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: September
Page One
This page has been broken up into two pages because of file size considerations. The second portion can be accessed via a button link at the end of this page.
- September:
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Encouraged by the Bush administration, Japan deals with Iraq in providing oil field studies, indicating that the Clinton administration's proscription for US allies against dealings with Iraq is no longer in force. (Bushwatch) - September:
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Bush administration makes drastic cuts in anti-terrorism expenditures, including ending Predator surveillance of Osama bin Laden. The National Security Agency has a "major policy shift" from the previous administration; investigators are ordered to "back off" on investigation of Saudi ties to terrorism, especially if it involves ties to the royal family and their retainers. This essentially puts the bin Laden family off limits for investigators. Osama bin Laden is officially an exception to this rule, but FBI agents are discouraged from looking too closely into his finances. (CCR) - September: Halliburton,
Halliburton
whose ex-CEO, Dick Cheney, is the new Vice-President (and who still gets a $1 million "retainer" fee even though he is no longer with the company and should not receive a dime because of ethical considerations), opens an office in Tehran, Iran, to begin new offshore drilling operations. Iran is one of the countries that US companies are forbidden to have dealings with due to Iran's sponsorship of international terrorism. According to Halliburton, the company is committed to a large investment of its resources in a market with "huge growth potential." Cynics may wonder if even this early (September 2000), Halliburton was positioning itself to take advantage of the upcoming war with Iraq. (CCR) - September:
Iraq war and occupation
A joint US/UK bombing mission on Iraq's air defense system achieves little, wins no international support, and outrages much of the Arab world. (CCR) - September:
Iraq war and occupation
Iraq is judged to be in the bottom 20% of the world as measured by health, educational, and economic standards. In 1989, 95% of the Iraqi population was literate, 92% had safe water, and 93% had free health care. In 1991, the water supplying Baghdad was as clean as any other developed nation's; in 2001, the untreated water from the Tigris used by most inhabitants was judged "lethal." (CCR) - Early September: Word from the Pentagon and Congress says that Donald Rumsfeld is out as Secretary of Defense.
US military
Rumsfeld's plans for reforming the military is generally popular, but according to one retired general, Rumsfeld is so arrogant and abusive that he has alienated everyone he needs to make his reform agenda happen. "Within six months, Rumsfeld wrecked the military," the general says. "He refused to talk to the military. The opposite of what [Dick] Cheney had done [Cheney was secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush]. He was worse than [Clinton's secretary of defense] Les Aspin. He asked for a $37 billion appropriations increase. But he was out of sync with his own administration. All they were talking about over there was tax cuts. Nobody on the Hill took him seriously. No one in the Pentagon took him seriously. By September 8, they were talking about his replacement. [Senator Richard] Lugar, I would guess." - The entire Bush administration was coming unmoored. Their arrogance had driven Senator Jim Jeffords out of the GOP, returning the Democrats to power in the Senate. Secretary of State Colin Powell had had to publicly clean up Bush's mess after Bush's hostile, uninformed comments inflamed the crisis stemming from an American spy plane colliding with a Chinese fighter jet (see the March 2001 page for more information). Bush is waffling on stem-cell research. Cheney was back in the hospital for his third visit since the elections, having recently had a pacemaker/defibrillator implanted in his chest and reviving late-night talk show hosts' jokes about Bush "being a heartbeat away from the presidency." But the September 11 attacks are just days away. (Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)
- September 4: On approximately this date, a "weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez" is sent to The Sun,
Domestic terrorism
a tabloid with offices in Florida. "But inside the oddly-worded letter was what was described as a 'soapy, powdery substance' and in the pile of that a cheap Star of David charm." The letter was handled both by Ernesto Blanco, who contacted anthrax, and Bob Stevens, who died of anthrax. The letter was thrown away, so it's not known if it contained anthrax. Bob Stevens was admitted to a hospital on October 2; the period between anthrax exposure and symptoms can be up to eight weeks. (CCR) - September 5: At 11 PM, a White House party honoring Mexican president Vicente Fox ends with an enormous (and very loud) fireworks display (at a cost to taxpayers of $250,000).
Conservative media slant
The fireworks, unannounced to the public, shake the ground and rattle windows for fifteen minutes, and are audible as far north as Mount Pleasant, Maryland, and as far south as Alexandria, Virginia. Thousands of local residents are frightened by the sudden barrage of light and sound, with hundreds calling police to report "gunfire" or worse, that some sort of attack is being launched against the capital city. "This is it," one resident recalls thinking, "We're being bombed." Another resident remembers thinking, "My God, there's something blowing up!" Once neighbors realize that what startled them out of sleep was a fireworks display and not some kind of attack, many become angry: "I think it's the height of insensitivity for the White House to wake up its neighbors," says one resident. Many post complaints on the Washington Post's Web site the next day, with one writing, "They're not on the ranch in Crawford, Texas. They're in the middle of the city. I think [Bush] could show us some consideration." A letter to the editor reads in part, "[M]aybe the president is cocky as hell and thinks the neighborhood [around the White House] is not really a neighborhood." The next night, ABC's Peter Jennings reports that "[t]he White House has apologized for a fireworks display last night in honor of the Mexican president." - The story is indeed a minor one, but illustrative of the difference in the way the media handles Bush as opposed to its handling of Clinton. Most media outlets indeed report on the fireworks display -- in gushing reports about the wonders of the display ("the gorgeous, 20-minute display of pyrotechnic virtuosity"), along with the lavish dinner and live performances put on, all at taxpayer expense. One reporter gushes about Clint Eastwood's attendance, another rhapsodizes about the "upscale Tex-Mex" dinner served, featuring an entree of "bison, we are told, encrusted in pumpkin seeds." The evening's entertainment (opera singer Dawn Upshaw) is fawned over, as is Laura Bush's "lollipop red" evening gown. Media expert Mark Crispin Miller calls it "a postprandial orgy of bedazzled reportage," but missing two elements -- the anger and outrage of the local citizenry at being awakened by "bomb blasts" of fireworks, and the tremendous expense of the presidential bash. Miller compares it to the manufactured outrage of the media at the fictitious story of Clinton's infamous "$200 haircut" from 1993, which prompted outrage over the supposed shutdown of LAX for two hours (which never happened). One can only imagine the media outrage over such a jet-set, lavishly expensive soiree if thrown by the Clintons. "It was exactly as if Bill Clinton had delayed a lot of flights to get his hair cut," writes Miller, "and the members of the press were on the plane, marveling at Christophe's superb technique and fancy scissors." (Mark Crispin Miller)
- September 9:
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Bush responds to the attempts by US military commanders to receive additional funding to combat domestic terrorism, and their attempts to redirect $600 million from the multi-billion dollar missile defense system, by promising to veto any such attempts to secure funding. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - September 9: General Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, is assassinated by two al-Qaeda agents posing as Moroccan journalists.
Islamist terrorism
A legendary mujaheddin commander and a brilliant tactician, Massoud had pledged to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan. The BBC says the next day, "General Massoud's death might well have meant the end of the [Northern] alliance" because there clearly was no figure with his skills and popularity to replace him. "With Massoud out of the way, the Taliban and al-Qaeda would be rid of their most effective opponent and be in a stronger position to resist the American onslaught." It appears the assassination was supposed to happen earlier -- the "journalists" waited for three weeks in Northern Alliance territory to meet Massoud. Finally on September 8, an aide says they "were so worried and excitable they were begging us." They were granted an interview after threatening to leave if the interview didn't happen in the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Taliban army (together with elements of the Pakistani army) had massed for an offensive against the Northern Alliance in the previous weeks, but the offensive began only hours after the assassination. Massoud was killed that day but Northern Alliance leaders pretended for several days that he was only injured in order to keep the army's morale up, and the army was able to stave off total defeat. The Northern Alliance releases a statement the next day: "Ahmed Shah Massoud was the target of an assassination attempt organized by the Pakistani [intelligence service] ISI and Osama bin Laden." (CCR) - September 10: According to the book, The Accidental President by journalist David Kaplan,
Supreme Court
US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a moderate, said that he firmly believes that had he had one more day to argue his case with his colleagues, he could have persuaded one more justice to vote with him in the landmark Bush v. Gore case that gave the US presidency to George W. Bush. If that had happened, the court would have ruled 5-4 to allow Florida's votes to be recounted; those recounts would have given the election to Al Gore. Souter believes that he could have persuaded another moderately conservative justice, Anthony Kennedy, to switch his vote. The justices are clearly uneasy with their decision, as shown by the open animosity displayed among themselves during a visit to the court by six Russian justices. "In our country," one of the Russians said, "we wouldn't let judges pick the president." The Russian justice continued, saying that he knew that in various nations judges were in the pocket of executive officials; he just didn't know that was so in the United States. Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal who passionately dissented from the majority of conservatives in their decision, attacked the decision then and there, in front of his colleagues and the Russian justices together. Breyer says that the decision was "the most outrageous, indefensible thing" the court had ever done. "We all agree to disagree, but this is different." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, another liberal dissenter, added, "[H]ere we're applying the Equal Protection Clause in a way that would de-legitimize virtually every election in American history." The third of the four dissenters, 80-year old John Paul Stevens, said simply: "I'm so tired. I am just so tired." Justice Kennedy, whose vote would have changed the outcome, refused to justify the decision, and merely said, "sometimes you have to be responsible and step up to the plate. You have to take responsibility." (Later inquiries prove that Kennedy, far from being willing to be swayed, was actually a driving force behind the decision.) (Guardian) - September 10:
US military
In a speech to the Department of Defense, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that the Department of Defense "cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." It is later shown that 25% of the yearly defense budget is unaccounted for. An experienced defense analyst says, "[Their] numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year." Coverage of this story is nearly nonexistent given the events of the next day. (CBS/Killtown)
September 11 attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon
- September 11:
9/11 attacks
The Islamist extremist terrorist group al-Qaeda mounts a devastating attack on US soil, using four hijacked American jetliners. The World Trade Center in New York is destroyed; the Pentagon is struck; a fourth airliner crashes in Pennsylvania, presumably due to passengers' attempt to retake the plane. Bush goes into hiding for almost 12 hours, leaving New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to take the lead in presenting a brave face to the shocked and horrified American public. The Bush administration knows that no connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda exists, but later ties Iraq into the terrorist attacks and uses this as a justification for their invasion of Iraq in 2003. Intimate personal and business ties between the Bush family and the bin Laden family (of Saudi Arabia) are investigated, but the American media, increasingly mesmerized by the prospects of war with Afghanistan and Iraq, pays little attention. (September 11 News)
For a timeline of events leading up to the 9/11 bombings, including a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day's events, and a timeline of the events following the bombings, visit this site's 9/11 page.
"The Bush Doctrine"
- In his evening speech on the attacks, Bush presents what comes to be known as the "Bush Doctrine,"
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
when he tells his listeners that the US will "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed those acts and those who harbor them" The decision to implement this as a linchpin of America's post-9/11 foreign policy is made by Bush and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, with no input from other officials, even Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Nine days later, he tells Congress, "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." Ethicist Peter Singer says this should be more properly known as "the first Bush doctrine," in light of his later assertion that the US can engage in preemptive war against other countries if he believes they will present a future threat. To this end, CIA director George Tenet prepares a presentation for Bush called the "Worldwide Attack Matrix" describing active or planned operations in eighty separate countries. (Peter Singer, Robert Jay Lofton/Frances Fox Piven)
Bush administration uses attacks to justify invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq
- September 11: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld learns from the CIA's study of flight manifests that at least three of the hijackers are known members of al-Qaeda.
Iraq war and occupation
He begins planning retaliation. In his notes composed at this time (which are leaked almost one year later), he writes he wants the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Note his immediate intention to link the attacks to Saddam Hussein (and the implied realization that Hussein is not involved), the intention to "go massive" and attack Iraq whether "things" are "related or not." (CCR, CBS/Paul Waldman) - September 11: Immediately after the attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft proposes an indefinite suspension of habeas corpus,
Attack on civil liberties
allowing the government to lock up anyone it wants without charges. Not even the White House officials are prepared to go this far in suspending such a bedrock of civil liberties. Later, Ashcroft's Justice Department inserts language in the extension of the USA Patriot Act that, if passed, would allow the government, for the first time in history, to make secret arrests. The extension will be tabled after it is leaked to the people and received with horror. (Paul Waldman) - Richard Clarke will later write in his book, Against All Odds, that he is relieved that Cheney, and not Bush, is on hand to make the immediate decisions in the hours after the attacks.
9/11 attacks
Clarke doesn't know Bush very well, but, despite his view of Cheney, during Cheney's tenure as a House member, as one of the "five most radical conservatives in Congress [whose views seem] out of place if aired more broadly]," he knows Cheney and finds his presence reassuring. Bush had not been briefed on the terrorism threats, though Clarke had briefed Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. And while these three officials had been briefed on Clinton's directive to "eliminate al-Qaeda" by arming Afghanistan's Northern Alliance and pushing the CIA to use lethal force, Bush knows nothing of the plan. Authors Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein write, "Eight months into his presidency, the president was the only principal out of the loop on his predecessor's plan for dealing with al-Qaeda." - "For the president, September 11, 2001 was the day when all the variables in the national security/presidential power equations fell into place," Dubose and Bernstein observe. "The country's need for a strong leader who could make snap decisions unencumbered by the deliberative inefficiency of a Congress provided an opportunity to restore an imperial presidency undone by Watergate. Constitutional impediments to intelligence gathering, and the arrest, detention, and prosecution of individuals who threatened 'homeland security' could henceforth be selectively observed."
- Just as importantly, Cheney believes that the attacks, and the executive branch's response to them, can finally move the country beyond the "Vietnam syndrome." "America didn't do enough" to win in Vietnam, Cheney said after the humiliating evacuation of US personnel from Saigon in 1975. The US can end the president's reluctance to use force that followed the Vietnam debacle.
- But Cheney, as is his wont, is cautious in the weeks after the attacks. He warns of the possible collapse of the Pakistani government if the US invades Afghanistan, and initially refuses to countenance Paul Wolfowitz's preposterous suggestion that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the attacks. Similarly, Cheney refuses to go along with Donald Rumsfeld's suggestion that the US attack Iraq merely because there are "not enough good targets" in Afghanistan. Cheney remains focused on retaliating against Afghanistan's Taliban and against al-Qaeda.
- But as the Afghanistan war seems to wind down in late 2001 and early 2002, Cheney turns around and becomes the administration's leading proponent for attacking Iraq. Dubose and Bernstein write in 2006, "Six years into the Bush administration, it seems clear that when historians look at its legacy, that legacy will be Iraq -- which more and more appears to be a colossal foreign policy blunder. And while the buck might stop at George Bush's desk, Dick Cheney was the man who made the war happen." Cheney is the one who, in early 2002, pushes the hesitant Bush into launching the preparations to invade Iraq. (Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)
- September 11: The FBI attempts to investigate WAMY, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a small organization in Falls Church, Virginia, that is suspected to be a front for terrorist activity,
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
with connections to Al-Qaeda and a number of other terrorist organizations and support groups. The leader of WAMY is Abdullah bin Laden, the nephew of Osama bin Laden. For unknown reasons, the FBI agents conducting the investigations are yanked off the trail and told to bury any information about WAMY they might have found. Pakistan, India, Bosnia, Holland, and the Phillippines have already accused WAMY of being involved in violent terrorist acts, but the US government refuses to freeze WAMY's assets or otherwise interfere with its operations. The FBI has been interested in WAMY since 1996, but has never been allowed to thoroughly investigate the organization. Four of the 9/11 hijackers were listed as living at or near the WAMY address in Falls Church. (Greg Palast) - In the days after 9/11, Bush's approval ratings soar from 55% to near 90%,
GOP campaign strategies
as Americans come together behind their political leaders. Political guru Karl Rove understands that his job is to make sure this political windfall is used properly. He predicts that Bush will enjoy seven to ten months of stratospherically high poll numbers, based on earlier crises. Bush himself declares privately that from now on, his presidency will be defined by the attacks. Just as his father's generation was called to World War II, this generation is called to fight global terror, he tells Rove. "I'm here for a reason," he tells Rove, "and this is going to be how we're going to be judged." (Bob Woodward)
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld forms secret "Office of Special Plans"
- Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld forms his own intelligence analysis team, nicknamed "The Cabal," and officially part of another new intelligence agency, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
(The OSP and CIA clashed over the necessity to invade Iraq; Bush chose to follow the recommendations of the OSP over the CIA.) The OSP is composed of approximately a dozen members, is overseen by William Luti, is directed by Abram Shulsky, and reports directly to Paul Wolfowitz (who conceived the group) and Douglas Feith. The secret intelligence unit headed by Michael Maloof and David Wurmser is also folded into OSP. (Wurmser becomes senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office, and actively promotes the Iraq war at State.) Shulsky, Luti, Wolfowitz, Feith, Maloof, and Wurmser have many things in common -- they are all neoconservatives, all have been strong advocates for war against Iraq, and all are willing to manipulate and even manufacture intelligence to serve their ends. Patrick Lang, the former chief of intelligence for the Middle East at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that the Pentagon has "banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA." A spokesman for Luti says that the OSP did the job that the CIA wasn't willing to do. A former Pentagon advisor who worked with OSP later says, "I'd love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won." - The 9/11 attacks did not trigger the creation of the OSP. Rumsfeld met with a group of influential Republican lobbyists and consultants, including Haley Barbour and Vin Weber, during the summer, prompting at least one participant to wonder what Rumsfeld could gain by discussing national security issues with consultants and lobbyists. Rumsfeld spent most of the meeting railing against the CIA: "He kept talking about how what he was getting from the CIA was out of date and wasn't any good," according to one attendee. Rumsfeld had a solution: "I'm going to create my own intelligence agency," he snapped. Rumsfeld already had his "own" intelligence organization, the DIA, but that agency is part of the larger US intelligence community headed by the CIA's George Tenet, who was constantly jockeying with Rumsfeld for control of the intelligence budget. And the DIA is made up largely of veteran analysts committed to policy-neutral analysis. Rumsfeld wants what he considers creative, out-of-the-box thinking; what he really wants is for an intelligence team to begin from certain paradigms -- i.e., Iraq is an imminent threat to US security -- and then find evidence proving those contentions. This is absolutely backwards from how intelligence usually works, which is to put together fragments of information into a cohesive whole as best as possible and draw conclusions from there. Rumsfeld loves to say that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," but as UN inspector Hans Blix says, absence of evidence is not evidence of concealment either. It is not evidence of anything, except, perhaps, ignorance.
- It only took the CIA and FBI hours of examination after the 9/11 attacks to determine that al-Qaeda was involved in the attacks. However, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith have different presumptions. The ragtag gaggle of terrorists in Afghanistan couldn't have pulled off such an elaborate, devastating attack on America by itself, they assert -- the terrorists must have had a "state sponsor," and that sponsor almost has to be Iraq. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and their gang of amateur intelligence analysts decide that if the CIA is too weak-willed and hidebound to find the connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq, they will use their own resources to find those connections themselves.
- OSP is created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld believe must be true: that Hussein has close ties to al-Qaeda and an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and possibly the United States. It is well known inside administration circles that Rumsfeld is at odds with the CIA, whom he believes is actively trying to disprove any suggested links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. One of Shulsky's prime mandates is to "prove" such linkages, and, failing to find such, to create enough smoke and dissension for Rumsfeld to assert such links without fear of factual dispute. "Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence agency because he didn't like the intelligence he was getting," says Larry Korb, director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Bush prefers the Cabal's advice to the information provided by the CIA, the DIA, and the State Department; the Cabal gets most of its "intelligence" from Ahmad Chalabi's discredited exile group, the INC (see below), and a group of as-yet unidentified Israelis.
- Feith is put in charge of the group's operations. Feith is perhaps the most extreme of the members, an ideologically dogmatic anti-Communist with hardline convictions about Israel and Palestine. His father, a Holocaust survivor, had been an activist with the Zionist group Betar, which preached that Israel was entitled to the entirety of the territory of the original Palestinian Mandate, including both the West and East Banks of the Jordan River. Feith absorbed many of his father's beliefs. During the Clinton years, Feith denounced the Oslo peace accords and any "land for peace" swap with the Palestinians. For a time, Feith did legal work for the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Feith is notorious for going off on hardline rants during policy discussions. "All he did was spout rhetoric," recalls one senior NSC official who came to despise Feith. "He would launch into these diatribes about neo-fascists.... He had no interest in problem solving." Like his boss, Rumsfeld, Feith is an inverterate bureaucratic infighter, and, like Wolfowitz, Feith is enamoured of Ahmad Chalabi. It is Feith who brings aboard two ideological allies, Wurmser, the AEI alumnus who considers Chalabi his "mentor," and Maloof, a longtime Perle ally.
- According to reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the official name of the OSP, or at least one arm of the group, is the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. They create huge, sprawling wall charts detailing the "linkages" and "associations" among various terrorist groups and "rogue" nations, connections "overlooked" -- usually dismissed as specious -- by the CIA and DIA. Wolfowitz repeatedly demands that the group receive raw, unprocessed intelligence reports from the US intelligence agencies, demands that anger and offend the veteran intelligence officials. "The CIA was apoplectic about the work we were doing," Maloof later recalls. "They were so pissed off." At least one agency head, the DIA's Thomas Wilson, refuses to provide the group any raw intelligence reports, saying that no one in the group has the proper security clearances. But Feith's amateur analysts succeed in getting enough information to begin filling out their charts. The charts looked "like a spiderweb," Maloof recalls, with all kinds of poorly sourced connections and conclusions based as much on inference and ideological conviction as any sort of fact. Before long, the team produces a 150-page report "proving" that while al-Qaeda operatives carried out the 9/11 attack, the attack was assisted by Hezbollah, the Shi'ite terrorist group, financed by the Saudi royal family, and sponsored, if not directed, by Saddam Hussein. "Saddam used al-Qaeda as an indirect conduit because he needed plausible deniability," the report says. It would have made Laurie Mylroie proud.
- Older CIA hands characterize the OSP's work as unreliable and politically motivated, and claim it has undermined decades of work by the CIA's trained spies and ignored the truth when it has contradicted its own, ideologically-based world view. "Their methods are vicious," says Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counter-terrorism. "The politicization of intelligence is pandemic, and deliberate disinformation is being promoted. They choose the worst-case scenario on everything and so much of the information is fallacious." Cannistraro describes serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for proferring "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi." (Chalabi, the son of a wealthy Iraqi banker who has not lived in Iraq since 1956 and was chosen by Rumsfeld to succeed to power in Iraq as early as 1997, was convicted in 1992 of 31 counts of bank fraud and embezzlement in Jordan and sentenced to 22 years hard labor in absentia, and is widely regarded as an unreliable source of information.) A former Bush administration intelligence official quits, and later says the Cabal "were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God."
- An Army intelligence officer says that Rumsfeld is "deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence." Former CIA analyst Patrick Lang states that intelligence on Iraq has been "exploited and abused and bypassed" by the White House. Rumsfeld has organized the OSP so that it bypasses the other US intelligence agencies, in order to prevent them from vetting its work, and feeds its information directly to the NSC and to the Bush White House. Interestingly, and possibly treasonously, it passes similar information to Israel's Ariel Sharon, information which bypasses Israel's Mossad and goes directly to Sharon's office.
- But the OSP's reports gain critical attention from senior White House officials, particularly aides from Dick Cheney's office. Wolfowitz is particularly fascinated by the "connections" between the Abu Nidal organization in Iraq and terrorist camps in Lebanon. Though the so-called connections are viewed as nonsensical by experienced intelligence analysts, who know that Abu Nidal, a feared terrorist organization in the 1980s, is now essentially moribund, Wolfowitz is impressed. The OSP is plowing new ground that even Mylroie hasn't considered. "Great work," Wolfowitz tells the team.
- The original line-up doesn't last long. Wurmser goes to work for John Bolton, the arrogantly combative undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Maloof leaves the team after losing all of his security clearances. Feith replaces them with Chris Carney, an assistant political science professor from Iowa State, and DIA analyst Tina Shelton. By June 2002, the OSP finds itself in direct conflict with the CIA. Bowing to presure from the White House and from Cheney's office, the CIA produces a report, "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," which is described in a cover note as "purposely aggressive in seeking to draw connections." Analysts in the Near East and South Asia division of the CIA are offended by the entire process, which in their minds abandons the whole concept of the "traditional analytic approach," which demands that intelligence be supported by "multiple sources" and "strongly supported reporting," in the later words of the Senate intelligence committee's report. The NESA analysts believe that the report has inflated "sporadic, wary contacts" between two sets of independent actors into a "relationship" that doesn't exist. Someone even submits a confidential complaint to the CIA's ombudsman for politicization, whose office exists to prevent undue political influence in the agency's reporting. The ombudsman finds at least six analysts who admit to having been "pressured" by administration officials, but concludes, fortuitously for his own career, that nothing untoward has happened.
- The Feith cell still isn't happy -- the CIA's ill-documented, ideologically slanted report hasn't gone far enough over the edge. Shelton writes in a memo that while the report's content is excellent, the "CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored." The battle continues well into the second half of 2002. (Consortium News, Boston Herald, Iraqi News, Observer. Global Exchange/Daily Kos, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Seymour Hersh, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- Shortly after the attacks, the Pentagon forms a shadowy new bureau, the "Office of Strategic Information" or "Office of Strategic Influence."
US intelligence
OSI's mission is cloaked in secrecy, but one of its jobs is to provide "disinformation" in the form of false news reports, intelligence briefings, and other misinformation protocols to both foreign and domestic journalists. "We shouldn't be in that business," says one senior Defense Department official. "Leave the propaganda leaks to the CIA, the spooks." OSI comes under the authority of the neoconservative Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and is headed by Air Force General Simon Worden. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for the Pentagon and Rumsfeld, refused to give precise information about when the bureau was created or what it was directed to accomplish. "It is a work in progress and the mandate is still unclear," she said, but investigators conclude that the office's mandate includes planting false stories in the press, sending pro-American e-mails from disguised addresses, and using cyber attacks to disrupt anti-American media coverage. OSI enjoys the broad support of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and has been given a multimillion-dollar budget from the $10 billion Pentagon emergency supplemental fund. - Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases. "It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white, a senior Pentagon official says in February 2002. Some Pentagon officials worry that the office will conduct illegal activities under the auspices of the DoD: "This breaks down the boundaries almost completely." It is worth noting that both the Pentagon and the CIA are barred by law from propaganda activities in the United States. The Pentagon has hired the Rendon Group, an international PR and consulting firm, to help run the office. Feith has told reporters that the Pentagon would never lie to the public, but he refuses to rule out the possibility that "hired guns"-- private lobbying or public relations firms with more legal latitude -- would spread misinformation on the Pentagon's behalf. Of more concern is the OSI's affiliation with the Army's Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS). While PSYOPS is barred by law from operating domestically, it has done so frequently over the last decades, most recently during the Kosovo conflict. (Reuters/Freedom of Information Center, New York Times/Freedom of Information Center, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- Shortly after 9/11,
9/11 attacks
Condoleezza Rice calls together senior members of the National Security Council and asks them "to think about 'how do you capitalize on these opportunities,'" which she compares with those of "1945 to 1947" -- the start of the Cold War. (New Yorker/Activist/Network Opposing War and Racism) - Political satirist Al Franken writes,
Iraq war and occupation
"[O]n September 11, 2001, the world changed. Overnight, Iraq developed a massive stockpile of, as Bush would describe them, 'the most lethal weapons ever devised.' It was an accomplishment that put the Manhattan Project to shame." Franken is referencing comments by administration officials such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice just weeks before that reassured Americans that Hussein had no such programs, had no ties to Islamic terrorists, and posed no military threat to either the US or his Middle East neighbors. That assessment flip-flops after 9/11, when Bush and his senior officials decide to use the terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq. (Al Franken) - Shortly after the attacks, Bush issues an order to the CIA, Department of Defense, FBI, State Department, and his Cabinet
US intelligence
that all classified information will be restricted to just eight members of Congress, essentially crippling Congress's ability to conduct oversight on intelligence matters. "The only Members of Congress whom you or your expressly designated officers may brief regarding classified or sensitive law enforcement information," Bush writes, "are the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate." Bush justifies the order by saying it will protect "military security" and "sensitive law enforcement." However, it will be used as a tool by the future chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, to ensure that no serious investigations will be mounted into the administration's successful "fixing" of the intelligence used to take the United States into a war with Iraq. (Raw Story)
Poor intelligence reports of Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Niger galvanizes the adminstration to accuse Iraq of working to create nuclear weapons
- Soon after the attacks, the CIA receives information from SISMI, Italy's Military Intelligence and Security Services,
Iraq-Niger scandal
about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican, made to several African nations, including Niger, during February 1999. The US ambassador to Niger made a routine report on the visit and forgot it. SISMI resurrects the visit for US intelligence and suggests darkly that al-Zahawie may have visited Niger to secure "yellowcake" uranium for Iraq as part of a secret plan to build a nuclear bomb. The US intelligence community doesn't find the speculation credible, and dismisses it as "amateurish and unsubstantiated." The report doesn't contain any documentation whatsoever, just a summary of allegations. "I can fully believe that SISMI would put out a piece of intelligence like that," says a CIA consultant, "but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me." But the report is quickly "stovepiped" to the Vice President's office without any response or caveats from the intelligence experts, and he and other senior Bush officials latch on to it as hard evidence of their assertions that Iraq has been creating nuclear and other WMDs. Cheney is quick to ask the CIA at his regular daily briefing about the allegation, and the agency returns with information that, in the early 1980s, Iraq had indeed acquired uranium ore from Niger, but that material had long since been placed in secure storage and monitored by the IAEA. "End of story," says a Cheney spokeswoman, but that is anything but the end of the story. - The story of the Nigeran documents began with a break-in at an apartment in the Nigeran embassy in Rome. Nothing noticeable was missing; later examination proves that the only things stolen were some letterhead with "Republique du Niger" at the top, documents with signatures, and some official embassy stamps. (Apparently the break-in was staged by Laura Montini, a SISMI agent working at the embassy, who actually stole the missing documents. See the October entry below for more information about Montini.) By October 15, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the director of SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, present the White House with the dossier containing the allegations. The text of the dossier's documents are apparently based on the forged documents, which do not become public knowledge until a year later. Berlusconi denies any connection to the forgeries, but former CIA counterterrorism expert Philip Giraldi and Rome's La Repubblica newspaper later say Berlusconi is eager to curry favor with the Bush administration by helping the White House make its case for war with Iraq. At the same time Pollari delivers the dossier to the CIA, it is delivered to MI6 in London. Giraldi believes neocon warhawk Michael Ledeen used his SISMI connections (see the They Said It page for more details, as well as the item documenting the December 2001 meeting with Ledeen, SISMI officials, and Bush officials in Rome cited below, as well as the October 15 item below and other items throughout this site) to move the fraudulent intelligence into American and British hands, in order to further his own desire to see the US invade and occupy Iraq. "Ledeen goes way back into SISMI," says Giraldi. "And don't believe anything the Italians are saying officially. Just don't believe any of that crap about them not being involved. They are up to their eyeballs in this."
- The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) debunks the Italian dossier within days, citing the lack of corroborating evidence and the tight control France maintains over Niger's uranium, which would have made such a transfer of uranium to Iraq impossible. The French and German intelligence agencies consider the allegations ridiculous, but hardline analysts at the CIA, the Department of Energy, and the DIA report that such a deal is "possible." Only the British and the Italians, both supporters of Bush's war efforts, are moving the intelligence through channels for high-level consideration.
- A former high-level CIA official later says that Cheney is unhappy with the information, and begins what becomes a year-long battle between the CIA and Cheney's office to use the information to build a case that Hussein's Iraq is becoming a nuclear threat. The battle is spearheaded by Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby, who, like fellow neocons Wolfowitz and Bolton, becomes increasingly reluctant to let the military and civilian analysts on his staff vet raw intelligence reports. "It was an unbelievably closed and small group," says the former CIA official, who notes that intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton administration years, and professional analysts had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. "There's so much intelligence out there that it's easy to pick and choose your own," he says. "It opens things up to cherry-picking." Cheney's spokeswoman, Cathie Martin, retorts, "some reporting is sufficiently sensitive that it is restricted only to the very top officials of the government -- as it should be." Within months, the allegation about Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium will find its way into administration reports to Congress, with Colin Powell telling the House International Relations Committee in February 2002, "With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it." Many insiders feel that CIA chief George Tenet, stung by criticism that his agency failed to predict the 9/11 attacks, is far too eager to endear himself to administration hawks and improve his standing with Bush and Cheney, and therefore doesn't try hard enough to provide rational assessments of the intelligence his agency receives, or to stand up for his agency's analysts. "They got pounded on, day after day," says a former administration official, and received no official backup from either Tenet or his staff. "Pretty soon, you say, 'F*ck it.' And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted." (Seymour Hersh, James Moore and Wayne Slater)
- Within weeks after the attacks, the Bush administration gives data mining company ChoicePoint,
9/11 attacks
of Florida 2000 fame, a $12 million contract to use its DNA database to identify body parts of 9/11 victims found in Staten Island garbage dumps, where much of the WTC debris has been hauled. But that contract is only the foot in the door for ChoicePoint. While Constitutional law forbids the government to spy on citizens unless there is legal justification, i.e. suspicion of criminal activity, the private sector can spy with impunity -- so, in essence, the Bush administration will "outsource" its citizen snooping to ChoicePoint, using the USA Patriot Act to justify its actions. According to the Act, passed later in 2001, the government can now ask private companies for the data it cannot legally obtain on its own. The federal Total Information Office, later supposedly disbanded and reborn under the moniker "Terrorism Information Office," will ask its employees to come up with new and unusual ways to use the ChoicePoint information about the citizenry. And well after 2001, ChoicePoint will begin its inaptly named "ChoicePoint Cares" program -- building a DNA database of every citizen and resident in the US. (The justification is to aid in finding lost and kidnapped children.) - It is some comfort to realize that ChoicePoint doesn't handle its information particularly well; in over a thousand rape cases which used ChoicePoint DNA identification, police scientists say ChoicePoint erred 25% of the time, in some cases producing results on evidence that didn't exist. But proof of the firm's incompetence is cold comfort: for example, in November 2000, when the BBC questioned ChoicePoint about its targeting of black voters for purging from Florida's voting rolls, a spokesman claimed that the firm had checked every name on its lists against Social Security numbers. In 95% of the cases, ChoicePoint had not checked...but it did accurately list each name by race. As a result, 91,000 of the 94,000 "felons" purged from the Florida voting rolls were guilty of nothing more than being black. ChoicePoint tells the media it isn't in the business of giving DNA records to the federal government, but when one of journalist Greg Palast's investigators called the company, posing as a student interested in data mining, the spokesman boasted that ChoicePoint is the single biggest supplier of DNA information to the FBI. According to a former employee of ChoicePoint, CEO Derek Smith says his biggest goal is to "build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States...linked to all the other information held by CP" from medical records to voting records.
- Such information is already being used in credit reports with info garnered by ChoicePoint, but, according to sampled information gathered by the World Privacy Forum, 90% of the information provided to the credit bureaus by CP contains errors. And in 2006, ChoicePoint will be fined $15 million by the FTC for mistakenly selling 145,000 credit card records to a group of identity thieves.
- Why does such a band of incompetent data snoops have such good connections to the Bush administration? Two of its senior officials include former Republican congressman Vin Weber, a member of the Project for the New American Century, and Richard Armitage, a former board member of CP's Florida unit, who after November 2000 was named Deputy Secretary of State. The CP board of directors include Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone, a billionaire who formerly headed Rudolph Giuliani's aborted 2000 Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton; both Marcus and Langone are heavy Bush contributors. In 2004, Langone will be charged with insider trading by the SEC, but Langone's massive fraud will be characterized by New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso as equivalent to "a traffic ticket." Grasso may have been influenced by Langone's secret approval of Grasso's taking an extra $100 million in "pay" from the NYSE. Both Langone and Grasso are, as of this writing, still fighting federal charges. CEO Smith is himself fighting insider trading charges stemming from his actions surrounding the credit card records sale to identity thieves, when he made sure to get rid of some of his CP stock before informing victims of the theft. Palast writes, "It's not the War on Terror these guys are fighting, it's the Class War. Information is a weapon and our betters are arming themselves. The Bush administration has reversed the flow common to democracy: Instead of information about the government going to We the People, it is now information about We the People going to government, or better, contractors beholden to board directors, not voters."
- On September 17, the FBI will contract with ChoicePoint to obtain government records on every citizen in a dozen countries, but not just the nations like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the Gulf emirates which spawned the 9/11 terrorists. Instead, the contract is also for countries like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Honduras, and Venezuela. Why those countries? Because, Palast avers, those countries either have an anti-Bush president running for re-election, or an anti-Bush candidate leading in an upcoming presidential race. Interestingly, in these countries, obtaining citizen files such as the ones ChoicePoint gathers is a crime. In Mexico, local contractors will be arrested; in Argentina, arrests will only be avoided when CP employees promise to erase the data they had collected. And as for the excuse that CP's data mining can help prevent future terror attacks, on 9/11, the hijackers used their real names with the airlines, which would in later years set off alarms at the Transportation Safety Administration. But, unfortunately, since then, terrorists have decided to use fake names for booking flights. (Greg Palast)
- Shortly after the attacks,
Attack on civil liberties
First Data Corporation, one of the nation's largest processor of credit-card transactions, agrees to give the FBI access to its records. Author Ron Suskind, of the June 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine, says that the First Data operation "swept up the suspicious, or simply the unfortunate, by the stadiumful and caught almost no one who was actually a danger to America." (Washington Post) - Shortly after the attacks,
9/11 attacks
Bush comments gaily to his budget director, "Lucky me, I hit the trifecta." He is referring to earlier comments that he had promised not to raid the Social Security funds except in the case of war, recession, and a national emergency. Before August 2001, he promised never to touch the Social Security funds, period. After the 9/11 attacks, the "trifecta" joke becomes a staple of Bush's campaign speeches, but only to audiences of supporters. True to his word, Bush begins to plunder the Social Security coffers soon after the attacks. (Guardian, David Cogswell) - Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine, writes,
9/11 attacks
"On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington inflicted heavy losses on the frame of the American body politic; they also severely injured -- not so obviously but no less surely -- its animating principle and spirit. By nightfall the notion of a democratic republic founded on the premise of honest and sometimes sharply pointed speech had been placed in administrative detention, suspended until further notice, canceled because of rain; in the skyboxes of the national mews media, august personages were reaffirming America's long-standing alliances with God, Moses, George Washington, and the hydrogen bomb. The barbarian was at the gates, civilization trembled in the balance, and now was not the time for any careless choice of word." (Lewis Lapham) - Satirist and political commentator Al Franken writes that Bush will use 9/11 as the all-purpose excuse and justification for virtually everything he does, from tax cuts to staggering increases in the US debt.
9/11 attacks
"As the wife of blogger Dwight Meredith observed, 9/11 became Bush's 'little black dress.' Meaning he could slip it on for almost any occasion. Bush put on his little black dress to accuse Senate Democrats of not being sufficiently patriotic, to unravel Americans' civil liberties, to make the case for drilling in ANWR, and even as an excuse not to allow prescription drugs to be reimported from Canada." (Al Franken) - September 11-16: Pakistani ISI Director Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, extending his Washington visit because of the 9/11 attacks,
9/11 attacks
meets with US officials and negotiates Pakistan's cooperation with the US against al-Qaeda. Apparently he is visited twice by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who offers him the choice: "Help us and breathe in the 21st century along with the international community or be prepared to live in the Stone Age." Secretary of State Powell presents Mahmood seven demands as an ultimatum and Pakistan supposedly agrees to all seven. Mahmood also has meetings with Senator Joseph Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Secretary of State Powell, regarding Pakistan's position. On September 13, the airport in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, is shut down for the day. A government official later says the airport had been closed because of threats made against Pakistan's "strategic assets," but doesn't elaborate. The next day, Pakistan declares "unstinting" support for the US, and the airport is reopened. Later it is suggested that Israel and India threatened to attack Pakistan and take control of its nuclear weapons if Pakistan didn't side with the US. It is later reported that Mahmood's presence in Washington was a lucky blessing; one Western diplomat saying it "must have helped in a crisis situation when the US was clearly very, very angry." (CCR) - September 11: Colin Powell, in Peru with,
9/11 attacks
among others, NSC counterterrorism expert Rand Beers, is at breakfast with Peru's president, Alejandro Toledo, when they learn of the attacks. Powell orders their plane refueled for their immediate departure, but the delay is maddeningly long; Powell is able to give a short speech to the Organization of American States assembly before the plane is ready to leave. Beers recalls the flight as being "somber all the way back," with little information available because they have no media access. (Rand Beers/Bill Katovsky) - Septemer 12 - on: CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks alerts senior military commanders, including Brigadier General Mark Scheid,
War in Afghanistan
the commander of Fort Eustis in Newport News, Virginia, that the military needs to "get ready to go to war" in Afghanistan, a task that military commanders have been looking forward to since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the day before. But, Scheid reveals in September 2006, the focus quickly changes. Within a day or two, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Scheid and other generals "we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast." Scheid recalls, "Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan, Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq." Scheid remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much." Planning for the Iraq invasion, originally based on offensive plans for Iraq already in place, was extremely secretive: "There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet," says Scheid. Eventually other military agencies like the transportation and Army materiel commands had to get involved, he says; the senior civilians in the Defense Department and the White House could not just "keep planning this in the dark." - Rumsfeld forbids any planning for post-invasion Iraq. "The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," says Scheid. "We won't stay." Scheid recalls that the planners continue to "write what was called Phase 4," or the section of the plan that includes post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction. Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid says. But Rumsfeld refuses. "I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," he recalls. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today. He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war." Scheid says that he cannot be sure what shaped Rumsfeld's thinking: "In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging." Scheid adds that even if the people who laid out the initial war plans had fleshed out post-invasion missions, the fighting and insurgent attacks going on today would have been hard to predict. "We really thought that after the collapse of the regime we were going to do all these humanitarian type things. We thought this would go pretty fast and we'd be able to get out of there. We really didn't anticipate them to continue to fight the way they did or come back the way they are. Now we're going more toward a Civil War. We didn't see that coming." (Knight-Ridder/Duluth News-Review, BooMan Tribune/Daily Kos)
- September 12: Following his notes from the day before suggesting that 9/11 should be blamed on Iraq and not just al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld proposes to Bush that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism."
Iraq war and occupation
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others support the idea. Bush and all of his advisors agree that Iraq should be attacked, but they decide such an attack should wait. Secretary of State Powell says, "Public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible." (There is still no evidence suggesting Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.) Wolfowitz is given the task of finding, or creating, a justification for a war against Iraq to be given to the world during Bush's next State of the Union address. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a member of the Defense Policy Board who backed an invasion of Iraq, theorizes that Saddam is connected to the World Trade Center attacks, and tells one journalist that no matter what, Iraq should be invaded because Hussein would likely be involved in future attacks. Woolsey goes to London to gather evidence to back up his theory, which has the support of Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, then the Defense Policy Board chairman. Wolfowitz, Perle, and other administration officials believe that, if they could tie Hussein to al-Qaeda, they could justify the war to the American people. As a veteran aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee observes, "They knew that, if they could really show a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, then their objective, ... which was go in and get rid of Hussein, would have been a foregone conclusion." Woolsey's main piece of evidence for a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda is a meeting that was supposed to have taken place in Prague in April 2001 between lead September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, but none of the intelligence agencies could place Atta in Prague on that date. Atta was proven to be in the US during this time, traveling between Florida and Virginia Beach, Virginia. - Wolfowitz, a proponent of the conspiracy theories promulgated by right-wing crackpot Laurie Mylroie that assert Hussein is behind virtually all of the terrorist attacks against the US in the past eight years (see below items), acts as if the 9/11 attacks prove Mylroie's theories. On September 15, Wolfowitz says that since there is a good chance Hussein was behind the attacks -- a 10 to 50% chance -- Bush should attack Iraq immediately, and notes that anyway, attacking Iraq would be easier than attacking Afghanistan. Two days later, Wolfowitz sends a memo to Rumsfeld restating Mylroie's conspiracy theories. A day later, he fires off another memo, this one with the ominous title, "Were We Asleep?," that suggests the US's complacency regarding Iraq is the reason why the attacks succeeded. Shortly thereafter, Wolfowitz sends Woolsey on his fact-finding mission to London, to find evidence that would prove Mylroie's claims.
- Bush's new counterterrorism director, Wayne Downing, is also on board the Saddam-as mastermind bandwagon. Downing, a retired general who has worked closely with Ahmad Chalabi's INC, will use the October 2001 anthrax mailings (see below) as "evidence" that Hussein is attacking the US with biological weapons. "This is definitely Saddam!" Downing shouts to several White House aides. One of the aides recalls Downing excitedly phoning Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith with his "news." "I had the feeling they were high-fiving each other," the aide recalls. Of course, the connection between Iraq and the anthrax attacks never goes anywhere.
- Eventually, Afghanistan will be chosen as an easier sell to the American people while public opinion is being manipulated to bring Iraq into focus as the next primary target. Many of these people, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Woolsey, Perle, and others, are members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which has decided as an organization to use the attacks as justification for their long-desired invasion of Iraq. Woolsey makes several TV appearances in the days after the attack pushing the theory of Iraqi involvement, as does fellow PNAC member William Kristol on NPR; other PNAC colleagues flood the media with editorials and talk show appearances calling for the extension of the Afghan war into Iraq. Of course, it is worth remembering that Rumsfeld instructed his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq five hours after the Pentagon was attacked.
- Opposition in the State Department prompts accusations of disloyalty from the neocon advocates of invading Iraq; Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, a signer of the 1996 PNAC letter to Bill Clinton, is accused of losing his nerve. "I've got to believe Wolfowitz and Feith are angry" at Armitage, one friend of all three men says. "They feel he's betrayed a fundamental conviction they shared." A former high-level intelligence official and Armitage supporter says in late 2001, "It's the revenge of the nerds. They won in Afghanistan when everybody said it wouldn't work, and it's got them in a euphoric mood of cockiness. They went against the establishment experts on the Middle East who said it would lead to fundamentalist insurrections in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Not so, and anyone who now preaches any approach of solving problems with diplomacy is scoffed at. They're on a roll." Armitage views the INC's eagerness to confront Saddam Hussein as ill-considered, the official says. "We have no idea what could go wrong in Iraq if the crazies took over that country. Better the devil we know than the one we don't." Armitage is determined to block the plan for an Iraqi invasion, and knows that if it goes ahead, "it will be a political disaster." A senior State Department official says that, while Chalabi is quite charming, the department has no intention of allowing "a bunch of half-*ssed people to send foreigners into combat." Of Chalabi and his followers, a senior State Department official says, "Who among them have ever smelled cordite? These are p*ssants who can't get the president's ear and have to blame someone else. We're not going to let them lead others down the garden path." Secretary of State Powell "backed away from the infighting" in late 2001, says a senior general, and leaves it to Armitage to stall the invasion for as long as possible. Powell and Armitage favor stricter, "smart" sanctions, which would allow the UN to crack down on "dual-use" goods that can be used for civilian or military purposes. As of now, Iraq is exporting an estimated two million barrels of oil a day under the Oil for Food program, and major purchasers include ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other American companies, who routinely buy the oil through third parties. Almost half of those two million barrels a day end up in the US market. (The New Republic, Online Journal, Asia Times, Truthout, The Atlantic, Seymour Hersh, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- September 12:
9/11 attacks
In response to the terrorist attacks, NATO invokes its mutual defense clause for the first time in its history, declaring the strikes to be attacks on the entire alliance. (NATO and UN History) - September 12: Condoleezza Rice cancels the speech she was to give at Johns Hopkins University.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
The speech, though intended to address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday," mentions nothing of terrorism. The speech's content is never made publkic, but as the Washington Post writes on April 1, 2004, "The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or extremist Islamic groups, according to former US officials who have seen the test." (Washington Post/Al Franken) - September 12: Former education secretary William Bennett,
9/11 attacks
a highly regarded conservative pundit, tells a CNN audience that in retaliation for the attacks Bush should declare war on militant Islam, and calls for strikes against targets in Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and even China. And a Wall Street Journal editorial calls for strikes against "terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, and perhaps even parts of Egypt." (CNN/Wall Street Journal/Frances Fox Piven) - September 12: Egyptian immigrant Hady Omar is arrested by the FBI.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
Omar is informed his arrest is because he purchased an airline ticket from the same Kinko's that terrorist Mohammed Atta had earlier purchased a ticket. Omar is kept without charge in solitary confinement in a maximun-security jail for two months, with the lights on 24 hours a day. When he asks to phone a lawyer, he is refused. Finally, Omar is charged with overstaying a tourist visa (though he is married to a US citizen, has a work permit, and is applying for permanent residency). After 10 weeks in custody, he is released. Others fare worse. Jordanian immigrant Ali Yaghi, also married to a US citizen, applies for a green card, and instead gets ten months in solitary confinement without charge. The FBI claims its evidence against Yaghi is secret, refuses to talk with Yaghi's lawyer, and deports Yaghi to Jordan without informing his family. His children ask every day when their father will come home; his wife has no answer. Attorney General Ashcroft and other Justice Department officials refuse to comment on either case, or dozens of similar cases. Ashcroft will later admit that "about 97%" of those detained on immigration charges after the 9/11 attacks have no connection to terrorists. In September 2003 the Justice Department will grudgingly admit that not one of the hundreds of citizens, immigrants, and foreign nationals picked up in its sweeps after the attacks have been linked to terrorism, or charged with any terrorist activities. (CBS/Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - September 12: Journalist Hunter S. Thompson writes of the bombings,
9/11 attacks
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.... We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now." (ESPN/Buzzflash)
