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
2002:
December
- December: Many in the Bush administration seem to prefer intelligence procured from Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmad Chalabi over that obtained by the CIA. Chalabi, who is deeply mistrusted by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, has demonstrated a talent for telling administration officials what they want to hear. Right now his message is simple: Iraq is ready for reclamation, the populace is ready for Hussein to be overthrown, the Iraqi people are solidly behind the Americans, all it takes is an act of will to make it happen. (Chalabi will be proven to be wrong on all counts.) "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency," writes reporter Richard Dreyfuss. "The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war." Much of the pro-war faction's information comes from Chalabi and the INC, even though "most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil." Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert, tells Dreyfuss, "[INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches." (In These Times)
- December: Bush appoints Dr. David Hager to the FDA's panel on reproductive health drugs, which determines whether drugs such as RU-486 (an abortifacent) is safe enough for public use. Hager comes from a position as a lobbyist for the Christian Medical Association, which stridently opposes the distribution of RU-486 and similar drugs to American citizens. Hager is also the author of a number of books that urge women to seek spiritual help for ailments ranging from PMS to headaches. One of his books, Stress and the Woman's Body, recommends that women imagine themselves being kissed by Jesus to help them end their extramarital affairs. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- December: William Miller, a nominee for the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse, is contacted by the office of HHS secretary Tommy Thompson and grilled on his personal beliefs and his level of support for Republicans, including questions such as, "Are you sympathetic of faith-based initiatives?" When Miller confesses that he did not vote for Bush in 2000, he is asked to explain why not, and does not receive a callback. His name is dropped from consideration. Miller's failed nomination is one of many ideologically-based nominations that is criticized by Britain's leading medical research journal, The Lancet, which writes in November 2002, "Expert committees need to be filled, by definition, by experts. That means those with a research record in their field and in epidemiology and public health. Members of expert panels need to be impartial and credible, and free of partisan conflicts of interest, especially in industry links or in right-wing ideology. Any further right-wing incursions on expert panels' membership will cause a terminal decline in public trust in the advice of scientists." (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- December 2: At a conference of senior leaders of the nation's Air National Guard, Dick Cheney once again asserts that the putative connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda constitute an imminent threat to the US that is part of the war on terror. Cheney says, "There is also a grave danger that al-Qaeda or other terrorists will join with outlaw regimes that have these weapons to attack their common enemy, the United States of America. That is why confronting the threat posed by Iraq is not a distraction from the war on terror." In fact, US intelligence is all but certain that Iraq is not going to attack the US. According to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence community has "low confidence" in that scenario, and Iraq appears to be "drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks" against the US for fear of providing cause for war. Cheney also asserts that Hussein's regime has provided training to al-Qaeda terrorists, saying, "His regime has had high-level contacts with al-Qaeda going back a decade and has provided training to al-Qaeda terrorists." Both statements are contradicted by the CIA and DIA. (Bush on Iraq, Frank Rich [PDF file])
- December 2: Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer says, "If he declares he has none [WMDs], then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world." (White House)
- December 2: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says, "[Bush's] determination to use force if necessary is because of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." (David Corn)
- December 2: Veteran journalist John Pilger writes of the long-term plans by Bush neoconservatives to militarily dominate the Middle East, and these plans coming to fruition. Pilger writes, "The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and 'think-tanks' were established to avenge the American 'defeat' in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a 'peace dividend' following the Cold War. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime." Pilger recalls interviewing Bush defense advisor Richard Perle, one of the architects of the PNAC plans, when Perle was a Reagan advisor: "...when he spoke about 'total war,' I mistakenly dismissed him as mad." But in a recent interview, Perle continued to promote the same idea in describing America's war on terror: "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq...this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war...our children will sing great songs about us years from now." Perle, along with Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other Bush officials have repeatedly characterized the 9/11 attacks as an "opportunity" to enact their plans. Pilger recalls Rice, last April, advising senior members of the National Security Council "to think about 'how do you capitalize on these opportunities', which she compared with those of '1945 to 1947:' the start of the Cold War. ...Under cover of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare." Pilger is disgusted with the complicity of the American and British media, saying that their complicity "makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to do." (John Pilger)
- December 3: The CIA has been given permission to kill Americans involved in overseas actions by al-Qaeda, according to the Bush administration's rules on dealing with terrorism. The authority to kill US citizens is granted under a secret finding signed by the president after the 9/11 attacks that directs the CIA to covertly attack al Qaeda anywhere in the world. The authority makes no exception for Americans, so permission to strike them is understood rather than specifically described. One American has already died in a CIA-authorized strike; on November 3, a Predator drone fired a missile that killed a carload of suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. The target of the attack, a Yemeni named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, was believed to be the top al Qaeda operative in that country. But the CIA didn't know a US citizen, Yemeni-American Kamal Derwish, was in the car. He died, along with al-Harethi and four other Yemenis. The Bush administration maintains that Derwish's death is legal. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice says, "I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here. There are authorities that the president can give to officials. He's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority." Derwish has been accused of leading an al-Qaeda cell in Buffalo, New York, but has never been charged by American authorities. His family has yet to speak to any government officials about their son's death. Mohamed Albanna, vice president of the American Muslim Council's Buffalo chapter, has urged federal authorities to confirm the death: "It's just a matter of common respect for the family here. After all, they are US citizens." He adds that Derwish "has not been tried and has not been found guilty, so, in that sense, he's still an innocent American who was killed. That's what the law states." The Bush administration sees it differently. In killing him, the administration defined Derwish as an enemy combatant, the equivalent of a US citizen who fights with the enemy on a battlefield, officials said. Under this legal definition, experts say, his constitutional rights are nullified and he can be killed outright. Many legal experts believe the Bush administration's definition of "enemy combatants" is not Constitutional. Scott Silliman, director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, says, "Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, DC, under the same theory? The answer is yes, you could." (ABC News)
- December 3: The New York Times' Judith Miller files a report that claims a Russian bioterrorism expert visited Iraq in 1990, possibly to pass along new and deadly strains of smallpox that can be used as a biological weapon. Miller's story, based on unidentified sources provided to her by the Bush administration, is proven to be completely wrong -- the last time the scientist in question visited Iraq was in 1970-71 as part of a global smallpox eradication effort -- but the correction is never issued. Public reaction to Iraq's supposed smallpox weapon is strong, and Bush will use this article to bolster his claim that Iraq has weapons-grade smallpox toxin. The claim is also used to justify a dangerous nationwide smallpox inoculation program. Later investigation by the US's "Team Pox" finds no stockpiles of smallpox, and the laboratory cited in the article as being the hub of smallpox production is found to be long deserted and covered in cobwebs. (Guardian, Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
- December 4: A New York federal judge rules that Jose Padilla, a US citizen who has been accused of being an al-Qaeda "dirty bomber," and held for months without charge or legal representation, has the right to meet with a lawyer. While the judge agrees with the government that Padilla can be held indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" even though he is a US citizen, he says such enemy combatants can meet with a lawyer to contest their status. However, the ruling makes it very difficult to overturn such a status. The government only need show that "some evidence" supports its claims. In Padilla's case, many of the allegations against Padilla given to the judge, such as Padilla taking his orders from al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, have been widely discredited. As the Guardian puts it, Padilla "appears to be little more than a disoriented thug with grandiose ideas." The government challenges the ruling, and continues to deny Padilla access to a lawyer. The ACLU and civil libertarians declare the decision a qualified victory, with the ACLU saying that the ruling is "a crucial rejection of the Bush administration's claim of almost unbridled power to unilaterally detain an American citizen and hold him indefinitely and incommunicado." (CCRCCR, Peter Singer)
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself." -- Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
- December 5: Press secretary Ari Fleischer says, "The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and as bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it." (Democratic Underground, David Corn)
- December 5: Donald Rumsfeld's chief civilian advisor, Steve Herbits, walks into Rumsfeld's office and announces, "You're not going to be happy with what I'm going to tell you, but you are in the unique position of being the sole person who could lose the president's re-election for him if you don't get something straightened out." Rumsfeld flushes. "Now that I've got your attention," Herbits continues, "you have got to focus on the post-Iraq planning. It is so screwed up. We will not be able to win the peace." (Rumsfeld later claims he does not recall the meeting with Herbits.) Like so many other things surrounding Iraq, Rumsfeld has taken personal control of the post-invasion planning, to the point where he intends to micromanage the actual troop deployments in Iraq from his Washington office. Rumsfeld's micromanagement frustrates and enrages the military commanders on the ground. Herbits warns Rumsfeld that Douglas Feith, the undersecretary in charge of post-Iraq planning, is screwing the entire situation up, presiding over meetings with State and Defense Department officials that are little more than shouting matches. Rumsfeld decides to become more personally involved. (Bob Woodward)
- December 6: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and chief economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey are forced off the Bush economic team, apparently as punishment for their resistance to adminstration assertions that the Iraq war and occupation will cost little more than $50 or $60 billion. O'Neill and Lindsey have publicly predicted that it will cost more than $100-200 billion. (See the Cost of War counter on this site's home page to see the current cost of the occupation.) OMB director Mitch Daniels later tells the New York Times that the administration's lowball estimate is correct.
- The afternoon of December 5, O'Neill receives a call from Dick Cheney: "Paul, the president has decided to make some changes in the economic team," Cheney says. "And you're part of the change. ...We'd really like to do this in an amicable and gracious way. The president thinks you should say you decided to return to private life, and you can decide whatever timing is good for you." O'Neill is taken aback by the cold, formal tones from a man he had once considered a close friend; he also knows that the decision is more likely from Cheney and Karl Rove than from Bush. O'Neill counters by saying he will offer his resignation on December 6, but does not want to fob off the resignation with the excuse for wishing to return to private life. "...I'm too old to begin telling lies now," he says. "If I took that course, people who know me well would say that wasn't true. And people who don't know me well would say, 'O'Neill was a coward -- things aren't going so well and he bailed out on the president. I'm perfectly okay with people knowing the truth that the president wants to make a change. That's his prerogative." O'Neill later recalls, "I thought I expected to find a bigger market [in the White House] for truth, but it didn't turn out to be right. Even friends in the media were more interested in small conflicts than in what was right or wrong, more interested in the push and shove of personalities rather than in the real conflict over ideologies that was going on inside the administration." Of the idea of responding to terrorism with "preemption versus retaliation[, i]t's a threshold issue. This is a changed world, there's a fork in the road.... It's profoundly important. It's not my view that says preemption is all wrong...it just gives to the appropriator such a weight of responsibility to really be right. And that's where it breaks down, because politics, as it's now played, is not about being right. It's about doing whatever's necessary to win. They're not the same."
- O'Neill offers a one-line letter of resignation, horrifying his more politically sensitive press secretary, Michele Davis, who doesn't want O'Neill to give the impression that he is leaving with a sense of rancor. "I refuse to say I'm leaving to spend more time with my family or any of that bullsh*t," O'Neill retorts. They compromise on a brief letter that speaks of the "privilege to serve the nation during these challenging times" and wishing Bush "every success as you provide leadership and inspiration for America and for the world." O'Neill tells the press on December 6 of his resignation, and says he will stay until December 31 to facilitate the transition to the new Treasury Secretary, former railroad executive and Reagan economic advisor John Snow.
- After his announcement, O'Neill receives condolences from, among others, rock singer and economic activist Bono of U2, who has become friends with O'Neill. "You're not a politician, that was always your strength," he tells O'Neill. He says that O'Neill "tried to make a real difference but found out it was about winning." The conservative media is joyous over O'Neill's ouster, with Robert Novak saying that O'Neill was always the wrong man for the job and that Bush should have checked O'Neill's ideological credentials before hiring him. The New York Times opines, simplistically, that O'Neill was fired because he was hard to keep on message and didn't do a good job in communicating the administration's economic policies.
- Lindsey, who has spent much time over the past two years publicly smearing O'Neill in the media, calls O'Neill in mid-December and asks O'Neill if he would "walk with him on the beach" -- parlance for a stroll on the long, rounded drive in front of the White House -- so the news media "could get shots of us looking okay, like, we're okay with each other and this whole thing is just fine with us." O'Neill declines. The chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, Christopher DeMuth, publicly berates Cheney for what he calls "the clumsy and backstabbing manner in which the departures" of both O'Neill and Lindsey have been handled. He later says that the administration now lacks any of what he calls rigorous "O'Neillian analysis" and that the "circle around this president is smaller and tighter than any we've seen in recent times...and I was in the Nixon White House." Later, O'Neill is asked by biographer Ron Suskind, during their initial meeting, if "creating an economic policy was actually in your job description." O'Neill laughs and says, "I probably should have checked -- they didn't seem to want one of those." (Mother Jones, Ron Suskind)
- December 6: Conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly has problems making up his mind about Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons. He tells his audience, "I can't, in good conscience, tell the American people that I know for sure that he has smallpox or anthrax or he's got nuclear or chemical and that he is ready to use that. I cannot say that as a journalist or an American." Two months later, on February 17, 2003, he changes his message: "According to the UN, he's got anthrax, VX gas, ricin, and on and on." And on the eve of the invasion he tells ABC's Good Morning America: "Here's the bottom line on this for every American and everybody in the world: Nobody knows for sure, all right? We don't know what he has. We think he has 8,500 liters of anthrax. But let's see." O'Reilly, who is a relatively reliable mouthpiece for the Bush administration though he routinely protests his independence, may have most accurately stated his (and the adminstration's) true rationale for war on January 14, 2003, when he will tell a caller, "We basically feel that he is a danger to our oil supply there." (FAIR
- December 7: Iraq releases a 12,000 page document disclosing information about its biological, chemical, WMD, and missile programs. The document is in both English and Arabic, mostly cut-and-paste in nature, and is not easily digested. Days later, Iraq admits that it came relatively close to making nuclear weapons before the Persian Gulf War, but insists that all of that technology has long since been destroyed. (The claim later proves to be accurate.) UN chief inspector Hans Blix says the document is "not enough to create confidence." Colin Powell, playing the good soldier, publicly thunders, in a State Department press release, "The declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger," even though privately Powell knows those "efforts" are nothing but fiction based on forged documents. "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?" Powell's denunciation is the first time a government official has publicly accused Iraq of trying to obtain uranium from Niger. Powell will soon tie the equally fallacious story of aluminum tubes supposedly to be used in constructing nuclear weapons into the Niger story.
- Eleven days later, Britain says that it has found omissions in the report which constitute a "material breach" of UN Resolution 1441. Much information showing American complicity in the 1980s buildup of Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs is redacted by the US government. The story is particularly telling; originally, the UN announced that it would release the entire document except for a section providing details on the construction of a nuclear bomb. The current nation presiding over the UN Security Council is Colombia; after the UN receives Iraq's report, US Secretary of State Colin Powell pressures the Colombian ambassador to provide the US with the report before anyone else can see it. US officials then take the report to Washington, ostensibly because there are better copying machines in Washington than in New York City. 26 hours later, the US provides the UN Security Council with a drastically redacted document comprising barely 3,500 of the 12,000 original pages. "What was in the missing 8,500 pages?" writes Amy Goodman, "Information embarrassing to US companies and the Bush administration." The result is that the UN Security Council, and the world's citizens, only receives a US-sanitized version of Iraq's reports on its weapons programs. The censored documents make no mention whatsoever of US corporate and governmental involvement in the arming of Saddam Hussein. Adding insult to injury, Powell promptly decries the redacted document as a "catalog of recycled information and flagrant omissions." Though UN officials such as Kofi Annan and Hans von Sponick protest the censoring of the document, none of the redacted information is made available until Germany's Die Tageszeitung newspaper publishes portions of the redacted material two weeks later. Predictably, the redacted information is damning in its proof of US complicity in arming Iraq. (CNN/Guardian/Electric Venom, Amy and David Goodman, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Frank Rich pp.67-8)
- December 9: A Washington Post story reports that the US suspects Iraq of supplying nerve gas to al-Qaeda, agitating the public and giving credence to the administration's allegations of connections between Iraq and the terrorist group. The story calls it a "credible report" in the first line, though much farther into the story the evidence is characterized as "uncorroborated" and "open to interpretation." An official says that "the message resulted only from an analyst's hypothetical concern." The suspicion is later proven to be false. (Guardian)
- December 9: A federal judge rules against the General Accounting Office's lawsuit against the Bush administration which attempted to force Vice President Cheney to reveal the energy industry's role in formulating the administration's energy policy. U.S. District Judge John Bates, a Bush appointee, claims that the GAO's lawsuit seeking to find out whom Cheney and his aides met with from the business sector was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues. In February 2003, the GAO will end its attempts to pursue the lawsuit, even though in the words of GAO head David Walker, "GAO strongly believes the district court's decision is incorrect.... [But] "further pursuit of the...information would require investment of significant time and resources over several years...." (CNN)
- December 10: A classified report shows that Saudi Arabia's involvement in the 9/11 bombings is much deeper than previously known. Saudi diplomats and intelligence agents provided support to the hijackers, as well as direct financing for the operation. The administration chooses to muzzle this report in light of the upcoming invasion of Iraq and the necessity for Saudi aid in that operation. (MSNBC)
- December 11: The US threatens to use nuclear weapons in Iraq if that country uses nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against American targets. (Fox News)
- December 11 - 17: The Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference is held in Bangkok, Thailand. Officials from 35 countries adopt a Plan of Action calling for stepped-up efforts and increased resources to provide reproductive health care, combat AIDS and protect adolescents against unwanted or too-early pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. The 35 nations present agreed that progress in addressing these and other population issues, including gender inequality, migration, urbanization and ageing, are closely linked to prospects for eradicating poverty in the region, home to two thirds of the world's 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 a day. Or, it would be more accurate to say that almost all of the nations present agreed. The United States opposes virtually every proposal eventually adopted. Led by, among others, John Klink, the former representative of the Vatican to the United Nations, the US delegation opposes reaffirmation of the 1994 Cairo Accords, an action program designed to promote the health rights of women and children. The US delegation opposes the terms "reproductive health services" and " reproductive rights," and tries to remove language that supports the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS; the proposals are defeated 31-1 with two abstentions. "The language of the ICPD Program of Action is extremely clear. There is no hidden agenda and no secret codes," says Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of UNFPA. "The phrase 'reproductive health services' is not code for the promotion or support for 'abortion services.' Nothing in the proceedings at Cairo, or the five-year review, justifies describing them as such." The US delegation also insists that the council support a statement that says life begins at contraception; that proposal is defeated 32-1. Delegates from other countries, who had worked closely with Clinton administration officials to craft the original accords, have difficulty working with the belligerent and ill-informed members of the Bush delegation. (PlanetWire, Peter Singer)
- December 11: Passenger and US citizen Doug Stuber was detained by security forces at the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina airport after they overheard him declare that George W. Bush is "dumb as a rock." (Stuber was detained in October 2002, but the story is released by the local media on this date.) Stuber says that he was questioned for hours, and was relentlessly interrogated over his former chairmanship of the North Carolina Green Party in 2000. Stuber was not allowed to make his flight to France, and was told that he could fly out the next day -- if he bought a $2,600 same-day fare. He did so, and instead of being allowed to board his flight, was again detained by security, who grilled him over his political beliefs. At one point, Stuber says he was shown a document that lists the Green Party as a haven for potential terrorists. Stuber later tried to fly out of both the Greensboro and Charlotte airports; after examining his passport, security officials at both airports turned him down. (Creative Loafing)
- December 12: Documents secretly published by the Project for the New American Century state that America needs "some catastrophic and catalysing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" in order for the populace to support US efforts at global domination. The 9/11 attacks are described as "the opportunity of ages." Richard Perle, one of the founders of the PNAC and authors of the documents, describes America's "war on terror" as "total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq...this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war...our children will sing great songs about us years from now." The documents go on to state, "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." (Project for the New American Century, John Pilger)
- December 12: Former Bush domestic policy advisor John DiIulio slams the Bush administration and particularly political advisor Karl Rove for never setting aside politics for the broader good of the country. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." Rove is a political disciple of Lee Atwater, who made it a point to reread Machiavelli's The Prince every year. Rove is also a great fan of Machiavelli, and has used one of Machiavelli's precepts that "perception is reality" as the centerpiece for both Bush's campaign strategy and for his administration in general. "There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues," DiIulio continues. "There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff, Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue."
- Others echo DiIulio's remarks. A current senior White House official says, "Many of us feel it's our duty -— our obligation as Americans -— to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It's just kids on Big Wheels, who talk politics and know nothing. It's depressing. DPC [Domestic Policy Council] meetings are a farce." Another senior White House official concurs: "There has been no domestic policy" in the Bush White House, "not even a pretense of it. ...Don't you understand? ...We got into the White House and forfeited the game. You're supposed to stand for something...to generate sound ideas, support them with real evidence, and present them to Congress and the people. We didn't do any of that. We just danced this way and that on minute political calculations and whatever was needed for a few paragraphs of a speech." Another administration official tells interviewer Ron Suskind, "You have to understand, this administration is further to the right than much of the public understands. The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best government can do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If that's your position, why bother to understand what programs actually do?"
- DiIulio continues, "Besides the tax cut...the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism." DiIulio on Rove: "Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office." Even Bush chief of staff Andrew Card acknowledged Rove's unprecedented power in a July 2002 interview with Esquire, when he commented on the shift of power caused by the departure of presidential aide Karen Hughes: "I'll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl... But it won't be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary."
- DiIulio, a conservative Christian who left his post as the head of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives almost a year before, is later browbeaten and intimidated by the White House into retracting most of his statements. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says, after his own firing in December 2002, that DiIulio was handled shamefully by the administration; Suskind describes O'Neill as enraged over the entire fiasco. "You know, I thought a lot about this guy, about why he would do something as absurd as say that a few thousand words of 'my deep thoughts' are baseless and groundless, and I thought about how it must look from inside his shoes. He's a young man, that's one thing. And these people are nasty, and they have a very long memory. And I guess he had to make a calculation of, you know, what it's worth to be in a fifty-year battle with this gang. What's the price of that? Personally and professionally, can he afford that?" O'Neill, who has decided to allow Suskind to write a hard-hitting, truth-telling biography of his tenure in Bush's cabinet, adds, "But here's the difference. I'm an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me." (Esquire, Kevin Phillips, Paul Waldman, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Ron Suskind)
- December 12: Donald Rumsfeld asserts, "It is clear that the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction. The issue is not whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction." (David Corn)
- December 13: In an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, Bush tells the reporter that he is the one to provide comfort to the bereaved families of soldiers who die in Iraq: "And there's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids on the death of their loved ones. Others hug, but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug, and that's me, and I know what it's like." Like so many of Bush's pronouncements of this kind, this is fallacious from beginning to end. Bush has yet to visit a single military funeral (neither has Cheney). Neither does he "know what it's like," having never spent a minute in a war zone, nor has he ever lost a close family member to a war. He has spent countless hours at Republican fundraisers, and sometimes has participated in staged photo-ops with carefully selected family members who have lost loved ones in Iraq. He also sends form-letter condolences, signed by a machine. (ABC News/Mark Crispin Miller)
- December 14: London's conservative Economist business journal writes, "It is hard to imagine that America would look kindly on a foreign government that demanded the right to hold some of its own citizens in prison, incommunicado, denying them access to legal assistance for as long as it thought necessary, without ever charging them with a crime. Nevertheless, that is the position that George Bush's administration has tried to defend in the courts with regard to American citizens whom it has deemed to be 'enemy combatants.'" (Economist/Village Voice)
- December 17: The CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) sends a report to the NSC challenging Iraq's assertions that it has no nuclear weapons program. The report bases its accusations on two debunked claims, one centering around the notorious aluminum tubes, and on the reports of Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger. Undersecretary of State John Bolton orders a posting on State's Web site highlighting WINPAC's claims, even though it is his department that has largely been responsible for debunking both claims. Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "Tenet, McLaughlin, and other senior CIA officials had already dismissed the Niger allegation, yet WINPAC analysts -- who were eager to show that Iraq was lying and determined to prove the nuclear case -- couldn't let go and were treating the charge as established fact. It was one more sign of severe dysfunction at the CIA."
- State Department analyst Simon Dodge, who initially cast doubt on the Niger documents, sends an annoyed e-mail to an Energy Department analyst complaining that the authors of the WINPAC paper failed to point out to the NSC that State had dissented on both the aluminum tubes and the Niger claims. The Energy analyst writes back, "It is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq's arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However when individuals attempt to convert these 'strong statements' into the 'knock-out' punch, the administration will ultimately look foolish -- i.e. the tubes and Niger." Though Dodge sends further e-mails to intelligence community analysts calling the Niger deal a "hoax" and calling some of the other documents "unbelievable," WINPAC refuses to back off. One WINPAC analyst later testifies to Congress that there was nothing "jumping out at us that the documents were forgeries." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- December 18: The Pacifica news show Democracy Now airs a report on the portions of Iraq's report on its weapons programs to the UN that had been redacted by the United States. The US claimed the material had been censored to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists, but the material instead proved the corporate and government complicity in arming Iraq -- not a subject of discussion the Bush administration wants in the prelude to invasion being orchestrated. The documents prove that at least 24 US corporations helped Iraq build its pre-Gulf War weapons programs and rockets, including Bechtel, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Computer Systems, Rockwell, Sperry, Tektronix, and Unisys. The report also shows that the US Department of Energy provided critical nonfissile parts for Baghdad's burgeoning nuclear program in the 1980s, and that the Reagan and Bush I administrations authorized secret sales of chemical and biological warfare agents to Saddam Hussein, including anthrax and bubonic plague. Predictably, the US media ignores this potential bombshell. German reporter Andreas Zumach, who published the original news article in Germany's Die Tageszeitung newspaper, later says, "This knowledge about our responsibility or co-responsibility for the problem now called Saddam Hussein has been suppressed, has been wiped out of our memory. The big papers [in the United States] were not interested at all. The European papers, the British, the Scandinavian, the French papers, the Italian, Japanese, Brazilian -- they were all on the telephone with me asking for information and doing huge stories. There was silence on this side of the Atlantic." (Amy and David Goodman)
- December 18: Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld gives a positive spin to the situation in Afghanistan on CNN's Larry King Live: "They have elected a government.... The Taliban are gone. The al-Qaeda are gone. The country is not a perfectly stable place, and it needs a great deal of reconstruction funds. ...There are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people who are trying to kill people in New York or San Francisco. So it's not going to be a perfectly tidy place. ...I'm hopeful. I'm encouraged." As of mid-2005, the Taliban is still a force to be reckoned with in most parts of Afghanistan outside the capital city of Kabul, which is the only area under the control of the "official" Afghan government of Hamid Karzai. Many thousands of American troops still patrol the mountains and highlands, hunting for Taliban and al-Qaeda forces; many are still dying in those hills and mountains, though the mainstream US media, as per the wishes of the Pentagon, are virtually ignoring the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan. Heroin production is soaring.
- In March 2004, a UN Development Program warning is made public, asserting that Afghanistan is once again becoming a "terrorist breeding ground." That same month, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's new book Against All Odds depicts the "victory" in Afghanistan as far less decisive than portrayed by the Bush administration: while the war began on October 7, 2001, it took seven weeks for the US to "insert a ground force unit to take and hold a former al-Qaeda and Taliban facility.... The late-November operation did not include any effort by US forces to seal the border with Pakistan, snatch the al-Qaeda leadership, or cut off the al-Qaeda escape." In April 2004, Clarke will tell journalist Seymour Hersh that the administration always viewed the Afghan operation as a military and political backwater -- a detour along the road to Iraq, the war that truly mattered to Bush and his advisors. Clarke's repeated warnings that "you can't win the war in Afghanistan with such a small effort" were ignored. "There were more cops in New York City than soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. We had to have a security presence coupled with a development program in every region and stay there for several months." Needless to say, none of this will be done. Instead, Clarke will give three reasons for the administration's choice of handling Afghanistan. First, they didn't want to repeat the mistakes made there by the USSR. Second, they were saving forces for Iraq. Third, Afghanistan would serve as a laboratory for Rumsfeld's theories about the ability of small forces coupled with air power to win battles. The results? As Clarke says, "the US has succeeded in stabilizing only two or three cities. The president of Afghanistan is just the mayor of Kabul." Significant money to counter the Taliban's efforts to destabilize the Karzai regime will not begin to flow into Afghanistan until 2003, and then not nearly enough. Meanwhile, the Taliban will shift its focus away from simply destabilizing Karzai and towards attacking UN officials and aid workers, a tactic they will find highly effective. (Seymour Hersh)
"If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, compassionate conservatism is the policy hypocrisy uses to disguise economic vice." -- Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty
- December 18: The US declares Iraq in "material breach" of Resolution 1441, and says that it has proof Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. The US says that omissions in Iraq's report to the UN on its weapons programs prompted the declaration. A day later, in response to Iraq's declaration of disarmament, the US officially brands Saddam Hussein a liar, and cites as proof his refusal to account for the "African uranium" his country has obtained. As the US well knows, Iraq has no such African uranium. (Independent/CommonDreams, Frank Rich [PDF file])
- December 19: The first report from UNMOVIC chairman Hans Blix on the state of Iraq's weapons programs is definitely mixed. He refuses to say whether Iraq possesses WMDs until UNMOVIC has reviewed the latest documents from Iraq, and admits that those documents appear to be merely reworkings of the same ones submitted in 1996. Blix says Iraq has disclosed its development of the Al Samoud missile and a variant that exceeds the permissible range by a few dozen miles. He notes that Iraq pointed out this fact and has explained it developed the missile when it was disputing UNSCOM's definition of its obligations. Blix says the issue will now need to be considered. Blix also notes that several questions remain unanswered, particularly about the existence of 500 mustard gas shells and the production and weaponization of VX. Blix states that UNMOVIC documents contradict Iraq's account of its production and unilateral destruction of anthrax in 1988 and 1991, and Iraq's account may not be accurate. (UN/Iraqwatch/Electric Venom)
- DDecember 19: Senior officials at the CIA meet to discuss the credibility of the Iraqi defector known as Curveball, the only source for the allegations that Iraq has mobile biological weapons labs. (See earlier items for more information on Curveball.) A senior CIA official lays the groundwork for the meeting by raising the possibility in an e-mail that Curveball has been "embellishing a bit" to get money and residence from the German government. She notes that once Curveball received his asking price from the Germans, he had become more reticent, and German intelligence has serious doubts about his credibility. "We have been unable to vet him operationally, and know very little about him," she writes. The meeting itself is marred by dissension, with a WINPAC analyst stubbornly defending Curveball's credibility and noting that Curveball's information has been corroborated by an (equally unreliable) Iraqi defector from Ahmad Chalabi's INC. Director of Operations James Pavitt decides in the following days to leave the matter to WINPAC. "We were reading the reports about him and scratching our heads and saying, 'What's going on?' later recalls an officer at the CIA's Joint Task Force on Iraq. "We were following this with great interest. But thankfully it was not our case. We knew he was a drunk. We knew this was beyond screwed up. But it had taken a life of its own, and it wouldn't go away. We watched it like a train wreck -- with detached fascination." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- December 19: During a Christmas visit to the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, DC, Bush says eloquently, "Those who are poor, those who suffer, those who have lost hope are not strangers in our midst; they're our fellow citizens. And in this time of joy, in the time of blessing, we've got to remember that." His remembrance of those less fortunate is constituted by his proposals to cut off 36,000 seniors' meal assistance, to eliminate 50,000 slots in after-school programs for children, to cut child-care benefits for 33,000 children, and to terminate heating assistance for 532,000 families during the Christmas season. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- December 20: UN inspectors demand proof of US claims that Iraq is lying about possessing WMDs. UN inspections team leader Hans Blix says, "If the UK and the US are convinced and they say they have evidence, then one would expect they would be able to tell us where is this stuff." (Independent/Common Dreams)
- December 21: Bush approves the first deployment of troops to the Gulf region. A delegation from the CIA goes to the White House to make its case for Iraqi WMDs; after Bush is underwhelmed by the hedging, contradictory evidence, he complains to CIA director George Tenet, "Nice try, but this isn't going to sell Joe Public. This is the best we've got?" Tenet replies, "It's a slam dunk case!" (FactMonster, Mother Jones)
- December 21: Over 1,500 angry Muslim-Americans attend a meeting of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee in Long Beach, California, in reaction to recent roundups of innocent Muslim-Americans in Los Angeles and other areas. (Between November 2002 and April 2003, all male non-citizens over the age of 16 from 25 different countries will be required to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. By the time the Department of Homeland Security, who will inherit the program from the INS, discontinues the program in January 2004, over 14,000 will be forcibly deported; only 11 of those were noted as having "suspected terrorist ties.") Days before, authorities in Los Angeles conduct a roundup of foreign males under the guise of immigration registration; so many are arrested that the police run out of plastic handcuffs. Hundreds are detained for a variety of immigration violations; many of those are shipped secretly to detention centers in four different states, most without being able to get word to their terrified families. Justice Department lawyer Joseph Zogby tells the agitated families at the MPAC meeting that they should report such detentions, along with hate crimes and other related problems; the audience points out that such reports are handed over to the INS, which can and often will begin investigations of the persons making the reports. Connie Rice, sister of national security director Condoleezza Rice and an impassioned civil rights attorney, addresses the meeting, visibly angered by the arrests that had taken place. Muslim-American attorney Banafsheh Akhlagi speaks of her difficulties representing those who have been rounded up, noting that her clients had been shuttled around the country and denied legal counsel. "What happened to the Sixth Amendment?" she asks. "What happened to due counsel?" The problem is not confined to California. The residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood nicknamed "Little Pakistan" are equally terrorized. Of the 120,000 residents, over 15,000 have fled the country for Canada, Europe, or Pakistan. Uncounted residents have been secretly detained or deported in secret airlifts. Residents coming home often find a business card from an FBI or INS agent in their doors with instructions to call in; as Amy Goodman writes, "By now every Pakistani in Brooklyn knows someone who has made that call to a federal agent -- and then vanished." It will not be until June 2003 that the Justice Department will acknowledge that illegal abuses have taken place; immigrants who are detained for minor violations have routinely been subjected to beatings, shacklings, and tortuous living conditions. Their families are often lied to about their whereabouts. Court orders for their release are often ignored. "They were treated as terrorists, even though they were not," says the Center for Constitutional Rights' Michael Ratner. (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
- December 23: Senator Bill Frist is named the Senate majority leader, succeeding the disgraced Trent Lott, who in early December made some infelicitous statements regarding his wish that the "good old days" of racial repression represented by Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats were still here. (Lott, in toasting his colleague, said, "We voted for Strom Thurmond in 1948. We're proud of it. And if he had won, we wouldn't have a lot of these problems we've been having ever since.") Lott did not receive the support of the Bush administration, which is usually quick to back its colleagues; historian Kevin Phillips, among others, believes that Lott was left to twist in the wind by a deliberate decision from Bush officials as political payback. (Bush tells an audience of black clergy in Philadelphia, "Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country. He has apologized and rightly so.")
- Phillips writes, "One [dynastic] sidebar to the rise of George W. Bush has been the steady elimination of old political foes -- Jim Hightower and Ann Richards in Texas; Texas Republican state chairman Tom Pauken; House Speaker Newt Gingrich (George W. Bush helped force him out in 1998, in part as payment over Gingrich's 1990 embarrassment of Bush senior over taxes); Albert Gore, one of the two 1992 regicides; and Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, a Reagan rather than Bush factionalist. Lott's throat was quickly cut in 2002 when his foolish remark about Strom Thurmond and segregation handed the White House a sharp knife. Indeed, the Machiavellian Bush role in the elimination of Speaker Gingrich and Senate leader Lott -- both replaced with easygoing, collaborative successors -- underscored yet another frequent restoration policy: to rebuild executive (royal) prerogative and influence at the expense of the legislative branch." Other pundits believe that Frist fits more closely with the Bush campaign's continuing attempt to reach out to minority and moderate voters than the unrepentantly segregationist Lott. Predictably, conservative pundits like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter line up to defend Lott's remarks, with Coulter accusing liberals of being more indignant about Lott's remarks than over the 9/11 attacks. Lott will later claim that he was "trapped" by enemies of "Christian conservative[s]." Joe Conason says that Lott was a victim of the Republican Party's own version of "political correctness:" "The conservatives dumped Lott to prove their racial sensitivity, though nearly all of them insisted that he wasn't really a racist at all." Democratic strategist and Bush friend Robert Strauss says of Frist, "They've got a skilled surgeon coming in to run the Senate, and they used a surgeon's skill to remove Lott without leaving any fingerprints."
- Interestingly enough, during the Lott brouhaha, the GOP tries to defuse the racial controversy by touting an organization called the African-American Republican Leadership Council, an organization that seeks to dispel the belief that "liberal [D]emocrat[s have a] stranglehold over Black America." The AARLC has a fifteen-person advisory board, thirteen of whom are white Republican party mavens such as Grover Norquist, Gary Bauer, Paul Weyrich, and Sean Hannity. The honorary chairman is listed as being Edward Brooke, the venerable former GOP senator from Massachusetts. When contacted, Brooke, an African-American, says he has never heard of the group and has no idea why his name is on the Web site (accessible at AARLC.org and now headed by black GOP activist Alex-St. James; Hannity, Bauer, Norquist, and Weyrich are still on the advisory panel). When asked why more blacks aren't on the AARCL's advisory board, political spokesperson Kevin Martin replies, "I'd like there to be more, but let's be honest, right now the Republican Party and African-Americans have a large rift." Hard to understand how creating a fake advocacy organization is going to heal that rift. Currently, the only two black Republicans to permanently appear on the home page's opening photo display are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, whose pictures appear after pics of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. (Disinfopedia, Kevin Phillips, Joe Conason, Paul Waldman, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Al Franken)
- December 24: Niger's prime minister publicly declares that Iraq has neither purchased nor inquired about purchasing uranium from his country since he took office in 2000. The prime minister's declaration is widely ignored. (Frank Rich [PDF file])
- December 25: Pope John Paul II uses his Christmas Day address to ask that the world do everything in its power to avoid a war in the Middle East. (CNN)
- December 26: UN weapons inspectors announce that they have yet to find any proscribed weapons in Iraq. (BBC)
- December 26-29: The Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church hold a multi-day event to celebrate "God and World Peace." A number of politicians, including Republican Senator Richard Luger and Democratic Representative Danny Davis, attend, but perhaps the most notable attendee is James Towey, director of the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Towey makes a respectful opening address to the audience, and is followed by Moon, who calls for all religions to come together in support of the Bush plan for faith-based initiatives. Moon, who believes he is the modern Messiah sent to earth to fulfill the promise of Jesus Christ, holds as his ultimate goal a world theocracy under his divine leadership. At first glance Moon and the Bush Republicans seem a strange pairing, and they are, but the conference is just one example of the deep ties and alliances formed between Moon and the conservative arm of the Republican party. The Unification Church has already succeeded in receiving $475,280 in funds from the Department of Health and Human Services to fund Free Teens USA, a teen organization in urban New Jersey. Free Teens USA claims to have no ties to the Unification Church, but documents obtained by Salon indicate that the director, the CFO, and many board members are present or former high-ranking officials in the Unification Church. (These officials failed to mention their affiliation in the grant applications.)
- George H.W. Bush received $1 million from the church towards the building of his presidential library, and he receives huge, and unreported, amounts regularly for speaking to various church-related organizations and groups. Then-incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft attended Moon's Inaugural Prayer Luncheon for Unity and Renewal just before George W. Bush took office in January 2001. Josette Shiner, who rose up through the Moon organization first as a Washington Times reporter and Moon disciple and later as editor of that newspaper, was named deputy trade representative in early 2001. (Shiner claims to have left the church; her press secretary refuses to discuss the matter.) Another Bush appointee, David Caprara, is a top official for Moon in Washington DC, and has been named to head up AmeriCorps VISTA. Caprara, a former aide to Republican Jack Kemp, had been director of Moon's American Family Coalition and was one of the Unification Church's top political operatives. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, one of the most vocal of Bush's supporters, accepted $3.5 million from one of the Unification Church's many affiliates to bail out his own floundering Liberty University. George H.W. Bush has claimed to be " philosophically close" to Moon, and has said through a spokesperson that " The Unification Church is also attempting to build its own right-wing media empire; currently it owns news service UPI, the South American newspaper Tiempos del Mundo, and the Washington Times, which prints full-page ads that feature Jesus Christ hailing Sun Myung Moon as the new messiah, with Peter, Paul, Martin Luther, St. Augustine, Muhammed, Karl Marx, Josef Stalin, and Deng Xiao Ping (among others) chiming in with enthusiastic endorsements of the self-proclaimed "God of all people." (Salon, USA Survival)
- December 27: Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan sign a deal to build the Caspian Sea oil pipeline. (BBC/Killtown)
- December 30: Islamist fighters with ties to al-Qaeda attack the Jiblah Hospital in southern Yemen, killing three American medical workers. The hospital has been operated for 35 years by Southern Baptist missionaries; Yemeni officials later say the hospital was attacked because it was converting Muslims to Christianity. (Michael Scheuer)
- December 31: Bush tells a reporter, "You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you." (Mother Jones)
- Late December: Halliburton Oil agrees to pay the US government $2 million in criminal fines for defrauding the government while Cheney was CEO. (CCR)
Late 2002
- Late 2002: Al-Qaeda spokesman Abu-Ubayd al-Qurashi writes an essay for the Web site Al-Ansar titled "A Lesson in War" where he describes al-Qaeda's intention to follow Clausewitz's teachings that the best place to strike its enemy is at its so-called "center of gravity." According to al-Qurashi, in studying the Vietnam War, al-Qaeda strategists determined that then, the American "center of gravity" was the popular dissatisfaction with the war and Americans' dislike of losing a large amount of soldiers and military personnel in such a questionable war. The strategists have determined that now, largely because of the sycophancy of the American media (explained with their own anti-Semitic twist), the current "center of gravity" lies not in the people, but in the American economy. Al-Qurashi writes, "A conviction has formed among the mujahedeen that American public opinion is not the center of gravity in America. The Zionist lobbies, and with them the security agencies, have long been able to bridle all the media that control the formation of public opinion in America. This time it is clearly apparent that the American economy is the American center of gravity. This is what Shaykh Usama Bin Laden has said quite explicitly. Supporting this penetrating strategic view is that the Disunited States of America are a mixture of nationalities, ethnic groups, and races united only by the 'American Dream,' or, to put it more correctly, worship of the dollar, which they openly call 'the Almighty Dollar.' May God be exalted greatly above what they say! Furthermore, the entire American war effort is based on pumping enormous wealth at all times, money being, as has been said, the sinew of war."
- CIA analyst Michael Scheuer writes, "Leaving aside jargon about Zionists and conspiracies, al-Qurashi's depiction of al-Qaeda's intent seems to mesh with reality. The 11 September attacks, of course, devastated the US economy; it is only now, in early 2004, recovering. But beyond the immediate impact lie massive expenditures -- at all levels of American government -- that will add permanently to the size and cost of government. In addition to the cost of hiring thousands of federal employees for homeland security purposes; acquiring buildings, equipment, and training to make them effective; and requiring proportionate upgrading at state, municipal, and local levels; there lie what must be substantial damounts of unpredictable expenditures for overtime wages -- in government and business alike -- whenever Washington raises the threat level, or when high levels of security are provided at public places or functions heretofore not seen as serious security risks. Likewise, al-Qaeda is at the core of massive increases in defense spending, costs that are likely to accelerate as US officials find the military is not organized, manned, trained, or equipped to fight the kind of wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, economic planning by government and business must be experiencing significant difficulty in projecting expenditures, given threats of a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attack in the United States; the enormous monetary, materiel, and manpower costs of running several worsening wars; the steady diet of shocks thrown into business by transport and tourist sectors -- by such events as the 'emergency' cancellation of flights from Western Europe to the United States in late 2003 and early 2004. Beyond the sound of bombs, then, al-Qaeda's attack has continued since 11 September on its notion of the US 'center of gravity.' Without a second 11 September-like attack, al-Qaeda has stimulated immense unanticipated spending, much of which will become fixed in budgets at all levels of government. 'Aborting the American economy is not an unattainable dream,' al-Qurashi wrote in Al-Ansar. Perhaps he is correct." (Michael Scheuer)
- At the end of 2002, the number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1.7 million, to 34.6 million. Median household income fell by $900, to $42,200. The proportion of the national household income going to the top 5% of the population reached an all-time peak, while the proportion going to the bottom 60% dropped to an all-time low. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
"I'm the commander. See, I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." -- Bush to Bob Woodward, in Bush at War, published November 2002
"Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality." -- Garrison Keillor, quoted in Buzzflash
