. According to the New York Times, "some Czech and German officials say that their best explanation of why Mr. Atta came to Prague was to get a cheap airfare to the United States." (CCR, David Corn) - October 14: Investigators of the anthrax attacks believe Iraq is the prime suspect.
Domestic terrorism
A CIA source says, "They aren't making this stuff in caves in Afghanistan. This is prima facie evidence of the involvement of a state intelligence agency. Maybe Iran has the capability. But it doesn't look likely politically. That leaves Iraq." However, this theory lasts only a few days. A week later, the theory that a domestic strain of anthrax, possibly released by "a disgruntled employee of a domestic laboratory that uses anthrax," is responsible for the attacks. The anthrax used in the mailings is proven to be a domestic strain that bears no resemblance to strains that Russia and Iraq have turned into biological weapons. However, in late 2002 with war against Iraq growing increasingly likely, the Iraq theory appears to make a comeback. (CCR) - October 15: Democratic senator Tom Daschle's office opens a letter mailed October 9, containing a lethal dose of anthrax.
Domestic terrorism
Fellow Democratic senator Patrick Leahy's similar letter is misrouted to Virginia on October 12, and isn't discovered until November 17. (CCR) - October 15:
Domestic terrorism
Bush attempts to link Osama bin Laden to the anthrax attacks. He states, "There may be some possible link. We have no hard data yet, but it's clear that Mr. Bin Laden is an evil man." (CCR) - October 15: The Russian government is leery of the upcoming US conquest of Afghanistan,
War in Afghanistan
seeing it as the first stages of a US attempt to replace Russia as the dominant political force in Central Asia, with the control of oil as a prominent motive. The US later appears to gain military influence over Kazakhstan, the Central Asian country with the most resource wealth, and closest to the Russian heartland. (SFGate, Independent/Common Dreams)
CIA learns of purported scheme for Iraq to buy large amount of uranium from Niger
- October 15: SISMI, the Italian intelligence service, cables a sketchy report on a possible Iraqi deal to buy a huge amount of uranium -- 500 tons -- from Niger to the CIA's operations directorate.
Iraq-Niger scandal
CIA officials are not impressed with the report. CIA, Energy Department, and DIA analysts all conclude the allegation is "possible," but short on details. The State Department's INR believes the allegation unlikely because a French consortium tightly controls Niger's uranium industry. Still, the CIA produces a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief stating that according to an unidentified foreign intelligence source, Niger had "planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq," but there is "no corroboration" of the allegation. On November 20, 2001, the US ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, cables Washington to say that the head of the French consortium has assured her that there is "no possibility" that Niger had diverted any of its approximately 3,000 tons of yellowcake produced annually to Iraq. - The source of the report, Rocco Martino. a former Italian military police officer, is an informant for a variety of Italian news organizations as well as SISMI and French intelligence. "I made a double, triple game," he once told another Italian paper. In 1985, he was arrested in Italy for extortion; in 1993, he was arrested in Germany for possessing stolen checks. In 1999, his chief contact at SISMI, Antonio Nucera, the deputy chief of the counterproliferation division and a WMD expert, introduced him to a longtime SISMI source at Italy's Niger Embassy, a clerk who was later dubbed by Italian journalists "La Signora." Her real name is Laura Montini. Nucera told Martino that perhaps Montini "could bring out of the embassy some interesting information." Nucera's motives for steering Martino to Montini are unclear, as are many details surrounding the Niger uranium forgeries, but it is quite possible that Nucera and SISMI wanted to leak politically useful information to the press without being directly tied to the leak. It is hard to believe that it was mere coincidence that the SISMI officer in charge of WMDs would lead a known informant to explosive -- if fraudulent -- documents detailing an impending uranium deal involving Iraq. (Montini also staged the New Year's Day break-in at the Nigeran embassy in Rome and stole Nigeran documents used to create the forgeries -- see the above item.)
- Martino eventually tries to sell the forged documents to Italian reporter Elisabetta Burba of the tabloid newspaper Panorama, a publication owned by Italian prime minister and hardline Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi. Burba is not interested and won't give Martino the 15,000 euros he is asking. After fruitlessly dropping his price, he eventually just gives Burba the documents. Afterwards, Martino begins portraying himself as a victim of SISMI manipulation; he alleges that the documents were turned over to the Americans as part of a shadowy operation involving members of Berlusconi's administration attempting to support Bush's upcoming invasion of Iraq. In a closed-door meeting of a special committee of Italy's parliament, Berlusconi officials deny any involvement, and say the document scheme was strictly an attempt by Martino to gain profit.
- Although Martino is anything but reliable and trustworthy, his story is interesting. For example, if Martino had gone to all the trouble of peddling the forgeries to Burba, and was turned down, why didn't he try to sell them to another news outlet instead of just giving them to Burba? Martino's explanation is that SISMI used him to pass the documents along to the Americans, but did not want to be directly involved. "It's true I had a hand in the dissemination of those documents, but I was duped," Martino tells an Italian reporter in September 2004. "Both Americans and Italians were involved behind the scene. It was a disinformation operation."
- Months after Martino and Montini began working together, an unexplained break-in occured at the office of the Niger embassy in Rome, on New Year's Day 2001 (see above). Niger government stationary, letterheads, and official stamps had been taken, along with a watch and some perfume. A CIA analyst subsequently recalled wondering what had impelled the break-in, but little note was taken by Western intelligence, and the break-in was never solved. Italian police later came to believe that the break-in was staged in order to create a false explanation of how Martino would soon come into possession of documents bearing the stationary and stamps of the Niger embassy. Later investigation proved that Montini actually staged the break-in and stole the documents and other goods.
- Niger is a landlocked, drought-ridden nation in the sub-Saharan region of north-central Africa, with only one thing of interest to most outside of the area -- huge uranium deposits. Most of the forged documents Montini slipped to Martino involved Niger's uranium dealings. She later told an Italian magistrate that Martino once told her that if she could produce documents showing Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, those documents could be worth a lot of money. It is doubtful that Montini herself could have created such forgeries.
- Martino may or may not have known from the outset that in February 1999, Wissam al-Zahawie, the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, had visited Niger and three other African countries (though certainly the forgers knew, as they were using the trip to give credence to their forged allegations). The trip was to convince those nations that they should re-establish commercial relations with Iraq, in defiance of UN sanctions. Al-Zahawie later denied that he had spoken to Niger's president, Ibrahim Bare Mainassara, about anything concerning Niger's uranium, but in their hour-long chat, talked about nothing but Iraq's invitation to open commercial dealings. Bare, according to al-Zahawie, was receptive, but Bare was assassinated several months later, and nothing came of the visit. In 2001, Martino was given a number of telexes, memos, and letters, some mentioning al-Zahawie, that purported to show that Iraq and Niger had signed a deal in July 2000 for Niger to sell 500 tons of yellowcake uranium to Iraq, an enormous amount. Another document purported to show a bizarre series of meetings among Iraqi, Iranian, and other nations who had gathered to discuss creating a "Global Support" military alliance of so-called "rogue states."
- Years later, the FBI would conclude that Montini, with the assistance of the Niger embassy's first counsel, Zakaria Yaou Maiga, had probably forged the papers and then passed them along to Martino for him to sell to his intelligence contacts. "It was a financial scam" says one FBI official in 2006. "This was concocted by La Signora, the guy at the embassy, and Martino." However, the FBI couldn't rule out any involvement by Nucera and SISMI in the forgery scheme. Martino later told the Italian press that "SISMI wanted me to pass the documents of the Niger dossier on to the allied intelligence, but at the same time they didn't want anyone to know of their involvement in the operation," but as noted above, the contradictory and unreliable Martino cannot always be considered truthful. Interestingly, on November 9, 2002, two days before the NSC asked the CIA to approve proposed speech language for Bush to make the Niger charge, SISMI director Nicolo Pollari will visit NSC deputy Stephen Hadley. The content of their discussion is unknown, but the NSC will call it a mere courtesy call and deny the Niger situation is discussed. What is known is that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a hardline conservative and ardent Bush ally, and that Berlusconi's minions had been appointed to run SISMI. SISMI shared its intelligence with both the CIA and Britain's MI6, but, as is customary, neither agency revealed to the other its sources. Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "So neither service knew that each had gotten its intelligence on Iraq's worrisome procurement of uranium in Africa from the same poisoned tree -- a questionable, hustling, down-on-his-luck, shadowy operator who had hooked up with a conniving Italian clerk turned forger. From this point, their con job would take on a life of its own."
- Interestingly, while Isikoff and Corn seem to accept the story of the forgeries being a product of Martino and Montini, authors James Moore and Wayne Slater aren't so sure. They note that US intelligence agents with years of experience in Italy are convinced SISMI was involved, and point out that when Pollari gave the dossier about the Iraq-Niger claim to the CIA, his information was not taken seriously. A frustrated Pollari approached Italy's defense minister, Antonio Martino (no relation to Rocco), who told him to see American neoconservative Michael Ledeen, a civilian advisor to the Pentagon's Douglas Feith and an associate of Feith's shadow "intelligence" bureau, the Office of Special Plans (OSP). In Ledeen's now-infamous December 2001 meeting in Rome with Iranian gun runner Manucher Ghorbanifar and several American neocons, Pollari and defense minister Martino were also present. Naturally, Ledeen denies that either of the Italians were at the meeting. (Ledeen will admit in 2006 to writing articles for Panorama, and to being a paid consultant for the magazine in December 2001.)
- At some point, Martino attempts to sell his bogus documents to the French intelligence agency, DGSE. The French are skeptical, based on Martino's previous attempts to sell them worthless information also sourced from SISMI. Additionally, Niger is a former French colony, and a French consortium handles Niger's uranium. If the documents are authentic, then they will implicate French executives in a massive illicit scheme. DGSE officials even wonder if someone -- SISMI or someone else -- is trying to set them up. Martino wants "a lot of money" for the documents, recalls Alain Chouet, the now-retired deputy director of DGSE. The going price for this kind of intelligence is around $100,000. But the French demur, instead paying Martino a small retainer fee and examining samples of the documents. It takes them very little time to conclude the documents are false. "We dropped the whole thing," Chouet recalls.
- The skeptical Burba refuses to write about the Nigeran documents, and her editor, Carlo Rosella, orders her to deliver the documents to the US embassy. The US ambassador to Italy, Mel Sembler, a hardline political crony and financier of the Bush administration, may or may not have been involved in accepting the documents, but the documents were cabled directly, and speedily, to Washington, bypassing the normal intelligence channels, where they soon landed on the desks of Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice (Sembler is a close friend of Cheney's, and has direct access to him). As is documented later in this site, the forgeries, though being dismissed as crude fakes by British and French intelligence, cause a sensation in the White House. Many believe that the documents are embraced by White House officials looking for any justification they can find to invade Iraq. One of those is former CIA official Vince Cannistraro, who served as the CIA station chief in Rome, the head of the CIA's counterterrorism operations, and directed the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan. "I do believe there has been a case of a very broad fraud committed in which US government officials were clearly involved," says Cannistraro. "I don't think that any of them were so stupid as to believe all of that silly crap in those documents. SISMI has lied about this not only in Parliament but publicly. I think there is very little else we can believe other than there was an effort to promote this as intelligence documents. And the Brits don't have another source. That's just bullsh*t."
- Chouet says his agency were given parts of the documents in the summer of 2001, well before the 9/11 attacks. He dispatched agents to investigate the allegations, who pronounced them to be completely specious. But the Americans didn't like Chouet's conclusion. "The CIA knocked on our door once again, with the story of the uranium, only in late spring 2002 [after Cheney had asked for the allegations to be investigated]," Chouet recalls. "Compared to the previous year, they were more precise. They named a country, Niger. Gave a number of details. They actually handed us all the information, which only later we found -- I'm stressing 'only later found' -- were from Rocco Martino, and which we had never heard about till then. As standard procedure, Langley held back the source." Chouet sent five of his best agents to Niger to check the story. Those agents arrived a few months after former US ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone to Niger and pronounced the allegations false. Of his agents, Chouet says, "[t]hey told me a very simple thing. The American information on uranium is all bullsh*t."
- But the Americans won't let go. Choeut says that DGSE receives another packet of documents from the CIA in the summer of 2002, four months before the actual forgeries surfaced in Washington. This time the DGSE will be given copies of the actual documents, not merely the summary as provided by Rocco Martino. "I can remember there were no more than a dozen pages," Chouet recalls. "There was a short introduction where the CIA explained the meaning of the documents, I would say. After a quick scrutiny we decided it was all rubbish. Gross fakes."
- Adding another layer of confusion is the fact that Rocco Martino worked, not only for SISMI, but for DGSE, at least according to the Italians. Chouet says he never heard of Martino until the forger attempted to sell DGSE the fake dossier for $200,000; the French roundly deny any connections with Martino. Ultimately, neither Chouet's nor Martino's claims can be independently verified. Martino says he succeeded in selling the dossier to DGSE, but Choeut denies that claim. What is clear is that US government officials helped get the fraudulent documents into the hands of the US intelligence community. Bush officials, led by Cheney, apply intense pressure on US intelligence analysts to prove one way or another that Iraq had indeed tried to restart its nuclear weapons program, perhaps with the Nigeran uranium. "Wrong" answers are not tolerated. As a predictable result, bogus intelligence that normally would have been thrown out is instead taken under consideration; standard protocols are violated and ignored. When the CIA proves recalcitrant, the same bogus intelligence is forwarded to the friendlier and more compliant DIA; eventually, the CIA isn't even allowed to take a look at some of the intelligence. Moore and Slater write, "After facilitating a corrupted intelligence process, and possibly being complicit in introducing fraudulent data into that system, the president and vice president later blamed the decision to invade Iraq on 'flawed intelligence.'"
- "The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the US government adopted," says Cannistraro. "It was a policy-based decision that drove the intelligence, and not the other way around. And that's, of course, the reverse of the process. You had a lot of people who played along to get along, and they understood that in that kind of administration, you couldn't say exactly what it is you really believed." Though Cannistraro won't come right out and say it, he seems to believe that Michael Ledeen was deeply involved in getting the forgeries into the hands of the Americans. Moore and Slater says that to believe that the entire Iraq-Niger debacle is the result of massive negligence or even incompetence is just too hard to swallow. There are too many experienced people in the Bush administration to be taken in by the forgeries. "The unavoidable conclusion is that they were involved in using the fraudulent materials for political ends." They will even attempt to cover their tracks by besmirching Joseph Wilson, through the extraordinary means of revealing that his wife is a CIA agent -- an incredible tactic that is certainly impeachable and possibly treasonous, and not one taken to cover up a mere mistake.
- "I think there is a much bigger story," says former CIA agent and counterterrorism expert Philip Giraldi. "But I think the much bigger story is that the OSP in the Pentagon was more heavily involved and definitively involved in the transmission of false information to make the case for war. When you think about that it is the kind of issue that can bring a government down and it is a Nixonesque issue. I don't buy that it's a petty act, this leak [of the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame]. You aren't going to get someone at Libby or Rove or Cheney's level involved unless there is a vital interest of the administration at stake." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn, James Moore and Wayne Slater)
- October 16: Reporter Seymour Hersh notes that
Islamist terrorism
Saudi Arabia under former ruler King Fahd was also "a major financial backer of the Reagan Administration's anti-Communist campaign in Latin America and of its successful proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union..." By the end of 2000, "Halliburton, the Texas-based oil-supply business formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, was operating a number of subsidiaries in Saudi Arabia." Money from the Sauds has consistent flowed to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups since 1996. A government expert on Saudi affairs says, "Only a tiny handful of people inside the government are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations. And that is purposeful." One of the reasons that the Saudis are so interested in cooperating with terrorist groups is to protect their own oil fields, which are tremendously vulnerable to terrorist attack -- a CIA study from the late 1980s claimed that with only a small amount of explosives, terrorists could essentially take the oil fields offline for two years. (New Yorker) - October 16: The US government releases flight control transcripts of three of the four hijacked planes.
9/11 attacks
Flight 93 is not released, and the three released transcripts are incomplete (example: Flight 77, which may have been downed by US missiles, is lacking the last twenty minutes of the flight), and a number of events that are part of the official story don't show up on these transcripts. (CCR) - October 16-17:
Domestic terrorism
28 congressional staffers test positive for anthrax. The Senate office buildings are shut down, followed by the House of Representatives. (CCR) - October 17:
Bush's economic policies
In an example of Bush's use of the 9/11 attacks to justify his own political agenda, this time on defending his tax cuts and economic policies, he says, "The terrorists want us to stop flying, stop buying, but this great nation will not be intimidated by the evildoers." (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - October 17: The Feminist Women's Health Center reports that over 170 abortion clinics and doctors' offices in 14 states and Washington, DC have received threatening letters claiming to contain anthrax in the last week.
Domestic terrorism
The envelopes had return addresses from the US Secret Service and US Marshal Service with postmarks from Atlanta, Knoxville, Chattanooga, or Columbus. The envelopes were also marked, "TIME SENSITIVE: Urgent Security Notice Enclosed." When opened by clinic staff, all letters contained a white powder with a letter stating, "You have been exposed to anthrax. We are going to kill all of you. Army of God, Virginia DARE Chapter." The contents of the letters are currently being tested by health officials; some will actually be found to contain anthrax spores. Over the years, the "Army of God" has claimed responsibility for several attacks on abortion clinics, including the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, a clinic bombing and the bombing of a gay and lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and the 1998 clinic bomb which killed a security guard and severely injured a nurse in Birmingham. Clayton Lee Waagner, the fugitive who claims responsibility for the mailings, will be found guilty of making threats to employees of reproductive clinics and sentenced to 19 years in prison. In June 2001, Waagner posted a message on the The Army of God website stating that, "I am going to kill as many [abortion providers] as I can." (Feminist Women's Health Center, Department of Justice/FindArticles) - October 17: After years of encouraging (and sometimes requiring) its workers to invest their retirement money in its own 401-K accounts,
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Enron locks its workers out of those accounts. Enron executives and senior officials are not locked out; they frantically move their own monies, over $1.1 billion, out of company stocks just before the value of the stocks collapses. By the time Enron's workers are once again allowed to access their retirement accounts, the stocks they own are virtually worthless. Employees wind up losing $1.2 billion; many lose every dime they have put away for their entire working careers. (Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose) - October 18:
Bush's economic policies
In an example of Bush's use of the 9/11 attacks to justify his own political agenda, this time on expanding his trade authority, he says, "The terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and we will defeat them by expanding and encouraging world trade." (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - October 18: Canada overrides Bayer's patent for anthrax treatment Cipro and orders a million tablets of a generic version from another company.
Medical research and funding
The US refuses to consider a similar move. Patent lawyers and politicians state that adjusting Bayer's patent to allow other companies to produce Cipro is perfectly legal and necessary. The New York Times notes that the White House seems "so avidly to be siding with the rights of drug companies to make profits rather than with consumers worried about their access to the antibiotic Cipro," and points out huge recent contributions by Bayer to Republicans. (CCR) - October 19: The Washington Post reveals that the Bush administration hid key evidence about North Korea's burgeoning nuclear weapons program from Congress.
North Korean nuclear program
The evidence was leaked only after Congress voted to authorize military action against Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's Secretary of Defense, failed to mention the North Korean WMD program during a classified briefing. While some Republican senators were privately briefed about the program by Assistant Secretary James A. Kelly, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat, did not learn of the program until he read the newspaper the next morning. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Joseph Biden, another Democrat, was not informed until two hours before the press released the information. A total of twelve days passed between the time that North Korea privately admitted to having a nuclear weapons program and the time that the Bush administration disclosed the admission. During that 12 days, Congress passed the Iraq resolution, and Bush signed it just hours before the information was disclosed. Former Clinton administration officials are the original sources of the press leaks; they heard it from contacts within the State Department. A Democratic aide says, "senators are concerned and troubled by it. This cloud of secrecy raises questions about whether there are other pieces to this puzzle they don't know about." While the Bush administration continues to hammer away at the necessity for a military invasion of Iraq, the same administration insists that North Korea does not present a serious threat, and the situation can be handled diplomatically. (Washington Post/Truthout) - October 19:
War in Afghanistan
US Special Forces begin ground attacks in Afghanistan. However, during the Afghanistan war, US ground soldiers are mainly employed as observers, liaisons, and spotters for air power to assist the Northern Alliance, not as direct combatants. (CCR) - October 21: The Bayer Corporation, holders of the US patent on the anthrax antibiotic Cipro,
Medical research and funding
agrees with the US to reduce the price of Cipro in the US from $1.83 to 95 cents. Analysts say the price reduction will reduce Bayer's profit margin from 95% to 65%. This reduction applies only to sales to the US government, not sales to the public. Bayer has allowed no other companies to produce or import Cipro into the US. Other countries with less stringent patent laws sell Cipro for 1/30th the US price, and have offered to import large quantities into the US. Nevertheless, a class action suit by over one million Americans has been filed against Bayer and two other companies, alleging that Bayer has paid $200 million to two competitors to not make generic versions of Cipro. The profits from Cipro are considered a "lifesaver" for Bayer, which had been considering pulling out of pharmaceuticals altogether. The Bush administration backs Bayer's position. Two days later, reports surface that several other drugs are as effective at treating anthrax infections as Cipro, yet the FDA refuses to recommend any other drug for treating the disease. (CCR) - October 23: In a National Security Council meeting,
War in Afghanistan
Bush is told that the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance has made little if any gains on the ground in Afghanistan. Worse, the CIA reports that the number of Taliban fighters has increased by the thousands at a crucial front line. After the briefing, Bush tells the press, "We're making great progress on the ground." (David Corn) - October 24: The House of Representatives passes the final version of the USA Patriot Act and other previously unpopular Bush projects:
Attack on civil liberties
Alaska oil drilling, $25 billion in tax cuts for corporations, taps into Social Security funds and cuts in education. (The acronym stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.") Republican Congressman Ron Paul states: "It's my understanding the bill wasn't printed before the vote -- at least I couldn't get it. They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote." It is later found that only two copies of the bill were made available in the hours before its passage, and most House members admit they voted for the Act without actually reading it first. Two days later, the Senate passes the final version of the Patriot Act by a 98-1 vote; only Democrat Russ Feingold votes against the bill. Anthrax targets Senators Daschle and Leahy now support the bill. Bush signs it into law the same day. - Feingold speaks out eloquently against the Patriot Act, saying on the floor of the Senate, "There have been periods in our nation's history when civil liberties have taken a back seat to what appeared at the same time to be the legitimate exigencies of war. Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans during World War II, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, during the Vietnam War. We must not allow these pieces of our past to become prologue."
- The Patriot Act is deliberately written as opaquely as possible. Worse, the Bush administration, with the collusion of Congressional Republicans, violates the law to pass a more stringent version of the Act. The Senate passed a version of the bill that had even less protections for civil rights than the House version, and Bush officials, in collusion with the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, worked in the wee hours of the morning to strip the bill of the protections emplaced by the House. The bill was finished at 3:45 AM on October 12. When Congress voted on the bill the next morning, most of the assemblage believed they were voting on the language agreed upon during the previous day's session. Instead, they voted on the bill that Hastert, John Ashcroft, and Bush officials had worked secretly to revamp. (CCR, Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Los Angeles Times/ACLU/Michael Moore)
"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought." -- George Orwell, 1984
- October 24: Israel sends a delegation to Washington to warn the Bush administration about its concerns over Iran's efforts to construct nuclear weapons.
Iran's nuclear program
They warn, bluntly enough, that Iran is trying to secure the technology and equipment for a bomb, and that the US must do something about it. The assertion puts the administration in a precarious position: Iran has foregone its long-standing ties to Afghanistan and offered US search-and-rescue teams to stage operations from bases on its soil, and has provided key intelligence about Afghanistan to the US. Since 9/11, Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, a reformer seeking to improve relations with the US, has publicly denounced bin Laden's interpretation of Islam, and made public statements of sympathy and support for the US over the terror strikes. Part of Khatami's position is political -- after all, the Taliban executed almost a dozen Iranian diplomats in 1998, and Iran wants to keep its political interests, not to mention its borders, secure. However, US intelligence is dubious about the level of Khatami's independence from Iran's conservative religious leaders. The mullahs remain in control of Iran's intelligence services, and have long maintained close financial and operative ties with the terrorist group Hezbollah as well as other anti-Israeli groups. - Iran, for what it's worth, has staunchly denied ever attempting to secure nuclear weapons capabilities. (For that matter, so has Israel, though it has possessed a nuclear arsenal for decades.) Some US and Israeli intelligence estimates place Iran from three to five years from developing nuclear capability, though intelligence about Iran and its nuclear ambitions is wobbly at best. Iran has been pursuing nuclear technology since the mid-1970s, when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi spent $6 billion in oil profits building, among other projects, two nuclear reactors near the Persian Gulf. (Iran's reactors were built largely by Siemens, the huge German conglomerate.) Though the reactors were to provide electricity, the regime was also attempting to covertly obtain weapons technology. The effort came to an abrupt end in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown and Iran was taken over by a fundamentalist Islamic government headed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1981, Israel attacked and destroyed an Iranian reactor at Osirik before it could be brought online. Afterwards, the devastating Iran-Iraq war depleted the military and financial resources of both nations, both Iranian reactors are badly damaged before completion, and the Iranian nuclear program was abandoned. In 1988, after Iran's loss in the war, the mullahs turned again to Siemens, but under pressure from Washington, Germany refused to let the company rebuild Iran's nuclear industry. Instead, the Soviet Union stepped in. Boris Yeltsin agreed to help the Iranians rebuild their reactors, and in 1995 agreed to jointly build a third reactor. US intelligence believes that Iran's nuclear weapons programs are not housed at the reactor sites, which are open to IAEA inspection, but in clandestine areas under military control.
- During the Clinton years, Iran relied on covert transactions with a number of former Soviet republics, particularly Kazahkstan, as well as private companies in Germany, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic to provide it with technology and material. Like the Bush administration, Clinton kept far more pressure on Iraq than it did on Iran, and thusly the Iranian nuclear program was allowed to, if not flourish, at least make progress. But when George W. Bush took office, his administration terminated discussions about Iran between US and Israeli officials. A former administration official explains, "Whyen Bush took over, [Iran] dropped off the radar screen. And the Israelis really didn't push it with the new guys. Part of it may have been that the new guys needed time. And part of it may have been the intifada [the renewed Palestinian insurgency in and around Israel]." Another official says simply that Israel "pulled its punches" with the new US regime. The Bush administration continued its policy of negligence, in 2002 calling for drastic reductions in the amount of money provided to secure former Soviet stockpiles of uranium and nuclear technology, and pressured Russian premier Vladimir Putin to jointly withdraw from the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty and create a worldwide missile-defense system. The Israelis were alarmed, especially when they provided evidence to Bush officials showing that two Russian companies were providing Iran with a number of products for the production of nuclear weapons. The Bush administration response, led by undersecretary of state John Bolton, was to brush off the Israelis in favor of focusing on toppling Saddam Hussein and gaining new and often unsavory allies in the war against terror. "[Once] Iraq is out of the way," a senior administration strategist says, "we will concentrate on Iran in an entirely different way." Besides, the US may need to draft Iran's support if the war on terror founders. (Seymour Hersh)
- October 26: The media unveils some of the deep financial connections between the Carlyle Group
Military-industrial complex
(headed by such American luminaries as ex-President George H.W. Bush, Reagan's Secretary of Defense and former CIA Deputy Director Frank Carlucci, Bush I chief of staff James Baker, and employing former Reagan budget chief Richard Darman, former British Prime Minister John Major, former Phillippines president Fidel Ramos, former Tahi premier Anand Panyarachun, former Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl, and former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt) and the bin Laden family. (George W. Bush served on the board of Caterair, a Carlyle subsidiary, from 1990 to 1992. Later, when Bush was governor of Texas, the board of directors of the Texas teachers' pension fund -- some of whom were his appointees -- voted to invest $100 million with the Carlyle Group.) The ties between Carlyle and the bin Laden family are ostensibly severed shortly after the story breaks, as the bin Ladens and other Saudis sell off their Carlyle assets. Although Carlyle is not a bank, Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz employs Carlyle to advise him in his purchase of 10% of Citicorp's preferred stock. Note: Among its other involvements in Saudi affairs, Carlyle has also served as a paid adviser to the Saudi monarchy on the so-called "Economic Offset Program," an arrangement that encourages U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to give back a portion of their revenues in the form of contracts to Saudi businesses, most of whom are connected to the royal family. The company claims that the arrangement had been terminated, but won't say if it was severed before or after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Boston Herald, Guardian, Buzzflash/Greg Palast, Buzzflash) - October 26: Bush signs the USA Patriot Act into law.
Attack on civil liberties
It states that non-citizens can be detained and deported if they provide "assistance" for lawful activities of any group the government chooses to call a terrorist organization. Under this provision the secretary of state can designate any group that has ever engaged in violent activity as a terrorist organization. Representative Patsy Mink notes that in theory supporters of Greenpeace could now be convicted for supporting terrorism. Immigrants can be detained indefinitely, even if they are found to not have any links to terrorism. They can be detained indefinitely for immigration violations or if the attorney general decides their activities pose a danger to national security. They never need to be given a trial or even a hearing on their status. Internet service providers can be ordered to reveal the web sites and e-mail addresses that a suspect has communicated to or visited. The FBI need only inform a judge that the information is relevant to an investigation. It "lays the foundation for a domestic intelligence-gathering system of unprecedented scale and technological prowess." It allows the government to access confidential credit reports, school records, and other records, without consent or notification. All of this information can now be given to the CIA, in violation of the CIA's mandate prohibiting it from spying within the US. Financial institutions are encouraged to disclose possible violations of law or "suspicious activities" by any client. The institution is prohibited from notifying the person involved that it made such a report. The term "suspicious" is not defined, so it is up to the financial institutions to determine when to send such a report. Federal agents can easily obtain warrants to review a library patron's reading and computer habits. The government can refuse to reveal how evidence is collected against a suspected terrorist defendant. The law passes with no public debate, no hearings or congressional debate. Says Congressman Barney Frank, "This was the least democratic process for debating questions fundamental to democracy I have ever seen. A bill drafted by a handful of people in secret, subject to no committee process, comes before us immune from amendment." Only 66 congresspeople, and one senator, Russ Feingold, vote against it. Few in Congress are able to read summaries, let alone the fine print, before voting on it. Feingold says, "The new law goes into a lot of areas that have nothing to do with terrorism and have a lot to do with the government and the FBI having a wish list of things they want to do." Supporters point out that some provisions will expire in four years, but in fact most provisions will not expire.
Some of the Constitutional guarantees that are curtailed or obviated by the Patriot Act include:- Freedom of association: To assist terror investigation, the government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity.
- Freedom of information: The government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public-records requests. "sensitive" information has been removed from government Web sites.
- Freedom of speech: The government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
- Right to legal representation: The government may monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
- Freedom from unreasonable searches: The government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
- Right to a speedy and public trial: The right of habeas corpus is effectively suspended for terrorist suspects, allowing the government to jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
- Right to liberty: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them. "Enemy combatants" will be held incommunicado, sometimes for years, and refused attorneys or even formal charges.
- Shortly after the signing of the USA Patriot Act into law,
Attack on civil liberties
Attorney General John Ashcroft assures the Senate Judiciary Committee that "each action taken by the Department of Justice...is carefully drawn to target a narrow class of individuals -- terrorists. Our legal powers are targeted at terrorists. Our investigation is focused on terrorists. Our prevention strategy targets the terrorist threat." Unfortunately, Ashcroft's statements are quickly exposed as lies. The media finds that federal law enforcement officers are increasingly using Patriot Act powers to investigate crimes that have no connection to terrorism. And a Justice Department guide to investigating financial crimes begins, "We all know that the USA Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know how it affects the war on crime as well?" In September 2002, the Justice Department will be forced to admit that hundreds of cases not related to terrorism have been pursued under the Patriot Act. A most egregrious example is the widespread use of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) search warrants against non-terrorist suspects; FISA warrants are not subject to the Fourth Amendment restrictions of "probable cause." FISA warrants were never intended for use in domestic investigations, but were strictly for investigation of suspected foreign agents. But under the Patriot Act, FISA warrants are routinely misused, bringing up serious constitutional questions and forcing at least one federal court to remind the Justice Department that FISA "is not to be used as an end run around the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of warrantless searches." The extensions of FISA are due to expire on December 31, 2005, though many other Patriot Act provisions that violate basic civil liberties do not expire at all. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - The Bush proposal of military tribunals deserves further exploration.
Attack on civil liberties
Bush's original plan is for secret military tribunals for any noncitizen he designates as a suspected terrorist. The tribunals would function outside the parameters of military or even Constitutional law, under rules laid down by the Secretary of Defense. Neither ordinary rules of evidence nor the concept of "reasonable doubt" would apply, a mere two-thirds majority vote would be sufficient to convict the defendant, and the death penalty would be in force. The only appeal would be to either Rumsfeld or Bush. The outrage surrounding the announcement of the tribunal proposal surprised Bush. Even conservatives were shocked, with famed columnist William Safire decrying the "kangaroo courts for people he designates before 'trial' to be terrorists," and writing that the proposal "turns back the clock on all advances in military justice, through three wars, in the past half-century." A prominent European judge says that if the tribunals were implemented, European nations would refuse to extradite any suspects that might face such proceedings. An angry Bush will defend his proposal by saying that "non-US citizens who plan and/or commit mass murder are more than criminal suspects. They are unlawful combatants who seek to destroy our country and our way of life." Bush doesn't seem to mind that the usual burden of proof needed to convict any accused criminal would be swept aside: as philosopher Peter Singer writes, "If we could take the say-so of the executive branch of government as reliable proof of guilt, we wouldn't need to have an independent judiciary at all. Bush, in this statement, seems to have forgotten that one of the foundations of basic liberties is the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty." Forgotten may be a kind characterization; ignored may be a better word. The outcry from both right and left prompts Bush to modify the idea, and as of Singer's writing, December 2003, no one has yet been tried in front of these tribunals that we are aware of. "That Bush could make such an announcement," Singer writes, "if indicative of either a lack of understanding about what basic human rights require, or a lack of commitment to protecting the human rights of noncitizens." Ronald Dworkin, an American who holds the chair of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, says, "If any American were tried by a foreign government in that way, even for a minor offense, let alone a capital crime, we would denounce that government as itself criminal." (Peter Singer) - October 27: A Los Angeles Times article reveals the existence of a "secret army" set up by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld,
Mercenaries and "private armies"
similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and outlawed by the US Congress. This "super-intelligence support activity" will bring together the "CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception." According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the organization, known as the "Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group," or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require "counter-attack" by the United States on countries "harboring the terrorists." The group states that any nation who is targeted by this group will have "[t]heir sovereignty...at risk." Responsibility and accountability for the P2OG is vested in a "special Operations Executive" in the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC would plan operations but not oversee their execution in order to avoid comparisons to past abuses, such as the Iran-Contra operations run out of the NSC by Oliver North during the Reagan administration. NSC plans would be executed by the Pentagon or the CIA. Similarities between the P2OG and "Operation Northwoods," the abortive 1960 plan to concoct phony terrorist bombings and murders within the US in order to promote a military strike against Cuba, are striking. (Alexander's Gas and Oil Connections, Asia Times, Los Angeles Times/CAH) - October 28: Administration officials continue to "pump" the war in Afghanistan,
War in Afghanistan
and whitewash the entire issue of civilian deaths. After a media teleconference where US spokespersons are forced to admit that the Afghanistan offensive is not going as well as previously reported, Donald Rumsfeld tells ABC's This Week that the offensive "is going very much the way we expected when we began.... The progress has been measurable. We feel that the air campaign has been effective." A day later, in a classified meeting, security advisor Condoleezza Rice says, "We can't afford to lose. The Taliban proved rougher than we thought." David Corn writes, "A president at war has to cheerlead and command, as do members of his national security team. Perhaps overly or unduly positive pronouncements can be justified as a cost of war. Yet no one had forced Rumsfeld to hold daily press conferences and become a media star celebrated for his supposedly straight-to-the-point manner, even though he was frequently spinning. What was less forgivable and less obligatory was Rumsfeld's duplicity on an inescapable fact of warfare: civilian deaths." Rumsfeld will repeatedly deny that the US targets villages filled with what he terms "innocent bystanders." He calls the idea of civilian casualties "unpleasant," but dismisses questions of civilian deaths as prompted by Taliban accusations and deliberate misinformation. Meanwhile, a brace of stories from the Washington Post and New York Times feature in-depth stories of US air strikes obliterating entire villages in the Tora Bora area and near Jalalabad. The Pentagon flatly denies that the villages were ever hit, even in the face of photographic, forensic, and eyewitness evidence showing the villages were obliterated and dozens of Afghan civilians died in the bombings. Corn writes, "It was not, as Rumsfeld asserted, 'impossible to get factual information about civilian casualties.' His military just did not bother." (David Corn) - October 29: As questions begin to arise about the Reagan and Bush administrations' complicity with Iraq,
Secrecy of Bush administration
the current Bush administration drafts "an executive order that would usher in a new era of secrecy for presidential records and allow an incumbent president to withhold a former president's papers even if the former president wanted to make them public," according to the Washington Post. The order also requires members of the public to prove "at least a demonstrated, specific need" for a president's papers to be released. Critics contend this would overturn the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which releases documents after 12 years. The White House maintains that a Supreme Court decision in 1977 allows presidents various privileges for their records. The decision raises generalized suspicions but ensures that no "smoking guns" are provided to the public which might give a different spin to Bush's efforts to eradicate Hussein. (Washington Post/From the Wilderness, Consortium News) - October 31:
Domestic spying
The Justice Department issues a regulation that allows eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations in federal prisons wherever there is "reasonable suspicion...to believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys to further or facilitate acts of terrorism;" the regulation requires written notice to the inmate and attorney, "except in the case of prior court authorization." Officials no longer have to show probable cause or get a court order. Media observers and lawmakers criticize the ruling as flatly illegal. (CCR) - Late October:
Antiwar protests
Katie Sierra, a 15-year old high school student in Sissonville, West Virginia, is suspended from school for wearing a T-shirt that reads, "When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America." Sierra and her mother sue the school, claiming that her free speech rights are being violated, but the courts uphold the suspension, saying that the potential threat of disruption posed by the T-shirt outweigh Sierra's rights. Sierra is removed from public schools after being subjected to numerous physical threats. The family has appealed the courts' decision. (Spectrezine, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
