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
December 2003
Week Four
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- December 22: Russian president Vladimir Putin tells an Iraqi delegation that Russia is ready to write off more than half of the $8 billion that Baghdad owes Moscow, its largest creditor.
Iraq war and occupation
At a Kremlin meeting, Putin adds that Russian companies are ready to invest up to $4 billion in Iraq as Russia looks to revive oil and other contracts ruptured or left unimplemented in the last years of Saddam Hussein's regime. "We have always developed ties with your nation," Putin says. "We strongly hope that Russia will have good relations with the new leadership of Iraq." Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the current president of the American-backed Iraqi Governing Council, says, "We received a generous promise to write off the debt, or at least a part of it." In return, "we will be open to all Russian companies." "Russia said it is willing to consider the write-off of the rest of the debt if it received beneficial treatment in terms of oil contracts," adds Jalal Talabani, a member of the Iraqi delegation. Russia's Lukoil consortium intends to begin negotiating for development of Iraq's West Qurna oil fields in the near future. (Guardian, New York Times) - December 22: A researcher sent to Iraq to perform chemical sampling says if weapons of mass destruction were the premise for the war, there shouldn't have been one.
Iraq war and occupation
Analytical chemist Daniel Fiorito, sent to Iraq as part of a group of UN weapons inspectors, says, "We were going to verify the existence or nonexistence of certain chemicals to lift sanctions off the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people are just like us. They have families and concerns. They had a war (with Iran), then sanctions. They didn't need another war." During his 10-week stay, Fiorito helped set up a chemical lab, analyzed suspect material and looked for evidence of a chemical weapons program. Although he can't discuss some aspects of his responsibilities, he questions why the United States rushed to war. "Knowing what I experienced, there was no indication we needed to go in there if the premise was weapons of mass destruction," he says. He left Baghdad in February 2003 because it was obvious a conflict would break out. He said it was only a matter of time before the rest of the United Nations team would evacuate. "I went over there trying to prevent a war," he says. "Looking back now, I realize how laughable that was." (Houston Chronicle) - December 22: After shutting down the Senate Intelligence Committee for over six weeks, GOP senators say that they may be ready to let the committee resume its functions.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and committee chairman Pat Roberts shut the committee down on November 7 after someone leaked a Democratic memo to Fox News. The memo advocated a stronger policy towards the committee's ongoing investigation into prewar intelligence failures, and accused Roberts of running a whitewash that was intended to throw all the blame onto the US intelligence community and to exonerate the White House and the Pentagon. "I think we will have, hopefully, some public hearings by February," says Roberts. "We will get those questions out." Pressure to restart the investigation has mounted since last week's television interview where Bush, asked to clarify whether he had hard facts about Iraqi weapons or just feared Baghdad may acquire them, replied: "So what's the difference?" Democratic senator Carl Levin called the remark "a stunning revelation" of Bush's "thinking and of his decision to go to war." (AFP/Google Groups) - December 22: Writer Paul Stenbjorn reminds us that the Bush administration has chosen to forge new and friendly relations with Libya, on the single condition that Libya dismantle its weapons programs; nothing has been said about Libya's "egregiously foul" human rights record.
Bush's foreign policies
He says, "Most Libya observers have long realized that it poses a scant threat militarily but is a noxious den of human rights abuses and terrorist accommodation." He then reminds us, "Oh, and yes, it possesses massive amounts of oil and its Mediterranean Sea port is much more hospitable to US producers than those in the Persian Gulf." In January 2003, Libya was nominated to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights; US Ambassador to Italy, Kevin Moley (also the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva), objected, saying a country with Libya's "horrible human rights record" is "not fit" to occupy a position of moral authority within the UN system. Furthermore, the US State Department, despite neoconservative attempts to normalize Libyan relations, still classifies Libya as a state sponsor of terrorism. In fact, it is widely believed that Ghadafi has been a financial benefactor of al-Qaeda. - The Council on Foreign Relations has documented Libya's longstanding association with terrorist groups, stating that Libya "has provided training, weapons, funding, safe haven, or other support to several Palestinian terrorist organizations and to the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, and Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front." It goes on to say, "In 1999, Libya helped negotiate the release of a group of international hostages held by the Abu Sayyaf Group, a Philippine terrorist group with ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda [sic] network. Libya said it was being helpful, but the State Department warned that letting Abu Sayyaf receive ransom for hostages 'served only to encourage further terrorism.'" It is apparent that Libya's human rights record is not a concern for the Bush administration, but Libya's oil is; Libya owns almost 30 billion barrels in proven reserves. The US has not produced oil in Libya since 1986. However, in 1999, a consortium of US oil companies returned to survey their former oil assets. A former president of the state owned National Oil Corporation stated that were the US to return to Libya they could continue to operate in their former fields. According to the US Department of Energy, "Libya would like foreign company help to increase the country's oil production capacity from 1.4 million bbl/d [barrels per day] at present to 2 million bbl/d over the next five years, at a cost of perhaps $6 billion." The DOE also confirms that extraction of oil in Libya is relatively simple (extraction costs are as low as "$1 per barrel at some fields." The DOE describes Libya as "a highly attractive oil province due to its low cost of oil recovery, its proximity to European markets, and its well-developed infrastructure." The term "province" is noteworthy. It becomes obvious why the Bush administration is suddenly cuddling with Gaddafi. (Republicons)
- December 22: Democratic candidate John Kerry is asked,
2004 presidential elections
"True or False: A solution to the Iraq problem, particularly the need to bring international cooperation into the conflict, and into the repair of that country, will never be found as long as Bush is in the White House." Kerry replies, "True. The solutions are very specific and very achievable, but depends on the United States not acting arrogantly, not acting unilaterally, and being willing to share power, authority and responsibility. If you are willing to transfer that to the United Nations, or to a coalition working under an umbrella -– it doesn't have to be directly UN, but has to be approved by the UN -– so that you are giving real shared authority over reconstruction and governmental transformation, and it's not a Paul Bremer/US decision-making process but a legitimate international accord as to how you empower the Iraqi people to decide their own future, then you absolutely have the ability to get additional help on the ground. I've talked to the ambassadors and the other people involved. I know Kofi Annan and the UN are prepared to be involved. But you have to invite them and share with them appropriately, and this administration has refused to do that." In defense of his controversial vote to support military action in Iraq, Kerry says, "Put it this way. Given the circumstances we were in at the time, the decision was appropriate, but in retrospect I will never trust the man [George W. Bush] again. That's why I am running against him. He deserves to be replaced with someone who is trustworthy." (Truthout) - December 22: Author Nat Parry notes that, since the capture of Saddam Hussein has neutralized the possibility of his riding a return to power on the backs of the Iraqi resistance,
Iraq war and occupation
the US is now in the position of outsiders battling a nationalist uprising, casting serious doubt on the Bush administration's stated goal of bringing democracy to Iraq. But plenty of evidence already points to the administration's real goal: to install a government in Iraq that is friendly, and manipulable, by the US. Many Bush officials, including Bush himself, have compared the Iraqi occupation to the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe after World War II. Security advisor Condoleezza Rice, an African-American, goes farther, comparing the occupation to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s: African-Americans "must never, ever indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom, they're culturally just not ready for freedom or they just aren't ready for freedom's responsibilities." Rice continues, "We've heard that argument before, and we, more than any, as a people, should be ready to reject it. The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East." It's quite a leap from Birmingham to Baghdad, and from a group of citizens struggling against the oppression of its own government and its fellow citizens to a citizenry struggling against an outside force intent on imposing its will on the populace, but Rice seems able to bridge that gap. - Contrary to his own tough words, Bush is using "a combination of gentle nudging and modest funding to achieve its ambitious goals," says the Washington Post. (By and large, the US media has wholeheartedly swallowed the Bush administration's rationale for occupying Iraq.) Parry writes: "Yet, even in attacking Iraq in the name of 'democracy,' Bush has based many of the US military operations in Persian Gulf sheikhdoms with few democratic freedoms. He also has enlisted allies in the so-called 'war on terror' who aggressively repress their own people. Uzbekistan's authoritarian government, for instance, commits human rights abuses on par with Saddam Hussein's former government, but Uzbekistan hosts a US military base in geo-strategically important Central Asia. So the Bush administration ignores the lack of democracy and even gives substantial military aid to the repressive government. Still, the U.S. news media rarely acknowledges the possibility that 'promoting democracy' may simply be Bush's latest rationalization, now that most other excuses for the war have collapsed, including the imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's alleged al Qaeda connection. Virtually never in the mainstream press do journalists acknowledge the possibility that Bush, the first popular vote loser in more than a century to claim the White House, is not only disinterested in advancing any meaningful concept of democracy but is rolling back the principles of open debate and popular rule, both in the United States and across the globe. Never do Washington journalists ask questions like, 'If Bush is so committed to democracy in Iraq, why did he stop the counting of votes in Florida?' Or 'why did Bush pollute the pre-war debate in the United States with emotional fear tactics that relied on false intelligence?' Or 'why – if Bush so cherishes democratic debate – didn't he rein in his supporters who repeatedly challenged the patriotism of Americans who questioned the factual basis of Bush's war on Iraq?' Without critical and open debate, words like 'democracy' and 'freedom' are left to those in power to define and apply selectively. The words, much like 'terrorism' and 'security,' can be rendered essentially meaningless."
- Much of the world considers the US actions in Iraq the latest in a long line of overtly colonialist actions taken against other countries, from the Mossadaq overthrow of 1953 in Iran, to the 1959 Ba'athist coup in Iraq, both supported and facilitated by the CIA. Hussein and the Ba'athists have ruled Iraq with an iron fist for 44 years; only since 1991, when Hussein invaded Kuwait, has Iraq's totalitarian regime concerned the US government. In 1992, when George H.W. Bush was under criticism for not "finishing the job," Colin Powell, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered this defense: "Saddam Hussein is a terrible person...but there is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting in the wings to hold popular elections. You're going to get -– guess what -– probably another Saddam Hussein." Rather than a flowering of democracy, Powell foresaw only a change of faces. "It will take a little while for them to paint the pictures all over the walls again, but there should be no illusions about the nature of that country or its society," said Powell, who is now secretary of state of the current Bush administration.
- That administration's neoconservative policymakers claim to have seen the error of those earlier ways. They insist they are now so committed to democracy across the globe that they have become what some have called "democratic imperialists," bringing freedom to the world at the barrel of a gun. It is interesting to look at Uzbekistan, a country every bit as authoritarian as Hussein's Iraq, and the administration's cozy relationship with that government, or the equally repressive Pakistan and its relations with the US. Apparently these countries' willingness to provide the US with military bases means more than the installation of democracy. The same applies to the repressive governments in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who offer the US favorable business deals. And the Bush family itself has long done business with many repressive states, including the communist government of China, where George W. Bush's brother, Neil Bush, recently disclosed a lucrative business arrangement with Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Worse, the government being built in Iraq looks much the same as other occupational governments, where a few hand-picked native officials represent the occupation's interests. A large grassroots movement has arisen in Iraq, calling for the quick end to the occupation and a rapid turnover to an elected Iraqi leadership. So far, these calls have been ignored. Early plans for Iraqi elections devised by the first US administrator, Jay Garner, were scrapped by his replacement, Paul Bremer, who preferred to appoint a number of Iraqi mayors and administrators instead. "Elections that are held too early can be destructive," Bremer said in June, after the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority canceled plans for the local elections. Bremer promised that as soon as a constitution was written and a national census taken, elections would follow.
- But census officials have devised a comprehensive plan to tally the country's population by summer 2004 and prepare a voter roll that would permit national elections in September. US officials rejected that idea in favor of an approach that would give the US more influence over the outcome. Parry writes, "While many Iraqis want direct national elections, the Bush administration prefers caucus-style indirect elections, in which representatives emerging from the caucuses then select Iraq's leaders. One effect of this two-stage process would be to avoid having a national leader arise who could claim a clear popular mandate and thus have international standing to contest continued US influence over the government and the economy." Former Bremer advisor Noah Feldman explains the US position succinctly: "simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people get elected," he says. "so the kind of electoral system Bush has in mind for Iraq basically allows the U.S. to maintain enough control over the process to ensure whatever results Bush desires, such as permitting an indefinite deployment of U.S. troops inside Iraq,"
- Parry writes. "Even if there were a 'Jeffersonian democrat waiting in the wings,' someone with widespread support among the Iraqi people and eager for full sovereignty for Iraq, he probably wouldn't stand a chance in this 'managed democracy.' Bush's approach to Iraqi 'democracy' recently came to a head in the Iraqi city of Hilla. There, Iraqi protesters converged on the provincial governor's office with a simple demand: that the hand-picked local governor resign. After three days and nights of protests, the governor, Iskander Jawad Witwit, did just that. However, the occupation authority simply appointed a new governor in his place, who also was unacceptable to the protesters. ...As one Hilla resident said, 'President George Bush promised us democracy. How can you have democracy without elections?'"
- Other issues are equally pertinent. Iraqi citizens enjoy few of the freedoms taken for granted by most Americans, including a free press, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Iraqi protesters are often shot dead by US soldiers, as with one incident in Falluja, where protests against the conversion of a local school into a US military headquarters resulted in 13 dead protesters. Even though the military claimed that the soldiers fired in self-defense, all evidence shows that the protest was a peaceful, unarmed one. US forces routinely raid homes; soldiers often place bags over the heads of detainees who are being rousted on the flimsiest of pretexts, handcuffed, and forced to kneel on the ground for hours. And the CPA has implemented stringent guidelines on the Iraqi press, prohibiting any reporting that "will foment social unrest or hostility towards American troops." Domestic and international journalist groups are highly critical of the US management of the Iraqi press. Iraqis are not permitted to make statements that are critical of the occupation. On November 11, American troops arrested a man and placed masking tape over his mouth after he had criticized the occupation. When asked why they had arrested the man, the commanding officer replied, "This man has been detained for making anti-coalition statements." And more, not less, repression seems to be in Iraq's near future. Entire towns are being wrapped in barbed wire. Family members of at-large suspects are being taken hostage by US forces and held until the suspect turns himself in, which violates the Geneva Conventions. Not that international law has been upheld by the Bush administration. The detention of suspected "enemy combatants" in Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is in direct violation of the Third Geneva Convention. Bush has literally mocked the entire concept of international law when asked about it. (Consortium News)
France, Germany, and Russia agree to forgive Iraqi debt in return for oil rights
- December 23: Many observers were surprised that countries like Russia and France agreed to consider reducing or forgiving the debt they are owed by Iraq,
Iraq war and occupation
even after the US refused to allow them to bid on contracts for rebuilding that country. It turns out that the explanation is quite simple: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who issued the restrictions, may be acting as the US's "enforcer" in the situation. As the Guardian's Naomi Klein reports, "[h]e showed up with a big stick to point out 'the threat of economic exclusion from Iraq's potential $500 billion reconstruction' just as Baker was about to speak softly." The US has consistently opposed efforts to forgive or reconstruct debt owed by numerous other countries, including Argentina, South Africa, Haiti, the Philippines, and Brazil. Klein observes, "so why is Bush so concerned that 'the future of the Iraqi people should not be mortgaged to the enormous burden of debt?' Because it is taking money from 'reconstruction,' which could go to Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon and Boeing. It has become popular to claim that the White House has been hijacked by neo-conservative ideologues in love with free-market dogma. I'm not convinced. If there's one thing the Wolfowitz/Baker dust-ups make clear, it's that the ideology of the Bush White House isn't neo-conservatism, it's old-fashioned greed. There is only one rule that appears to matter: if it helps our friends get even richer, do it." (Guardian)
Zinni predicts Iraq to become another Vietnam
- December 23: Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni fears that Iraq is becoming as big, and as tragic,
Iraq war and occupation
a mistake for the US as Vietnam became a generation before. Zinni, who three years ago was the head of the US Central Command in the Middle East, says bluntly, "Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy. The longer we stubbornly resist admitting the mistakes and not altering our approach, the harder it will be to pull this chestnut out of the fire." In 1998, Zinni warned, "I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn't done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now." "I don't think these questions have been thought through or answered." It was a warning for which Iraq hawks such as Paul Wolfowitz, then an academic and now the second highest official at the Pentagon, attacked him in print at the time. - Five years later, Zinni sees his predictions coming true. "since we've failed thus far to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he says, "I don't have confidence we will do it now. I believe the only way it will work now is for the Iraqis themselves to somehow take charge and turn things around. Our policy, strategy, tactics, et cetera, are still screwed up." In August 2002, Zinni, who describes himself as a former Bush supporter who is a moderate "kind of a Lugar-Hagel-Powell guy," became alarmed when he heard Vice President Cheney give a speech advocating an attack on Iraq, justified because of evidence that Zinni found slim at best. "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in US intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD: "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.'" Zinni worked in intelligence right up to the invasion. "I did consulting work for the [State Department], right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?'" Their response, he recalls, was, "silence." After hearing Cheney's speech, Zinni went away convinced that Bush was determined to wage war in Iraq no matter what the justifications, or lack thereof. He thought as he left the auditorium, "These guys don't understand what they are getting into." Six weeks later, at a Senate panel concerning Iraq, while listening to vague speculations about how to handle a post-war Iraq, Zinni was even more alarmed. "I was listening to the panel, and I realized, 'These guys don't have a clue.'"
- In 1999, Zinni devised a plan for the occupation of Iraq he called "Desert Crossing," which called for a nationwide civilian occupation authority, with offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. That plan contrasts sharply, he notes, with the reality of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US occupation power, which for months this year had almost no presence outside Baghdad, an absence that some Army generals say has increased their burden in Iraq. Listening to the administration officials testify that day, Zinni began to suspect that his plans had been disregarded. Concerned, he later called a general at Central Command's headquarters in Tampa and asked, "Are you guys looking at Desert Crossing?" The answer, he recalls, was, "What's that?" The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist neoconservative ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand. "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground." Now those "dilettantes" are in power, sacrificing the lives of American soldiers, and calling Zinni a traitor.
- Zinni, a decorated Vietnam vet, dismisses the epithets, but is afraid that Iraq is becoming more and more like Vietnam. "It feels the same. I hear the same things -- about [administration charges about] not telling the good news, about cooking up a rationale for getting into the war." He sees both conflicts as beginning with deception by the US government, drawing a parallel between how the Johnson administration handled the beginning of the Vietnam War and how the Bush administration touted the threat presented by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I think the American people were conned into this," he says. Referring to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Johnson administration claimed that US Navy ships had been subjected to an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The Gulf of Tonkin and the case for WMD and terrorism is synonymous in my mind." Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the 1960s that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands. And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies as the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president."
- He is especially irked that, as he sees it, no senior officials have taken responsibility for their incorrect assessment of the threat posed by Iraq. "What I don't understand is that the bill of goods the neocons sold him has been proven false, yet heads haven't rolled," he says. "Where is the accountability? I think some fairly senior people at the Pentagon ought to go." Who? "That's up to the president." "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he said at a talk to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers and others at a Crystal City hotel ballroom in September. "I ask you, is it happening again?" The speech, part of a forum sponsored by the US Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, received prolonged applause, with many officers standing. Zinni says that he hasn't received a single negative response from military people about the stance he has taken. "I was surprised by the number of uniformed guys, all ranks, who said, 'You're speaking for us. Keep on keeping on.'" (Washington Post)
Iraq becoming a haven for terrorism because of occupation
- December 23: Analysis proves that, far from slowing down terrorism, the actions of the US in Iraq have "thrown open Pandora's box," making the area a "paradise for international terrorists."
Iraq war and occupation
David Hirst's analysis for the British newspaper the Guardian begins by explaining the significance of the Iraq invasion: to the Arab world, the invasion was a historic event on the scale of the final breakup of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century before. "That led to the arbitrary carve-up of its former Arab provinces by the European colonial powers and, in 1948, to the loss of one of them, Palestine, to the Israeli settler-state," Hirst observes. The invasion struck the death blow to the concept of the "Arab system," which mandates that the separate parts of the Arab collective unite to oppose threats to its collective security and territorial integrity. "To the disgust and shame of the Arab peoples, it was not merely incapable of preventing the conquest and occupation of what, properly governed, would have been one of the most powerful and prosperous Arab lands, it was largely complicit in it. It simply stood and watched as the world's only superpower embarked on its hugely ambitious, neo-colonial enterprise: to make Iraq the fulcrum for reshaping the entire region and, with regime change and 'democratization,' cure it of those sicknesses -- political and social oppression, religious extremism, corruption, tribalism and economic stagnation -- that had turned it into the main threat to the existing world order. It did not formally envisage a full-scale redrawing of state frontiers, but it looked as though by an inexorable momentum that might come to pass. It was seen as a second Palestine, not so much because it was a foreign conquest of another Arab country, but because, via the Bush administration's neo-conservative hawks, it was at least as much Israeli in inspiration and purpose as it was American. The mighty blow struck in Baghdad would so weaken other Arab regimes that the Palestinians, more than ever bereft of Arab support, would submit to that full-scale Israeli subjugation and dispossession of all but a last pitiful fragment of their original homeland." - What goodwill the US did earn by the overthrow of Hussein, a despised tyrant within the Arab world as well as in the West, was quickly thrown away by the fumbling, repressive handling of Iraq after Hussein was overthrown. Militant Arabs from all over the world have joined the anti-American cause, some coming to Iraq to directly oppose the US occupation, others working outside the country. Arab extremists, including terror group al-Qaeda, have profited from the US actions: "By pretending that Iraq was crawling with al-Qaeda," writes columnist Maureen Dowd, "Bush officials created an Iraq crawling with al-Qaeda." And not just Iraq: since the invasion the terrorists have struck in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey, mostly at the expense of other Muslims. Israel's air raid on Syria announced to the entire Arab world that the US invasion of Iraq and Israel's efforts to subjugate the Palestinians were part and parcel of the same overarching goal: Western domination of the Arab world. Bush's clumsy, pro-Israeli "roadmap for peace" has disintegrated, replaced by a fresh wave of suicide bombings and Palestinian resistance. And the equally clumsy plan for allowing Iraq its own government -- one structured to be submissive to US demands -- shows Arabs everywhere that the US is not serious about peace and freedom in Iraq or anywhere else.
- Hirst concludes, "With this subterfuge, Mr Bush might just, as he apparently plans, manage to declare 'mission accomplished' on the eve of the presidential election. But it would be remarkable if such an essentially US-installed government, presiding over a hastily reconstructed army and police, was able for long to master the maelstrom of colliding passions and political interests which the removal of the tyranny has unleashed. An Iraq at loggerheads with itself, and a paradise for international terrorists, would spare none of the principal actors in this geopolitical drama. Not the US, confronted as it then would be with the classical colonial dilemma of whether to pull back or plunge yet further in. Not the Arab world, whose regimes in their people's eyes only differ from Saddam's in the degree of their degeneracy, nor Israel. The danger is what Arab commentators habitually call 'Lebanonisation' -- first of Iraq and then, by an inevitable contagion, the rest of the eastern Arab world. Hizbullah, that most successful of anti-Israeli insurgencies, grew out of a single failed and fratricidal state. What might an entire failed region throw up?" (Guardian)
Former Blair official confirms Britain knew about decision to invade Iraq in summer 2002
- December 23: Clare Short, the former international development secretary in Tony Blair's cabinet before she resigned on May 12, 2003 over the Iraqi war, gives an interview to Canada's Walrus magazine.
Iraq war and occupation
Short says she knew that Britain and the US would join forces to overrun Iraq as soon as June or July 2002, before the government's summer recess. "It was already in the press, surfacing more and more," she says. "I asked for a discussion in the Cabinet. The prime minister told me he didn't want it in the Cabinet, but that we'd have a personal discussion." Short was considering resigning even this early because of the duplicity of the so-called "peace process" which was actually a gearing-up for war. She remembers, "The prime minister kept giving assurances to me personally, to the Cabinet, to the parliamentary Labour party, to the country, that we were operating through the UN and that there would have to be a second resolution." - When asked if Short believes that Blair was sincere about wanting to operate through the UN, she replies, "I think he committed himself to go with America. He did it in either June or September. He made it clear that it was preferable to go through the UN, but I think he committed so strongly [to America] that he lost any leverage for Britain to say, 'We'll come with you if we do this right.' The people of Iraq were suffering terribly and the UN was being defied and ignored, its authority flouted. Personally, I was always willing to contemplate the possible use of force to back up the authority of the UN, if we exhausted all other means. I think the tragedy for Tony Blair and for our country is that he pre-committed us. We didn't have any leverage. We didn't actually have the courage to say to America, 'On certain conditions we're with you, but if not, not.' ...I think [Blair] was squeezed between the promise he had given to Bush and the promise he'd given to Britain: the second UN resolution. So they tried to get a second resolution, to tick the box of the promise of the second resolution. But they were just trying to get the UN to authorize the military action they had already agreed to take by this date. ...The big thing for us is that Blair absolutely fixed himself onto [French President Jacques] Chirac's threat of a veto, and kept saying Chirac would veto any second resolution. It's now clear to many people who have drawn the record to my attention that Chirac said, on television, in France, on the tenth of March, 'We must go with [UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix. Blix needs more time. But if Blix then comes to the Security Council and says he cannot achieve disarmament through inspection, then the Security Council would have to authorize action. But in my view, war would become inevitable.' So the suggestion that the French made action through the UN impossible is completely untrue. All that vilification of France was a smokescreen...."
- Of Blair and Hussein, she says, "I think [Blair] misled me personally, and the House of Commons, and the Cabinet. He's putting more and more emphasis now on what a vile regime it was, the mass graves. Most of the mass graves were the result of the uprising after 1991, but there's no dispute Saddam Hussein was a really evil dictator. The world should have acted more quickly and not left it for twelve years. But that doesn't excuse rushing to war or being dishonest with your country about going to war when you're putting the lives of your own citizens at risk and you're killing other innocent people and bringing about the kind of effect this has had on Iraq." Short says of the events leading up to her resignation, "It was clear we were going to war, and you can't criticize once you've got your troops on the ground and your soldiers' lives are at risk. I rang up the BBC and said Tony was being reckless. It was my last throw of the dice -- I was going out of the government. That was before we went to war. There's some suggestion that the House of Commons could have stopped Britain from joining in with a vote, but the Conservative Party was backing the government. It was never [a] winnable [vote]. The prime minister spent a lot of time trying to persuade me not to go, saying war was inevitable, misleading me about the French position, and then saying that the UN resolution was completely and utterly impossible, saying, 'You can't stop it, but the reconstruction of Iraq is so important and you can make a significant contribution to that. Please help us to do that right.' He absolutely wouldn't listen to me about what needed to be done, about the role of the UN; how he had to get the IMF and the World Bank involved; how to internationalize it and bring the whole of the international community together. The Americans were steaming on with these Pentagon-appointed agencies, full of mistakes, fixated on which Iraqis they were picking to take over the transitional government rather than how to reconstruct the country in a proper way. The prime minister wasn't listening to me, wasn't keeping to his promises, again wasn't using any leverage with the US to say, 'We've got to at least do the reconstruction right and internationalize it and give the UN a proper role.'"
- She goes on to say that while the British government and military always intended to occupy Iraq in the role of peacekeepers, constrained by UN regulations and the Geneva Conventions, the US had no such intentions, and refused to be bound by any rule of law: "They were in a very bullying mood." Short believes that Blair joined the US in part to keep the Americans from completely running roughshod over Iraq: "...I think our prime minister thought for some reason (he's never explained because he's kept it secret) that it would be a disaster for the world if the Americans acted alone, and therefore, we had to accompany them. He listened to the higher reason that justified him duping his country." (Walrus Magazine)
- December 23: Condoleezza Rice's new deputy is Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India and an expert in Asian foreign affairs.
Partisan Bush appointees
Rice worked for Blackwill in the first Bush administration. Blackwill is the coordinator for strategic planning, a new post that, in the words of the Washington Post, "makes him the in-house visionary at the National Security Council. It means he has free rein to think, track global trends and predict the unnoticed or unintended consequences of US foreign policy decisions anywhere in the world...." Blackwill is also charged with helping shape foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The new post was designed to provide cohesion and long-range planning for a White House foreign policy team under stress from breaking wars and ongoing crises. Speculation is widespread that Blackwill may replace Rice in a second Bush term. (Washington Post) - December 23: The Bush administration's fetish for secrecy has reached epic proportions.
Secrecy of Bush administration
Even Republican Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 investigative commission, recently protested: "I've been reading these highly, highly classified documents. In most cases, I finish with them, I look up and say, 'Why is this classified?' And so one of the things that I hope is that maybe out of our work and maybe others, a lot of these documents that are classified, will be unclassified." Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, says it is nothing less than a "mutation in American politics" away from open government. "There is an unwholesome change in the deliberative process unfolding before our eyes," he says. "These are not technicalities. These are fundamental issues of American government that are now up for grabs." (Washington Post) - December 23: Many current and former members of the US military believe that the Bush administration wouldn't be so gung-ho for war in the Middle East if any of them had ever served in combat themselves.
Iraq war and occupation
Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni says that if any of the senior members of the administration had experienced combat as young men, they might have thought longer about invading and occupying Iraq. "I think it would have changed them," says Zinni. "I just wish somebody in that chain of command would have seen combat at that time." He believes this is a moral issue. "They were my contemporaries. They should have been there, and they found a way not to serve. And where are their kids? Are their kids serving? My son is in the Marines." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who avoided military service, says in response that he knows enough about combat from his visits to a military hospital. "I am not at all unmindful of what it means to send American kids into combat. I go up to Walter Reed enough to see some of the consequences." (Washington Post) - December 23: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry calls on Bush to immediately appoint a Special Counsel to investigate whether John Ashcroft violated federal criminal law during his 2000 failed bid for re-election to the United States Senate.
2000 presidential elections
Last week, a majority of the Federal Elections Committee (FEC) determined that Attorney General Ashcroft violated campaign finance laws, possibly exceeding the federal contribution limit by as much as 200 times, and failed to disclose certain contributions during the 2000 election cycle. "Because Mr. Ashcroft is the Attorney General and accordingly the supervisor of both the FBI and the United States Attorneys, there is a conflict of interest in the Department of Justice supervising such an investigation. Simply put, it is not in the public interest for Mr. Ashcroft to investigate himself," Kerry writes. "Mr. President, now more than ever, Americans must have total faith in their Nation's chief law enforcement officer. An independent investigation by a Special Counsel is the only way to preserve that faith." Attorney General John Ashcroft's leadership PAC, "Spirit of America," illegally contributed a fundraising list of 100,000 donors to his failed 2000 Senate campaign in Missouri, and, in violation of federal law, neither organization reported this contribution to the FEC. Ashcroft's failure to disclose this mailing list as an asset may render his United States Senate Public Financial Disclosure Reports for 1998 and 1999 materially false, and their filing a felony violation of Federal criminal law. Normally this would be investigated by the FBI, and then referred to the Attorney General for prosecution. But John Ashcroft cannot be called up to investigate himself. - Kerry says that this was just the sort of situation that the Special Counsel Law was created for. He notes that during the Clinton administration, Ashcroft argued for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate then-Vice President Gore when he was accused of far less serious campaign finance violations. Ashcroft said at that time that Attorney General Janet Reno should demand a special prosecutor because "the man who signs her check is the man that she's investigating." (John Kerry)
- December 23: A Palm Beach circuit judge gives prosecutors permission to examine conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh's medical records to determine whether he should be charged with "doctor shopping" for prescription painkillers.
Conservative media slant
Limbaugh's lawyers plan to appeal the ruling. "Mr. Limbaugh was not doctor shopping and he should not have to sacrifice his privacy to prove his innocence," says lawyer Roy Black. Black said his client suffered from a degenerative disc disease with "pain so great at one point doctors thought he had bone cancer," and that Limbaugh chose to take addictive painkillers rather than have surgery. Black fails to note that Limbaugh became an avid golfer during that same time period, a sport that would be most difficult to take up with such a condition. Predictably, Limbaugh says he is the victim of a liberal conspiracy: "The Democrats still cannot defeat me in the arena of political ideas," he told his radio audience earlier. "And so now they're trying to do so in the court of public opinion and the legal system." He notes that the state attorney general, Barry Krischer, is a Democrat. (ABC News, E! Online) - December 23: Rush Limbaugh claims, through his lawyer, that he was being blackmailed by his housekeeper and her husband.
Conservative media slant
He claims to have paid "extreme amounts of money" to Wilma Cline, his former housekeeper, and her husband, first for pills and then for extortion. His lawyer, Roy Black, alleges that the Clines threatened to go public with information about Limbaugh's drug use unless they received $4 million. Black claims that Limbaugh wanted to contact the FBI, but was told by an unidentified friend that if he went to the authorities, they would target him, and his political enemies would use the information against him. "That's exactly what happened," says Black, who also made accusations that Cline's husband is a convicted drug trafficker. "They cornered him in the parking garage of his studio, and they demanded $4 million in order to keep this quiet and not sell it to the Enquirer," says Black. Ed Shohat, an attorney for the housekeeper, vehemently denies Black's charge. "Rush Limbaugh confessed and admitted that he bought the pills," Shohat says. "I know of no facts that my clients demanded money from Rush Limbaugh in any way." The accusations don't jibe with Limbaugh's concurrent claims that he was taking the 2,000-plus prescription pills per month for legitimate reasons. (CNN, E! Online)
Bush's own agency confirms lie about Iraqi nukes
- December 24: The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board has concluded that the White House made an inaccurate claim in January's State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain nuclear materials because of its desperation to show that Hussein had an active program to develop nuclear weapons.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
While the board, chaired by former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, says that it can find no reason to believe there was a "deliberate effort to fabricate" a story, the board believes the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable. The board made its findings available to the administration earlier this month. It makes it clear that the White House should share blame with the CIA for allowing the questionable material into the speech. CIA Director George Tenet and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley have accepted responsibility for allowing the assertion into the address. In May, Bush asked Scowcroft to look into how the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium in Niger made it into the presidential speech. The intelligence board, made up of 16 members, including former California governor Pete Wilson, former Netscape chief executive Jim Barksdale and retired Admiral David Jeremiah, traditionally provides the president private advice on intelligence questions. Scowcroft served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, among others. The Senate plans on reporting on the board's findings next spring. "No one checked their facts carefully," says an anonymous source familiar with the report. "It was a mistake that propagated itself. They should have known better to check and ask more questions about the information." (Washington Post, CNN) - December 24: Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix says that Libya's response to international pressure to abandon its WMD programs demonstrates that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary, and that similar pressures would have had similar effect on the Hussein regime.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Last week Libya announced it was bowing to UN pressure, and abandoning its plans to build atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Blix rejects claims that it was the war on Iraq that had forced Libya's hand, and said that his willingness to cooperate with the UN underlined the power of sanctions. Blix also repeats his belief that Saddam Hussein almost certainly destroyed his stocks of biological and chemical armaments after the 1991 Gulf War. "Years of pressure has meant that Gaddafi has gone a slow path to this result...the country has been worn down," Blix says. "so, I think one could just as well say that the example shows that perhaps Iraq could also have been handled with continuous containment." (Independent) - December 24: American oil companies, banned from dealing with Libya for 17 years, are lining up to once again handle that country's oil.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Libya is currently unable to produce as much oil as it wishes -- it's down half from its 1970 high of 3.3 million barrels a day -- and is desperate for Western involvement. Wood Mackenzie Consultants in Edinburgh, Scotland describes Libya as "highly under-explored" and having "excellent" potential. Exploration would accelerate if the United States ended its embargo, and advanced drilling techniques would enhance recovery rates at Libya's aging oil fields, it says. Without sanctions, Libya might also be able to develop its natural gas reserves and resume its neglected effort to export liquefied natural gas. (China Daily) - December 24: The Pentagon has suspended compulsory vaccination of US troops against anthrax after a federal court judge orders the military to stop treating its personnel like "guinea pigs."
US military
US District Judge Emmet Sullivan rules that the mandatory inoculations, administered to more than 900,000 troops, violates a 1998 law prohibiting the use of experimental drugs on troops. Lawyers representing US soldiers say the shots have sickened hundreds and caused a number of deaths. Sullivan rules that the anthrax vaccinations violated a law passed by Congress in the wake of concern that similar inoculations may have led to illness among veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. (The Age) - December 24: Journalists in Iraq note that they are given far different treatment from American soldiers and officials depending on what they are trying to report.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
The Nation reports: "When US Central Command has good news to report in Iraq, as it did after troops from the Fourth Infantry Division captured Saddam Hussein on December 13, it adores the media. But journalists say that when there's bad news -- a helicopter crash, a mortar attack -- they are increasingly being blocked from covering the story by US soldiers, who frequently confiscate and destroy their film disks and videotapes." Photographer David Gilkey of the Detroit Free Press notes that, while he was trying to take photos of the Chinook helicopter that crashed near Fallujah on November 2, his film disk was taken from him and erased; Gilkey and fellow journalists were then forced to go to another site twenty miles away. "Listen, I have respect for these guys," Gilkey says of the soldiers. "I truly understand that they are upset, and angry, that they've lost friends. The point is, however, you don't have the right to take disks and clean them. When did that become standard operating procedure?" - Knight Ridder photographer Chip Somodevilla was accompanying two Iraqi fishermen on their small boat in the Tigris River in Baghdad on December 9, when shots from a high-velocity rifle exploded in the water under the port bow of their twelve-foot craft. "We looked in the direction from which it was fired -- a mansion formerly belonging to Saddam Hussein's nephew -- and noticed several men waving their arms in the air and shouting," Somodevilla told his editors after the incident. The shooter turned out to be an American in civilian clothing who was carrying a high-velocity rifle outfitted with a silencer and scope. "He asked who I was and what I was doing," Somodevilla said. The American, who appeared to be some sort of Special Operations paramilitary or intelligence official, "asked me to produce identification and then attempted to destroy my press credentials. He forcefully quizzed me about my assignment and then turned to an Iraqi standing nearby" to verify aspects of the photographer's story. "After being shot at, I felt very threatened and swore to the man that I was an American and that I was on his side," Somodevilla said. "Yeah, John Walker [Lindh, the so-called American Taliban] made a lot of promises too," the American interrogator snapped back. "What have you done for your country?" He let Somodevilla go with the warning, "We're watching you."
- "Our journalists in Iraq have been shoved to the ground, pushed out of the way, told to leave the scene of explosions; we've had camera disks and videotapes confiscated, reporters detained," says Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press. On November 12 Johnson sent a letter to the Pentagon, signed by thirty other media companies, which cited their concern at "a growing number of incidents in Iraq in which journalists are harassed by US troops in the course of covering the news." "We consider it to be a pattern that is a problem," Johnson says. "There are no circumstances under which it is acceptable for an American soldier to destroy camera disks or take videotapes from journalists at gunpoint. The Pentagon knows that. We went through the whole war with virtually no incidents. All they have to do is send guidance to the field that this not acceptable behavior."
- Although the military acknowledges that Johnson's concerns are valid, according to journalists in the field, very little has been done to curb US soldiers' or officials' behavior. "This is without a doubt the nastiest, scariest conflict that we've seen in half a century," says Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. "It's just very, very dangerous over there. And when the soldiers get very nervous, and one can hardly blame them, they tend to shoot at anything they perceive as shooting at them," including journalists. Journalists who report about controversial topics, such as the poor treatment of soldiers by US corporations charged with caring for them in the field or stories about bodies from Iraq being returned in the dead of night, find themselves blackballed by the Pentagon, unable to get cooperation from US soldiers or officials. Jim Crawley, military reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, says: "These restrictions back home are not being made in the heat of battle. They are conscious decisions being made by people who have time to deliberate. And there is a potential that there is a political motivation for those restrictions." "All we ask for is fair play," says Sig Christenson, military reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, currently on assignment in Iraq. "It's a pretty tough place to work, and what we reporters are doing is in the great tradition of American democracy: to tell people back home what is taking place, the good and the bad. At the end of the day, Americans should be thankful." (The Nation)
- December 24: The FBI issues a warning for law enforcement agencies to beware of people carrying almanacs.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Almanacs, according to the bulletin, can be used by terrorists "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." Law enforcement officials were warned to consider arresting anyone with an almanac "annotated in suspicious ways." (Lewis Lapham)
Media begins orchestrated attack on Howard Dean
- December 24: Performing its usual role as watercarrier for the GOP, the American mainstream media has decided to open up a full-bore attack on Democratic front-runner Howard Dean.
Conservative media slant
The attack opens with what The Note terms "a button-popping, eye-bugging anti-Dean editorial" from the supposedly liberal Washington Post. Expressing its horror at Dean's observation that that Saddam Hussein's capture leaves the United States no safer than before, Post editors term Dean's views to be "not just unfounded but ludicrous" and complain of his "departure from the Democratic mainstream." David Brooks of the New York Times, another supposed bastion of the liberal press, contrasts Dean with the Bush administration. Brooks says that Bush is suffering "an insincerity crisis" owing to his "honesty and candor," along with his "candor and forthrightness." Meanwhile Dean is laughed off as "the only guy who goes to the Beverly Hills area for a gravitas implant." What did Dean do to deserve Brooks's ire? Give a moderate, Clintonesque foreign-policy speech to the Pacific Council of World Affairs. ABC's Sam Donaldson doesn't like the "vibes" Dean gives off. And the Post's Howard Kurtz, the darling of the American Conservative Union, complains that Dean has yet to ask about the journalists following him -- as if the journalists, and not the candidates, are the focus of the news. - Eric Alterman writes, "Another part of the problem is that punditocracy poster boy Joe Lieberman is currently more likely to get the Republican nomination than the Democratic one -- and more deserving as well. Dean is being punished, in part, for cleaning Joe's clock. Kurtz speaks for fellow Lieberman lovers when he insists, sans evidence, that 'Dean and the war's opponents have not yet come up with a convincing argument that the status quo would have been preferable.' Just whom Kurtz has in mind when he employs the phrase 'convincing' is left undefined, of course. It obviously does not apply to most of the planet's population, since outside the United States, only Israelis supported Bush's invasion, and that was before anyone was aware of just how dishonest were the Administration's arguments for war and incompetent its postwar planning. Even following Saddam's capture, however, 42 percent remain convinced that the war was not worth fighting; 78 percent of Americans questioned professed to share Dean's view that Saddam's capture did nothing to reduce the threat of terrorism -- a correct judgment, apparently, as evidenced by the current orange alert."
- Alterman concludes that, as in 2000, the media has chosen to side solidly with Bush, and to hell with journalistic objectivity: "We've all been to this movie before, of course, just one election ago, and it's therefore no surprise that the anti-Dean media fury has increased exponentially with Al Gore's brave, antiestablishment endorsement. In the meantime, the question of the Democratic nomination has come down to this: Will this election be about turningout your base, or winning over swing voters? Gore did the latter but not the former. He won the election, but, thanks to Ralph Nader's megalomania (with an assist from the SCLM -- So-Called Liberal Media -- and Gore's own crappy campaign), not by enough to prevent the Supreme Court from handing it to Bush. Today, the nation remains no less divided than four years ago, with about 20 percent of the vote up for grabs. The punditocracy has chosen its side. Perhaps it's time the rest of us choose ours." (The Nation)
- December 24: Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is poised to begin broadcasting in Great Britain.
Conservative media slant
The channel, called FX, is modeled on the Fox channel currently broadcasting in America. (Guardian) - December 24: A teenaged boy is being held in federal prison for damaging a boat engine belonging to George H.W. Bush.
George H.W. Bush
The boy, who was 14 at the time, broke into a boathouse in Arundel, Maine, to steal a boat engine, along with an older friend, in April 2002. When the two saw security cameras in place, they burned down the boathouse to hide their actions. A boat engine owned by the elder Bush was one of several engines and boats burned in the fire. The parents of the boy say that their son was arrested as a potential terrorist. "There were Secret Service, ATF agents, fire marshals and local police," the boy's mother says. "They said that they had concerns that this could be a terrorist attack. They cited national security concerns." The boy's parents are appealing what they say is a harsh and unfair sentence of 30 months in federal prison. They believe their son is being singled out because of misplaced security concerns, politics and the desire by federal agents to send a message. The boy was prepared to plead guilty to local prosecutors, but the case was then turned over to federal prosecutors. "There seems to be no rational explanation for why Patrick was turned over to the federal justice system," says the boy's stepfather, who is acting as his attorney. "Every time we asked, we got a different answer, and none of the answers made sense." A spokeswoman for the Maine Attorney General's office says the singular treatment of the boy has nothing to do with the fact that Bush property was destroyed, and was meted out because "[a]rson is a crime of violence.." There is only one other juvenile in federal custody in all of New England. The other perpetrator, 19-year old Christopher Conley of Kennebunkport, is serving a 57-month prison sentence and must pay $728,000 in fines and restitutions. Patrick, whose last name is being withheld, is in maximum security detention, and only allowed to see his parents for five minutes a week. Almost all arsons committed by juveniles are handled by local law enforcement, and the convicted juveniles receive significantly less harsh sentences. (ABC News) - December 24: Palm Beach Circuit Judge Jeffrey Winikoff temporarily reseals conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh's medical records
Conservative media slant
while Limbaugh's lawyers seek to have a ruling to unseal the records overturned. The records were seized by prosecutors investigating Limbaugh for "doctor shopping" to fuel his addiction to painkillers. To protect Limbaugh's privacy, Winikoff has ruled that prosecutors could look at the files but not disclose material from the records to anyone else. (Reuters/FindLaw) - December 24: In a compendium of the year's strangest quotes from America's political leaders,
Bush family
Barbara Bush stands out by saying, "I am advising the former president, the governor of Florida and the president of the United States. I guess you could say I rule the world." She is the husband of the former president and the mother of the current president and the governor of Florida. John Kerry, Democratic candidate for president, responded to the former first lady's statement by saying, "I promise just to serve two terms. Republicans do it differently. They just have the son repeat the father's whole first term." (Scripps Howard/The Gleaner)
