THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

February 2004, Week Two

Page Two

 

• February 12: A classified US intelligence study done three months before the war in Iraq predicted a problem now confronting the Bush administration: the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction might never be found. The study by a team of US intelligence analysts, military officers and civilian Pentagon officials warned that US military tactics, guerrilla warfare, looting and lying by Iraqi officials would undermine the search for banned Iraqi weapons. Portions of the study were released to the public today. Three high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials describe its purpose and conclusions. "Locating a program that...has been driven by denial and deception imperatives is no small task," says the December 2002 report. "Prolonged insecurity with factional violence and guerrilla forces still at large would be the worst outcome for finding Saddam's WMD arsenal." The report went to the National Security Council but was not specifically shown to President Bush, the officials say. The study findings diverge from statements by US officials that caches of banned weapons would be found. (USA Today)
• February 12: Bush names the last two members to the commission investigating intelligence failures and misdirections regarding Iraq. One of the new members, Henry Rowen of Stanford University, is a founding member of the neoconservative, pro-war think tank Project for a New American Century. Rowen signed the 1996 letter to then-President Clinton advocating an invasion of Iraq. Rowen was an assistant defense secretary under the first President Bush from 1989 to 1991. The other new member, Charles Vest, is president of MIT. (AP/Las Vegas Sun)
• February 12: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence votes to expand its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq by probing whether Bush and other top administration officials exaggerated intelligence information to make a case for war, a move Republicans on the panel had resisted for months. The decision "illustrates the commitment of all members to a thorough review, to learning the necessary lessons from our experience with Iraq, and to ensuring that our armed forces and policymakers benefit from the best and most reliable intelligence that can be collected," says chairman Pat Roberts. Vice chairman Jay Rockefeller says in the same statement that the "agreement reflects a difficult and lengthy process, but in the end, we were able to reach consensus on the need to expand the investigation into several key areas." He was referring to the closed-door struggle between Republicans, who sought to keep the focus of the panel's inquiry on the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and Democrats, who wanted to add a thorough probe into administration actions leading up to the war. Republicans succeeded in limiting the probe of the administration to a review of public statements, reports and testimony given by administration officials. Democrats and others also accuse top administration officials of exaggerating the Iraqi threat and of dropping the qualifiers and caveats included in intelligence reports; it is unclear how much the commission will investigate these areas. The vote does not authorize the committee to use its subpoena power to probe whether Bush and his top officials relied on other, as yet undisclosed, intelligence when they made statements about Iraq's weapons -- a line of inquiry that Democrats had sought. "It's progress, but there's no reason why we shouldn't have a full inquiry," says senator Carl Levin. For the past eight months, the committee has been investigating the underlying judgments that went into the intelligence assessments on Iraq. That part of the probe is to be completed by the end of March. The new findings will be contained in a second report to be released months later. (Washington Post, Los Angeles Times/CommonDreams)
• February 12: The Bush administration is refusing to release 30 pages of President Bush's medical records, without giving an explanation. Communications director Dan Bartlett says there is "nothing unusual" in the records, but won't explain why they are not being released. Additionally, the administration says it has obtained Bush's complete records from the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, but again, those records are not being released. Information from the records that the White House did release shows that the single witness that has stepped forward to confirm that Bush did indeed serve his duty in Alabama, a Republican businessman named John Calhoun, is a liar. Calhoun says that Bush showed up for duty several times from May to October 1972. But the payment and retirement records the White House handed out three days earlier show that Bush received no pay or attendance credits from April until the end of October 1972. The Nation's David Corn writes, "Three decades is a long time, and perhaps Calhoun's memory is off on the dates. But Bush's inability to produce a witness prior until now and his unwillingness to provide any recollections of what he did when he served in Alabama (or what he did regarding the Guard when he returned to Houston) are reasons to be wary of late-in-the-game eyewitness testimony that is facilitated by an unnamed 'Republican close to Bush.' Would GOPers -- or a single GOPer -- concoct a fake alibi for Bush? Perhaps. As noted below, one former National Guard official charges that a Bush aide cleaned out portions of Bush's military records in 1997 -- an allegation denied by the White House. There may be a legitimate explanation for the contradictions between Calhoun's recollections and the documents. Could Bush have been showing up 'unofficially' at Dannelly Field? Was there a record-keeping screw-up regarding his request to do his time at that base? But given the dishonest spin the White House has resorted to in trying to defuse the AWOL controversy -- and given Bush's broken promise -- there is reason to be suspicious of any information that is selective, unconfirmed or contradicted. That is why that at this point Bush has only one honorable option: release the records." (The Nation)
• February 12: The Alabama dentist who performed dental work on National Guardsmen in 1973 does not recall George W. Bush ever being treated by him. The White House recently released dental records showing that Bush had a dental evaluation at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery on January 6, 1973. The records, which Bush officials say proves that Bush served in Alabama during his time as a National Guardsman, are intended to support Bush's account of his Air National Guard service in Alabama. Unfortunately for Bush, a number of members of the Montgomery unit say they never served with Bush at their Montgomery base. Dr. John Harris, the dentist, says that although he doesn't recall Bush specifically, that doesn't mean he wasn't at the airbase. "I don't remember seeing him. That does not mean he was not there," says Wayne Rambo, who was a first lieutenant with the 187th Supply Squadron at the time. Over a dozen former members of the unit have been contacted by the media; none recall ever seeing Bush. (AP/Guardian)
• February 12: White House press secretary Scott McClellan loses his temper with the grande dame of Washington journalism, Helen Thomas, when, during a private meeting between McClellan and several reporters, Thomas asks if George W. Bush might have missed his guard duty in Alabama because of having to perform community service in Texas. Rumors have long hinted that Bush may have been convicted of possession of cocaine in Texas, and had to perform community service as a result. While Bush has admitted to performing the service, he nor his officials have ever commented on why he performed community service. According to reporters in the press room, McClellan gets red-faced and becomes so angry, it looks to some as if he were ready to pounce. He calls Thomas's question "gutter politics." Thomas, who has covered every president since Dwight Eisenhower and now writes a column for Hearst, maintained her calm. "I think they are getting pretty nervous about this," she says later that afternoon. "I've learned over the years that when you put out records, it often leads to more questions." Some questions are out of bounds, McClellan insists. "Helen was asking about trashy rumors. There's a difference between trashy rumors and journalism. I will not dignify them from the podium." "Scott is trashing reporters for asking questions," says one veteran correspondent. "He's dissipating the goodwill he had for not being Ari Fleischer. He's proving to be as testy and disdainful as Ari." McClellan's job is even harder than most other administrations' press secretaries, according to veteran journalists, because the Bush White House has tried to control information and stay "on message" more than most administrations. "I think he's doing what they want him to do," says National Journal's Carl Cannon, president of the White House Correspondents' Association. "But no matter how much you want to stick to the party line, the job entails thinking on your feet. They don't want their guy thinking on his feet." CBS's Cokie Roberts notes, "We don't get our questions answered most of the time. He's toeing the party line quite ably." (Washingtonian)
• February 12: The Federal Election Commission is poised to restrict all political communication that "promotes, supports, attacks or opposes" any candidate for federal office must be paid for by "hard money" -- that is, by small-dollar donations. While the restriction sounds good on paper, in reality it will sharply restrict activities by liberal and Democratic organizations that are attempting to counter the huge monetary advantage enjoyed by Republican political campaigns, who have meticulously restructured their organizations to comply with the upcoming FEC ruling. The ruling, writes the Washington Post, "was drafted in response to a query from a Republican organization that really doesn't seem to be an organization at all, but rather a device to stop Democrats from registering voters and getting commercials on the air. The organization, whose existence hovers somewhere between virtual and non, is Americans for a Better Country (ABC). The one known activity of ABC, formed by three senior Republican operatives, is to have sent the FEC a query November 18 about the legality of a series of election-related actions ABC said it might undertake. The actions seem to have been derived entirely from press accounts of activities on which a number of new Democratic organizations -- dubbed '527s' after the section of the tax code they fall under -- had embarked.
• "The 527s took shape last year in response to the prohibitions that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law placed on political parties. The act forbade parties from using large 'soft money' donations for such activities as voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, and at the same time it doubled the amount that individuals are able to donate to political campaigns. Problem is, the Democrats were far more reliant on soft money than the Republicans. It was only through the largesse of unions and major contributors from show business and finance that Democrats have been able to bring new and sometime voters to the polls. In 1999, for instance, the Republican Party committees raised $156 million in hard and soft money combined, while the Democrats raised $110 million. In 2003, with soft money abolished in mid-year and the ceilings on hard money raised, the Republican total rose to $206 million (which does not include the $200 million that the Bush-Cheney campaign plans to have on hand within a few weeks), while the Democrats' total dwindled to $95 million. Accordingly, a number of Democratic operatives established 527s last year that were not linked to any party organizations but that sought to do the voter registration and other such activities that the party had previously undertaken. Already, these groups have registered hundreds of thousands of largely minority voters in such swing states as Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio. [FEC lawyer Lawrence] Norton's draft opinion contends that these activities, so long as they are funded by large contributions, must cease. However, the language of the opinion is so broad that hundreds of advocacy groups that do not engage in electoral politics -- in the parlance of the trade, 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s -- believe that their own ability to advocate for specific public policies is threatened. Indeed, 324 such organizations have sent a letter to the commission asking it 'with the greatest sense of urgency and in the strongest terms possible, not to issue the draft opinion in its present form.' They note that the opinion draws no distinction between 'attacking' a policy advanced by Congress or the administration and campaigning for or against officeholders who are also candidates. Among the signatories are independent-living centers, homelessness advocates and tenants associations that promote particular policies but that have never remotely contemplated walking a precinct." (Washington Post)

False rumors of Kerry's infidelity surface and are scotched; doctored photos of Kerry appear on right-wing Web sites

• February 12: An unfounded rumor alleging that Democratic frontrunner John Kerry had a two-year affair with an intern appears on the scandal-mongering tabloid Web site The Drudge Report, a news and gossip site produced by Republican flack and former Fox News talk show host Matt Drudge. Kerry angrily denies the allegation. When asked about the issue on MSNBC, Kerry responds, "There is nothing to report, nothing to talk about. There's nothing there. There's no story." "It's absolute crap. Crap from start to finish," says daughter Vanessa Kerry, a 26-year-old Harvard Medical School student. "I read it on the Drudge Report and I died laughing." The woman in question is reported to be a 20-year-old former New York journalist who worked for Kerry as an intern; Drudge claims that she has gone to Africa at Kerry's behest to keep her identity secret. Drudge says his source for the story is a friend of the woman in question, a friend who "fled the country" and can't be contacted for confirmation; he himself has not spoken to the "friend." Key parts of the Drudge story have already proven to be lies. Drudge claims that General Wesley Clark, one of Kerry's Democrat rivals, had set the ball rolling by telling a dozen reporters that Kerry had an "intern issue" which threatened to "implode" his campaign. Clark's campaign calls the report "utter rubbish," and informs the media that Clark will soon endorse Kerry's campaign. Drudge also claims that half a dozen news outlets were investigating the allegations against Kerry, but the media outlets in question deny doing so. Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, mentioned by Drudge, says, "This is the first we've heard that we're working on a story that we're not working on." A reporter with Time magazine, also cited by Drudge, says that the magazine was as puzzled by the story as the rest of the world. Kerry's campaign cites the story as the beginning of a campaign of innuendo and sleaze orchestrated by Republican supporters of Bush. (London Times, Houston Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, New York Press, New York Daily News)
• February 12: Conservative columnist Ann Coulter savagely attacks Vietnam veteran and war hero Max Cleland, a former senator who is actively campaigning for John Kerry. Cleland won a Silver Star in Vietnam, and lost three limbs in a grenade explosion. Coulter writes a completely fantasical column claiming that Cleland was injured when, on his way to drink beer with friends on base, stupidly picked up a live grenade which exploded in his hand. "He could have done that at Fort Dix," Coulter writes. "Luckily for Cleland's political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam." She even goes so far as to imply Cleland deliberately injured himself so as to parley his injuries into a career as a politician. As usual, Coulter's facts are demonstrably wrong. Cleland won his Silver Star four days before he was maimed by a grenade, for daring a rocket barrage to rescue injured comrades on the battlefield. When he was injured by the grenade, he was preparing to jump from a transport helicopter into a battle zone near Khe Sahn. He saw a grenade on the floor of the helicopter and, believing it had become dislodged from his web gear, picked it up. It exploded. Later it was discovered that the grenade belonged to a young soldier new to the theater. That soldier had improperly prepared the grenade pin for easy detonation and had dropped it while coming off the helicopter. Cleland's superior officer at Khe Sahn, Maury Cralle, who ordered Cleland on the mission that resulted in his injuries and confirms the account of his last mission, writes, "This Ann Coulter has written real slime. Only in America. Our service men and women fight and die to defend your right to a free press. The press needs to be aware of their responsibility to use this democratic tool in a responsible way." (Town Hall, Gainesville Times, Buzzflash)
• February 12: Bill O'Reilly backpedals on his admission to Good Morning America host Charles Gibson that he was wrong in trusting the Bush administration on its claims that WMDs were present in Iraq. "Well, my analysis was wrong and I'm sorry," O'Reilly tells Gibson. "I am much more skeptical of the Bush administration now than I was at the time." (It was obvious that O'Reilly didn't like making the admission; Gibson had to play a tape of O'Reilly saying a year before that he would never trust the Bush administration again if WMDs were not found in Iraq before O'Reilly would own up, and then O'Reilly was less than gracious about it: "I just said it," he told Gibson. "What do you want me to do? Go over and kiss the camera?") The next day, O'Reilly uses his forum on his Fox News talk show, The O'Reilly Factor, to disavow much of his admission and blame the "left-wing press" for reporting his admission. Instead of blaming the Bush administration, he now fixes the blame directly onto the CIA. He says, "...I go on 'Good Morning America' yesterday and say that I'm personally sorry my analysis on WMDs before the war was wrong and I'm angry about the CIA mistake. I mean, any honest commentator would say that, but the left-wing press sees my admission as some kind of liberal policy vindication and is using my words to hammer the president. Well, that's dishonest. I still believe removing Saddam was the right thing to do and that history will prove it. And there's also the possibility that WMDs will be found, so I might have to apologize for my apology. I don't mind. I still hope they find WMDs. But at this point, President Bush should retire George Tenet, the CIA chief. ...Enough is enough. Tenet should go. I don't think President Bush lied about WMDs, but he should be stronger in fixing US intelligence. That's the bottom line here. My mistake was not being skeptical enough about the CIA's reporting on WMDs. But the left-wing press, which is so happy about all this, has made dozens of mistakes itself and continues to deny that the world is a better place because Saddam is gone." (Fox News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
• February 12: A watchdog group is questioning the legality of a deal between Neil Bush and a Texas charitable foundation that appears to benefit his educational software company, Ignite! The HISD Foundation, an organization that works for schools in the Houston Independent School District, was aided by Bush in raising money to buy Ignite!'s eighth-grade US history software for over a dozen of the district's schools. The director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Rick Cohen, says the deal not only raises legal red flags but also ethical concerns. "The spirit of [IRS] laws are to prevent this kind of self-dealing, particularly in the name of philanthropy," says Cohen. "It sounds like it really pushes the border of legality." The district's school board will soon vote on whether to accept the $115,000 raised by Ignite! in order to buy the software. Some HISD officials and Ignite! officials pushed the plan. HISD Foundation Chairman Jenard Gross says, "We have examined all donors contributing to [the Ignite! curriculum] and determined that no legal conflicts exist." The arrangement between the company and the foundation falls into a legal gray area, says Frances Hill, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law who specializes in tax-exempt organizations. Hill says Ignite! officials' actions were legal if all they did was help the foundation raise money, even if the funds were earmarked for the company. However, if Ignite representatives exerted "substantial influence" over the foundation, the fund raising could have been illegal. (ABC News/KTRK-TV)
• February 12: Army Lieutenant Seth Dvorin, who was killed in Iskandariyah, Iraq on Feb. 3, is remembered by his grieving family, who is furious over his death. "My son died for absolutely nothing," says Dvorin's mother, Sue Niederer. She blames President Bush personally for her son's death. "seth died for President Bush's personal vendetta," she said. "Bush put us where we should never have been. We're not even in a declared war." Dvorin may have died while trying to defuse an unexploded bomb, a task for which he had not been trained. His family isn't getting coherent stories from the Army. "We're getting mixed stories from the Army, to say the least," says his mother. "You won't get anything from them. They'll just tell you it's all under investigation. One officer I spoke to told me Seth was handling the bomb, attempting to deactivate it, when it went off, killing him. It took off a piece of his skull. Another officer told me that there is no way, absolutely no way, he was touching the bomb." Dvorin's grandmother, Florence Sapir, adds, "War used to be an honorable thing. This one is as far from that as you can get. Seth died in vain. So did the more than 500 other soldiers who died over there. They died for nothing." Niederer says that, since learning of her son's death, she asked her congressman Rush Holt how many wives, husbands and children of US congressmen and senators actually are in a war zone in Iraq. "You know what he told me?" she asks. "None. Somebody tell me how fair that is." Dvorin leaves a wife, Kelly, whom he married five days before leaving for Iraq. (Hopewell Valley News)
• February 12: Illinois Republican Peter Fitzgerald is retiring from the US Senate because he refuses to abandon his principles and knuckle under to his party's neoconservative demands. Fox News freelancer Radley Balko reports, "He's retiring because his own party has turned on him and promised to run a primary candidate against him. That's because this particular senator decided that while he was in office he'd be his own man and vote his own conscience. He wouldn't be a lackey for his party, he wouldn't vote pork home to his state, and he wouldn't do what the special interests who run his party told him to do. And that got him into trouble. When Fitzgerald announced his retirement last April, he'd already been the scorn of his home state's newspaper columnists and editorial boards. The Republican Party -— both state and national -— was elated to see him go. The Washington Times ran an editorial gloating over his departure. No one, it seems, would be shedding any tears over Peter Fitzgerald's retirement. That's too bad, because we need a heck of a lot more Peter Fitzgeralds in Washington." Fitzgerald is an old-line conservative who defeated Carol Moseley Braun in part because of his declared intention of running an independent campaign without the involvement of special interest monies. Fitzgerald will probably be most remembered for his opposition to the federalization of a planned expansion of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Congress's seal of approval would have ensured that the $13 billion expansion forge ahead, without any input from Illinois residents, including those who owned the hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses that would have been bulldozed to make way for the new runways. The expansion was pushed by a shady consortium of business developers, who launched a PR campaign just as its major players were making political contributions to prominent and powerful Illinois politicians. Fitzgerald's opposition to federalizing what should have been a local issue postponed the expansion, which later fizzled when the airlines endured post-Sept. 11 financial problems. He also offended fellow Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, by refusing to help Hastert ram pork-laden bills through Congress. (Fox News)
• February 12: Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago says Bush is an "imbecile" for leading the war against Iraq. The Portuguese novelist, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1998, calls the war in Iraq "stupid, obscene" and notes it was "directed by that imbecile named Bush." He adds that the White House was more interested in finding water on the planet Mars than fighting poverty. "It is obscene that [someone] could die of hunger," Saramago says. (AP/My Telus)

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David Kay says Bush administration should admit errors on issue of WMDs

• February 13: Former US weapons inspector David Kay advises Bush to acknowledge he was wrong about hidden storehouses of weapons in Iraq and move ahead with overhauling the intelligence process. Kay says the "serious burden of evidence" suggests Saddam Hussein did not have caches of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons at the beginning of the Iraqi war, but was seriously engaged in developing missiles. "You are better off if you acknowledge error and say we have learned from it and move ahead," Kay says. "I'm afraid if you don't acknowledge error, and everybody knows why you are afraid to acknowledge error, your political opponents will seize on it, the press will seize on it, and no one will give you credit." Since resigning last month, Kay has said repeatedly that US intelligence was wrong in claiming that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and advanced nuclear weapons programs. Those programs were the main justification for the Iraq war. Asked whether analysts believed their findings had been distorted, Kay responds: "Were some people uncomfortable about some of the rhetoric? I think the fair answer to that is 'yes.'" He stressed that analysts are generally uncomfortable with any change to their wording, but understand that is the nature of politics. "Politicians choose the best possible argument that will support the course of action they've decided on regardless of whether it's foreign policy or not. Is that cherry picking? That's the nature of the political process." (AP/Guardian)
• February 13: The White House releases hundreds of pages of documents, claiming that they constitute Bush's "complete records" of his service in the National Guard. Unfortunately, the documents show nothing new, and do not prove that Bush fulfilled his duty to his country, and merely add to the confusion. The documents include several daily pay stubs and a record of a dental examination. Bill Press writes, "Here's what the White House documents show. First, that Bush was not paid at all from April 1972 till October 1972. Which means even the White House admits he did not report for duty in Alabama, as required, for at least six months. Second, that Bush was paid for nine appearances, a total of 25 days, between October 1972 and April 1973, but they don't say where. Third, that Bush received a dental exam at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery on Jan. 6, 1973. That's it. The sole piece of evidence that Bush ever showed up at a National Guard base in Alabama: He went to the dentist. Once. Whoop-de-do! Documents released by the White House still shed no light on why Bush did not take his annual physical, as required, in August 1972. But they also raise a more serious question. Pay stubs show Bush on duty the weekend of May 1-3, 1973, at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. Yet that very same weekend, on May 2, his two superior officers at Ellington signed a report saying they could not complete his annual evaluation because 'Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of report.' Who's lying?" (New York Times, World Net Daily)
• February 13: Intelligence experts cast doubt on information leaked by the Pentagon and White House that allegedly proves the so far elusive link between al-Qaeda and terrorism in Iraq. According to the Bush administration, a "key al-Qaeda suspect was arrested in Iraq carrying a 17-page memo on a computer disk on his way to Afghanistan, where the disk was be handed over to Osama bin Laden, or his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The author of the memo was purported to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian national on the loose and longtime number one suspect of being the missing link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. In the memo, al-Zarqawi allegedly appeals to the al-Qaeda leadership to help detonate a civil war in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'ites as the next definitive step to get rid of the Americans. For the Bush administration, this is "the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and al-Qaeda." However, this latest intelligence makes little sense to some experts. They believe it is highly unlikely for al-Qaeda couriers to move around with computer disks in their briefcases: since early 2002, the organization has used women couriers to deliver strictly verbal messages. The memo says that the resistance against the occupation is "struggling to recruit Iraqis." This is not borne out by the situation on the ground -- the resistance continues, even rising, despite the capture of Hussein. The purported memo also says that the "new anti-American campaign" must start before "zero hour," when power is scheduled to be transferred to an Iraqi administration in June. Again, this is not true, according to observers; the resistance knows all too well that only the responsibility for security will be transferred in June, not power. The Americans will remain behind their heavily fortified military bases, but will remain as occupiers.
• The memo says that "if we succeed in dragging them [Shi'ites] into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis, who are fearful of destruction and death at their hands." But experts believe that he last thing the Shi'ites want is to be involved in a civil war: they are fighting for strong political representation in a new Iraqi government. Sunnis most of all want the end of the occupation; the bulk of the Sunni resistance is a nationalist movement: they may welcome technical support from al-Qaeda, but not for a civil war. US Secretary of State Colin Powell was quick to defend the apprehended memo as giving "credence" to American claims, roughly one year ago, about an alleged connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Powell even addressed the UN Security Council and made these charges. Hussein denied it; the radical group Ansar al-Islam, in the mountains of northeast Iraq, denied it; and no proof was ever found to substantiate the Americans' claims.
• Now, the Asia Times writes, "the same scenario is resurrected to explain at least some of the dozens of attacks against American soldiers and the new Iraqi police and army. Conveniently, al-Zarqawi in his memo claims responsibility for '25 operations, some of them against the Shi'ites and their leaders, the Americans and their military and the police.' The street version of one of the attacks differs from the official version -- a suicide bombing via a pick-up truck loaded with explosives. Dozens of eyewitnesses said that they had heard a helicopter and the whoosh of a missile flying through the air just before the explosion. They later swore by Allah that the Americans brought a bulldozer to fill in the crater caused by the explosion. American commanders and Iraqi police chiefs continue to repeat the same mantra: the attacks show 'al-Qaeda's fingerprints.' Who profits from exploiting these 'fingerprints?' The Bush administration, of course. With full exposure of the weapons of mass destruction sham, the official Washington excuse for the Iraq war has changed: now the spin is that Saddam was a bad guy, and terrorism in Iraq (which did not exist in the first place) must be fought. The ever-elusive bin Laden remains the main justification for the Bush administration. Yet what is qualified as 'terrorism' in Iraq is being conducted by a cluster of the so-called 'unaligned mujahideen,' with only marginal input from al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The American non-governmental organization Iraq Body Count, in a still partial investigation that has not covered the whole country, has stated that there have been more than 10,000 civilian deaths in the Iraq war. As the number of seriously wounded in such wars is usually four times bigger than the number of fatal casualties, there may be 40,000 injured civilians. Russian observers estimate Iraqi military losses at 30,000 deaths and 120,000 seriously wounded. This means that many Iraqis now know that in the name of their 'liberation,' the Americans have killed or maimed 200,000 people. When something like this happens, you don't need any help from al-Qaeda to fuel your anger."
• Experts and observers believe that the Bush administration's hunt for Osama bin Laden is planned to fail. Why? Because he is much more useful to the administration if he is still operating than if he is captured or killed. As the Times writes, "For the Bush administration, as well as for Musharraf's government, the current status quo is the best option. If bin Laden is killed, he instantly becomes a martyr -- and mini-bin Ladens, post-bin Ladens and crypto-bin Ladens will pop up like mushrooms all over Islam. This would also mean the end of the 'war on terror,' which is the Bushite passport for global intervention. If bin Laden is captured alive, like Saddam Hussein, he has to be judged: a trial would not only enhance his charisma, but reveal the explosive convergence of objectives between successive US administrations, the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and so-called radical Islam. [French terrorism expert] Alain Chouet maintains that since September 11, only 30 percent of all attacks and suicide bombings -- invariably attributed by the Bush administration to al-Qaeda -- 'can be really linked to the activity of debris of al-Qaeda.' So the bulk of what is defined as 'international terrorism' is now in fact linked to 'the internal context of the country where the attacks take place, and nothing links them to al-Qaeda.'
• "The targets may be international, as in Iraq, but the motivation and the objectives are local: in the case of Iraq, the end of the occupation by any means necessary. The attackers or suicide bombers may be radical Islamists, but they have nothing to do with Islam and don't even relate their actions to Islam. Many in the European intelligence community now agree: political violence in the Arab-Muslim world has entered a new phase. It has nothing to do with Islam as a whole. It has nothing to do with a common threat. It has nothing to do with a messianic project. But it has everything to do with unresolved, and strictly local, political, economical and social problems. That's the case in Iraq: a nationalist movement fighting foreign occupation, just like Palestinians fighting Ariel Sharon's Israel. Al-Qaeda may have given the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration the perfect motive for bombing Afghanistan and then invading Iraq. But even seriously disabled, al-Qaeda benefits enormously, although not directly. The fact is that the US military machine now rules over more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. Untold numbers are turning to a myriad Islamist radicals groups and sub-groups all over the Muslim world -- which they identify as the only force, although incoherent, capable of at least facing and demoralizing bit by bit the American empire. As for a weakened, disabled al-Qaeda, it is definitely voting Bush next November. Al-Qaeda wants the Iraq occupation to be prolonged, with or without a puppet government: there could not be a better advertisement for rallying Muslims against the arrogance of the West. Al-Qaeda's and the Bush administration's future are interlocked anyway. European intelligence sources confirm that al-Qaeda has no capability of carrying out a major terrorist attack on US soil remotely similar to September 11. This hypothetical attack would certainly generate a strong backlash against the Bushite regime for being unable to prevent it. But al-Qaeda could certainly organize something like a small-scale suicide bombing in New York, Washington or Miami during the presidential campaign, with a few American casualties. This would be like help from above for the Bushites." (Asia Times, Asia Times)
• February 13: Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix says that, based on his experience with the Bush administration, he is sure Bush will twist the data provided to him about Iraqi WMDs to serve his own ends. Blix says his reports to the UN Security Council on Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction already had been misinterpreted by pro-war governments, including that of neighboring Denmark. "Many of these politicians have put exclamation marks where we put question marks," he says. "We never said that there were [weapons of mass destruction]. We said there could be." When asked whether members of the Bush campaign might try to alter the meaning of his reports to back the decision to invade Iraq, he says: "I'm sure they will." (AP/Philadelphia Inquirer)
• February 13: Doubts are raised about the veracity of retired Texas Air National Guard Bill Burkett, who has maintained for years that George W. Bush's military records have been altered and scrubbed. Burkett says that in 1997 he heard one TANG officer give the order to "sanitize" Bush's file, and later witnessed another officer looking through the file; later, Burkett maintains, some records from the file were discarded. But a key witness to some of the events described by Burkett now says that the central elements of his story are false. George Conn, a former chief warrant officer with the Guard and a friend of Burkett's, is the person whom Burkett says led him to the room where the Bush records were being vetted. But Conn says he never saw anyone combing through the Bush file or discarding records. "'I have no recall of that," Conn says. "'I have no recall of that whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada." Conn's recollection also undercuts another of Burkett's central allegations: that he overheard Bush's onetime chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, telling a Texas Guard general to make sure there were no embarrassments in the Bush record. Burkett says he told Conn, over dinner that same night, what he had overheard. But Conn says that, although Burkett told him he worried that the Bush record would be sanitized, he never mentioned overhearing the conversation between Allbaugh and General Daniel James.
• Allbaugh, a Washington consultant and lobbyist, has his own denials, saying, "I would never be so stupid as do something like that." Allbaugh claims that he discussed Bush's files with Guard officials after Bush requested to view the file, and has never seen it. Author James Moore, a former Houston TV news correspondent who has written a book about Burkett's experiences, says he believes Burkett's allegations are true. "I think we're into a classic he-said, she-said," Moore says. Interestingly, the questions about Burkett's veracity have their own problems. Conn previously confirmed Burkett's version of the incident for USA Today, who was preparing (but never ran) its own story on the Bush files. Allbaugh, Conn, and other key figures refused to discuss Burkett with Moore, but Conn told another reporter that Burkett is "truthful and honorable." Burkett believes that Conn, an employee of the US Army in Germany, is afraid for his career and denied his involvement in the file purging in order to placate his superiors and avoid losing his job with the Defense Department. Burkett still considers Conn his friend, "[b]ut I can't expect him to give up his life for me over this," he says. The Boston Globe story that casts doubt on Burkett's veracity is prominently featured on the Bush campaign Web site. Shortly after Burkett goes public with his accusations, his monthly medical disability payments are slashed. (Boston Globe, Buzzflash, Ian Williams, Mark Crispin Miller)
• February 13: Contrary to Halliburton's assertions that it was pressured by Kuwait into accepting the Kuwaiti firm Altanmia Commercial Transport as its provider of gasoline for Iraq, it comes to light that Halliburton actually chose Altanmia, a company with no experience in fuel transport, as its subcontractor. A letter dated May 4, 2003 and sent from an American contracting officer to Kuwait's oil minister plainly describes the decision to use Altanmia as Halliburton's own "recommendation." The letter also shows that the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees such transactions, supported Halliburton's decision to use the expensive subcontractor, which may explain why it has been reluctant to criticize the deal. Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, confirms the authenticity of the letter, and acknowledged that Halliburton had picked Altanmia. "Halliburton told us that only Altanmia could meet our requirements," he says. Experts in the Persian Gulf oil business say that the Altanmia deal looks suspicious. "There is not a reason on earth to sell gasoline at the price they did," Youssef Ibrahim, the managing director of the Strategic Energy Investment Group, a consulting firm in Dubai, says. "Halliburton and their Kuwaiti partners made out like bandits." A well-informed Kuwaiti source calls the prices charged by Altanmia "absurd," and says that Halliburton's arrangement to buy Kuwaiti oil through a middleman, rather than directly from the government, was "highly irregular." He adds, "There is no way that this could have transpired without the knowledge and direction" of Kuwait's oil minister, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah. It also appears that the oil minister's brother, Talal Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, may have secret financial ties to Altanmia. (The brothers are also nephews of the Emir and the Prime Minister of Kuwait.) "There are calls in parliament to open an investigation," says a Kuwaiti official. It could shake the government."
• Investigations show that while Halliburton billed the US government $2.64 per gallon on 75 million gallons of gasoline, the Iraqi national fuel company was paying only 97 cents per gallon to purchase fuel in Kuwait and other nations bordering Iraq. And the US Defense Energy Support Center was paying $1.32/gallon for fuel for the US military. Halliburton was charging the US government exorbitant rates and pocketing the profits, which were around $61 million. Halliburton's subsidiary, KBR, had contracted with Altanmia (or al-Tanmia) at the behest of the US ambassasor to Kuwait, Richard Jones, who wrote to his staff, "Tell KBR to get off their butts and conclude deals with Kuwait now! Tell them we want a deal done with al-Tanmia within 24 hours and don't take any excuses." The contracts were subsequently bid, by telephone, in a single day.
• Halliburton will also be forced to repay $6.3 million in tainted profits after one of its procurement officials admits to taking a $1 million kickback for transportation subcontractors and is subsequently indicted by an Illinois grand jury. (The New Yorker, Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)
• February 13: The New Yorker investigates the depth and breadth of Vice President Cheney's connections to his former company Halliburton. Cheney has gone to great lengths to minimize his public connections to Halliburton, including failing to mention in his government biography that he worked at all for the company (Cheney was Halliburton's CEO from 1995 through 2000, when he quit to join George W. Bush on the Republican presidential ticket.) While there is no proof that he personally directed the US government to steer contracts to the company, and no proof that he has personally benefited from said contracts, Cheney owns $18 million in stock options, which he says he will donate to charity, and receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensations. Reporter Jane Meyer writes, "[B]eyond the immediate financial ties, there is the larger question of what, over time, he has done for the company, and what it has done for him. Cheney earned some forty-five million dollars from Halliburton during his five-year tenure there, from 1995 to 2000. And Cheney is, in many ways, the architect of the contract that gave the company its signal role with the US military today. When Cheney was Secretary of Defense, during the first Bush administration, he oversaw a redesign of the way that corporate America services the military. Halliburton was paid $3.9 million to draw up a plan for the way a private company could provide military support to US troops all over the world. Then, in the last months of that administration, Halliburton was awarded the Army's contract to provide those very same services. The company's familiarity with the process, the experts I spoke to said, gave it the inside track on what has turned out to be billions of dollars of government business. Cheney is unlikely to have been involved in choosing Halliburton in any detailed way, but even his supporters acknowledge that he oversaw the shift to providing so much business to a single company. This ties him to the story today."
• Meyer notes that Halliburton was awarded its "unusual" no-bid Iraqi contracts from the military under "emergency" procedures that sidestepped the usual procurement process. Halliburton, and Cheney, insist that no other private company can do the job Halliburton does. Meyer responds, "The original reason for bringing private military contractors in to handle these jobs for the Pentagon -- rather than having the government do them itself -- was that the rigors of a competitive marketplace were supposed to drive down costs. But if there is virtually no competition then the situation is more monopolistic than competitive, and cost efficiencies are lost. So it's not much of a defense of the current system to say that no other companies can do what Halliburton can." Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught at the National War College, says that so many of the contracts in Iraq are going to companies with personal connections with the Bush Administration that the procurement process has essentially become a "patronage system." "The system is sick," Gardiner says. Cheney, he adds, can't see the problem. "He doesn't see the difference between public and private interest." Cheney's insistence that the federal government played no role in his accumulation of personal wealth as the head of Halliburton is equally specious. As Meyer writes, "The government helped make Cheney rich. While Cheney was in the private sector, working as Halliburton's CEO, he spent a great deal of his time personally lobbying for government credit guarantees, and he increased the number of subsidies to the company hugely. So, after years of championing the private sector and opposing big government, Cheney's own business career was very much dependent upon the federal government." Cheney collected approximately $44 million in his five years at Halliburton.
• Meyer goes on to observe, "What also gives the Halliburton story a new degree of significance is that it illustrates the consequences of years of government privatization. Military contractors such as Halliburton have become more and more important, while the bureaucrats who are supposed to oversee them have been diminished. The result is a shift of power, in which some experts fear that the companies are virtually unmanaged by the government. Cheney is a lifelong champion of privatization, so it's fair to see the current mess surrounding Halliburton's dealings in Iraq -- or instance, that it overcharged the government for fuel -- as an unintended consequence of his political approach." Meyer notes the history of Halliburton's construction and engineering subsidiary, KBR; it began in 1919 as Brown & Root, a small road-paving company; it quickly grew into one of Texas's largest construction companies, managing huge projects for the US Navy, private oil industries, and others. Brown & Root thrived under the patronage of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texas Democrat who has come to stand for the entire concept of political patronage and profiteering. Meyer notes, "the company served as a munificent sponsor of his political campaigns, and in return was rewarded with big government contracts. In 1962, Brown & Root sold out to Halliburton, a booming oil-well construction-and-services firm, and in the following years the conglomerate grew spectacularly. ...Brown & Root was part of a consortium of four companies that built about eighty-five per cent of the infrastructure needed by the Army during the Vietnam War. At the height of the resistance to the war, Brown & Root became a target of protesters, and soldiers in Vietnam derided it as Burn & Loot."
• Cheney himself cut his political teeth as an advocate of partisan military cutbacks; after the end of the Cold War, Cheney and others attempted to use their mandate for military cutbacks as a weapon to punish Democratic opponents. A Democratic aide on the House Armed Services Committee during those years says that "contrary to his public image, which was as a reasonable, quiet, soft-spoken, and inclusive personality, Cheney was a rank partisan." The aide says that Cheney used downsizing as a political weapon. He once compiled a list of military bases to be closed; all were in Democratic districts. Cheney's approach to cutting weapons systems was similar: he proposed breathtaking cuts in the districts of Thomas Downey, David Bonior, and Jim Wright, all high-profile Democrats. The aide notes that Congress, which was then dominated by the Democrats, beat back most of Cheney's plans, because many of the cuts made no strategic sense. "This was about getting even," he said of Cheney. As Defense Secretary, Cheney grew increasingly contemptuous of Congress and more and more enamoured of the private sector, and particularly of Halliburton.
• "[T]he Pentagon commissioned Halliburton to do a classified study of how this might work," writes Meyer. "In effect, the company was being asked to create its own market. Halliburton was paid $3.9 million to write its initial report, which offered a strategy for providing support to twenty thousand troops. The Pentagon then paid Halliburton five million dollars more to do a follow-up study. In August, 1992, Halliburton was selected by the US Army Corps of Engineers to do all the work needed to support the military during the next five years, in accordance with the plan it had itself drawn up. The Pentagon had never relied so heavily on a single company before. Although the profit margins for this omnibus government contract were narrower than they were for private-sector jobs, there was a guaranteed profit of one per cent, with the possibility of as much as nine per cent -- making it a rare bit of business with no risk." In other words, Cheney helped create the situation in the Pentagon where a single company takes over much of the logistical and support services required by the Pentagon, then takes over the helm of that company and, through his contacts in the Pentagon administration, ensures it receives over $1.5 billion in military contracts, then, after becoming Vice President, helps to ensure that his administration stages a costly invasion and occupation of a country that will tremendously fatten his former company's finances. (Cheney's PAC contributors in 1993, when Cheney was considering a run for President, included Thomas Cruikshank, Halliburton's CEO at the time, Stephen Bechtel, whose family's construction-and-engineering firm now has a contract in Iraq worth as much as $2.8 billion, and Duane Andrews, then senior vice-president of Science Applications International Corporation, which has won seven contracts in Iraq.) After a weekend of fly-fishing with several corporate moguls, Cheney was hired by Halliburton in 1995 not because of his business experience, of which he had little, but because of his network of political contacts in the US and abroad.
• Meyer writes, "Cheney was close to many world leaders, particularly in the Persian Gulf, a region central to Halliburton's oil-services business. Cheney and his wife, Lynne, were so friendly with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the US, that the Prince had invited the Cheney family to his daughter's wedding. (Cheney did not attend.) 'Dick was good at opening doors,' [Halliburton board member and former secretary of state Lawrence] Eagleburger said. 'I don't mean that pejoratively. He had contacts from his former life, and he used them effectively.'" In 1998, after a quail-hunting weekend with executives from Dresser Industries, Cheney closed a deal to have Dresser merge with Halliburton, a $7.7 billion deal that not only made Halliburton the largest company of its kind in the world, but also left Halliburton responsible for Dresser's numerous pending asbestos-injury lawsuits. Halliburton's stock plummeted 80% and several offshoots of the corporation were forced into bankruptcy, leaving the company looking for a way to bring in large amounts of revenue quickly. Shortly thereafter, Cheney left the country, helped Bush win the presidency, and oversaw the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Cheney also oversaw Halliburton subsidiaries' involvement with three countries who were blacklisted by the US for sponsoring terrorism: Iraq, Iran, and Libya. Meyer writes, "In the case of Iraq, Halliburton legally evaded US sanctions by conducting its oil-service business through foreign subsidiaries that had once been owned by Dresser. With Iran and Libya, Halliburton used its own subsidiaries. The use of foreign subsidiaries may have helped the company to avoid paying US taxes."
• Though Cheney often said during the 2000 campaign that he was morally opposed to doing business with Iraq, and would not allow Halliburton to do so, he lied. "I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," he told ABC News. But, under Cheney's watch, two foreign subsidiaries of Dresser sold millions of dollars' worth of oil services and parts to Iraq. The transactions were not illegal, but they were politically suspect. The deals occurred under the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, at a time when Saddam Hussein chose which companies his government would work with. Corruption was rampant. It may be that it was simply Halliburton's expertise that attracted Hussein's regime, but a United Nations diplomat with the Oil-for-Food program has doubts. "Most American companies were blacklisted," he said. "It's rather surprising to find Halliburton doing business with Saddam. It would have been very much a senior-level decision, made by the regime at the top." Cheney has said that he personally directed the company to stop doing business with Hussein. Halliburton's presence in Iraq ended in February, 2000.
• Some trace Cheney's hatred for government oversight to Halliburton's experience with Russia's Tyumen Oil: Halliburton was part of a $490 million oil deal with Tyumen, which was almost derailed when the Russian company was forced to defend itself against multiple charges of corruption. When the State Department attempted to block an Export-Import loan on the grounds that Tyumen was involved in illegal activity, Cheney personally lobbied the government in an effort to keep the deal alive. Meyer notes, "He was particularly incensed by the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, which sided with the State Department. According to a friend of Cheney's, he was convinced that the CIA had been duped by opposition research spread by Tyumen's rivals. Eventually, the deal went through. By then, though, Cheney's frustration with government had become profound. As he said in a speech in 1998, 'The average Halliburton hand knows more about the world than the average member of Congress." In its 2002 annual report, Halliburton describes counterterrorism as offering "growth opportunities." One businessman with close ties to the Bush administration says, "Anything that has to do with Iraq policy, Cheney's the man to see. He's running it, the way that LBJ ran the space program." About the incestuous relationships between US corporations, current administration figures such as Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and old Republican politicians such as Jack Kemp and Lawrence Eagleburger, the businessman says, "It's like Russia. This is how corruption is done these days. It's not about bribes. You just help your friends to get access. Cheney doesn't call the Defense Department and tell them, 'Pick Halliburton.' It's just having dinner with the right people." (The New Yorker, The New Yorker)
• February 13: John Kerry gains the endorsement of the US's largest labor union, the AFL-CIO, and former rival General Wesley Clark. Clark meets with Kerry in Wisconsin, site of a key primary, and says, "sir, request permission to come aboard. The Army's here." Kerry responds, ""This is the first time in my life I've ever had the privilege of saying welcome aboard to a four-star general. Normally, back when I was wearing a uniform, my knees would have been quaking around a four-star." Later Clark says of Kerry, "I'm here today because I believe that John Kerry has the right experience, the right values, the right leadership, the right character and the right message to bring this country forward effectively into the 21st century." (Houston Chronicle, AP/Bloomberg News/Denver Post)

Doctored photo of Kerry and Jane Fonda inflames conservatives

• February 13: A conservative Web site posts a picture of John Kerry supposedly appearing with Jane Fonda at an antiwar protest in the early 1970s. (See the February 15 item proving the picture was faked.) The picture shows Kerry several rows behind Fonda. The Kerry campaign says that while Kerry was at the same event as Fonda, he never appeared with her at any rally or meeting, and the two are not associated. The Web site owner, Ted Sampley, bought the picture from an anoymous source for $179 and posted it immediately. Sampley says he does not know who tipped him off to the photograph, and he does not care. "I'm going to use it as much as possible," he says.
• Conservatives have been trying hard to deflect criticism of Bush's military record by attacking Kerry's record as an antiwar protester, and part of the thrust of the attacks is to paint Kerry as being associated with longhaired hippie peaceniks. (The Weekly Standard called the Vietnam veterans who protested at the National Mall "hairy men, men with Easy Rider mustaches.) Talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, have relentlessly attacked Kerry's supposed connection to Fonda. The conservative magazine National Review says Kerry, who returned from Vietnam a highly decorated veteran and then led protests against the war, "helped to slander a generation of soldiers who had done their duty with honor and restraint." The Weekly Standard is highlighting a 1971 book co-written by Kerry, The New Soldier, which commemorated a march on Washington by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Shortly after the articles appear, a doctored photograph of Kerry sitting side by side with Fonda at an antiwar protest. The photograph has been proven to be false; its origins are unclear. Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has been giving speeches around the country detailing Kerry's votes on military and intelligence programs, including his 1984 opposition to the missile defense program promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and his 1991 Senate vote opposing the use of force in Iraq. "John Kerry has a history of hypocrisy on defense issues," said spokeswoman Christine Iverson. Kerry's "rhetoric as a presidential candidate does not match his record as a United States senator."
• But officials with the Kerry campaign provide documents showing that Kerry questioned the science behind the Reagan-era missile program, and quoting him as saying he believed the country needed more time in 1991 to build support for the war in the Gulf region. "This is part of an overall slime-and-defend strategy," says Max Cleland, the former Georgia senator and Vietnam veteran who has been campaigning for Kerry. Cleland well knows the effectiveness of GOP slander campaigns, having lost his own Senate seat due to allegations that Cleland was a closet supporter of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. "They don't want to talk about Vietnam, and they don't want their candidates to talk about veterans' issues because it hurts the president." One Republican, a friend of Cleland's who is running for statewide office in Nevada, said he had attended a meeting where officials from the Bush re-election campaign urged Republican candidates not to talk about Vietnam. "Basically they're saying, 'Don't bring up veterans' issues and don't bring up Vietnam; our surrogates will take care of it,'" says the candidate, Ed Gobel, who is running in a Republican primary for a seat in the Nevada state Assembly, but says he is opposed by a candidate who has the backing of the party.
• The Bush campaign's attempt to out-military its own candidate in comparison to Kerry is fraught with problems. Photos showing a beaming elder Bush pinning lieutenant's bars to his son's National Guard uniform raises questions of Bush's own fraudulent Guard service (a subject much detailed throughout this site). The stock answer from the White House about Bush's AWOL Guard record: "This issue is settled," a hard sell considering it was less than a year before that Bush donned a flyboy outfit and strutted around the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare that the war in Iraq was over. Kerry's war-hero record in Vietnam, and his principled opposition to that war upon his return, is a tough nut for the Bush campaign to crack. For the Bush campaign to resort to hackneyed 1960s-era accusations that Vietnam protesters were traitors and hippies is a guarantee of failure; it isn't long before the campaign's manager, Karl Rove, decides to attack Kerry's record as a war hero and smear him as a liar and a fabricator.
• The New York Times's Frank Rich writes in 2006 that Rove and his minions will decide to create an entire "fictional biography" of Kerry "and impose it on him, no matter what Kerry himself might have to say about it. In this revised biography, the war hero would have to be stripped of his battle heroics -- indeed literally stripped of his medals -- so that he would be on the same footing as a president whose Vietnam service consisted of sporadic participation in the Texas 'champagne unit' stateside." This decision will open what is perhaps the most well-orchestrated, unethical, and dishonest vilification of a presidential candidate in modern American history, a vilification led by a supposedly independent "puppet" organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Kerry unwittingly plays into Rove's scheme by placing all of his chips on presenting himself as an upright Vietnam war hero, even choosing to accept the Democratic nomination for president at the July convention with the words, "Reporting for duty." The Kerry campaign decision to play the military card is, of course, designed to offset the relentless drumbeat from Bush and the right that only Republicans can be trusted to be strong and protect the country. Kerry's own attempts to transform himself in the eyes of the voters from a Boston Brahmin blueblood with an ancestry as upper-crust as Bush's into an all-American manly man leads to some infelicitious moments, such as Kerry's piloting a Harley-Davidson onto the set of Jay Leno's late-night talk show. His attempts to reach out to "ordinary" Americans often fall flat ("Who among us does not love NASCAR?" he will intone, joins a GQ reporter for a beer, rhapsodizes on the physical charms of actresses Charlize Theron and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and, on a day trip with a camera crew to illustrate a day in his life, buys a jockstrap). But the Kerry campaign does not anticipate the hammerblows coming its way from the Swift Boat Veterans and other puppet organizations who will slime and trash his military career with a success even Karl Rove cannot predict. (New York Times/International Herald Tribune, Frank Rich p. 139-40)
• February 13: Two government officials have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was specifically asked not to reveal the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson in his column. Novak's outing of Plame, a covert specialist in Middle East weapons programs, has resulted in an investigation of the leak that reaches deep into the Bush administration. The two officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work, stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive overseas sources. These accounts directly contradict public statements made by Novak. He has downplayed his own knowledge about the potential harm to Plame and ongoing intelligence operations by making that disclosure, and has also claimed in various public statements that intelligence officials falsely led him to believe that Plame was only an analyst, and the only potential consequences of her exposure as a CIA officer would be that she might be inconvenienced in her foreign travels. The two administration officials questioned by the FBI characterized Novak's statements as untrue and misleading. One of the sources also asserted that the credibility of the administration officials who spoke to the FBI is enhanced by the fact that the officials made their statement to the federal law enforcement authorities. If the officials were found to be lying to the FBI, they could be potentially prosecuted for making false statements to federal investigators, the sources pointed out. The two officials say Novak was told that Plame's work for the CIA "went much further than her being an analyst," and that publishing her name would be "hurtful" and could stymie ongoing intelligence operations and jeopardize her overseas sources. "When [Novak] says that he was not told that he was 'endangering' someone, that statement might be technically true," one source says. "Nobody directly told him that she was going to be physically hurt. But that was implicit in that he was told what she did for a living." Another official adds, "At best, he is parsing words. At worst, he is lying to his readers and the public. Journalists should not lie, I would think."
• One of the government officials who has told federal investigators that Novak's account is false has also turned over to investigators contemporaneous notes he made of at least one conversation with Novak. Those notes appear to corroborate the official's version of events. After Novak's column appeared, an anonymous administration official said the CIA warned Novak of "security concerns" that would arise if he were to publish Plame's name. Novak has disputed that account as well. In an online column, "Take Three Steps to Avoid Future Novaks," Aly Colón of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit, educational organization for journalists, writes, "There's an old adage that claims journalists are only as good as the sources that feed them. Here's a new one: Journalists are only as credible as the ethics that guide them. By disclosing the identity of a CIA operative, Novak provoked a Justice Department investigation of his sources and raised serious questions about his ethical conduct." (The American Prospect)
• February 13: Economist Paul Krugman lambasts the Bush budget document, not just because it is filled with "lies, damned lies and statistics," but because it is stuffed with 27 glossy pictures of Bush at work and at play. "We see the president in front of a giant American flag," Krugman writes, "in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River. It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential. The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office. ...The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive discussion of his policies. In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history —- the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq —- and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September. But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets -— or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence -— their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image." (New York Times/CommonDreams)
• February 13: Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, a former Enron lobbyist, says that the Democrats are running the "dirtiest" presidential campaign in history, and the press is playing along. Gillespie complains about the Democrats' attempt to "smear" Bush over his National Guard record, and claims that the Republicans are running their campaign strictly on policy issues. Democratic activists have gone so far as to plant false accusations that Mr. Bush once paid for an ex-girlfriend's abortion, Gillespie charges. "We now know that sometime this fall Kerry campaign operatives intend to go into pro-life chat rooms on the Internet to spread a scurrilous story that President Bush drove a former girlfriend to an abortion clinic, and paid for her abortion, according to the New York Daily News," says Gillespie. The Daily News recently reported Monday that rock star Moby, a Kerry supporter, expressed hope of dampening Republican turnout in November by spreading anti-Bush gossip on the Internet. "For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion," the newspaper quoted the musician as saying, adding: "Moby didn't claim that he believed the abortion story." A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee says that Gillespie is "hyperventilating," and notes recently released Guard records fail to "clear up this controversy." Gillespie fails to note Republican attempts to smear Kerry with false rumors of his having an affair with a reporter, and disseminating doctored photos of Kerry supposedly joining Jane Fonda at a 1973 anti-war rally. (Washington Times)
• February 13: The Los Angeles Weekly delves into the question of how exactly a young Texas Air National Guard applicant with aptitude scores in the 25th percentile got chosen over hundreds of more qualified applicants to be part of the TANG flight training program. The Weekly writes: "Rather than only asking how a young George W. got out of the National Guard, we ought to ask how he got in when 350 American men were dying each week in Vietnam and 100,000 were on National Guard waiting lists across the country. For years the talk in Austin political circles had Bush using his father's stroke as a Republican congressman from Houston to secure one of two or three rare open billets in an Air National Guard Unit -- after scoring in the 25th percentile on the standard test given to flight-program candidates. There was also the story of a political contribution conveyed to the Democratic speaker of the Texas House to secure a slot for Bush. When Bush moved into the Governor's Mansion, the stories dried up -- as did two of the sources who circulated them in Austin bars frequented by the state's political cognoscenti." Former Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes, a Democrat, testified in 1999 that he often found slots in the National Guard for the fortunate sons of friends and supporters. It had already been reported that two of his aides would take the names of the lucky young men who won the legislative lottery over to the commandant of the Guard, who would find space for them. In 1969, a Houston oil-service company executive, Sid Adger, called on Barnes and asked him to get George W. Bush into the National Guard. Adger was a longtime friend of George H.W. Bush, who nicknamed him "The King." When the younger Bush was preparing to graduate from Yale, Adger called on Barnes to get him into the TANG.
• "It was a commonplace story," writes the Weekly: "A young man of privilege ends up in a National Guard unit that looks like a polo team without horses. Senator Lloyd Bentsen's son was there, as was a relative of Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, along with the Adger kids (but not in the flying unit.) There were even a couple of Dallas Cowboys. ...A history of service to country in a country-club Guard unit was acceptable while Bush was managing partner of the Texas Rangers and governor of Texas. But it was a problem for a presidential candidate. And the problem would only get worse if it looked like he got preferential treatment. Long before Bush announced he was a candidate, he sent Commerce Secretary Donnie Evans to Austin to find out what Barnes might say if reporters asked. Evans was one of W. Bush's oil-field cronies from Midland, where the two men had found Jesus together in an intense, all-male, Bible-study group. He was also the finance director for Bush's presidential campaign. 'The Bushies got to Barnes first,' an Austin political consultant told me at the time. Barnes put Evans' fears to rest, and Governor Bush personally thanked the former speaker: 'Dear Ben: Don Evans reported your conversation. Thank you for your candor and for killing the rumor about you and dad ever discussing my status. Like you, he never remembered any conversation. I appreciate your help.'
• "...In 1999, Barnes reluctantly gave his deposition (which was sealed when the case was settled), telling lawyers the story of Adger asking him 30 years earlier to help the son of a Republican congressman get into the National Guard. Barnes also provided reporters a brief summary of what he had said under oath. The Bush campaign claimed their hands were clean because there was no direct appeal from the Bushes. Again, the story was advanced through the queer syntax of George W. Bush. 'All I know is that anybody named George Bush did not ask him for help,' Governor Bush said at the time. His father wasn't so cocksure, saying he was 'almost positive' he hadn't discussed his son's draft status with Adger. Then both Bushes began to argue that Adger's appeal to Barnes was done without their 'knowledge or consent.' Adger wasn't talking because he had died three years earlier. So this is what we're supposed to swallow: A close friend of the Bush family took it upon himself to get G.W. Bush a billet in the Air National Guard. A Democratic House Speaker who had nothing to gain from helping a two-term Republican from Houston did so because it was the right thing to do -- while he was, in the Wild West of campaign finance, raising money to run for statewide office. And the younger Bush, after scoring the absolute minimum on his flight test, was moved to the top of the recruiter's list by Guard officers who recognized his potential as a flyer. If you buy that, then you'll buy my Enron stock. And the former speaker of the Texas House filled one hole in the story on Monday. When I asked him how well he knew Adger, he said he had been a political contributor." (Los Angeles Weekly)
• February 13: Paul Waldman, author of a book about the strategies behind the Bush campaign called Fraud, says in a Buzzflash interview "that at some point [George W. Bush] had to have sat down and taken a good, long look at who he was and what he wanted to do, and come to the realization that, if he gave it to the American people straight, they wouldn't buy it. They would not have elected somebody who had accomplished so little and had been given so much. They wouldn't sign on to this agenda that's at odds with their own interests. So if that's the position you're in -- you've got this agenda, you've got a candidate who has really so little to commend himself, other than his name, and has spent his entire life walking on a path laid before him with wealth and influence, and has so little in common with the people that he's going to be claiming to represent -- then you've got to come up with a story. And that story is going to be a false one.
• "So what do they do? They said we're going to create this persona that isn't somebody who went to Andover and Yale and Harvard, whose father was a President and whose grandfather was a Senator, and who, his entire working life, had never had a real job. It's all been about his Daddy's friends giving him money to lose. They created this persona that he's a regular guy, a Texas cowboy. He bought a ranch just before the campaign started so he could go down there and clear brush. He exaggerates his drawl whenever he can. He does 'home to the heartland' tours to show that the place where he comes from, and the people who vote for him come from, is the real America. And if you live on the East coast or the West coast, or you live in a state that votes for Democrats, then you must not be a real American. So that's part of it -- the creation of this persona, this kind of regular guy who doesn't, in fact, represent the interests of his class. Then you have the second problem, which is: What do you do about this agenda? Well, the agenda is not going to change. That we know. So what they did was they created this wonderful thing called 'compassionate conservatism.' Now what's compassionate conservatism? I think the best summation of it is if you go to the Bush campaign website -- Georgewbush.com -- you can see a 'Compassion Photo Album.' Now what's the Compassion Photo Album? It is -- I kid you not -- two dozen pictures of George W. Bush with black people. That's the compassion photo album. And that pretty much sums up what compassionate conservatism is. ...[Y]ou stick him in a room full of black people and he will hug them 'til the cows come home. The cameras will click away, and it'll be wonderful for everybody."
• Waldman says that once the media implicitly gave Bush "permission to lie" (by being so "stupid" that he couldn't be held responsible for his own statements), that the Bush handlers knew they could get away with just about anything: "And once they decided that Bush was stupid, they gave him permission to lie. There's a quote that I cite from Cokie Roberts -- if you want to know what the conventional wisdom among reporters is, you can just listen to what she's got to say. After the first debate, Gore made some utterly trivial inaccurate statements about the girl who has to stand in her classroom when in fact she had a chair, or he went to the fires in Texas with the director of FEMA when it was actually the deputy director. And Bush told a number of falsehoods that were actually consequential and were meant to deceive people about what he wanted to do. What Cokie Roberts said was that with Bush, 'you know he's just misstating.' And that's a quote. You know he's just misstating, as opposed to it playing into a story about him being a serial exaggerator. That's what reporters felt. If Bush said something that wasn't true, oh, well, you know, he's not too smart, so he must have just made a mistake, so we don't have to hold him accountable for his lies. And we may not even have to say that what he said was wrong. And when they realized that this was going on, the Bush team knew that they had struck political gold: He was never going to be held accountable for the things that he said. After the State of the Union last year, when he said that Saddam was looking for uranium in Africa, one White House aide said: Well, the President's not a fact-checker. And this is always their line. It's not his fault because he's George W. Bush. He's not too smart. He's doing what he thinks is the right thing. But he doesn't have to be held accountable for the things that he says. I've had it with that. When he was running for President, he said that he was going to usher in the responsibility era. Well, it's time for him to take some responsibility." (Buzzflash)

---

Bush's attempt to paint Kerry as beholden to special interests falls flat when facts show that Bush has taken more from those interests in one year than Kerry has in 19

• February 14: The Bush campaign Web site posts a video accusing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of being a tool of special interests. Kerry's campaign strikes back with its own Web video, accusing Bush of "the politician who's taken more special interest money than anyone in history" and detailing the fact that Bush's campaign has accepted more money from special interests in 2002 than Kerry has accepted over his entire 19-year Senate career. The video claims Bush is cozy with polluters, pharmaceutical companies, big banks and investment firms, and says that Enron is the president's largest contributor. Kerry has run at least a dozen TV ads assailing Bush or his policies over the past six months. "Instead of attacking America's problems, George Bush and our opponents have once again turned to attack politics," Kerry tells a Democratic audience in Wisconsin. As if speaking to those GOP rivals, he said, "You're not going to get away with it this time. Not in November of this year." (AP/New York Times)

 

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