February 2004: Week Three: This Far and No Further

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February 2004, Week Three, Page Two

February 15: Iraq, the six countries bordering it, and Egypt jointly declare during a summit in Kuwait that the US must withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. The eight countries also join in asking the UN to intervene in the country's reconstruction. The American legate, Paul Bremer, says that while he is open to suggestions, the US remains committed to a transition into a Iraqi-led government by June 30, a government that will largely be appointed by US bureaucrats without direct voting by the Iraqi people. Iraqi spokespersons also insist that former dictator Saddam Hussein be turned over to the Iraqi people for immediate prosecution. (BBC)
February 15: The Bush administration refuses to make public the financial histories of the commissioners President Bush appointed to investigate American intelligence failures. Administration officials say the arrangement has helped to attract the best-qualified people for the panel, but critics say the White House's refusal to disclose financial information raises questions about potential conflicts of interest that could cloud the commission's work. Experts say the White House's refusal to make public the commission's business links may fuel questions about its independence and taint its investigation into one of the Bush administration's biggest potential political vulnerabilities: the quality of intelligence used to justify the Iraq war and other issues involving unconventional weapons. Laurence Silberman, a conservative judge who is one of the commission's two chairmen, has drawn particular criticism from liberal groups because of his judicial record and close ties to the Bush administration. Several other commissioners also have financial links to groups in the Middle East and the defense industry that could become involved in the inquiry. "This is a critical commission, and if the White House is going to withhold basic information about its members that should be made public, that's a shame," says Bill Allison, a spokesman for government watchdog group the Center for Public Integrity. "The point of a financial disclosure form is that it's supposed to be disclosed," Allison says. "This completely defeats the purpose. You're starting from a position of bad faith."
One high-level commission that does make public the financial interests of its members is the panel created by Congress and the White House in late 2002 to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. But it, too, has been dogged by charges of conflicts of interest. The original chairman of the 9/11 commission, Henry A. Kissinger, stepped down abruptly because he said resolving potential conflicts of interest would have meant liquidating his consulting firm, while his vice chairman, former Senator George Mitchell, stepped aside in part because of an unwillingness to sever ties with his law firm. The commission's current executive director and a commissioner have also been interviewed by the commission about their knowledge of intelligence activities leading up to the attacks, spurring charges of a conflict from some of the victims' survivors. Bush administration officials and ethics specialists said that when politicians seek to appoint people with broad experience to serve on important commissions, charges of conflicts arise almost inevitably because those people usually have extensive contacts in business and global affairs as well. "It's a problem that's endemic to Washington," says Stan Brand, a Washington lawyer specializing in government ethics. "If this commission is really going to conduct a wide-ranging review of intelligence gathering, at some point its members are going to bump into individuals or entities of the kind that they've represented, and they're going to have to confront that by sealing themselves off from those clients."
Critics, however, suggest that the commissioners' extensive resumes may create conflicts. One commissioner, William Studeman, for instance, was a former official at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and is now a senior executive at Northrop Grumman, a military contractor that does work in weaponry and in planning and detection for unconventional weapons, among many other areas. Also on the panel is Lloyd Cutler, a prominent Washington lawyer who has served in several Democratic administrations. The firm he founded, Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, has done work for the Carlyle Group, a large Washington equity firm that has used former President George Bush and other well-connected Republicans to advance its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Cutler said in an interview, however, that he had not personally represented the Carlyle Group. Clearly the most scrutiny has fallen on Judge Silberman, a senior part-time judge on the United States Court of Appeals in Washington. Conservatives hail Judge Silberman as a well-respected and savvy leader who has had a long and diverse career as a diplomat, law enforcement official and jurist. But several liberal groups and Democratic lawmakers have attacked what they call his severe partisanship on and off the bench in episodes including the Iran-contra affair, the Whitewater investigation and accusations of sexual misconduct against President Bill Clinton.
In a lengthy attack on Judge Silberman delivered on the Senate floor, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, charged that "the canons of judicial ethics meant nothing" to the judge and that he should be replaced on the panel. Silberman, Reid said, was on the panel "to protect the president, not to get fair information." As long as Silberman is associated with the panel, he said, "it is smeared with partisan prejudice." Silberman dismissed such charges as "fabrications" and said he did not believe they would distract from the commission's work. "This all sounds like politics," he said. "Why should I be concerned if I know these charges have no merit?" Silberman acknowledged that he counts among his friends both Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, two of President Bush's most influential advisers on Iraq. And he said, "I plead guilty to being something of a conservative," but added that this would not color his leadership of the commission. As for the commission members' financial interests, Judge Silberman said he was unaware that the White House planned to keep the information confidential, and he pledged to make his own disclosure form available in the coming days. "It's plain vanilla. The only financial interests I have are mutual funds," he said. (New York Times/Truthout)
February 15: Bush makes a campaign stop at the Daytona 500 in Daytona Beach, Florida. He then journeys to Tampa to address another campaign event. Both visits are billed as "official" business, meaning that American taxpayers, not the Bush campaign, will pay for the visits. Bush spokesman Taylor Gross defends the campaign event-cum-official visit by saying, "The president continues to travel throughout the country to discuss his policies and initiatives for America. The president is reaching out Americans to discuss his goals for America and our economy." Democrats have criticized Bush's recent round of official visits around the country; recently, the Democratic National Committee called them "taxpayer-financed campaigning." As part of Bush's Daytona appearance, his personal jet, Air Force One, made a low-level flyover of the track. Shortly thereafter, Bush's motorcade made a partial lap around the track. Carefully orchestrated "encounters" with selected and screened "fans" in the pit led to a number of media shots of Bush, in the words of the New York Times, "happily mingling with fans and drivers" in the pit. The campaign also engaged country singer Lee Greenwood to sing his well-known patriotic songs during the presidential visit. (St. Petersburg Times, New York Times)
February 15: Many European governments believe that if John Kerry defeats Bush for the presidency, there is hope that relations between their countries and the US will benefit. "If Kerry wins, the more he conquers America's indifference toward Europe and the more he expects of us, the better it will be for transatlantic relations," former German President Richard von Weizsaecker says. "He wants to consult America's valuable allies, rather than frightening them off. He is committed to protecting the environment and wants cooperation in the United Nations." "There is a structural difference between Bush and Kerry -- Bush is out to get us and Kerry isn't," says Francois Heisbourg, head of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research foreign policy institute. "As far as I am aware he has no axe to grind with the Europeans, or the French in particular." (Reuters)
February 15: The respected urban legend debunking site Snopes shows unequivocally that a photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda sharing a stage at a 1971 antiwar rally was doctored to bring the images of the two together. The Associated Press released the photograph days ago, sparking anger among many veterans who dislike Fonda for her infamous visit to North Vietnam during the war. Snopes writes, "The picture of John Kerry was captured by 20-year-old photographer Ken Light and documented Kerry preparing to give a speech at the Register for Peace Rally held in Mineola, New York, on 13 June 1971. The picture of Jane Fonda was snapped by Owen Franken over a year later while the actress was speaking at a political rally in Miami Beach, Florida, site of the Republican National Convention, in August 1972. Contemporaneous news accounts do not list Jane Fonda as one of the speakers at the 1971 Register for Peace Rally." As of this point, it is unclear exactly who produced and released the photograph, and why they were able to convince the AP of its authenticity. (Snopes)
February 15: Former senator Max Cleland, a decorated Vietnam veteran who lost his legs and an arm in service, defends his service record against the astonishing attack from conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Coulter alleged that Cleland was injured while drunkenly staggering around a US military base in Vietnam, when he picked up a live grenade that happened to be lying around. In reality, Cleland was injured when a grenade became detached from a colleague's kit while he was on a helicopter, preparing to jump into a battle zone. "He didn't 'give his limbs for his country,' or leave them 'on the battlefield,'" Coulter sneered in her column. "There was no bravery involved in dropping the grenade on himself with no enemy troops in sight." Cleland responds, "I volunteered for a combat mission with the 1st Air Calvary division going into break the siege at Khe Sahn, and if that isn't a combat mission, you ought to ask some of the people that were there and the 200 guys that were killed in that mission." Rusty Paul, a Georgia Republican Party strategist, said Coulter crossed the line with her comments. "You can't take away from Max Cleland his record of service to this country and the sacrifice that he's made, regardless of the circumstances. To me, that's out of bounds to talk about that," he says. (WXIA-TV)
February 15: Three years after the fact, the New York Times finally acknowledges that the 2000 Florida elections were thrown to George W. Bush by the illegal purge of tens of thousands of Florida voters, mostly black and mostly Democratic, by Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign as well as the state official charged with overseeing the elections. The editorial begins, "In 2000, the American public saw in Katherine Harris's massive purge eligible voters in Florida, how easy it is for registered voters to lose their rights by bureaucratic fiat." At the time investigative reporter Greg Palast was reporting on the purges -- weeks before the 2000 elections -- neither the Times nor other mainstream American media outlets would report the story, including CBS, who told Palast that they would not run Palast's articles because Harris's office denied the purges. (So much for impartial journalism.) It was not until June 2001 that a major American media outlet, the Washington Post, would run Palast's articles. (MediaChannel/Greg Palast)
February 15: Jeremy Warren, the former communications director for the Texas Democratic Party, calls the Bush campaign "profligate liars" over their assertions that they have released all the pertinent documents relating to George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. Warren knows differently. He writes, "In 1994, the Texas press corps essentially bought the Team Bush line and did no digging and Ann Richards barely mentioned it on the campaign trail. In 1998, the issue never came up, not even once. I should know. In 1998 I was Communications Director for the Texas Democratic Party and would have loved the opportunity to force then Governor Bush on go on the defensive about something. We hit him over Harken Energy, the Patient Protection Act veto, his plan to increase taxes and more. But the National Guard never, ever came up and for McClellan even to infer otherwise is a flat out lie. We all know how deeply his service was examined in 2000. The Boston Globe exposed the story and then absolutely nothing happened. It was thrown into the trashbin along with any other story line that didn't conform to the 'Al Gore is a liar, George W. Bush is a man of integrity.' Eight years after every word Bill Clinton every uttered or wrote about his draft service was replayed by the media like Kevin Costner rewinding the Zapruder film in JFK, and 12 years after Day Quayle was virtually flayed alive, Bush got a free pass. The funny thing is that Quayle actually 'did his duty.' The facts of this story have never changed, only the spin coming from Team Bush. First it was 'I served.' Then it was, hilariously, 'his doctor was back in Houston.' Now it is simply that those asking questions are 'playing politics' and 'trolling for trash.' For the first time, however, the spin isn't working and McClellan, Bartlett and Bush can't get the press to just go away. I don't know about you, but I smell another 'Orange Alert' on the horizon." (Buzzflash)
February 15: Columnist Jimmy Breslin excoriates George W. Bush over his military record: "[H]e is a guy who ducked the war, dodged the war, reneged on any chance to go to war, and yet without even a hint of personal shame sends young people to die in a war that his record shows that he would duck. That Bush was not near any of this is his business. Of course he had joined the National Guard so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. That he barely went to any National Guard drills is also his business. What matters to all our senses is that he is a president who struts around as a war hero, who dodged Vietnam and most of the National Guard drills and who with less shame than anybody we have had maybe ever, sends your kids to a war that he ducked as if he was allowed to do it by birth. The picture of him playing soldier suit on an aircraft carrier, the helmet under his arm like he just got back from a run over Baghdad, marks him as exceedingly dangerous. He believes he is a warrior president. ...He confuses himself with George Patton, and proudly passes a National Guard record around all over America. ...He is not. He is a war dodger. Therefore, it is preposterous for George Bush to be a commander of anything. He doesn't have the right to send people to war and yet he orders them off, and almost cheerfully. ... What we are sure of is that we have a commander in chief who plays soldier with other people's lives." (Newsday, Newsday)
February 15: The Bank of England is not looking forward to a possible John Kerry presidency. In 1992, Kerry led the US Senate's investigation into the Bank's involvement with BCCI. Kerry said then, "The Bank of England delayed unconscionably in closing BCCI, and millions of investors were hurt.... It was negligent and costly.... I'm saying very directly that the Bank of England had sufficient information in front of it to close BCCI 15 months earlier than it did." Since Kerry is one of the few US politicians with an extensive knowledge of the entire sorry BCCI affair, the Bank of England, which has ceased denying its involvement with BCCI and now portrays itself as an unwitting victim of bank fraud, doesn't like the idea of Kerry's presidency, especially if, as Kerry has promised, he makes a crackdown on banking secrecy and tougher regulation a key component of his administration. (Guardian)

Desmond Tutu asks Blair and Bush to apologize for war

February 16: South African archbishop Desmond Tutu challenges Tony Blair and George W. Bush to apologize for their pursuit of a fruitless and "immoral" war in Iraq. He ridicules the "dangerously flawed" intelligence that Britain and the US used to justify a military action which has made the world a "great deal less safe." In his delivery of the Longford Lecture, Tutu argues that the turmoil after the war proved it is an illusion to believe that "force and brutality" leads to greater security. "How wonderful if politicians could bring themselves to admit they are only fallible human creatures and not God and thus by definition can make mistakes," Tutu says. "Unfortunately, they seem to think that such an admission is a sign of weakness. Weak and insecure people hardly ever say 'sorry'. It is large-hearted and courageous people who are not diminished by saying: 'I made a mistake'. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair would recover considerable credibility and respect if they were able to say: 'Yes, we made a mistake'." He goes on to say, "It may not be fanciful to see a connection between this [Bush's support of capital punishment] and the belligerent militarist policies that have produced a novel and dangerous principle, that of pre-emption on the basis of intelligence reports that in one particular instance have been shown can be dangerously flawed and yet were the basis for the United States going to war, dragging a Britain that declared that intelligence reports showed Iraq to have the capacity to launch its weapons of mass destruction in a matter of minutes. An immoral war was thus waged and the world is a great deal less safe place than before. There are many more who resent the powerful who can throw their weight about so callously and with so much impunity." Tutu says that the two leaders have operated a policy of "might is right -- and to hell with the rule of international law." Sir Menzies Campbell, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, responds, "These comments from such a widely respected figure of independent mind emphasises the extent to which Britain's reputation and possibly influence have been affected by the military action against Iraq. I doubt if President Bush or Mr. Blair are going to apologise, but they should certainly reflect seriously upon the alienation of figures such as Desmond Tutu." (Independent/Truthout)
February 16: Columnist Tim Benintendi notes the similarities between the management of the Vietnam War and Bush's management of the Iraq occupation. He writes, "1. Current planning and deployment constraints force the prosecution of war on an unrealistic budget -- precisely what Westmoreland faced in Vietnam, when the paucity of troops translated into a greater loss of American lives. Rumsfeld's 'Shock and Awe' has turned into an acute shortage of manpower for securing Iraq. 2. From Vietnam we learned the necessity of military police to moderate urban terrorism and of civic action teams to restore public facilities. Had there been an appropriate security plan for military police deployment in place before we seized Baghdad and a civic action plan for civilian reconstruction, we would have had a monthlong window of opportunity to blunt the lawlessness and guerrilla warfare. 3. In Vietnam, the U.S. policy of 'Protective Reaction Strikes' allowed us to illegally bomb North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos under the rationale that certain targets possibly harmful to our operations were ripe for pre-emptive destruction. Under Bush, this policy has morphed into a national policy of 'pre-emption' as a rationale for attacking anyone, anywhere, who is deemed an enemy. This 'bring-it-on' Bush quality of making it up as you go mirrors al-Qaeda tactics against us and does not befit our society. 4. In Vietnam, we failed to develop an exit strategy before conditions in that occupied country warranted a responsible transfer of power. Bush's effort to declare conditions ripe for turnover to the Iraqi leadership prior to this November's US election is transparently dishonest. The fuzzy math of end-game development in Iraq may just inspire a civil war, with us floundering in the middle of it. ...Spare me, in years to come, the apologies of Bush, Rove, Cheney or Rumsfeld for the unfortunate loss of American military personnel in a deceptive waste of national credibility and resources. Apologies from Robert McNamara regarding Vietnam didn't do a thing for the families who suffered staggering losses because of his arrogant and careless actions. This Iraqi distraction has emboldened terrorists, has kept us from pursuing al-Qaeda in more threatening arenas, and draws unnecessarily from our treasury. I don't see any light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel." (Anchorage Daily News)
February 16: The woman falsely accused of having had an affair with Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry issues a statement flatly denying the accusations, which first appeared on Matt Drudge's Web site over a week ago. Former AP reporter Alexandra Polier writes, "For the last several days I have seen Internet and tabloid rumors relating to me and Senator John Kerry. Because these stories were false, I assumed the media would ignore them. It seems that efforts to peddle these lies continue, so I feel compelled to address them. I have never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumors in the press are completely false. Whoever is spreading these rumors and allegations does not know me, but should know the pain they have caused me and my family. I am in Kenya with my fiance visiting his family, and we ask that the press respect our privacy and leave all of us alone." Her parents issue a statement alongside their daughter's which reads: "We have spoken to our daughter and the allegations that have been made regarding her are completely false and unsubstantiated. We love and support her 100 percent and these unfounded rumors are hurtful to our entire family. We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation, and intend on voting for him for president of the United States." (San Francisco Chronicle)
February 16: Two members of the Air National Guard unit that George W. Bush allegedly served with as a young Guard flyer in 1972 had been told to expect him late in that year and were on the lookout for him. He never showed, however; of that both Bob Mintz and Paul Bishop are certain. Mintz recalls, "I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with." But, says Mintz, that "somebody" never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember. "And I was looking for him," Mintz says. He assumed that Bush "changed his mind and went somewhere else" to do his substitute drill. It was not "somewhere else," however, but the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly to which Bush had requested transfer from his regular Texas unit. Mintz's unit, the 187th, is where Bush claims to have completed his ANG service. "There's no way we wouldn't have noticed a strange rooster in the henhouse, especially since we were looking for him," insists Mintz, who has begun poring over such documents relating to the matter as are now making their way around the Internet. One of these is a piece of correspondence addressed to the 187th's commanding officer, then Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, concerning Bush's redeployment. Mintz remembers a good deal of base scuttlebutt at the time about the letter, which clearly identifies Bush as the transferring party. "It couldn't be anybody else. No one ever did that again, as far as I know." In any case, he is certain that nobody else in that time frame, 1972-73, requested such a transfer into Dannelly.
Mintz confesses to "a negative reaction" to what he sees as out-and-out dissembling on Bush's part. "You don't do that as an officer, you don't do that as a pilot, you don't do it as an important person, and you don't do it as a citizen. This guy's got a lot of nerve." Though some accounts reckon the total personnel component of the 187th as consisting of several hundred, the actual flying squadron to which Bush was reassigned numbered only "25 to 30 pilots," Mintz says. "There's no doubt. I would have heard of him, seen him, whatever. ...[N]obody I can think of remembers him." Mintz's friend Bishop confirms Mintz's recollections. "I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush," he says. Bishop, a veteran of the Air National Guard, the stunt pilot for the movie Air Force One, and a Bush supporter, is nevertheless disgruntled by Bush's lies about his military record. "I think a commander-in-chief who sends his men off to war ought to be a veteran who has seen the sting of battle," Bishop says. "In Iraq: we have a bunch of great soldiers, but they are not policemen. I don't think he [Bush] was well advised; right now it's costing us an American life a day. I'm not a peacenik, but what really bothers me is that of the 500 or so that we've lost almost 80 of them were reservists. We've got an over-extended Guard and reserve."
Part of the problem, Bishop thinks, is a disconnect resulting from the president's own inexperience with combat operations. And he is well beyond annoyed at the White House's persistent claims that Bush did indeed serve time at Dannelly. Bishop didn't pay much attention to the claim when candidate Bush first offered it in 2000. But he did after the second Iraq war started and the issue came front and center. "It bothered me that he wouldn't 'fess up and say, Okay, guys, I cut out when the rest of you did your time. He shouldn't have tried to dance around the subject. I take great exception to that. I spent 39 years defending my country." A Dannelly veteran, Major John Calhoun, has said that he remembers Bush on base during the time in question. Both Bishop and Mintz don't believe it. "I'm glad he [Calhoun] remembered being with Lt. Bush and Lt. Bush's eating sandwiches and looking at manuals," says Bishop. "It seems a little strange that one man saw an individual, and all the rest of them did not. Because it was such a small organization. Usually, we all had lunch together. ...Maybe we're all getting old and senile," Bishop adds sarcastically. "I don't want to second-guess Mr. Calhoun's memory and I would hate to impugn the integrity of a fellow officer, but I know the rest of us didn't see Lt. Bush."
As Bishop (corroborated by Mintz) described the physical environment, the safety office where the meetings between Major Calhoun and Lt. Bush allegedly took place was on the second floor of the unit's hangar, a relatively small structure itself. It would have been "virtually impossible," says Bishop, for an officer to go in and out of the safety office for eight hours a month several months in a row and be unseen by anybody except Calhoun. In any case, says Bishop, "If what he [Calhoun] says is true, there would be documentation of the fact in point summaries and pay documents." No such documents are known to exist. Bishop raises yet another issue about Bush's ANG tenure: the cancellation after 1972 of the final year of his six-year obligation, ostensibly to pursue a post-graduate business degree at Yale. That doesn't sit well with the veteran pilot. "When you accept a flying slot with the Air National Guard, you're obligated for six years," Bishop says. "Even if you grant him credit for that missing year in Alabama which none of us remember, he still failed to serve his full commitment. Even graduate school, for which he was supposedly released, is attended during the week usually. It wouldn't have conflicted with drill weekends, whether he was in Connecticut or Massachusetts or wherever. There would have been no need for an early release. Maybe they do things differently in Texas. I don't want to malign the commander-in-chief, but this is an issue of duty, honor country. You must have integrity." (Memphis Flyer)

February 17: Defense advisor Richard Perle calls for the heads of both the CIA and DIA to resign over intelligence lapses in Iraq. Perle, a close adviser to defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, says top officials made no attempt to skew the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he observes, top policymakers relied in good faith on the conclusions of the intelligence agencies. "[Director] George Tenet has been at the CIA long enough to assume responsibility for its performance," Perle says. "There's a record of failure and it should be addressed in some serious way. ...The CIA has an almost perfect record of getting it wrong in relation to the [Persian] Gulf going back to the Shah of Iran." Perle says "a shakeup" in the US intelligence establishment is needed. "I think, of course, heads should roll," he says. "When you discover that you have an organization that doesn't get it right time after time, you change the organization, including the people." He says the DIA "is in at least as bad shape as CIA (and) needs new management." The DIA is headed by Navy Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby. (Toronto Star)
February 17: While the Bush campaign attempts to paint Democratic frontrunner John Kerry as being "beholden to special interests and out of touch with regular Americans," a new study by the non-profit, good-government group Public Citizen shows "the president accepted more in direct contributions from lobbyists in one year than Kerry did in the past 15 years." In 2003 alone, the Bush campaign accepted more than $6.5 million from special interests and lobbyists. Among the biggest donors giving at least $100,000 each to Bush's re-election effort, 53 are lobbyists. Compare this figure to the $640,000 collected by Kerry over the last 15 years. The Bush campaign is correct when it says that Kerry has gotten more from individual lobbyists than any other senator, but the claim neglects an important fact -- Kerry does not accept money from political action committees. When PAC contributions are thrown in, Kerry ranks near the bottom of the list of senators for the total amount received. Among the top contributors to the first Bush campaign were electric utility lobbyists who were then allowed to help write energy policies that gutted the Clean Air Act. Other generous donors are former Republican lawmakers and Bush administration employees, who switched to lobbying for, among other things, contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. The list goes on and on. The pharmaceutical industry has been particularly generous with the Bush campaign, and it came out smelling like a rose in the new Medicare prescription drug program, which forbids the government from negotiating lower drug prices. Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, says, "In modern times, no president or presidential candidate has come close to being as indebted to special interests as the current occupant of the White House."
Bush has also attacked the US Senate for letting its ties to special interests hold up an insurance industry-backed bill to restrict medical patients from seeking legal redress in the event of malpractice, yet it was Bush who accepted more than $3 million from the insurance industry before he wrote the bill. On the campaign trail last year, Bush said, "We can't let the special interests of Washington prevent us from doing what is necessary to protect the biggest interest we have, which is the American people." Yet it was Bush who did the bidding of his friends in the meat processing/meat packing industries by refusing to protect the American people from Mad Cow disease. Specifically, Bush refused to enact stringent meat inspection regulations and delayed country-of-origin labeling laws at the urging of the agribusiness industry which has given him $5.5 million. To make sure that the agribusiness special interests were protected, Bush also packed the US Department of Agriculture with agribusiness executives. Even on issues of war and peace, Bush has put special interests before almost anything else. As the Center for Public Integrity reported, the more than 70 companies and individuals that Bush awarded up to $8 billion in Iraq/Afghanistan contracts have "donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush -- a little over $500,000 -- than to any other politician over the last dozen years." (USA Today/Center for Public Integrity/Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily Misleader)
February 17: Former US Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board as well as a board member of Hollinger International, is under investigation for allegedly failing to disclose bonuses worth about $3 million which he received for running an investment scheme. Perle, a noted neoconservative and vocal supporter of the Bush administration, was awarded the money as a reward for investing Hollinger shareholder funds in a series of separate businesses. Perle also held a stake in some of those businesses. While the scheme put Hollinger International shareholders' money at risk, it was never disclosed to them. Perle was one of five Hollinger International directors who participated in the bonus scheme. The other four directors divulged their awards to shareholders, but Perle has so far failed to do so. Perle is apparently in violation of laws enforced by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Although Perle appears to have received the biggest bonuses through the scheme between 2000 and 2001, his takings were never disclosed in the company's proxy letters to shareholders. Perle is said to have helped to set up a bonus scheme where 22 per cent of all gains on investments made by Hollinger International went into a central pot that paid bonuses to himself and other company executives. Shareholder money was funnelled through a company called Hollinger Digital Inc, where Perle was co-chairman. The group was a unit of Hollinger International and was set up in 1996. The existence of the bonus scheme, which is understood to be documented and has been confirmed by Hollinger insiders, has not been denied by Perle. When asked about the incentive scheme this week, Perle denied that he had received $5 million from the scheme but refused to deny that he had received $3 million, despite being given several opportunities to do so. (London Times/Fair Use)
February 17: Assistant US Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit files a lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft and the US Justice Department, accusing them of "gross mismanagement" of the war on terrorism. Convertino believes that Ashcroft and his officials have interfered in the terrorism case Convertino is prosecuting in Detroit, compromised a confidential informant, and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism. Convertino came under internal investigation in the fall of 2003 after providing information to a Senate committee about his concerns about the war on terror. His testimony came just months after he helped convict some members of an alleged terrorism cell in Detroit. The government now admits it failed to turn over evidence during the trial that might have assisted the defense, including an allegation from an imprisoned drug gang leader who claimed the government's key witness made up his story. (USA Today, St. Petersburg Times)
February 17: Speculation continues among certain circles within the Republican Party on whether the party will decide that George W. Bush needs to run for re-election in 2004 with a different vice presidential candidate. Dick Cheney trails Bush by well over 10 points in popularity polls, and is seen by some as a problem for the Bush ticket that will continue to escalate, most of his problems stemming from his association with Halliburton and his unwavering insistence that Iraq indeed possessed WMDs. Among those mentioned as possible replacements: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, Representative Rob Portman of Ohio, Colorado Governor Bill Owens, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, now Bush's homeland security secretary, and two New Yorkers, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki. Insiders say that if Cheney wants, or if the party deems it necessary, he could step aside using his heart as his excuse -- he has had four heart attacks already. However, a spokesperson for Cheney says his health is "fine." (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
February 17: The roles of Republican-connected "journalists" like Matt Drudge are being examined anew in light of the failed intern scandal Drudge, and his GOP handlers, attempted to hoke up against Democratic candidate John Kerry. The British newspaper Guardian traces the situation back to the Clinton presidency, where savagely angry Republicans faked up scandal after scandal about the Clintons and shopped them around to mainstream journalists. When the mainstream failed to bite, Republicans used the much less ethical, less established rumormongers they had drawn to themselves, including gossip columnist Matt Drudge, to introduce their lies to the public. The writer of the Daily Brew says of Drudge: "Drudge's true function in the GOP media ecosystem is as the liar of last resort. The everyday lies, the ones that can be dressed up as jokes, opinions, or exaggerations, come from a million sources. But when the polls numbers are crashing, and the GOP really needs a hard-edged smear to change the subject, Drudge is the go-to-guy. His willingness to make the over the top accusation is critical, because without someone willing to take the fall, the rest of them can't repeat the lie without tarnishing their own credibility, such as it is. So Limbaugh, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the whole cast of print pundits and media talking heads who form the Republican spin machine need a designated stooge. Drudge fills that role." The Guardian adds, "Drudge had plenty of assistance in gaining a wider audience in those days. The Times and the Telegraph in London both served as his chambermaids during the later Clinton years, emptying the pot on the British side of the ocean when no American news outlet would pick up the job from him and deliver it to a wider audience. That gave news organizations in the US that were part of the same stable (News Corporation's New York Post and Fox TV News in the case of the Times; Hollinger's Chicago Sun Times for the Telegraph) cover to process the same muck, but attributing it to London newspapers. Competing newspapers and broadcasters were unable to avoid repeating the stories."
The same axis of media sleaze joined together to spread the Kerry intern rumors. The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph both picked up Drudge's intern story. Though Drudge had not named the woman, both the London papers showed no inhibition. The Telegraph splashed it across the front. The Times gave it two full pages inside, and included specious allegations about tell-all confessions by the woman in question to a major network news show. They both offered photos of her and of her parents' house. As was the case so often in the past, mainstream American outlets began to pick up the story, though more gingerly than was their wont in the Clinton days, although, just as predictably, right-wing radio ran for the goal line with the story (Rush Limbaugh trumpeted the stories for days on end, justifying his obsession with the story by saying that the story was "all over" the British press; at the same time, Limbaugh criticized Democrats for daring to disbelieve Bush's explanation of his National Guard service). And with good reason: not only was Drudge able to find a single scrap of proof for his allegations, he fouled up the basic facts of the story. The woman was not an intern, but a journalist. She had been an intern six years before, years before the alleged affair took place, but was not an intern for Kerry or even in the Senate. Where Drudge claims she "recently" fled the country at Kerry's behest, it appears that she has been in Africa for months visiting her future in-laws. "Innuendo piled on error piled on implication," the Guardian notes. "so, not only sewage, but wrong sewage. Fortunately, the plumbing seems to be working. The story has disappeared in the US."
During the last three years, Drudge has faded from the public view, largely because he isn't getting tasty tidbits fed to him on a regular basis from the Republican leadership or from the Whitewater investigative commission. And Drudge has no interest in airing any of the Bush administration's dirty laundry. Slate ironically notes the various justifications that mainstream media outlets use for airing such patently unfounded sleaze, including the following: "It's a press story" (i.e. the story is whether or not the press should cover such stories, and the fact that the allegations are trumpeted over and over again is irrelevant), "It's an Internet phenomenon" (as if the fact that the story originated on the Internet and not in the Weekly World News is worth reporting), "It's a story about bare-knuckled negative campaigning" (in that case, why isn't the source of the rumor being outed in the news?), "It's a story about financial impropriety, maybe" (well, no it's not, but can it be justified as such?), "It's a story about sexual harassment" (again, no it isn't, but hey, it worked against Clinton with the Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick stories, even though those had no basis in fact, either), "It's a story about character" (a favorite justification, as if the fact that some mysterious someones are spreading lies about a candidate somehow reflects on that candidate's character), "It's a story about hypocrisy" (since Kerry, like every other candidate, is four-square in support of marriage and families, then somehow this story reflects on his integrity, even though it's unfounded), "It's a story about electability" (everything affects Kerry's electability, even the lies), "It's a story about a Democrat, and all Democrats are scum" (only effective in the conservative press and on Fox News), and "Lighten up—it's a humor piece!" (yeah, right). (Mother Jones, Guardian, Slate, The Daily Brew)
February 17: Los Angeles Times John Glionna misreports John Kerry's 1971 testimony to Congress about atrocities committed by US troops in Vietnam. According to Glionna, Kerry "accused fellow servicemen of committing wartime atrocities against civilians." In reality, according to transcripts of Kerry's testimony, Kerry actually said that he was present when his fellow servicemen had testified about war crimes they themselves had committed. The Daily Brew observes, "In the GOP-preferred version, Kerry is stabbing his fellow vets in the back, accusing them of crimes. In the real world, Kerry wasn't accusing anyone of anything. He was simply repeating stories told by his fellow vets and bringing them to the attention of the Congress. ...The reason that this particular lie is so insidious is because it fits so tightly with the emerging GOP narrative. Judging by the poll numbers, figuring out how to beat Kerry is proving a tough nut to crack. But Karl Rove has the focus groups are working overtime, and we are starting to see the rough outline of what is coming. Bush's overarching theme is shaping up to go something like this: 'George Bush is a strong, war-time leader who puts the safety of the American public first. John Kerry is a blame-America-firster who puts our troops and our nation at risk by criticizing our government while our troops are in the field. He did so by leading protests against Vietnam, he did so during his Senate career with his votes against funding our military and intelligence services, and he is doing so today with his criticism of our efforts in Iraq.'" (The Daily Brew, University of Richmond)
February 17: Media observers Eric Alterman and Michael Tomasky offer the American media a five-step prescription towards rousing itself from its post-2000 "torpor," as they term it, and becoming once again a vigorous and independent entity. They write:
"1. Go beyond the "he said, she said" and tell us what you believe to be true and important about a story. The chief convention of most news reporting -- this side says this, that side says that -- needs a drastic rethink. In the age of spin, an age brought to new lows by this White House, a formula that requires giving equal weight to both sides ends up helping the side that's lying. So when Bush says, as he often did during the last campaign, "[B]y far, the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom end of the spectrum," this obvious and factually checkable lie got the same play in most stories as the truth did. The he said, she said convention actually blurred the truth. This reflex was at work in the major papers' coverage of Bush's February 7 Meet the Press interview. Some of the news stories were skeptical, especially Dana Milbank's in the Washington Post. Even so, Bush plainly made several claims that simply were not true. Reporters were aware of this, having received a well-documented fact-check from the Center for American Progress within hours of the interview's broadcast. Still, many allowed Bush to continue to attempt to justify the war on grounds that had already been discredited. We've entered an age in which instantaneous Web analyses are quickly getting readers accustomed to ways of taking in news that are more frank and opinionated. Editors need to reconsider these conventions and reinvigorate them so that they are less concerned with giving equal weight to each side and more concerned with pursuing the factual truth (and yes, this should apply to lying Democrats as well). Truth is sometimes elusive and hard to pin down. It is, however, the point.
2. Challenge the master narrative with genuine investigative reporting. Do you have a good idea of how presidential sibling Neil Bush makes his money these days? Can you describe even briefly what Interior Secretary Gale Norton has been up to for the last three years? Can you name three (or even one) of Bush's top 10 corporate contributors? Do you know anything about The Carlyle Group beyond the fact that the president's father is affiliated with it? If the media were working properly, you'd be able to answer at least a couple of those questions. But unless you're among America's most ferocious newshounds, you can't. And the reason you can't is that investigative reporting has all but disappeared in Washington. We're aware of the many reasons for this problem: reduced newsroom budgets, Bush administration intimidation, and more. But the primary culprit is the tyranny of an instant news cycle coupled with the power of the master narrative. The cable shows, the Sunday shows, the major news weeklies, and, to a lesser extent, the leading editorial and op-ed pages -- with the hard-right radio world providing the background white noise -- establish a story line: Bill Clinton is Slick Willie, George W. Bush is Winston Churchill. All Democrats are sissies unless proven otherwise. In the land of the 24-hour news-cycle, the narrative, which gets repeated over and over until it takes on the veneer of being true even when it's nonsensical, is king. With the glorious exception of the indomitable Seymour Hersh (and damn few others), the Washington media have given this administration an almost total pass. Even the one criminal probe into the administration, the Valerie Plame Wilson leak investigation, was itself leaked to the Washington Post by a disgruntled administration official and only became a full-blown story after the Department of Justice announced its investigation. Speaking at Harvard University last spring, Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie said the following: 'So if you do tough investigative reporting about Democrats or about issues that are important to the left, you'll get a strong backlash from the left. Similarly, if you do tough investigative reporting of the Republicans or people on the right, you'll get a strong backlash from them. And I think this is also having an impact on the media. It's scaring people.' There you have it. The top editor at America's second most-important newspaper admits that angry phone calls and e-mails are frightening editors (it's a good thing there was no Internet when Ben Bradlee was editor, we guess). And in a bit of painful poetic justice, the paper's most famous and once-great investigative reporter, Bob Woodward, has reverted to the role of court stenographer; channeling the majesty, greatness, and unwavering resolve of Bush, Cheney, and company in exchange for unrestricted access to national-security meetings and documents that are routinely denied to more critically minded reporters.
3. Show proportionality in covering controversies. In the runup to John Kerry's February 3 victories in five states, the New York Times' Glen Justice and John Tierney published a front-page article examining Kerry's and other Democrats' contributions from special interests. Fair enough: The public has a right to know. But it also has a right to knowledge that's placed in some sort of sensible context. Take a look at this sentence, for instance: 'Mr. Kerry denounces President Bush for catering to the rich, but he has depended more heavily on affluent donors than the other leading Democrats except for another populist, Senator John Edwards.' Just how does Kerry's standing vis-a-vis the other Democrats provide a useful measure of whether Bush caters to the rich? And do Kerry's contributions from special interests come even close to those of the president? This question is not explored with reporting. Instead, the authors tell us, using the paradigmatic 'to be sure' construction, 'To be sure, none of the Democrats have collected donations on the scale of President Bush's campaign, and they generally avoid donations from political action committees . But the Democrats are hardly naifs when it comes to enlisting support from special interests in Washington and elsewhere, from corporate leaders and from unions in the public and private sectors.' Talk about your false constructions. Did anyone accuse the Democrats of being 'naifs when it comes to enlisting support from special interests in Washington and elsewhere, from corporate leaders and from unions in the public and private sectors?' A single sentence of context -- provided with no numbers whatever -- hardly gives readers a fair sense of who's giving what to whom. Rather, it plays perfectly into the Rove game plan of selling the country to special interests while proclaiming it to be in the public good. It would have taken Justice and Tierney about 90 seconds to go to a Web site every political journalist knows and discover that in fact, Bush has received 28 times more money in PAC donations than Kerry has.
4. A little solidarity on behalf of the truth, please. ABC Political Director Mark Halperin began a campaign awhile back for reporters to break former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer of his habit of ignoring questions he didn't like by calling on another reporter who would conveniently change the subject. Great idea, but it went nowhere. The apogee of a servile media was reached on television a year ago when reporters sat still for a perfectly scripted imitation of a prime-time press conference that had fewer surprises in it than the umpteenth viewing of an old I Love Lucy episode. There's really nothing that should prevent political reporters from agreeing not to ask a new question until their colleague gets a satisfactory answer to his or hers. In the long run, such a rule (which should of course be applied to Democrats, too) would help everyone. But it isn't just reporters who should show solidarity. The news organizations they work for need to do the same. Last year, Jonathan Weisman, an economics reporter at the Washington Post, published a letter detailing the terms laid down by the White House that he would have to accept to get an interview with an administration official for a story about outgoing economic adviser R. Glenn Hubbard: The interview would be off the record only, quotes Weisman wanted to use would have to be e-mailed to the press office in advance of publication, and, if approved, the quotes could be attributed to a 'White House official.' Weisman went on to note that even after he met all these conditions, the official he was quoting demanded that the quote be changed -- that words never spoken be placed within quotation marks. When Weisman met this demand only halfway and the story appeared, he was met with 'an angry denunciation by the White House press official,' telling him that he had broken his word and 'violated journalistic ethics.' As Weisman acknowledged, he had violated ethics -- by agreeing to all this nonsense in the first place. The blame here rests not with Weisman, who was brave enough to publicize these details, but with his employer. Why should the big, powerful Washington Post bow to terms like these? On a regular basis, our greatest media institutions are accepting conditions that every undergraduate journalism student in the country is taught to reject. Individual reporters, scrambling for access and scoops, can't change this on their own. It's up to their bosses and owners.
5. Don't let non-news organs drive the news cycle. This may be the most important point, and you need only think back to the last election to see how it might work this time. Some right-wing radio host or FOX will push some tale about the Democratic nominee. It will either be an outright deception (Gore and Love Canal), a perverse distortion of something that contains a small kernel of truth (Gore and the famous 'standing student' in Sarasota, Florida), or something completely irrelevant to the man's qualifications to run the country (Gore and fully buttoned brown suits). It will be framed as reflecting the nominee's 'character.' And many voters, who pay only moderate attention to the news and don't give any thought to how and why the information in front of them gets there, will buy into it. Every serious journalist will know, deep down, that it's exaggerated, unfair, and orchestrated. But it won't matter. It will travel from the right-wing media to the cable shows (if, indeed, that can be called 'traveling' at all) and then land on the network news shows and the front pages and op-ed pages of the respectable newspapers. A lot of things get 'reported' on shows like Hardball with Chris Matthews and The O'Reilly Factor, and by people like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh, that are, to be more than generous, not exactly nailed down. The fact that they are 'out there,' as an MSNBC producer once said about the report that a witness had caught Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the act inside the White House, is not a reason for journalists to put their own names and that of their news organizations behind them. Journalists need to ask themselves not only whether a story is true but whether it's significant. Is it somehow more important that John Kerry may have gotten a Botox shot when the nation's deficit is shooting out of control and Iraq is proving not only unmanageable but turns out to have never been threatening? ...Journalists are supposed to enjoy their work and take pride in it. Otherwise, why bother? We are not typically overpaid or commanding of the respect in society that doctors or successful businesspeople enjoy. The profession experienced an all-too-brief injection of self-worth in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. 'When you find yourself covering sex and sleaze stories, you're not terribly proud of it,' explained Clarence Page, a Chicago Tribune columnist. It wasn't the kind of thing I could go home and talk to my kid about. Now my son comes to me with questions about Afghanistan. I feel proud of what I do....' If journalists demonstrated the kind of tenacity in going after key political stories that they did during that brief shining moment, well, America will have an election worthy of the world's oldest democracy, and reporters and editors alike will be able to speak proudly of the charge given to them by its oldest written constitution: to protect and defend the public's right to know its leaders -- and to choose them wisely." (The American Prospect)
February 17: The US war on terror has been "extremely damaging" for human rights, and has been used as an excuse by totalitarian regimes to impose oppressive laws, according to a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The IISS, traditionally viewed as an establishment body, concludes that issues such as Guantanamo Bay mean that Washington can no longer "assume a high moral position." Countries such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan have brought in so-called anti-terrorist laws insisting that they are not much different to the Patriot Act enacted by the Bush administration, says the report. The IISS compiled a dossier of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war. It said Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and would use them if attacked. Tony Blair's dossier, which followed two weeks later in September 2002, drew heavily on the IISS document. Last month the IISS said it had commissioned a new study to reassess its findings. The report, "Human Rights and Counter-terrorism in America's Asia Policy," examines the effect of US support for human rights in five countries seen as being in the front line against Islamic terrorism: Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. The report points out that following the attacks of 9/11, the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said: "Civil liberties matter to this President very much, and our values matter to us abroad. We are not going to stop talking about things that matter to us: human rights, religious freedom.... We're going to continue to press these things; we would not be America if we did not." The report concludes: "US national security officials have also been reported as using techniques outlawed under the 1984 Convention Against Torture...which the US signed in 1994, in their interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects. US authorities have returned or sent a number of prisoners for further interrogation to countries where there are strong grounds to suspect they will be tortured. It is...important to note that the credibility of America's externally directed human rights message has been damaged by US curtailment of the rights of its own citizens and non-citizens." (Independent/Information Clearinghouse)
February 17: AlterNet's Thom Hartmann writes that Bush and his chief advisor Karl Rove made a deliberate decision not to bring Osama bin Laden in after 9/11, for the politically expedient reason that Bush needed a "supervillian" to contrast himself against. "If they could recast George as the opponent of a power as great as the Ring," Hartmann writes with the recent movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings in mind, "then the rather ordinary Dubya could become the extraordinary SuperGeorge, rising from his facileness to prevail over supernatural powers of evil." He notes that the Clinton administration chose to treat bin Laden as a criminal, maximizing their effectiveness in limiting bin Laden's capability to injure the US but simultaneously failing to use bin Laden as a figure of evil in which to contrast the president.
Hartmann writes, "As Clinton left office, he and the CIA were tightening the noose on bin Laden, and his National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, told me that when he briefed his successor, Condoleezza Rice, he told her to put bin Laden and al-Qaeda at the top of her priority list and thus finish the job the Clinton administration had nearly completed. As we know, when Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, et al. finally came up with the priorities for their new administration, al-Qaeda had been replaced by tax cuts for Bush's rich donors on the 'A' list, and didn't even appear on the 'B' list. Thus came 9/11, despite warnings given to the President on August 6, 2001 that in the immediate future al-Qaeda intended to hijack commercial planes and use them to attack East Coast targets. (Bush apparently took the warnings seriously -– Ashcroft immediately stopped flying on commercial aircraft, and Bush moved to Texas for the longest vacation in the history of the American presidency...and even when that was over, he preferred Florida to target-listed Washington, D.C.)
"In the days after the 9/11 attacks, America had the sympathy of the world, and the police and intelligence agencies of even normally hostile nations offered to help us track down and bring to justice its perpetrators. Mullah Omar of Afghanistan offered to arrest bin Laden on our behalf and turn him over to a western nation for prosecution; Muslims all over the world were horrified at the actions of one of their own, a fundamentalist turned criminal and murderer. It would have been so easy to accept Omar's offer, bring in bin Laden, dismantle the training camps and track down their attendees and sponsors, and launch an international effort to disassemble and render impotent al-Qaeda. It probably could have been done in a year or less, given the intensity of the worldwide empathy for citizens of America and the many other nations whose people died in the World Trade Center. Over 500 American soldiers would still be alive, and thousands would not have lost arms, legs, and eyes. Over 40,000 innocent Afghans and Iraqis would still be alive. But Karl Rove knew that George W. Bush had a problem, and saw in bin Laden the solution. Bush had not defeated Al Gore fair and square, and was seen by most Americans as a spoiler, an illegitimate leader. As soon as the details of his proposed 'supply side' voodoo economics hit the press, the markets went into a nosedive. And already there were stories circulating in the media of his cozy relationship with corrupt oil barons like Ken Lay and the secret energy meetings in the Spring of 2001 –- before 9/11 -– in which Cheney, Lay, and others in the oil industry were apparently carving up the oil fields of Iraq.
"Bush, in short, was seen as a buffoonish pretender, an ineffectual manager, and a sellout to big oil and other scandal-ridden industries. He was the butt of late-night jokes, a former college cheerleader, a 'dry drunk' (except when tempted by pretzels), an inside trader, a small man on the national and international stage. George W. desperately needed his own Lex Luthor if he were to reinvent himself as Superman. Rove and Bush realized that if they simply branded Osama as the criminal thug that he was –- the leader of an obscure Islamic mafia with fewer than 20,000 serious members –- they wouldn't have the super-villain they needed for George W. Bush to be seen as a super-hero. If Bush only authorized a police action, he'd miss a golden opportunity to position himself as the Battle Commander of The War Against Evil Incarnate. And so began the building of the mythos. Osama as evil genius. Osama as worldwide mastermind. Even Osama as the antichrist (as General Boykin reminded us so candidly). Even though Osama is almost certainly dead or badly disabled (otherwise we'd see him on the video he so loved to use before Tora Bora), Bush can't afford to acknowledge that -– to retain his Superman pose, George must continue to have a Kryptonite-equipped foe. If the remnants of al Qaeda try to pull our strings by increasing 'chatter about particular flights, for example, we must hyper-react with many press conferences and televised appearances by Tom Ridge. Every action must be trumpeted. We must keep 'Terror Alerts' on the screens of TVs nationwide as long as possible. We must remind the people that George The Good is battling the One True Dragon, so they will renew his Sacred Mission for another four years.
"For George to remain SuperGeorge throughout his term of office, and thus to pull the country behind him for an FDR-sized transformation of the nation on behalf of his corporate masters, George needs a war every bit as huge as FDR's WWII. And that requires Osama to be as big as Hitler in the minds of Americans. ...This archetypal transformation of George W. Bush from spoiled, rich pretender-to-the-presidency into the caped (well, flight-suited) SuperGeorge, Defender Of All Things Good And Right has had a powerful impact on the American people, and Rove hopes to ride it to victory in 2004. But there is a weakness in it, which the Democrats can use to stop Bush's demagogic PR machine and ongoing destruction of American democracy. Howard Dean was the first to raise a fist full of Kryptonite against SuperGeorge when he suggested we should internationalize the efforts against al-Qaeda and involve more police agencies. Dean's speeches -– particularly his speech on foreign policy -– make clear that while he realizes the very real danger al-Qaeda represents, he also knows that Bush's superhero go-it-alone posturing is doing us -– and democracy itself -– more harm than good. To the extent Democrats can de-mythologize bin Laden, they will deprive Bush of his superhero costume. Bin Laden-as-wretched-criminal must become part of the lexicon of the Democratic worldview.
"...We must repeatedly remind the American people that a horrific crime -– not an act of war -– was inflicted upon us on 9/11. Like the crimes of the IRA against the citizens of Britain, the crimes of the November 17th terrorist group against Greece, or the crimes of the Red Brigades against Italy, it will be best fought by investigators, intelligence operatives, and the highly effective web of police agencies that stretch across the world. Although less filled with shock and awe, these able people can bring al-Qaeda to justice without further elevating bin Laden or extending his reach and influence. By recasting bin Laden from a super-villain into a banal criminal, we weaken support for him around the world. And we also deflate the heroic SuperGeorge action figure in the minds of average Americans, allowing more rational statesmen and women to bring this great nation back to the peace we held through so much of the last half of the 20th century." (AlterNet)
February 17: AlterNet's Jim Lobe writes an open letter to Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor supervising the stalled investigation of the Valerie Plame Wilson leak. He recommends that Fitzgerald subpoena Clifford May. He writes: "There is at least one person who knew of Valerie Plame's relationship to the CIA even before Novak published his column: Clifford May. He is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a non-profit organization founded two days after the 9/11 attacks that, in its words, 'conducts research and education on the war on terrorism.' More importantly, there is no reason why Mr. May should have known about Plame's CIA credentials, nor did he possess the requisite security clearances to do so. Tracking down the source of his 'leak' could well bring us closer to identifying the culprits who gave the same information to the likes of Bob Novak. Mr. May has not been coy about sharing his knowledge of Plame's CIA background. On Sept. 29, the same day that the Washington Post confirmed that the CIA had asked for a criminal investigation of Novak's sources, the National Review Online published a column by Mr. May claiming to be in the know long before Novak blew her cover. 'That wasn't news to me,' he wrote. 'I had been told that -– but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.' Mr. May later told Fox News the same day that Plame's identity was 'something of an open secret.' Mr. May's assertions raise some troubling questions. Exactly who were the 'insiders' for whom this was 'something of an open secret?' How did they obtain this information and why did they pass it on so readily to someone like him?"
Lobe notes that May is a well-known Republican operative, formerly the director of communications at the Republican National Committee as well as a senior member of public relations firm BSMG Worldwide, a large and well-connected firm. May founded the FDD in 2001, and boasts among his board members Republican insiders such as Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Steve Forbes, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Jack Kemp, while Newt Gingrich and former CIA director James Woolsey are among his organization's "Distinguished Advisors." He has plenty of connections. Lobe observes, "Of course, the 'insiders' Mr. May referred to in his column need not be members of his own board. But it isn't unreasonable to view them as likely candidates for that role. Gingrich, Woolsey, and Perle all serve on the DPB and carry high-level security clearances. Although it is difficult to imagine how or why Plame's identity would come up in official DPB deliberations, but these three men also have close informal relationships with the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney –- the two men who were most annoyed by Wilson's revelations. Woolsey, Perle and Gaffney also fit the description of 'someone who formerly worked in the government.'" As of last week, May has not yet been contacted by the FBI or anyone else investigating the case. (AlterNet)
February 17: Kevin Phillips, author of the Bush family biography American Dynasty, explains how a uniquely unqualified George H.W. Bush was elevated to high office, paving the way for his even less qualified son to "inherit" the Presidency, and the scandals that beset the two of them. (Note: This material has largely been covered in the earlier pages, but Phillips sums a lot of facts up very concisely.)
"George Herbert Walker Bush decided, announced, that he was running for President [in 1979]. Three years earlier, he had been the director for about 13 or 14 months of the CIA. In that role, he was principally involved with the concern that was growing about oil in the Middle East because of the oil price increase. He was involved in opening up and strengthening US relations with the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia and Iran, in particular. After this role, he gets out, he takes up a role as chairman of the executive committee of a major Texas bank, spends a fair amount of time in London making contacts with Middle Eastern financial institutions. In the meantime, Jimmy Carter, having taken over the Presidency, fires a whole lot of people who have been in the clandestine covert operations side of the CIA. They leave office, and they're looking for a place to gather, politically, governmentally, what have you. In 1979, George Bush announces that he's running for President. A lot of people in the Republican Party said 'President of what? President of a company or something?' It wasn't too easy to believe. Here was a guy that had his clock cleaned running for senator from Texas twice, but he was a certain type of a fungus. You can't get rid of him. He had real contacts, if you know what I mean. He was a made man, in a certain sense. Well, when he made his announcement, one of his consultants, who currently is the president of the American Conservative Union, David Keene, said, and I pretty much quote here, 'Half of the people in the audience were wearing trench coats.' Now, this is significant because he left the CIA and became a Presidential candidate with the unique set of relationships with the CIA.
"Now, in 1980, the 50-odd hostages that had been seized in Iran by the Ayatollah's government were being held, and there was an attempt made to rescue them in April of 1980 by the Carter administration. It didn't work. The helicopters were shot down. At this point, pollsters in both parties calculated that you had about six to ten points of the vote hanging on the outcome of whether or not the hostages were released. If Carter could get them back, that vote would swing to Carter, if not, that vote would swing to the Republican nominee who quickly became Ronald Reagan with George H.W. Bush as his running mate. Now, in the summer, because of this enormous importance of the six to ten points on which the election was hanging and on which you had this focus on the return of the hostages, both sides got very much concerned with this; and the Republicans set something in motion, allegedly, that has been covered in several books, and became a scandal known as 'The October Surprise.' In essence, there were ties sought, and then relationships opened with the Ayatollahs and the revolutionary government of Iran, and the allegation is, in these several books, that basically, contact was made by George Bush and Bill Casey, who later became the next CIA director, and had been in the OSS in World War II; and the point was that the Iranian government was being offered money and arms if they held onto the hostages. In other words, you don't free the hostages before the election. You hold onto them. Now, I remember not paying too much attention to this. It became an issue in 1991 and 1992, belatedly, way after the event, because a group of scandals were gathering around Bush, and this was one of them.
"...But George Bush was defeated in 1992. He got 37.7% of the vote, the worst showing for an incumbent president since William Howard Taft in 1912. He was shellacked. So they just folded up the investigations of these different scandals. But in December of 1992 and January of 1993, the congressional informal investigation had received material from the French and from the Russians that related to the fact that they had observed and noticed that these negotiations were in fact held. A book was later published by Pierre Salinger, who was with ABC news in France at the time, that made mention of these negotiations, and the French intelligence people had helped Bill Casey arrange them. So, there was confirmation from the French. It did not say that George H.W. Bush was involved. The Russians sent back a communication that their intelligence services had in fact observed, and been reported to, that the Republicans talked to the Iranians in Paris, and that both George Bush and Bill Casey were there. An Israeli agent named Ari Ben-Menashe said the same thing in a book, but he was essentially repudiated by the Israeli government. He said he wasn't anybody, he didn't know much, and that sort of dragged along. Nobody credited him, but in 1998 an examination came out, the history of the Israeli Mossad, by an English writer, that said basically, he was subject to a disinformation campaign. This did in fact happen. So, there you are. There's recent material from the French, from the Russians, and from the Israelis, that the odds are much higher that this did in fact take place."
Phillips then turns to the next Bush scandals, Iran-contra and Iraqgate: "Iran-Contra was a sort of October Surprise II, in a sense, because what you had was the provision, by the Reagan-Bush administration, of arms to Iran in order to get help from the Iranian government, in negotiating the release, by Islamic radicals in Lebanon, of a new set of American hostages taken there. This became known in late 1986, and a special prosecutor was appointed, and he was not exactly a major pinko or liberal. He was Eisenhower's former deputy Attorney General, Larry Walsh. He wound up indicting Casper Weinberger, the Defense Secretary, and right before the election in '92, he made a re-indictment of Weinberger, in which he discussed how George H.W. Bush had been in the loop. He was part of this. There were two or three laws violated. It was serious stuff. Bush denied that he was in the loop. It was so close to the election. This petered out after Bush was defeated, but in December of '92, Bush pardoned Weinberger, so there could not be a trial, in which Weinberger would have implicated Bush and some other people. So, that's the second of the scandals in the Middle East. The third scandal is something called 'Iraqgate.' ...These things got pushed aside, when George Bush was defeated in '92. The upshot of Iraqgate was that George Bush, as Vice President, got involved in a program of providing arms to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Not just arms, other supplies, dual use technology, biological cultures, nuclear know-how. All of the sort of things that were described as existing in the form of weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
"...Saddam invaded Kuwait in the beginning of August, 1990. During June and July of 1990, the State Department people had been flashing a green light to him to go ahead and take a small slice of the northern Remallia oil fields in [Kuwait]. That's what he wanted. So, there are all of these quotes from Margaret Tutwiler, who was Jimmy Baker's spokeswoman, and the assistant secretary of the near east, that we had no obligation to defend Kuwait. The United States was not concerned about the oil disputes. It was repeated time after time. We did not have a responsibility to defend Kuwait. So, on August 2, after hearing all of this stuff, and after the CIA had briefed President Bush Sr. on the fact that they were just expected to take a little slice at the top of Kuwait, Saddam said, you know, why go for the bronze when you can go for the gold? They went right in and they took Kuwait. Now, this was, obviously, embarrassing to the administration potentially, after all of the green lights and after all of the buildup. So, they had to take Saddam, who, up to this point, was just your ordinary garden variety authoritarian bum, and he had to become the second Hitler. That wasn't too hard because you had a lot to work with. But essentially, they had to throw in a little more for good luck. There was a hearing conducted in Congress in 1990, in the fall, and there was testimony by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nahiryah, that 300-odd premature babies had been ripped out of incubators by the Iraqis when they invaded Kuwait. Well, it turns out nobody -- no babies were ripped out of incubators. This was pretty much made up, pumped up by a major U.S. public relations firm. It was cited a number of times by president Bush, 312 babies ripped out of incubators, but they weren't. This girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. She was part of the ruling family. So, what you have in here was just an enormous patchwork of lies and fake-outs and deceits, and, as this became known better by people in 1991 and '92, it became an enormous problem for Bush. I would say that the average American didn't know all about it, but enough people knew, and Bill Safire, that notorious left-wing columnist for the New York Times, he was so disgusted with Bush, he wrote a column saying how he couldn't endorse him and couldn't vote for him in 1992 because of this. There you have a succession of three scandals involving the first Bush president in the Middle East.
"Now we jump to a dual scandal that sort of picks up the continuity of generations. This is the Bushes, BCCI and the bin Ladens. Now, they go back. That's the thing. You wouldn't think that they do, but they do. In the 1970's, when George Sr. was the CIA director, part of what he did, to watch for developments in the Middle East and the oil industry, involved enlisting as a CIA asset a fellow named James Bath. ...Bath...was the North American representative of two Saudi families -- the family of Khalid bin Mafus, and the bin Laden family. But this was Salem bin Laden. Nobody knew about Osama at that time. Then after his father was in the CIA, he leaves. He does his banking and has his Middle East connections, but George W., at this point, is establishing his famous first oil firm...Arbusto. ...So, it turns out as they're raising money for the firm, he gets $50,000 from James Bath, the North American representative of the bin Ladens and the bin Mafuses. ...Bath didn't use his own money, he used the money of his two client families in Saudi Arabia. So, that's the first connection that brings the bin Ladens into the Bush orbit. Then we jump ahead to the 1990's. George senior gets out of office, gets out of the Presidency, and he gets involved in the Carlyle group. The Carlyle group is a merchant bank that I'm sure a number of you know. It consisted of a number of senior people in the Bush and Reagan administrations, Defense Secretary Carlucci, from the first Bush administration, Secretary of State, Jimmy Baker. George Bush Sr., himself becomes a member of the advisory board of the Carlyle group, gives speeches for them, raises money for them. They wind up getting money from 12 Saudi families. And the Saudis are encouraged to give, according to a story in the Washington Post, sort of out of respect for former President Bush. Now, as most of you will probably guess, what is the name of one of the 12 Saudi families, the bin Ladens. So, there they are. They're in the inner recesses of the Carlyle group and were up until 2001. Nobody exactly knows what they all talked about at these various meetings, but the media have identified that a planeload of bin Ladens were sent back after 9-11, that a number of conferences included from the Carlyle group the former President and some of the bin Ladens, but no real details.
"I should say that no family in the American presidency has ever been involved in an overseas region like the Bushes have been involved in the Middle East. George Bush Sr. had his first oil venture dealing with the Persian Gulf in 1961. By 1980's, the family had basically come to see the region as a spigot. By the 1990's, not only did you have George W. connected to BCCI and the gulf oil people and the bin Laden family and et cetera, but you had his brothers. His brother, who is now the Governor of Florida, has been reported to have been very friendly during the early 1980's with the chief Washington and national representative of BCCI, the bank of credit and commerce international that funded a lot of these arms operations. Also known in common parlance as the bank of crooks and criminals internationally. Jeb was friendly with a fellow who ran it who was based in Miami. Neil, of course, this is the Silverado kid. [As for George W., h]e has been involved with several different dimensions of this. His business partner down in Houston was described as a Syrian-American businessman in a big Financial Times article that appeared September 12. He was also described, and I don't think I believe this, as one of the founders of the Ba'ath party in Syria and Iraq. Kind of amazing. Marvin Bush -- this is the youngest brother. Marvin Bush went to Kuwait after the war, and made some good business connections. He became a shareholder and director of Kuwait-American corporation and something called Secure-Acom, partly owned by the Kuwatis. For several years, it was one of the contractors for security at the World Trade Center before 2001. You know, that's kind of amazing, I would think.
"so, you have got Bushes and 9-11. What's the connection? Now, I don't think that some of the groups that organize with a whole set of Halloween scary stuff are making a great contribution, but I think there is a relationship. Nobody knows quite what it is. Did the Saudi ties interfere with the investigation of 9-11, or taking it seriously before it happened? Did the Saudi ties provoke? Was this part of a reason why the animosity for the United States was so strong? Was it connected to the family? Well, essentially, we don't know. But there's some people concerned. You may have seen a former governor, Tom Kean, of New Jersey, running the 9-11 commission, very unhappy about not getting the material from the White House and suggesting that they might have to take measures. He's a former Republican Governor of New Jersey. Well, then, by the time you start adding up some of the Republicans in this, you may get the sense that this is not that much, purely, a matter of ideology and I think that's right.
"Now, let me turn to the question of Iraq, the inherited war. Now, this, to me, is amazing that you could have had all of these developments in Iraqgate that involve Bush Sr., and the media did not pick up on this, when we had George W. taking office, virtually from the start, obviously looking for a war with Iraq, and maneuvering towards it, and there was just no real linkage of his role and his attitude with his father's circumstances. The lies about the weapons of mass destruction go right back, and it reminds me of the whole business about the 312 babies in the incubators that never existed and so forth. There's seemingly no great compunction about making a lot of this stuff up. The second thing is, you may remember, that right after 9-11, George W. talked about a crusade. Very unfortunate language, because there was nothing more calculated to arouse the Muslims in the Middle East, but it wasn't just George W., it was this personal circus of religious right leaders that he has dancing around. Falwell referred to Mohammad as a terrorist. The great prophet of Islam is a wild-eyed fanatic. Franklin Graham, Billy's son, 'Islam is evil.' And Jerry Vines, head of the Southern Baptist convention, who referred to Mohammad as a demon-possessed pedophile. These people are unbelievable. We're trying to convince the Muslims that this is not a holy war, and you have got all of these flaky fundamentalists running loose with every sort of drivel that you can imagine. And then a lot of people missed the personal aspect of all of this. When George W. was down giving a speech to a Republican audience in Texas in 2002, he said that Iraq was a special preoccupation of the United States, and he was referring to talk about an assassination attempt on his father. He said, Iraq was a special U.S. preoccupation because they tried to kill my dad. I mean, you don't start a war because of a rumored assassination attempt on your father after he was out of office. You carry that as a grudge, but that's -- you know, that's something else.
"Then you get here the incredible military incompetence of George W. Bush. I don't see why this hasn't been an issue from word one. I'm not a total fan of General [Wesley] Clark, but he seems to be making that an issue, and there's one thing the Republicans cannot say about a man who has four stars on his uniform, and that's that he is not a patriot. He's serving a very useful purpose there. But you all remember the George W. and the great top gun moment in May, went out to the carrier and land and announced that the fighting was over. You know, and he wouldn't know fighting was over any more than a chocolate bar would know what was happening in August sun. And worse than that -- and this is the sort of thing that ought to be raised outside of every military base in the Sunbelt. ...I think he should be renamed for the duration of this fighting in the Middle East, Commander AWOL. ...I'm going to make one suggestion to liberals, progressives and Democrats -- these are the sort of issues, I think, that if used correctly can do something that will have an enormous effect on the 2004 election. They'll take back the American flag." (Democracy Now)

"Four generations of building toward dynasty have infused the Bush family's hunger for power and practices of crony capitalism with a moral arrogance and backstage disregard of the democratic and republican traditions of the U.S. government."
-- Kevin Phillips, quoted in Buzzflash

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THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

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