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February 3: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, tells investigators he gave nuclear weapons technology to other countries with the full knowledge of top army officials, including now-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. "Whatever I did, it was in the knowledge of the bosses," he is quoted as saying by a close friend and fellow scientist. According to Khan's friend, two former military chiefs, General Mirza Aslam Beg and General Jehangir Karamat, and even Musharraf were "aware of everything" he was doing. "I am also convinced that [Khan] couldn't act unilaterally," the friend adds. Military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan denies Musharraf was privy to any transfer of nuclear technology or that he authorized Khan to do it. "It is absolutely wrong," Sultan says. Musharraf "was not involved in any such matter. ...No such thing has happened since he seized power in 1999." (ABC News)

Ricin found in US Senate buildings

February 3: Three Senate office buildings are closed after a suspicious white powder, apparently delivered through the mail system, was found in the Senator Bill Frist's office. Officials said tests were positive for ricin, a deadly poison. "This is a criminal action," says Frist, the Republican majority leader, whose staff discovered the white powder in their Dirksen Senate Office Building mailroom. At least 16 people on the floor were decontaminated; no one as yet has shown symptoms of ricin poisoning. Twice as deadly as cobra venom, ricin, which is derived from the castor bean plant, is relatively easily made and can be inhaled, ingested or injected. Capital police chief Terrance Gainer said the police is still investigating how the powder got into the mailroom. The Homeland Security Department is monitoring the situation, and the FBI is awaiting final tests from a laboratory at Fort Detrick before deciding whether to get more fully involved in the case. It is later discovered that the positive test results indicating ricin were probably false. (AP/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, MSNBC)
February 3: In the wake of David Kay's revelations about no WMDs in Iraq, and his subsequent attempts to explain away the lack of WMDs in a way that doesn't reflect badly on the Bush administration, AlterNet's David Morris reminds us that, in contradiction of Kay's assertion that "we were almost all wrong," many knowledgeable observers were telling the world all along that Iraq did not possess WMDs. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has been telling us that Iraq had no WMDs as far back as 1998; it was only a few months ago that the Wall Street Journal labeled Ritter a traitor who was on the payroll of Saddam Hussein. Ritter's old boss, Richard Butler, said he couldn't explain Ritter's contentions because he isn't a psychoanalyst. Kay told Congress that he couldn't make Ritter's assertions jibe with "known facts." Secretary of State Colin Powell contrasted his own scientific approach with that of Ritter: "We have facts, not speculation." Similarly, UN weapons inspection chief Hans Blix and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed El Baradhi, were ridiculed and insulted by US officials. At the same time Ritter, Blix, and El Baradhi were being smeared by the US government, the Bush administration and the Pentagon were pressuring the CIA to come up with "intelligence" that would support their assertions that war was justifiable and, in fact, a necessity. In March 2003 the Washington Post quoted a senior administration official with access to the latest intelligence who said, "I have seen all the stuff. I certainly have doubts." The US, he said, will "face significant problems in trying to find" such weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so displeased with the CIA and NSA's findings that he set up his own intelligence unit, staffed with true believers with little or no expertise, to give him the "intelligence" he wanted.
"Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency," wrote Robert Dreyfuss in the December 2002 issue of American Prospect. Dreyfuss quotes Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counter-terrorism expert who describes the "tremendous pressure on [the CIA] to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted." Morris makes three suggestions to rectify the ongoing misperceptions about said intelligence: "First, insist that those who got it right, like Scott Ritter, become regular commentators on Iraq on network and cable news stations. Second, widen the mandate of the Commission so that it can examine whether and to what extent the intelligence community was bypassed or compromised by the White House and Pentagon. Third, ask the Commission to report back before the election." (Alternet)

Bush budget exposed

February 3: Economist Paul Krugman points out in detail just how farcically bogus the 2005 Bush administration's projected budget truly is; the Berkshire Eagle terms it "as brazen a fabrication as the weapons of destruction used as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq." The record-breaking $521 billion deficit is specious; all indications point to a deficit far larger than that number, incredible as it may seem. (Krugman reminds us that in 2002, the administration told us that the 2004 deficit would be only $14 billion, wrong by a factor of more than 10.) The GOP revamp of Medicare will cost at least $154 billion more than was admitted while the bill was under discussion, it is finally admitted by administration officials. And to make the situation worse, the administration is trying to placate Heritage Foundation and other conservative economic observers by blaming "runaway discretionary spending" -- i.e. money spent on schools, social programs, and the nation's infrastructure. That is a lie. The problem is that the government's take from tax collection has fallen to its lowest level relative to the GDP since 1950. This is directly due to Bush's favor-the-rich tax cuts, along with a generally depressed economy and a stagnating stock market.
Krugman writes, "so what will it take to get the budget deficit under control? Unless Social Security and Medicare are drastically cut -- which is, of course, what the right wants -- any solution has to include a major increase in revenue. Many Democrats have called for a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts, preserving the 'middle class' cuts -- those that convey at least some benefit to the 77 percent of taxpayers in the 15 percent tax bracket or below. Such a partial rollback would have reduced this year's budget deficit by about $180 billion; that would help, but one hopes politicians realize that it's not enough. Another major source of revenue could be a crackdown on tax loopholes and tax evasion, which has reached epidemic proportions. In particular, what's going on with the tax on corporate profits? That source of revenue is down, as a percent of G.D.P., to 1930's levels. No, that's not a misprint. And receipts are not growing nearly as fast as one would expect, given an economic recovery that has bypassed workers but given big gains to their employers. An administration that actually tried to make corporations pay their taxes might be able to find $100 billion or more each year. An eventual budget solution will involve all this, and more. But the first step is to stop looking for villains in all the wrong places." The Center for American Progress believes that the budget is part of the administration's plan to, in its words, "to force cuts in public spending, privatize Social Security, and permanently shift tax burdens to working Americans." (New York Times, Center for American Progress, Berkshire Eagle)

Dems push for vote-buying investigation

February 3: Democratic representative Steny Hoyer, says he will push for an investigation into claims by Republican representative Nick Smith that he was offered a bribe and threatened as part of the GOP's attempt to pass the administration-sponsored Medicare bill in late 2003. Hoyer has attempted to get House Speaker Dennis Hastert to open an investigation, but Hastert has refused, saying that it's up to the House Ethics Commission, not him, to open any investigation; the Ethics Commission, controlled by Republicans, has so far declined to acknowledge the allegations of vote-buying and threats. Hoyer says he plans to raise the issue with Hastert again but adds, "If there is no action, and the only alternative is an individual complaint...frankly I would expect that to happen." Some Republicans have alleged that Democrats are complaining because they lost the vote; Hoyer responds, "These are not Democratic assertions. These are Republican assertions against a Republican. ...Until such time as the committee renders its own conclusions on the matter, the House will operate under a cloud of public suspicion." While the US Justice Department claims to be looking into the matter, no one has bothered to interview Smith yet. GOP reaction is angry: "I think the Democrats in the House ought to leave their campaign plan outside the chamber," says Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is fighting his own ethics accusations. "They are trying to politicize the ethics committee, and I think that is wrong. They are starting to throw mud and try to burn down the House. ...I think this does nothing but try to cast aspersions on the House, and that mud will get all over all of us, Democrat and Republican. I think what they are doing is very, very dangerous, and they shouldn't be able to." A GOP aide says privately that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is worried that the bribery scandal will become a major issue: "The Speaker is worried that Democrats might launch an ethics war, and we're hoping that does not happen. No meetings have taken place thus far." (Washington Post, The Hill)
February 3: Frontrunning Democratic presidential candidate and senator John Kerry calls on Bush to clear up questions surrounding his ignominious military record. "It's not up to me to talk about them or to question them at this point," Kerry says of accusations that Bush failed to complete his Vietnam-era duty with the Texas Air National Guard. "I don't even know what the facts are. But I think it's up to the president and the military to answer those questions." Bush is widely considered to have gone AWOL for over a year during his term of duty, and received preferential treatment in being honorably discharged from service without completing his duty requirements. (Boston Globe)
February 3: Veteran political writer Robert Dreyfuss gives a succinct, if caustic, view of the Bush administration's attempt to blame the CIA, without publicly calling it out, for its own intelligence failures regarding Iraq. "In the year and half before the war began in March, Cheney and the neocons constantly disparaged the CIA for underestimating the threat posed by Iraq. In public and in private, they lambasted the agency for overcautiousness. Behind the scenes, they pressured analysts -- not to mention George Tenet, the CIA director, whose spine seems made of soft clay -- to find more, more, more evidence of Iraq's WMD and of Iraq's (nonexistent) connections to al-Qaeda. They created a mini-intelligence unit inside the Pentagon, staffed by neoconservative ideologues such as Abram Shulsky and David Wurmser, to scour mounds of intelligence tidbits and extract incriminating evidence to prove what wasn't provable. They treated Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress as a virtual Oracle of Delphi, giving credence to the lying defectors and bogus intelligence he produced, even as the CIA warned that Chalabi was a fraud. They gave credence to the cockeyed theories of Laurie Mylroie, who believed not only that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 but that he was the mastermind behind Tim McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, too. And, disregarding CIA warnings, they convinced Bush to say that Iraq was secretly trying to buy uranium for A-bombs in West Africa, even though the documents they cited were forged. Now, believe it or not, they want you to think that it was the CIA that got it wrong. That it was the CIA that presented the White House with alarmist intelligence about the supposed threat from Iraq. And that -- acting on the CIA's conclusions -- the White House and Pentagon went to war. David Kay, who helped lead the snark hunt in Iraq that failed to find a thing, now says that the CIA owes Bush an apology, that he could find no evidence of political pressure on the CIA, and that it was all just a big mistake. 'Sorry, world,' says Kay. 'It was the CIA's fault.'"
But even though Bush wants the public to believe that the CIA, and not his own people, were to blame for the massive failures surrounding Iraqi policy, neither he nor his officials are quite ready to go public with their attempts to fix blame. Dreyfuss writes, "Not only would that look silly and unpresidential, but it would probably unleash a flood of resignations, op-eds by former CIA officials, leaks to the media by current ones, and more. The CIA may not be very good at covert operations, but they'd manage to run an effective one against the White House. So, aided by the malleable Kay, the White House decided to punt, calling for one of those Kissingeresque blue-ribbon commissions that will report back in, oh, say, 2005. And though its scope is supposedly undecided as yet, you can count on it picking apart years of CIA reports on Iraq while avoiding an inquiry into Cheney's office and the Pentagon's Shulsky-Wurmser Office of Special Plans. Same in Congress: the GOP-led intelligence committees have no intention of investigating the politically explosive Cheney-OSP nexus, and they're resisting Democratic demands for a wider inquiry." Dreyfuss knows what the Bush administration will do; he wonders if the Democrats will "have the courage to make the Bush-Cheney lies and exaggerations over Iraq a campaign issue?" (TomPaine.com)

Blair intelligence claims revealed to have no support in UK intelligence community

February 4: Dr. Brian Jones, the Blair administration's former senior weapons expert in the Ministry of Defense, confirms that not one intelligence expert would support the claims of Iraqi WMDs and imminent threats posed by the Hussein regime that were touted by Blair as reason to invade Iraq. Jones, who was head of the nuclear, chemical and biological branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) until he retired last year, reveals that the experts failed in their efforts to have their views reflected. Jones says, "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities." Jones identifies Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett as the author of the infamous "45-minute" claim, and calls on Blair to release the intelligence used to bolster his claim that Iraq could launch a biological or chemical strike within 45 minutes, a claim that Jones does not believe: he is "extremely doubtful" that anyone with chemical and biological weapons expertise had seen the raw intelligence reports and that they would prove just how right he and his colleagues were to be concerned about the claims. He says he foresaw at the time of the Government's dossier in September 2002 that no major WMD stockpiles would be found. He made a formal complaint about the dossier to avoid himself and his fellow experts being cast as "scapegoats" for any such failure. Blair has already announced that another inquiry will investigate "intelligence-gathering, evaluation and use" in the UK before the conflict in Iraq. Lord Butler of Brockwell, the former cabinet secretary, will chair the five-strong committee, which will meet in private. The Liberal Democrats refuse to support the inquiry because they said that its remit was not wide enough. Jones's testimony to the Hutton commission was all but ignored by Hutton in his report. (Independent)

CIA backs off on intelligence claims

February 4: CIA Director George Tenet says that the agency never claimed Iraqi weapons were an imminent threat, an assertion critics say calls into question the Bush administration's justification for the war. Tenet also denies any political pressure from anyone in the administration to modify or exaggerate its intelligence findings about Iraq's WMDs: "No one told us what to say or how to say it." Tenet fails to mention that not only did a number of administration officials use the term "imminent," many officials, including Bush himself, made repeated statements asserting that Iraq's WMD programs constituted a clear, present, and imminent danger to the US. Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry said in response: "Today, we found out that George Bush...and the rest of the administration weren't passing on sound facts on Iraq to the American people." Tenet does acknowledge serious misjudgments. US intelligence "may have overestimated" Iraq's progress in building a nuclear weapon, Tenet admits. None of the chemical or biological arms that US intelligence said Iraq possessed have been found, he acknowledges. Tenet's speech -— an extraordinary public declaration by the nation's top spy -— is an unapologetic defense of his agency in the wake of growing criticism after former US chief weapon inspector David Kay's conclusion that Iraq had no banned weapons. Tenet disagrees with Kay's judgment that the weapons hunt is all but over, and charges that critics of the CIA run the risk of damaging US intelligence, and he characterizes intelligence professionals as patriots who must cope with sketchy evidence. "Intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden," he says. "In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right." In a new disclosure, Tenet describes two key prewar sources. One source "with direct access to Saddam" told a US ally that Iraq was aggressively seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, had chemical weapons, and was "dabbling" with biological agents. The other, who had access to senior Iraqi officials, said Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. "Did this information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did," Tenet says. (AP/USA Today)
February 4: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he is not yet ready to concede that Iraqi WMDs do not exist. He tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that US weapons inspectors need more time to reach final conclusions about whether chemical and biological weapons existed in Iraq before the war. He says he is confident that prewar intelligence, while possibly flawed in some respects, was not manipulated by the administration to justify its war aims. He offers several examples of what he calls "alternative views" about why no weapons have been discovered in Iraq, starting with the possibility that banned arms never existed. "I suppose that's possible, but not likely," he says. Other possibilities Rumsfeld includes are: weapons may have been transferred to a third country before U.S. troops arrived in March; weapons may have been dispersed throughout Iraq and hidden; weapons existed but were destroyed by the Iraqis before the war started. (MSNBC)
February 4: Bush says, "Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms...." At this time, an Army investigation is in the process of documenting systematic abuses and tortures of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers, CIA operatives, and private contractors or mercenaries. (White House/Slate)
February 4: The Justice Department has opened up an inquiry into whether Halliburton Co. was involved in the payment of $180 million in possible kickbacks to obtain contracts to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria during a period in the late 1990's when Vice President Dick Cheney was chairman of the company. The Justice inquiry, along with a related probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission, parallels a separate investigation into the Nigerian payments that is being conducted by a French magistrate which has received widespread attention in recent months in the European (if not the US) press. But the Justice Department and SEC probes have not previously been reported, although they were briefly mentioned by Halliburton last week near the end of a lengthy filing with the SEC. In the filing, Halliburton disclosed that the French magistrate was investigating the Nigerian payments and then added: "The US Department of Justice and the SEC have asked Halliburton for a report on these matters and are reviewing the allegations in light of the US. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Halliburton has engaged outside counsel to investigate any allegations and is cooperating with the government's inquiries.... If illegal payments were made, this matter could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations."
The Justice Department inquiry involves a trail of payments to unknown recipients that were routed through off-shore bank accounts and were allegedly handled by a longtime Halliburton lawyer in London who was also a financial advisor to Nigeria's late dictator, General Sani Abacha. The payments were made in connection with the construction of a giant liquefied natural gas plant on a remote island in Nigeria. The plant, one of the largest in the world, was built by TSKJ, a consortium of four major international construction firms, including Kellogg, Brown & Root, a major Halliburton subsidiary that has been the principal recipient of the company's contracts in Iraq. Halliburton touted its role in the Nigerian project in a March, 2000 press release headlined: "Four Industry Leaders United to Execute World Class Project in Nigeria." The question Justice is probing is how exactly Halliburton's subsidiary came to play that role. According to lengthy accounts of the probe in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, the TSKJ consortium in 1994 had created a subsidiary called LNG Services on Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic where companies are not required to pay any taxes. The French investigation was triggered when an official of one of the consortium's French partners, Technip, was charged two years ago with embezzlement growing out of a separate, long-running corruption case involving the French oil company Elf Aquitaine. George Krammer, the accused Technip official, was outraged when Technip refused to defend him and turned state's evidence. The paper reported that he told French authorities about an alleged $180 million "slush fund" that TSKJ maintained to bribe Nigerian officials relating to the natural gas plant in Nigeria. French authorities then tracked close to the same amount in "support contracts" from LNG Services, the subsidiary on the Portuguese island, to yet another obscure entity called Tri-Star, which was located on the British tax haven of Gibraltar. Tri Star was headed by a London lawyer named Jeffrey Tesler, who has long done work for Halliburton, and was known to have close relations with officials in Abacha's Nigerian government.
The allegations that TSKJ may have made improper payments to Nigerian officials prompted a Paris prosecutor to open up an investigation into the case in October, 2002. The probe was among the first in France under a new international treaty banning the payment of bribes in commercial contracts, a prohibition that became part of French law in 2000. The case in France has since been transferred to a French investigative magistrate, Reynaud van Ruymbeke, an indication that it is being taken seriously by French authorities. Halliburton is expected to counter the charges by saying that it was "merely" a 25% partner in the TSKJ consortium; such a defense should not work well, because Halliburton is widely acknowledged to have been the driving partner in the consortium, the one who led the way and made the decisions. (Newsweek/Common Dreams, AP/Kansas City Star)
February 4: The Christian Science Monitor notes that the Bush doctrine of "preventative war" "Already the wisdom of waging war against a gathering but unexercised threat is being questioned in Congress and among weapons experts," the Monitor writes; "But the failure to find weapons and the clouds over prewar intelligence are also feeding US allies' doubts on the rationale for war, and solidifying opposition to the administration's stated right to preemptive war." Jens Van Scherpenberg at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin says, "People who opposed this war feel vindicated and will feel even stronger about the risks of the doctrine of preventive war, that you have to base it on intelligence that may be flimsy, inaccurate, or can be interpreted in different ways." Calling the last year "difficult for everybody," a European diplomat in Washington says, "We see validation of the importance of inspections, the priority of cooperation, and we will emphasize that as the right way to go forward." "There is a lasting schism" between the US and some of its allies over the use of military force, fed by specific differences over defense spending, adds Van Scherpenberg. He and others in antiwar countries say the underlying differences, while too deep to go away, will be played down in coming months as Europe seeks to repair relations with Washington, and Washington continues to press for international help in postwar Iraq. Some experts argue that British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and perhaps even Bush himself, will be hesitant to repeat the Iraq venture because of public opposition and political scrutiny. In short, observers note, antiwar leaders may not feel compelled to focus on the doctrine's liabilities since others in Washington already are. Earlier this week, former chief US weapons inspector David Kay said, "If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly can't have a policy of preemption." And in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Democrat Bob Graham, former chairman of the Sentate Select Committee on Intelligence, said, "if we continue to rely on preventive or pre-emptive military actions as a central part of our strategy, it is critical that we have accurate intelligence to justify that the threat to be preempted is imminent."
European allies of the US are hoping that recent steps taken by both the Bush and Blair administrations to question the intelligence leading up to the war may signal the impending improvement of relations between the allies. Recent statements by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, first acknowledging that weapons of mass destruction may not have existed in Iraq, and then stating that a clear absence of stockpiled weapons might have affected his recommendation for war, might mean that the Bush administration may be backing off of its fixation on military intervention as its only means of dealing with global problems.
There is hope in some European capitals that the administration is shifting its emphasis to building alliances. "France always felt the doctrine of preemptive action was impracticable, and while that view has not changed, the emphasis now is on improving relations with the US," says Philippe Moreau Defarges, an international-relations expert at the French Institute for International Relations. Moreau Defarges says Paris wants to heal relations with Washington and, in turn, improve counterterrorism and international economic policies, so the French government will not make an issue of Iraq at this time. "Look at the recent cancellation of some commercial flights from Paris to the US," he says. "There a strong signal from the French government saying, 'We want to cooperate.'" Though the French are no more likely to go along with preemptive war, he continues, they feel reassured that the US has reached the limit of its own doctrine. "Look at North Korea: That is a more dangerous threat, but the US is not talking about waging war there." Indeed, though a tougher stance may be required in North Korea, any action would be made more difficult by doubts about the Iraq war, says David Mepham of the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research. "The chance of getting public support will be reduced," he says. "The lack of credibility brought on by going to war in Iraq on the basis of inaccurate intelligence has undermined public trust and made the world more insecure." (Christian Science Monitor)
February 4: Corporate watchdog organization CorpWatch says it has documented a systematic pattern of "waste, fraud and abuse among US companies receiving multi-million-dollar reconstruction contracts" in Iraq, "including massive over-charges for projects; shoddy work or a failure to complete tasks; and ignoring local experts who contend they could do the job better and cheaper." Among the report's findings:
- Despite over eight months of work and billions of dollars spent, key pieces of Iraq's infrastructure power plants, telephone exchanges, and sewage and sanitation systems have either not been repaired, or have been fixed so poorly that they don't function.
- San Francisco-based Bechtel has been given tens of millions to repair Iraq's schools. Yet many haven't been touched, and several schools that Bechtel claims to have repaired are in shambles. One repaired school was overflowing with unflushed sewage; a teacher at the school also reported that the American contractors took away their Japanese fans and replaced them with Syrian fans that don't work, billing the US government for the work.
- Inflated overhead costs and a byzantine maze of sub-contracts have left little money for the everyday workers carrying out projects. In one contract for police operations, Iraqi guards received only 10% of the money allotted for their salaries; Indian cooks for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root reported making just three dollars a day.
The report also reveals further details of Halliburton's contracts: for example, that of Halliburton's $2.2 billion in contracts, only about 10% has gone to meeting community needs. The rest has been spent on servicing U.S. troops and rebuilding oil pipelines. Halliburton has also spent over $40 million in the unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction. "A handful of well-connected corporations are making a killing off the devastation in Iraq" observes Chris Kromm, publisher of Southern Exposure, the magazine that first broke the report. "The politics and process behind these deals have always been questionable. Now we have first-hand evidence that they're not even doing their jobs." (Corporate Watch)
February 4: Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman withdraws from the campaign after failing to win any delegates in seven primaries and caucuses. He says he believed his "mainstream voice" was the right message for his party, but acknowledges that voters disagreed. "The judgment of the voters is now clear," Lieberman tells supporters gathered at a hotel in northern Virginia. "For me, it is now time to make a difficult but realistic decision. I have decided tonight to end my quest for the presidency of the United States of America. Am I disappointed? Naturally. But am I proud of what we stood for in this campaign? You bet I am." Representative Calvin Dooley, an early supporter, says he thinks the campaign was not able to get any traction because Lieberman was "perceived as being less of a contrast from President Bush than other candidates." (AP/Guardian)
February 4: Republicans and their allies have begun laying the groundwork for a familiar line of attack against Senator John Kerry: that he is "out of sync" with most voters, "culturally out of step with the rest of America," a man who votes with "the extreme elements of his party," as Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, has put it in recent days. In short, that he is a Massachusetts liberal. A similar attack strategy worked against Michael Dukakis, the Democrats' presidential nominee in 1988, who ended the campaign battered by the Republicans as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU," a product of the "Harvard boutique" who coddled criminals and was too much of a legalistic liberal to require school children to say the pledge of allegiance. The Bush campaign intends on using Kerry's 19-year voting record to portray him as a flip-flopper who reversed himself on key issues based on his own political fortunes. USA Today notes, "The drawback to the Bush strategy is that much of it has been tried before, most recently by Kerry's rivals for the nomination. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean called Kerry 'the handmaiden of special interests,' and retired general Wesley Clark said he's 'part of the problem' in Washington. Those criticisms have not slowed Kerry in the Democratic primaries." However, with well over $170 million to spend, Bush strategists believe that the sustained attacks they began in early February will raise doubts among voters. The Bush campaign wants to negate Kerry's self-portrait of a moderate who fights special interests before that picture is rooted in voters' minds. Kerry has said he expects such tactics and is ready for them. "We welcome a debate with the likes of Ed Gillespie, Karl Rove and this White House about who's out of sync with Main Street America," says Kerry spokesman David Wade. "Their tired old GOP attack dog just won't hunt," Wade says, adding that Republicans would be running against "a Democrat who fought for his country in war, put criminals behind bars as a prosecutor, stood up for balanced budgets in the Senate," and "kept faith with America's veterans." Another Kerry adviser is more blunt. "This is not the Dukakis campaign," the adviser says. "We're not going to take it. And if they're going to come at us with stuff, whatever that stuff may be, if it goes to a place where the '88 campaign did, then everything is on the table. Everything." (New York Times, USA Today)
February 4: In a case that Arab-Americans say illustrates what they hate about US immigration policy, a Muslim woman and mother of 3, Amina Silmi, is facing deportation after accidentally being caught in a line of cars trying to cross into Canada. Silmi's three children are American citizens, being born and raised in Cleveland, but Silmi herself is a Muslim from Venezuela. She must return to Venezuela, but has not yet decided whether to take her children with her, where they will start their lives over in a country they have never seen, or have them stay with her sister in Cleveland. "I'm waiting for a miracle right now," Silmi said before surrendering to federal authorities. "My hope is that somebody will hear me, because me and my kids, we're yelling for help." Her case has attracted the involvement of Ohio representative and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, who has asked Homeland Security director Tom Ridge to let the family stay in the US. Kucinich's letter accuses immigration officials of breaking up a family with a "zealous interpretation" of immigration laws. Kucinich added a personal appeal to the letter: "Her children are U.S. citizens, for God's sake!" His appeal wasn't enough to stay deportation proceedings. Meanwhile, Muslim activists are taking up Silmi's case.
Silmi has a tragic history. In 1990, Silmi's family married her off at age 19 to an Arab man in Cleveland who carried a green card. The husband beat her, and left her while she was six months pregnant with her first child. He refused to sponsor her application for a green card while they were married. They divorced, and Silmi married again, to a man named Ibrahim Salti, who also beat her, she said. She had two more children with Salti, including a 5-year-old boy who is autistic and receives care here that he cannot get in Venezuela. In 1998, Salti sponsored her request for a green card, but his own immigration woes soon undermined her application. Silmi, meanwhile, was told she could not leave the country with the application pending. A wrong turn in traffic put her and Salti in a line of cars entering Canada; immigration authorities caught both of them. Salti was told that by "voluntarily leaving the country," he voided his application for a green card, and was forcibly deported to the West Bank in Palestine. Silmi appealed her own deportation order under the Violence Against Women Act, a law with a provision to help battered women like herself to stay in the country; a judge denied her appeal. She says, as she packs her bags to leave, that she is unsure whether or not to grant custody of her children to her sister. "she's not their mother. My children need their mother." (Chicago Tribune)

February 5: Tony Blair admits he didn't know that the claim that Iraq could launch a biological or chemical weapons strike within 45 minutes referred strictly to battlefield weapons that would be used in battle against another army -- a much different story than Blair's claim that Iraq could strike virtually anywhere in the world with only 45 minutes notice. He admits he led the crucial parliamentary debate that approved the war in Iraq without knowing the full truth behind the government's claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. He is pressed in the Commons to spell out when he knew that the claim Iraq could launch a deadly attack with weapons of mass destruction within that period related only to battlefield weapons, rather than long-range missiles, saying, "I've already indicated exactly when this came to my attention; it wasn't before the debate on 18 March. ...When you say that a battlefield weapon would not be a weapon of mass destruction, if there were chemical or biological or nuclear battlefield weapons that most certainly would be held as a weapon of mass destruction and the idea that their use wouldn't threaten regional stability I find somewhat eccentric." He goes on to say that "The report from the Secret Intelligence Service [MI6] did not specify the specific delivery system to which the time of 45 minutes applied," a statement that contradicts testimony given to the Hutton investigation by Secretary of State Geoffrey Hoon. Hoon has already admitted that he knew the 45-minute claim was only for battlefield weapons, but did nothing to correct the misperception among media reports. Challenged to explain why Blair did not know the claim related to battlefield weapons, Hoon says: "The Prime Minister will speak for himself, but I make it clear that inevitably...in the details of government activity in the responsibilities I carry out are inevitably going to provide a great deal more detailed information than is available at all times."
An incredulous Michael Howard, the Tory leader, responds: "Is the Secretary of State seriously suggesting that he had this information but that he did not pass it on to the Prime Minister? Is that what he is telling the House this evening?" Critics of the war seized on Blair's comments. The former foreign secretary Robin Cook says: "I find it difficult to reconcile what I knew and what I'm sure the Prime Minister knew at the time we had the vote in March." The claim by weapons expert Brian Jones that the anxieties of intelligence officers about the dossier were overruled was repeatedly aired during the Parliament debate. Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, says: "The government made every conceivable effort to have a public presentation, in terms of the interpretation of that document, that clearly was designed to move people decidedly in one direction, and one direction only." Andrew Mackinlay, a Labour MP, urged parliamentary committees not to take the "soft option," saying, "It's our duty not to buckle under this. It seems to me that what we want are MPs who are still prepared to ignore the sign which says, 'no trespass, don't go here'." Bernard Jenkin, shadow defense secretary at the time of the war, says: "If we want the public to believe that published intelligence information is intelligence and not propaganda we've got to be able to answer the question: at what stage does intelligence become propaganda when it is in the hands of the spin doctors and the politicians?" Tam Dalyell, a Labour MP and critic of the war, says: "As Father of the House, in 41 years in the Commons, I thought I had heard it all. Not so. I have just heard Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon say from the despatch box 'Ask the Prime Minister'. I fear the awful truth is that Blair did jolly well know on March 18 that any weapons of mass destruction were battlefield weapons -- and suppressed the information from the House before the crucial vote." (Independent)
February 5: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite cleric, survives an assassination attempt Thursday when gunmen open fire on his entourage in Najaf. An attempt on the 73-year-old cleric's life is likely to spur anger among Iraq's long-oppressed Shi'a community as it seeks greater influence in Iraq. It was not immediately clear how many people were traveling with Sistani and if anyone in his entourage was hit. In recent weeks, Sistani has spoken out against US proposals for transferring power back to an Iraqi government by July 1, saying he wants direct elections to be held rather than the US plan for a system of indirect regional caucuses. Sistani's pronouncements carry enormous weight in Iraq and his opposition to the US power transfer plans has thrown into question whether sovereignty will be returned by the deadline. (ABC News)
February 5: Federal law enforcement officials have developed "hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct" by two senior aides to Vice President Dick Cheney in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. The two aides, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby, could be indicted for a variety of crimes. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law enforcement officer says. The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, says another one federal law enforcement official. (Insight, Capital Hill Blue)
February 5: The United States supports Pakistan's presidential pardon of Abdul Qadeer Khan, after Khan admitted he gave nuclear weapons technology to other countries such as Iran, Libya, and North Korea. The State Department says Pakistan's decision to pardon Khan was an internal Pakistani matter. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf says controls are now in place to stop such proliferation, and no one in his government was involved in the transfer of the technology. However, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohammad ElBaradei has called the Khan revelations "just the tip of the iceberg." ElBaradei is aware of individuals and companies in at least five other countries in Africa, Europe and Asia in the business of proliferating of nuclear technology. Former IAEA weapons inspector David Albright is urging the United States to put pressure on Pakistan to be more open with the agency. Albright, now president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), says the IAEA should be able to interview Khan and other Pakistan scientists involved in the counry's nuclear weapons program. He says it was likely that people higher up in the Pakistan government knew of Khan's activities. Khan's confession and subsequent pardon by Musharraf "may be necessary, but it's still a charade," Albright says. "There are so many questions unanswered," he says, such as exactly what technology was transferred, when it was transferred, and to whom. CIA director George Tenet says Khan's transfer of nuclear technology "was shaving years" off the time some countries needed to develop nuclear weapons. (CNN)
February 5: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testifies before the House Armed Service Committee, and insists that it was still too early to conclude that weapons of mass destruction would not be found in Iraq. He says that "there's work still to be done" in surveying Iraq's weapons programs, "and it is too soon to come to final conclusions." The hole in which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was found December 13 "was big enough to hold biological weapons to kill thousands" of people, Rumsfeld says. "such objects, once buried, can stay buried." Senator Edward Kennedy tells Rumsfeld that the conclusions given by weapons inspector David Kay represent "a devastating refutation of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq" that "seriously undermines our credibility in the world." Kennedy suggests that an investigative commission planned by President Bush "look hard and fast at not just what the intelligence was, but how it was manipulated" by administration policymakers. Kennedy and other Democrats on the Senate committee remind Rumsfeld of his words in September 2002, when he said "we know" where weapons of mass destruction are stored, even as a Defense Intelligence Agency report -— since declassified -— said that "there is no reliable information" on the production in Iraq of a chemical weapons stockpile. "How do you explain that?" asks Democrat Carl Levin. "What was the basis of the intel of those statements of certainty?" Rumsfeld acknowledges that he had made it sound as though he was talking about actual weapons. But he said he was referring to suspected weapons sites: "You're quite right; shorthand, 'We know where they are,' probably turned out not to be exactly what one would have preferred in retrospect." Rumsfeld answers Kennedy's questioning with a combative response: "You've twice or thrice mentioned manipulation. I haven't heard of it. I haven't seen any of it, except in the comments you've made." Several Republicans, including committee chairman John Warner, defend Rumsfeld and the Bush administration during the questioning. (Los Angeles Times, Washington Times)
February 5: CIA director George Tenet gives a speech at Georgetown University, where he insists that the CIA did not distort the evidence it gave the White House on Iraq's WMD programs, and the CIA had not gotten its analyses of those putative Iraqi WMD programs entirely wrong. (See earlier items for more specific details of Tenet's claims.) He concedes that the agency "may have overestimated" the progress Iraq was making towards a nuclear weapon (note that Iraq's nuclear program was completely moribund after the Gulf War), and notes that the October 2002 NIE had contained dissents related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program, though he fails to mention the CIA's WINPAC division and its aggressive promotion of the infamous aluminum tubes and the supposed Iraq-Niger uranium connection. Indirectly referring to the disastrous Curveball intelligence, Tenet admits that the CIA is now "finding discrepancies" in its information about Iraq's (nonexistent) mobile bioweapons labs, but as yet has been unable to "resolve the differences." (The day before, Tenet had been briefed that Curveball is now considered a complete liar, but Tenet refuses to accept that assessment.) He still insists that, given time, the US will find chemical weapons in Iraq.
Interestingly, he insists that the NIE had said Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but had never made the claim tha Iraq posed "an 'imminent' threat." Instead, he says, CIA analysts "painted an objective assessment...of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests." The NIE was "an estimate," he says, with no firm conclusions.
Tenet, already mired in a morass of self-serving half-truths and outright lies, now leaps into complete fantasy. He refers to "sensitive reports" coming from a source who "had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle" who insisted Hussein was "aggressively and covertly" developing nuclear weapons, "stockpiling chemical weapons," but only "dabbling" in biological weapons. The source, whom Tenet does not identify, is Iraq's former foreign minister, Naji Sabri. Sabri, as detailed in items above, had told CIA station chief Bill Murray that Hussein had nothing like the weapons capability the Bush administration insisted he had. Instead of being straight with his audience, Tenet thoroughly inflates and distorts Sabri's statements, an assessment later confirmed by the CIA's head of European operations, Tyler Drumheller.
Drumheller had handled Murray's reporting on Sabri, and had himself drafted several paragraphs on the Sabri operation for Tenet's speech. But Tenet and his speechwriters rewrote Drumheller's own words. Drumheller recalls that he had written a more precise account of what Sabri had actually told the CIA: that Hussein had talked about pursuing a nuclear weapons research program but was far from actually being able to get it going, and that he had given up developing chemical weapons, dispersing what was left of his arsenal to provincial political leaders. Charitably, Drumheller doesn't consider Tenet's words flat-out lies; instead, Drumheller merely says Tenet is "parsing the language" to "maintain some level of respectability. ...He was spinning."
Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "Tenet was implicitly saying, We did our job; if you don't like the results, talk to the White House. Tenet and [deputy CIA director John] McLaughlin may have even believed this. About the time of the speech, a senior CIA official subsequently recalled, 'McLaughlin said to me, "For the want of a few adverbs and adjectives we would have been fine." He said to me, "It's not an intelligence failure." I said to him, "What is it, a success?" He didn't have much of a response.'" (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
February 5: The US Supreme Court grants a request from the Bush administration to stop a lower court from communicating with a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The action underscored a temporary reprieve granted by a single justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, last week. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals was poised to notify the detainee of that court's ruling in December that Guantanamo prisoners should be allowed to see lawyers and have access to courts. The Supreme Court grants the government's request to put that ruling on hold, at least until the Bush administration files a full appeal in the case of detainee Falen Gherebi. Solicitor General Theodore Olson had asked the high court to block any developments in Gherebi's class-action lawsuit over treatment of the Guantanamo detainees. The case could be affected by the Supreme Court's ruling, expected later this year, in a separate case that asks whether Guantanamo detainees may contest their captivity in American courts. In asking the high court to step in, Olson argued that national security is at stake. Communication with the prisoner would "interfere with the military's efforts to obtain intelligence from Gherebi and other Guantanamo detainees related to the ongoing war against terrorism," Olson writes. (AP/Guardian)
February 5: The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, files a complaint against the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, accusing the campaign of breaking finance laws. CREW alleges that by accepting a master contact list of conservative activists in 37 states from Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, it broke a number of campaign laws. Norquist's group is a registered corporation; campaigns are prohibited from accepting contributions from corporations. According to FEC regulations, Bush-Cheney could not accept the list if it came directly from Americans for Tax Reform. CREW believes that Bush-Cheney may have also violated FEC filing requirements by failing to record the contribution of the list. Recently the FEC fined Attorney General John Ashcroft's unsuccessful 2000 senatorial campaign for a similar offense. "The public needs to know that no one, including the president of the United States, is above the law. F EC laws are clear and must be followed," says CREW's Melanie Sloan. "Mr. Norquist's contribution of the master contact list is very similar to Attorney General Ashcroft's problematic involvement with the contribution of a mailing list. The FEC has already found such a contribution to violate the law." If the FEC chooses to investigate, the process could take months. (Forbes)
February 5: A member of Senator Bill Frist's staff will resign this week, in an apparent attempt to mollify Democrats who insist that an investigation be held into the theft of Democratic strategy memos from secure computers by Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. The aide, Manuel Miranda, had spearheaded the Republican effort to push President Bush's judicial nominees through the Senate in the face of fierce Democratic opposition. Miranda agrees to resign under pressure from Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. Democrats have not agreed to scale back their demands for wide-ranging punishments following a full-blown leak inquiry. Republicans are still trying to refocus the story onto the content of the memos and away from the theft. "It's capitulation to the old Democratic trick that if you catch us with our hands dirty, we'll blame Republicans for dirty tricks," says a GOP aide, who ignores the fact that Republican staffers may have broken a number of laws in obtaining the documents. (The Hill)
February 5: Ron Suskind, author of the book The Price of Loyalty, is beginning the massive undertaking of posting a number of documents online proving the assertions he and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill make about the Bush administration. While the documents are likely to be too technical for mass consumption, the ones already posted prove just how much of a sham Bush's economic policies are, as based on statements from, among others, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Other documents show the desperate attempts former EPA chairwoman Christie Todd Whitman made to try to force the administration to regulate greenhouse gases -- attempts that would prove fruitless -- and other documents of interest to those interested in uncovering the perfidy of this administration. (Slate, Ron Suskind)
February 5: Veteran writer and former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal says bluntly, "There was no failure of intelligence" concerning Iraq. "The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden and suppressed. ...Precisely because of the qualms the administration encountered, it created a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, located within the Pentagon and under the control of neo-conservatives. The OSP roamed outside the ordinary inter-agency process, stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding them to the president. At the same time, constant pressure was applied to the intelligence agencies to force their compliance. In one case, a senior intelligence officer who refused to buckle under was removed."
The intelligence officer, "Bruce Hardcastle, was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons program and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle 'told [the Bush administration] that the way they were handling evidence was wrong.' The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle from his post: 'They did away with his job,' Lang says. 'They wanted only liaison officers...not a senior intelligence person who argued with them.' When the state department's bureau of intelligence and research (INR) submitted reports which did not support the administration's case -- saying, for example, that the aluminum tubes Saddam possessed were for conventional rocketry, not nuclear weapons (a report corroborated by department of energy analysts), or that mobile laboratories were not for WMDs, or that the story about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was bogus, or that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaeda (a report backed by the CIA) -- its analyses were shunted aside. Greg Thielman, chief of the INR at the time, told me: 'Everyone in the intelligence community knew that the White House couldn't care less about any information suggesting that there were no WMDs or that the UN inspectors were very effective.'"
When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the Saddam/al-Qaida connection, its reports were ignored and direct pressure applied. In October 2002, the White House inserted mention of the uranium into a speech Bush was to deliver, but the CIA objected and it was excised. Three months later, it reappeared in his state of the union address. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed never to have seen the original CIA memo and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley said he had forgotten about it. Never before had any senior White House official physically intruded into CIA's Langley headquarters to argue with mid-level managers and analysts about unfinished work. But twice Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, came to offer their opinions. According to Patrick Lang: 'They looked disapproving, questioned the reports and left an impression of what you're supposed to do. They would say: "you haven't looked at the evidence." The answer would be, those reports [from Iraqi exiles] aren't valid. The analysts would be told, you should look at this again. Finally, people gave up. You learn not to contradict them.' Similar pressures were brought to bear by, among others, Condoleezza Rice and defense consultant Newt Gingrich. As for CIA director Tenet, instead of standing up for his analysts, he folded, choosing to support the administration's conclusions even when he knew his agency couldn't support them. Congress was given a 90-page intelligence estimate at the beginning of its debate over supporting the war; over 40 caveats had been removed from the original document before Congressional members read it. Tenet also remained silent about the existence of Rumsfeld's OSP. "That's totally unacceptable for a CIA director," says Thielman.
Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous February 5, 2003 speech to the UN was another example of falsehoods and misrepresentations being passed off as truth. "Cheney and Libby had tried to inject material from Iraqi exiles and the OSP into his presentation, but Powell rejected most of it," Blumenthal writes. "Yet, for the most important speech of his career, he refused to allow the presence of any analysts from his own intelligence agency. 'He didn't have anyone from INR near him,' said Thielman. 'Powell wanted to sell a rotten fish. He had decided there was no way to avoid war. His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as we could scrape up.' Powell ignored INR analysts' comments on his speech. Almost every piece of evidence he unveiled turned out later to be false." Blumenthal finds it fascinating that Powell is now changing his tune somewhat on the existence of WMDs and the war in general. "Powell offered a limited mea culpa at a meeting at the Washington Post, Blumenthal notes. "He said that if only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an invasion. Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to distance himself from other members of the administration and especially Cheney. Powell also defended his UN speech, claiming 'it reflected the best judgments of all of the intelligence agencies.' Powell is sensitive to the slightest political winds, especially if they might affect his reputation. If he is a bellwether, will it soon be that every man must save himself?" (Guardian)
February 5: Renowned feminist and abortion rights proponent Gloria Steinem tells Buzzflash that if George W. Bush is re-elected in 2004, "abortion will be criminalized." "To my knowledge, there has never been an administration that has been more hostile to women's equality [than the Bush administration], to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right, and has acted on that hostility. They certainly have pursued abstinence-only sex education programs and gutted and gotten rid of comprehensive sex education. They've pursued the gag rule that uses US foreign aid to suppress reproductive information, and that has literally endangered and damaged the lives of millions of women in poor countries. And they've suppressed AIDS information and emergency contraception. In addition to their clear drive to criminalize abortion, there has been no opportunity of which I'm aware that they have not taken to restrict women's rights and to oppose reproductive freedom. ...If he is elected in 2004, abortion will be criminalized in this country. We will continue to injure and kill millions of women in other countries by the gag rule and the withdrawal of funds for family planning, for AIDS education. And we will endanger many other advances we take for granted -- Title IX and so on. If Bush is elected, it will only breed disrespect for the government because it will put a right-wing extremist regime in a position to make decisions in our lives -- decisions with which the majority doesn't agree. And I fear that fewer and fewer people will vote. We'll become more and more disillusioned with the government, and the very idea of democracy -- the fact of democracy -- will be damaged. It's a truism to say democracy can't exist without feminism, because obviously democracy, if it means anything, means equal rights for all citizens. But feminism is part of it. The whole question of majority rule is threatened when so few people vote with so little knowledge of the issues that we get an unrepresentative, extremist government like we have now."
Steinem believes that the administration's opposition to abortion rises out of the right wing's patriarchal approach to leadership, where white males dispense judgment and laws: "a bunch of middle-aged white men making a decision about choice and celebrating a choice-restriction bill without any women around," says the Buzzflash interviewer. Steinem notes, "[I]t's important to say that this isn't based in biology -- it's based in politics. There are many white males who feel very differently. But the idea that one should have a position of power because of one's condition of birth is the problem, and that is what this kind of deep political system, the patriarchal system, is built on. ...I think the deep reasoning here...is to control women's bodies as the most fundamental means of production. Because unless you control that process, you can't make the decisions about how many workers a country needs, how many soldiers, what races should reproduce more than others. The ability to control reproduction is one of the two pillars of nationalism. The other is the ability to control territory. I think this goes very deep and really does not have that much to do with religion. If you look at the religious groups in this country, most of them support reproductive freedom. The cloaking of political imperatives in religious language is the problem." About the patriarchy of religious conservatives reflected in the current administration, she says, "[T]hey are trying to cite unproveable arguments -- arguments that take place in heaven and life after death -- as reasons why we should obey them now. These literally are the type of people that the Europeans who founded America came here to escape." The interview notes the "common wisdom" that the Bush administration intends to wait until after the 2004 election, when they intend to present cases designed to overturn the seminal abortion rights case Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court, where they will be upheld 5-4. (Buzzflash)
February 5: Democratic candidate Howard Dean, whose former frontrunner status has evaporated due to strong showings by fellow candidates John Kerry, John Edwards, and Wesley Clark, says he will drop out of the race if he doesn't win the Wisconsin primary. Wisconsin's primary is February 17; Dean's campaign is mounting an all-out push to win in that state. Dean's campaign suffers another blow when eminent former Democratic senator George Mitchell endorses Kerry. Kerry is running a national campaign, while Clark and Edwards are focusing primarily on Southern states. (San Francisco Chronicle)
February 5: Some Utah Republicans show the viciousness often associated with their party in a rally sponsored by a Salt Lake chapter of the College Republicans. The audience giggled over a call for support of "the Democrat killers," but the kicker comes during a speech in support of congressional candidate Tim Bridgewater. The speaker, Mike Clement, speaks excitedly about Republican successes when College Republicans work hard, citing the victory of Norm Coleman in the 2002 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota; as Clement bantered with the crowd, one Republican alongside of Clement notes that they defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale in that race, adding: "We had to kill off Wellstone to get it." He is referring to the death in a plane crash of Senator Paul Wellstone and his family before the election. The crowd laughs appreciatively. Later Clement, along with acting club chairwoman Danielle Fowles, claim they did not hear that comment and believe the laughter was just a continuation of the ongoing banter. (Salt Lake Tribune)
February 5: A poll by the Canadian magazine MacLean's indicates that only 15% of Canadians would vote for George W. Bush if they were eligible to vote in US elections. The same poll indicates only 12% feel Canada is better off since he took office; an earlier poll showed that 75% of Canadians oppose sending Canadian troops to Iraq. Admittedly, Canada tends to be a little leftward both politically and socially of the US, but the antipathy runs deeper than that. "But where Ronald Reagan and Bush the elder were at least grudgingly respected, Dubya is decidedly not. Despite a spate of polls showing a broad desire for improved relations with the United States after the often rocky Chrétien years, there is a sense that this administration isn't one we want to do business with. 'These numbers really show the difficulty for Paul Martin,' says [Mike] Marzolini, the long-time pollster for the federal Liberal party. 'He has to get closer to the Americans, but he can't get too close to George Bush. It's a fine balance.' The intense sympathy Canadians felt following the attacks of 9/11 -- something that manifested itself not just in acts of mourning and charity, but in a willingness to support whatever actions the US deemed necessary -- has dissipated. In its place is a deep dislike of the bellicose new global reality, and a lingering distrust of Bush's motives." A Dutch doctor notes that opinions of the President are often even harsher abroad. "In Amsterdam," she says, "we think he is kind of stupid." (MacLean's)

Bush names commission to investigate Iraqi intelligence failures, chaired by one of architects of Arkansas Project smear campaign

February 6: Under intense pressure, President Bush agrees to name a bipartisan commission to investigate the intelligence failures that led up to the war against Iraq. "We're also determined to make sure that American intelligence is as accurate as possible for every challenge in the future," Bush says. He, in conjunction with Vice President Cheney, names four Republicans and three Democrats to the commission, and will name two more later. Bush says the panel would "examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction" and other threats, and issue recommendations. The report is due by March 31, 2005, well after the November presidential election. The commission will be co-chaired by Laurence Silberman, a judge and far-right Republican activist, and former Democratic senator Charles Robb, a conservative considered quite reliable by other Republicans. Other members include Lloyd Cutler, who served as White House counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton; Republican senator John McCain; former appellate court judge Pat Wald, a Democrat; Rick Levin, president of Yale University and board member of Lucent, the Hewlett Foundation (a huge investor in numerous oil companies), and Satmetrix; and retired Admiral Bill Studeman, a former deputy director of the CIA under Bush's father and a senior official of Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor. Silberman is a former member of the Reagan and Bush administrations, and achieved notoriety when he was revealed as an active and influential behind-the-scenes participant in the Arkansas Project, the huge smear campaign launched in the mid-1990s to hoke up fraudulent scandals against former president Bill Clinton and his administration, and which culminated in impeachment proceedings against that president. Silberman also played key roles in the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Paula Jones lawsuit.
Silberman is originally chosen by Dick Cheney. A senior judge for the US Court of Appeals in Washington who works part-time, Silberman is prepared to resign from the bench, but Cheney secures an opinion from White House chief counsel Alberto Gonzales that says a senior judge isn't required to resign if he takes a presidential appointment. Bush asks former Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley to take the co-chairmanship; Foley initially agrees, but reconsiders after hearing from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats, who argue that the commission is nothing more than a means to provide cover for Bush. The commission will not have the independence or credibility it would need to carry out a thorough and non-partisan investigation, Pelosi writes days later, in a letter signed by herself and two senior Senate Democrats, Jay Rockefeller and Tom Daschle, the minority leader. It certainly will not have the gumption to investigate either Bush or Cheney's own statements and actions. Silberman says that he needs a Democratic co-chair to give the commission the appearance of bipartisanship; Bush agrees, and after a brainstorming session between Bush, Silberman, Cheney, and chief of staff Andrew Card, Charles Robb's name surfaces. Robb, a former senator and governor of Virginia, had supported the 1991 Gulf War and had criticized Clinton's decision to rule out using ground troops in Kosovo in 1999. Robb agrees to serve. Silberman wants a single liberal Democrat on the commission to give it the appearance of covering the political spectrum, so he selects Wald. Though he disagrees with Wald on just about everything, Silberman says, he has great respect for her. Bush political advisor Karl Rove is dismayed at the selection of Wald. "Don't you remember, Mr. President?" he says jokingly, "Back in the antediluvian age, she was a Commie."
For his part, Bush wants the commission to head off any Congressional investigation which might resemble the Church and Pike committees after Watergate in 1975 and 1976 that exposed tremendous levels of malfeasance, incompetence, and criminality at the CIA and NSA, including illegal spying on American citizens, and illicit assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other national leaders. For their part, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate want to model the commission along the same lines as the 9/11 commission, with the president and Congress each appointing half the membership. Bush was having none of that. Instead, he announces the signing of an executive order appointing nine hand-picked members, including Silberman and Robb, to the commission. The commission will have broad authority to look at not just Iraq WMD intelligence, he says, but to study WMD intelligence worldwide and to take a look at all US intelligence capabilities and organizations. The commission will issue its report by March 31, 2005 -- five months after the presidential elections.
Silberman later says he never would have accepted the position if he had been mandated to investigate either Bush or Cheney. "It was clear and understood that we would not be asked to evaluate the administration's use of the intelligence," he recalls. "And frankly, if that had been the charge, I wouldn't have wanted the position. It was too political. Everybody knew what the president and vice president had said about the intelligence. They can make their own judgment as to whether that was appropriate or fair or whatever." Such ethical caveats are fascinating coming from the man who had supervised the manufacture of false evidence against the previous president in an attempt to force impeachment hearings. Veteran House Democrat Henry Waxman says that the commission "had been told to ignore the elephant in the middle of the room, which is how the intelligence was used and misused by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other senior administration officials." Senator Harry Reid, the number two Democrat, says simply that the commission is designed "to protect the president."
Pelosi dismisses the commission as "wholly owned by the executive branch. ...To have a commission appointed exclusively by President Bush investigate his administration's intelligence failures in Iraq does not inspire confidence in its independence," says Pelosi. McCain, widely perceived as a "maverick" Republican in spite of his strong support for the invasion, says he agreed to serve on a commission because he believes it is important to explore how intelligence is being gathered and interpreted, saying there were clearly "failures" on Iraq. "We need an assessment of the capabilities of the United States of America to gather intelligence in order that the president...may make the most difficult decisions that a president has to make," says McCain. "That process is under severe criticism and scrutiny in some quarters." He is confident that politics can be kept out of the investigations. Several former intelligence officials say that the commission must investigate secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Cheney and Pentagon neoconservatives if it truly wants to find out why the intelligence estimates of Iraqi WMDs were so inaccurate. They fear that Bush, gearing up his fight for re-election, will try to limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies, and ignore the key role the administration's own internal intelligence efforts played in making the case for war. Speaking anonymously, the officials don't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they say that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions. Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaeda and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies. "There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence...that are worth scrutiny, including the Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president," says one former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion.
Some of the disputed findings were presented as facts to Americans as Bush drummed up his case for war. Those findings included charges of cooperation between Saddam and al Qaida, Cheney's assertion that Iraq had rebuilt its nuclear weapons program and would "soon" have a nuclear bomb, and Bush's contention in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam was seeking nuclear bomb-making material from Africa. Senior officials recently revealed new details of how Cheney's office pressed Secretary of State Colin Powell to use large amounts of disputed intelligence in a February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council laying out the US case for an invasion. A senior administration official said that during a three-day pre-speech review, Powell rejected more than half of a 45-page assessment on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction compiled by Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and based on materials assembled by pro-invasion hard-liners in the Pentagon and the White House. Powell also jettisoned 75 percent of a separate report on al-Qaeda, says the official. Still, he says, Libby continued pressing Powell unsuccessfully right up until a few minutes before the speech to include fabricated or false information purportedly linking Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. (CNN, CNN, Knight Ridder, Buzzflash, Bob Woodward)
February 6: Israeli police question Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at his home about corruption allegations after the indictment of a businessman on charges of attempting to bribe him. The commander of the International Investigations Unit, Yohanan Danino, leads the questioning in connection with the so-called Greek Island affair, according to police spokesman Gil Kleiman. Sharon was last interrogated in October, but this session comes after the indictment last month of property developer David Appel on charges of trying to bribe Sharon when he was foreign minister. (Agence France-Press/Melbourne Herald-Sun)
February 6: The House Ethics Committee opens an inquiry into bribery and coercion allegations surrounding the November 2003 Medicare bill. The bill passed the House, but one Republican, Nick Smith, says he was both threatened and offered a bribe to vote "yes" on the bill; Smith refuses to say who made the threat, but speculation centers on Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The committee calls it an "informal fact-finding" and not an official investigation. (Washington Post)
February 6: The Associated Press learns that President Bush requested that an $8.2 million research program on how to decontaminate buildings attacked by toxins be terminated, on the same day a poison-laced letter closed Senate offices. "It is a stunning example of the budget choices this administration has made, where tax cuts for elites are more important than public health or adequate homeland security," says Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. In October 2001, Daschle received an anthrax-laden letter while he held Frist's position. The Environmental Protection Agency says that losing the research money would "force it to disband the technical and engineering expertise that will be needed to address known and emerging biological and chemical threats in the future." (AP/Guardian)
February 6: Manuel Miranda, the aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist who was forced to resign amid an investigation into the theft of Democratic strategy documents that were subsequently leaked to the media, files a Senate ethics complaint against the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee alleging "public corruption." In a letter to Robert Walker, the Senate Ethics Committee's chief counsel, Miranda writes that the memos show "a violation of the public trust in the judicial confirmation process on the part of Democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee. ...This includes evidence of the direct influencing of the Senate's advice and consent role by the promise of campaign funding and election support in the last midterm election." Miranda formally resigned his post in Frist's office on Friday. He had been on administrative leave pending the result of an investigation into whether Republican staffers violated any laws or Senate rules in obtaining the memos. In his letter to the committee, Miranda writes that the Democratic memos contain "documents evidencing public corruption by elected officials and staff of the United States Senate." David Carle, spokesman for Senator Patrick Leahy, the committee's ranking Democrat, says there is a "whiff of desperation" in the letter from Miranda, whom he describes as "someone who has just resigned in the midst of an investigation about theft and wrongdoing. ..."There also is no small irony in his accusations, considering that his very job was to plot strategy with outside, right-wing Republican groups," he notes. No one else has accused the Democrats of breaking any ethics constraints or laws with the material documented in the stolen memos; on the other hand, Miranda may well face formal ethics complaints and even criminal charges. Miranda has been shown to have leaked sensitive Democratic information to conservative media outlets such as the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and columnist Robert Novak. The information has been used to prepare some of Bush's judicial nominees for congressional hearings. (AP/Excite! News, Mark Crispin Miller)
February 6: New allegations of impropriety are circulating about the hunting trip to Louisiana by Vice President Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, with the revelation that Cheney and Scalia flew to Louisiana at taxpayer expense aboard Air Force Two. Cheney is a defendant in a case currently before the Supreme Court over his refusal to grant access to records regarding his energy task force. Justices regularly withdraw from cases where a conflict of interest is perceived, but in this case, Scalia has declined to do so, saying: "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned. ...Social contacts with high-level executive officials (including cabinet officers) have never been thought improper for judges who may have before them cases in which those people are involved in their official capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity," he says. Bill Allison of the Center of Public Integrity says, "It does raise the level of closeness a little bit higher. ...It makes it seem more like Cheney was courting Scalia." (Los Angeles Times/BBC)
February 6: Former Vice President Al Gore accuses President Bush of abusing the trust of Americans by playing on their fears as he led the United States to war against Iraq. Gore says that Bush's decision to enter into a war with Iraq was taken under "patently false pretenses." He continues, "Fear was activated on Sept. 11 for all of us. And it was exploitable for a variety of purposes unrelated to the initial cause of fear." Gore says the Bush administration had no scruples about using fear of terrorists as a means "to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution, to create a class of permanent prisons and to make it possible to imprison American citizens without due process." On international relations, Gore notes that "the administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear." The normal debate over policy that takes place in a healthy democracy was muted after Sept. 11, he says. "At a time of great vulnerability we placed our trust in President Bush. ...[I]n the aftermath of the tragedy, I said 'George W. Bush is my president. I will follow him in this time of crisis.' I was one of millions who asked him to lead us wisely and well, and he abused the trust of the people by exploiting the fears of the American people in order to take this nation on an adventure that had been preordained before the attacks of Sept. 11 ever took place." (Reuters)
February 6: Bush's new faith-based advisor, Lou Sheldon, is an extremist religious radical; it is clear that Bush is bringing Sheldon into the administration at least in part to shore up his support with the extreme religious right. Sheldon has referred to gays as "dark forces" who want to destroy "faith and families." He advocates the forcible quarantining of AIDS victims in concentration camps. He supports violent anti-abortion groups like Operation Rescue. And in the wake of 9/11, he advocated denying gay victims relief funds. He once wrote that "gays and lesbians live perverted, twisted lives that feed upon the unsuspecting and the innocent." Sheldon, an Orange County, California, minister, has a long and checkered history of political involvement. In 1978, he joined anti-gay activist Anita Bryant in attempting to purge the California school system of gay teachers, a referendum denounced by liberals and conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, whose criticism of Sheldon and his referendum helped defeat it. In 1994, he caused a scandal when his supposedly nonpartisan charity took $47,000 from the California GOP to churn out voter guides; the scandal hit the media only after Sheldon helped the GOP win valuable seats in the state legislature. Now Sheldon is standing shoulder to shoulder with the president as Bush signs a bill outlawing partial-birth abortion. More is undoubtedly to come. (In These Times)
February 6: Geneva Overholser, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, former editor of the Des Moines Register, ombudsman of the Washington Post, and member of the New York Times editorial board, writes that it is time for Robert Novak to reveal his sources in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. She writes: "As a piece of journalism, the Novak column raises disturbing ethical questions. He apparently turned a time-honored use of confidentiality -— protecting a whistleblower from government retribution -— on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead. Worse, he enabled his sources to illegally divulge intelligence information. Now Mr. Novak may be called to testify before the grand jury. To most in the press, this signals an immediate duty: stand shoulder to shoulder beside a colleague. But before we all jump to his defense, there are two questions journalists should consider: one about what should not happen in the courtroom, the other about what should not happen in the newspaper. Yes, it is in the public interest to protect journalists from being required to name their sources in the courtroom. But it is also in the public interest for journalists to speak out against ethical lapses in their craft. Far from undermining the principle of confidentiality, our acknowledgment that protecting sources can be used for ill as well as for good can bolster it, reassuring a public that often wonders who is watching the watchdog. In this case, then, journalists should call upon Mr. Novak to acknowledge his abuse of confidentiality and reveal his sources himself -— thereby keeping the control of confidentiality in journalistic hands rather than in those of the legal system. Mr. Novak has in the past shown a willingness to identify sources who turn out to be lawbreakers: three years ago he revealed that he had taken information from Robert Hanssen, the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for the Soviet Union. He needed to divulge his connection to Mr. Hanssen, he wrote, 'in order to be honest to my readers.' The same ethic holds true in this case. And any journalists who step out of line to call for such an accounting in the Novak-Wilson affair would be protecting both the principle of confidentiality and the practice of journalism in the public interest." (New York Times)
February 6: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld slams the Arab TV news network Al-Jazeera for bias and overt anti-American content. "We are being hurt by al-Jazeera in the Arab world," he says. "There is no question about it. The quality of the journalism is outrageous -- inexcusably biased -- and there is nothing you can do about it except try to counteract it." He says it was turning Arabs against the United States. "You could say it causes the loss of life," he adds. "It's causing Iraqi people to be killed" by enflaming anti-American passions and encouraging attacks against Iraqis who assist the Americans, he claims. (Chicago Tribune)
February 6: Former presidential candidate Richard Gephardt, a favorite of politically powerful labor unions, endorses frontrunner John Kerry for the Democratic presidential nomination. "To beat George Bush, we need a leader who can go toe-to-toe with George Bush in these difficult, dangerous times on national security, toe-to-toe," he says at a Kerry rally. "We need a leader who can defeat George Bush in November in the general election, and we need a leader who we all know can walk into that Oval Office tomorrow afternoon and be a great president of the United States. That leader is John Kerry, and I'm proud to endorse him to be the president of the United States of America." (CNN)

Aussie troops told before war that no WMDs existed

February 7: Australian troops fighting in Iraq were told in an official briefing days before entering the country that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to launch weapons of mass destruction against its neighbors. Roger Hill, Australia's most experienced weapons inspector, says that he briefed Australian troops that, while Iraq possessed the remnants of weapons of mass destruction, its ability to use them on the battlefield was "almost zero." Hill says, "There is no question Iraq possessed materials, documents and possibly products. But it did not have the ability to conduct attacks on its near or regional neighbors. I told our troops that. I also told people in the other coalition forces. But I was a lone voice." While Hill was telling the troops one thing, Prime Minister John Howard was telling the country another. In March 2003, shortly before the war, Howard told Parliament: "We are determined to join other countries to deprive Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, its chemical and biological weapons, which even in minute quantities are capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale." Hill says that Australia should have had a closer look at the intelligence information it had received before committing troops to the US-led invasion. (The Age)
February 7: The New York Times learns that the Bush administration used information provided by an Iraqi defector labeled as unreliable by the DIA for critical portions of its assessment of Iraqi WMDs. A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the DIA to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information. Because the warning went unheeded, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles. Intelligence officers from the DIA interviewed the defector twice in early 2002 and circulated reports based on those debriefings. They concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to American intelligence. Nevertheless, because of what intelligence officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February as having provided "eyewitness accounts" about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources. The intelligence about the mobile facilities was central to the prewar conclusion that Iraq was producing biological arms. No such arms or production facilities have been found in Iraq since the war, and David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, has said he believes that Iraq never produced large stockpiles of the weapons during the 1990's. "He was either making it up or he heard somebody else talking about it," one intelligence official says of the information the defector had provided, "but he didn't know what he was talking about." The official said the notification circulated by the DIA had advised other agencies "that the information that this guy provided was unreliable." (New York Times)
February 7: A federal judge orders Drake University to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists, the first such successful subpoena of its kind since the communist-hunting rulings of the 1950s. Additionally, subpoenas were served on four of the activists who attended a November 15 forum at the university, ordering them to appear before a grand jury on February 10. The subpoena orders Drake to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum. The NLG will ask a judge to block the subpoenas. "The law is clear that the use of the grand jury to investigate protected political activities or to intimidate protesters exceeds its authority," says guild President Michael Ayers. Representatives of the Lawyer's Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union said they had not heard of such a subpoena being served on any US university in decades. Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq in 2002. They say the subpoenas are intended to stifle dissent. "This is exactly what people feared would happen," says Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on." The forum, titled "stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" came the day before 12 protesters were arrested at an anti-war rally at Iowa National Guard headquarters in Johnston. Organizers say the forum included nonviolence training for people planning to demonstrate. The targets of the subpoenas believe investigators are trying to link them to an incident that occurred during the rally. A Grinnell College librarian was charged with misdemeanor assault on a peace officer; she has pleaded innocent, saying she simply went limp and resisted arrest. Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, says he had not heard of any similar case of a US university being subpoenaed for such records. He said the case brings back fears of the "red squads" of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters. The Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, "all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting, and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting." It also asks for campus security records "reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting." Several officials of Drake, a private university with about 5,000 students, refused to comment. A source with knowledge of the investigation says a judge had issued a gag order forbidding them from discussing the subpoena. (AP/Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
February 7: Frontrunner John Kerry says he won't back down from Republican smear attacks on his candidacy and his character. "They're extreme. We're mainstream, and we're going to stand up and fight back," he says. "This week, George Bush and the Republican smear machine have trotted out the same old tired lines of attack that they've used before to divide this nation and to evade the real issues before us. Well, I have news for George Bush, Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie and the rest of their gang: I have fought for my country my whole life. I'm not going to back down now." Gillespie, head of the Republican Party, has borrowed from the 1988 campaign strategy that defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis to label Kerry a Massachusetts liberal with a "long record in the Senate is one of advocating policies that would weaken our national security." Kerry counters, "This is one Democrat who's going to fight back, and I've only just begun to fight. George Bush, who speaks of strength, has made America weaker -- weaker economically, weaker in health care and education. And the truth is George Bush has made us weaker militarily by overextending our forces, overstraining our reserves, and driving away our allies." Earlier, Kerry said he'll campaign against Bush in the South, dismissing Republican assertions that he is too liberal and out of touch to win in southern states. "This administration is busy trying to paint everybody else as out of touch, out of synch, somehow out of the mainstream,'' Kerry said at a Nashville university. "But let me tell you something: I'm not worried about coming down South and talking to people about jobs, schools, health care and the environment. I think it's [the president] who ought to worry about coming down here." Kerry, a Navy veteran,regularly tells crowds of supporters, "We all saw George Bush play dress-up on an aircraft carrier. Well, I know something about aircraft carriers for real. And if George W. Bush wants to make national security the central issue in this campaign, I have three words for him I know he understands: Bring it on." (AP/Guardian)
February 7: A rather disparaging piece on the Democratic Underground Web site compares the mythical "G. Walker Bush, Texas Ranger" tough-guy character with the reality of "George W. Bush." Writer David Sirota makes the following comparisons: "[W]hile the made-for-TV "G. Walker Bush, Texas Ranger" might make us feel safe and secure, the real George W. Bush should not. On the economy, G. Walker Bush the character plays the up-from-the-bootstraps Marlboro Man, a guy who spends his free time in blue jeans moseying on his ranch and thinking about how he can help average folk. The real President George W. Bush grew up wealthy, worked his family's connections to get ahead, calls his palatial mansion a "ranch," and thinks ordering around his landscaping servants for five minutes means he's "clearing brush" on the frontier. "He is, as his wife calls him, a true 'windshield cowboy,' a man who thinks he's a real wrangler simply because he drives a luxury pickup truck, wears boots with spurs, dons an engraved brass belt buckle, and once saw a double feature of City Slickers and City Slickers 2. This Bush -- the elitist under the 10-gallon hat -- is the one really making economic policy. He is the one who gave people making $1 million an average tax cut of more than $22,000, while giving people making $22,000 about $13. Similarly, on the War on Terror, G. Walker Bush is the blunt-talking Texas loner, gutsy enough to tell terrorists to 'bring on' the attacks, as if he will face them himself. But President George W. Bush will face none of the consequences of such saber rattling. His declarations may fire up supporters who want a Dirty Harry in the White House, but he will be the last to bear the brunt of the increasingly lethal attacks Iraqi insurgents have directed at US troops since his taunts.
"On military issues, G. Walker Bush is the compassionate wartime leader who bravely delivered a Thanksgiving dinner to troops in Baghdad and praised them for their service. President George W. Bush actually held up a fake turkey and used troops as a prop in a photo-op. President George W. Bush has yet to punish his pals at Halliburton for repeatedly feeding these soldiers unsanitary food, and has 'thanked' soldiers by refusing to provide them with adequate body armor. On Iraq, G. Walker Bush is the fearless naval aviator, borrowing a flight suit for a courageous appearance on an aircraft carrier, to declare 'Mission Accomplished' and America secure. President George W. Bush is the man who skipped his National Guard service during Vietnam, and who now appears so disinterested in the human toll of war that he refuses to appear at any funeral for the fallen. The real man has no explanation why nine months after putting on the Top Gun costume and saying the war was over, 500 soldiers are dead, $166 billion has been spent, and the US Army now says the entire Iraq endeavor 'diverted attention and resources away' from defending against more pressing terrorist threats. So with Bush's growing resume of acting experience, it is not surprising that we will be treated to a grand finale of political theater come election 2004.
"This time, we will see G. Walker Bush at his finest, playing up his national security machismo while playing down the economy -- all while President George W. Bush works behind the scenes. The State of the Union address provided the preview: G. Walker Bush was the tough-on-terrorism sheriff. As the New York Times noted, the Texas Ranger 'held himself out as the candidate who can best protect the nation from the evils of a post-9/11 world.' His speech 'was a remarkably candid acknowledgment of how much he intends to exploit the political value of his posture as the only effective warrior in the war against terror,' said Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy. And the swagger sure made for good TV -- it tapped into the same desire for strength that still garners a wide audience for John Wayne reruns. The problem is that President George W. Bush is pushing tax cuts while refusing to provide what's necessary to protect the homefront. While G. Walker Bush bragged that 'my 2005 budget has got $30 billion in there for homeland security,' President George W. Bush's budget proposes to provide $66 billion in new breaks to his friends who earn a million dollars or more per year. All this while the experts say his homeland security budget is dangerously inadequate. That's right: while G. Walker Bush said he pledged 'to give our homeland security and law enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend us,' President George W. Bush proposes to allocate double the amount for millionaire tax cuts than for defending the country. Meanwhile, there will be only token reference to the economy, as new polls show 80% of Americans feel no benefit from President George W. Bush's tax cuts. Certainly, G. Walker Bush will say he is concerned about unemployment and wants more funding for job training, but President George W. Bush tried to slash more than $1 billion from job training programs, rejected efforts to raise the minimum wage, prevented eight million workers from receiving overtime pay, and yet is still pressing for $1 trillion in new tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy." (Democratic Underground)

Back to February 2004 | On to February 2004 Week Two

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

page title

subtitle

Ricin found in US Senate buildings

Bush budget exposed

Dems push for vote-buying investigation

Blair intelligence claims revealed to have no support in UK intelligence community

CIA backs off on intelligence claims

Bush names commission to investigate Iraqi intelligence failures, chaired by one of architects of Arkansas Project smear campaign

Aussie troops told before war that no WMDs existed

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