February 2004: Week Three: Page Two: This Far and No Further

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February 18: France leads an international effort to send UN peacekeeping forces to Haiti, an effort opposed by the US, which wants to wait for a political settlement before sending troops. "'What we want to do right now is find a political solution, and then there are willing nations that would come forward with a police presence to implement the political agreement that the sides come to," says US secretary of state Colin Powell. Powell also calls on Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his political opponents to open a dialogue and try to reduce tensions, which spring from disputed legislative elections in 2000. French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin disagrees, saying military intervention is necessary now: "An intervention force...implies a stop to the violence, a restart of the dialogue. Nothing will be possible in Haiti if there's isn't a jolt." Senator Bob Graham of Florida urges the Bush administration to cooperate "with an international military or police force to restore order" in Haiti. "If we can send military forces to Liberia -- 3,000 miles away -- we certainly can act to protect our interests in our own backyard," he says. "Inaction can no longer be our policy." (Miami Herald)
February 18: 25,000 Marines are slated to land in the town of Fallujah, a center of Iraq insurgency, to both mollify and pacify the populace. General Michael Hagee says that Marines are historically better prepared to fight "small wars" than the Army, and will put troops everywhere around Fallujah, west of Baghdad. "They know that the most lethal, dangerous weapons system on any battlefield is the United States Marine armed -– and that is one of the things that we will bring," says Hagee. The US Army earlier came under sharp criticism from Iraqis for what some saw as a heavy-handed approach in the area when it destroyed homes of suspected insurgents and blocked off troops from the population with razor wire. That has begun to change under the 82nd Airborne and will change even more, Hagee says. He points as well to the effort to obtain information from Iraqis in the area, relying on techniques dating back to the Vietnam war. "Establish that relationship – 'hearts and minds' was the term used in Vietnam. I think that's still accurate...where the people will come to you and say 'Hey, the bad guy is around the corner here and I want to show you where he is.' That is starting to happen now," he says. (Reuters/San Diego Union-Tribune)
February 18: The Project on Defense Alternatives issues a report that details and criticizes the Defense Department's propaganda tactics and information manipulation during the Afghan and Iraq wars regarding casualties. The report states, "During the course of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts the US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted 'perception management' campaigns that obstructed the public's appreciation of the wars' human toll. The casualty issue was not alone in suffering such treatment during the prologue to the Iraq conflict. Distortion and miscalculation affected the official discourse on many of the key issues surrounding the war, including: the nature, magnitude, and immediacy of the threat; the likely financial cost of the war; the troop requirement for both the combat and post-war phases of the operation; and the difficulty and expense of post-war reconstruction and stabilization efforts. The casualty issue is one of strategic import. In addition to US and allied losses, approximately 18,000 Afghan and Iraqi combatants and non-combatants were killed during the main combat phases of the two wars. (About one-third of the total were non-combatants.) This toll bears directly on (1) the threat environments in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan; (2) the regional and global reactions to US operations, (3) the prospects for building multinational security cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism; and, (4) the appeal, influence, and growth of terrorist organizations and extremist movements. Official efforts to shape the public's appreciation of the issue may have included the pre-war placement of suspect stories meant to cast doubt on subsequent casualty reports.
"During the wars, perception management included efforts to 'spin' or frame casualty incidents and stories in ways that minimized their significance, cast doubt on their reliability, or shirked responsibility for the occurrence of casualties. DoD and armed services officials often (but inconsistently) refused to divulge casualty estimates, although relevant intelligence was available at every level ranging from the Office of the Secretary of Defense down to field units. DoD and other US officials also promoted more general concepts to frame public discussion and media coverage of the casualty issue. One of these frames -- the concept of a new low-risk 'precision warfare' -- created unrealistic expectations that war would produce very low casualties on all sides.
Another frame -- what might be called 'casualty agnosticism' -- implied that it was impossible to derive usefully accurate estimates of casualties, despite the presence of prodigious investigative resources in the field (both governmental and non-governmental). DoD was fairly successfully in projecting these framing concepts into US media coverage of the wars and war casualties. Polls of foreign public opinion indicate that the perception management campaigns were distinctly unsuccessful in influencing their putative primary target: foreign public opinion. They may have been more successful in influencing domestic US opinion -- insofar as a 'perception gap' now separates Americans from much of the rest of the world on war-related issues. Distortion of the casualty issue can only serve to impede the sober assessment of US policy, policy options, and their consequences. It is antithetical both to well-informed public debate and to sensible policy-making." (Project on Defense Alternatives)
February 18: The US national debt tops $7 trillion for the first time in history. The governmental debt ceiling of $7.384 trillion is expected to be reached in the fall of 2004; at that point, the Bush administration will need Congress's permission to exceed that figure in its spending. (ABC News)
February 18: Richard Perle resigns from the Defense Policy Board, in part due to an investigation of his financial ties to Hollinger, a corporation which is profiting from the Iraq war. (Perle says he is resigning because he does not want his views confused with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's during the upcoming election.) The investigation was triggererd by the investigative journalism of Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh; Perle tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist," and promises to sue Hersh. The lawsuit never materializes. (Knight Ridder, Seymour Hersh)
February 18: Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb speaks out in a USA Today op-ed that castigates Bush for his military incompetence and reckless use of the American military in Iraq. After roundly criticizing the anti-war efforts of John Kerry, Webb turns to Bush. He reminds readers of Bush's lackadaisical and shadowy "military service," which he says many veterans find troubling. He then blasts Bush's decision to invade Iraq: "Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence. There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves." Webb then hammers the Bush electoral strategy of smearing the patriotism of anyone who criticizes his administration: "At the same time, those around Bush, many of whom came of age during Vietnam and almost none of whom served, have attempted to assassinate the character and insult the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them. Some have impugned the culture, history and integrity of entire nations, particularly in Europe, that have been our country's great friends for generations and, in some cases, for centuries. Bush has yet to fire a single person responsible for this strategy. Nor has he reined in those who have made irresponsible comments while claiming to represent his administration. One only can conclude that he agrees with both their methods and their message." (USA Today, Frances Fox Piven)
February 18: Columnist Naomi Klein asks why the US government, and the US media, is ignoring the over 10,000 dead civilians in Iraq who died, and continue to die, as a result of the US occupation. She castigates both the Bush administration and the Democratic frontrunners for ignoring the issue. John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, says that while the passing of the grim 10,000 mark made the British papers and the BBC, it received "scandalously little attention in the United States," including from the leading Democratic candidates, even as they hammer Bush on his faulty intelligence. "If the war was fought on false pretenses," Sloboda says, "that means that every death caused by the war is a death on false pretenses."
Klein observes that international law requires a country who wages a war of aggression to pay reparations as a penalty for their crimes against the civilian population of the victimized country. But, she writes, "in Iraq, this logic has been turned on its head. Not only are there no penalties for an illegal war, there are prizes, with the United States actively and openly rewarding itself with huge reconstruction contracts. 'Our people risked their lives. Coalition, friendly coalition folks risked their lives and therefore, the contracting is going to reflect that,' Mr. Bush said. ...'This war profiteering is poison to America, poison to Americans' faith in government and poison to our allies' perception of our motives in Iraq,' [Democratic candidate] John Edwards said. True, but he somehow failed to mention that it also poisons Iraqis -- not their faith, or their perceptions, but their bodies. ...Every dollar wasted on an overcharging, underperforming US contractor is a dinar not spent rebuilding Iraq's bombed-out water-treatment and electricity plants. It is Iraqis, not US taxpayers, who are forced to drink typhoid- and cholera- infested water, and then to seek treatment in hospitals still flooded with raw sewage, where the drug supply is even more depleted than during the sanctions era. There is currently no plan to compensate Iraqi civilians for deaths caused by the willful destruction of their basic infrastructure, or as a result of combat during the invasion. The occupying forces will only pay compensation for 'instances where soldiers have acted negligently or wrongfully.' According to the latest estimates, US troops have distributed roughly $2-million in compensation for deaths, injuries and property damage. That's less than the price of two of the 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched during the war, and a third of what Halliburton admits two of its employees accepted in bribes from a Kuwaiti contractor. To talk about the price of the Iraq war strictly in terms of US casualties and tax dollars is an obscenity. Yes, Americans were lied to by their politicians. Yes, they are owed answers. But the people of Iraq are owed a great deal more, and that enormous debt belongs at the very center of any civilized debate about the war." (Toronto Globe and Mail)
February 18: The problem with underarmored Humvee vehicles in Iraq has long been documented. Many soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded while traveling in the vehicles, most of which are not armored heavily enough for adequate protection of their passengers, and some still sport simple canvas roofs and doors. So, the Bush administration has decided to address the problem by underfunding the program to armor said Humvees. "We do not have as many armored Humvees as we would like," the Army's vice chief of staff testified before Congress in late September. "We're kind of sitting ducks in the vehicles we have," said one lieutenant colonel. The Pentagon says it needs a total of 4,200 up-armored Humvees (vehicles with the proper armor installed in the factory) and 8,400 armor kits for retrofitting Humvees already in service. Currently it is estimated that only 1,600 up-armored Humvees are in service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and only about 1,400 vulnerable Humvees have been retrofitted. This leaves a need for 2,600 up-armored Humvees and 7,000 armor kits, and that doesn't take into account the fact that the Pentagon is constantly revising its need estimates upward. The military can only produce about 220 up-armored Humvees a month, which means it will be late 2005 before enough up-armored Humvees are produced. The Bush administration's proposed budget for 2005 includes funds for 818 up-armored Humvees, which may or may not be enough, depending on whether the military's latest estimate of its needs holds steady and how many up-armored Humvees are already in the pipeline. As for the thousands for armor kits the military says it needs, the proposed budget includes no money whatsoever for them. And Humvees aren't the only vehicles suffering from armor shortage. The administration only intends to fund some 27% of the budget requested for armoring medium trucks, for example. Senator Ted Kennedy noted in a recent Armed Services Committee hearing, "Medium truck add-on armor kits: zero '04 funding, zero '05 funding. Heavy truck add-on armor kits: zero '04 funding, zero '05 funding." One National Guard officer told the Army Times that the failure to deliver a sufficient number of armored and up-armored Humvees to Iraq "bordered on negligence." (Slate)

Dean drops out of presidential campaign

February 18: Presidential candidate Howard Dean, once the Democratic frontrunner, ends his campaign for the presidency and promises to back whoever the Democratic candidate may be. Dean's departure leaves Senator John Kerry as the undisputed frontrunner, with fellow senator John Edwards in second. Dean says he intends to continue building his grassroots organization "to continue the effort to transform the Democratic Party and to change our country." Observers credit Dean with redefining the primary race and forcing more moderate candidates like Kerry, Edwards, and even Joseph Lieberman to become more aggressive in their opposition of Bush policies, particularly the war in Iraq. (AP/Guardian)
February 18: "Democrats owe Dean big time for his service to the country and the party in this election campaign," writes Jesse Jackson. "Dean gave Democrats back their voice. He stood up firmly against George W. Bush and his reckless policy of preemptive war and destabilizing tax cuts. He said loudly that the emperor had no clothes. And his candidacy took off because he tapped into the deep anger that many citizens feel toward this radical right-wing administration. In doing so, Dean taught his better-financed and better-known rivals how to run."
Before Dean, writes Jackson, the other frontrunners, Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman, were competing with each other to see how far right they could force each other to go in competing to "out-tough" Bush. "Dean would have none of that, and he took no prisoners," writes Jackson. "He forced Kerry and Edwards and Gephardt to step up and take on the president. The dramatic transformation of Kerry and Edwards over the course of the campaign was forged by the heat provided by Howard Dean. Dean, of course, took hits for breaking with the beltway conventional wisdom. He dared to utter unmentionable truths and was pilloried for it. ...Dean assailed Bush's doctrine of preemptive war, for the radical and dangerous rupture it represents from American postwar policy. He made the common-sense comment that we were no safer after Saddam Hussein was captured than we were before. For that he was mocked, but he was surely right: The pace of violence in Iraq has accelerated in the weeks since Saddam's capture, as have the alerts here at home. By standing up, Dean not only engaged the peace movement, he helped to bring that energy into the Democratic primaries. His campaign and strong voice helped isolate those who disparaged electoral politics, or those who preferred the fool's gold of third-party politics. Whether Ralph Nader decides to run or not, he is far more isolated now because of the Dean candidacy. Dean, of course, had rivals on his message. Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich all had more populist positions and knew how to rouse audiences.
"But Dean did something more: He figured out how to break the money primary. And this may be his most lasting contribution to American politics. With his Web-based fund-raising, Dean empowered people. Small donations fueled his rise. Special interests had no hold on him. His use of the Web to bring people together, to enlist volunteers, and to unleash energy launched a revolution in American politics. Now, in both political parties, insurgents know that a people's politics can be financially competitive against the establishment's candidates. Dean has opened the door for a new people's politics across the country. ... The other candidates learned from him, and began to recycle his lines. When Iowa was lost, momentum went another way. It surely would be human for Dean to feel both bitter and betrayed. But he has another contribution to make in this election year. Having unleashed the energy and the potential of a new politics, and brought it into the Democratic Party, he must make certain that his defeat does not embitter his followers. He must keep their eyes on the prize -- to take back America from George W. Bush and the dangerous politics of privilege that he represents. He must make certain that his Deaniacs understand that, although they have already transformed this election season, they still have work to do. And in doing this, as I am certain he will, Howard Dean will earn the respect and the thanks of citizens of conscience across the land." (Chicago Sun-Times)
February 18: Journalist Naeem Mohaiemen echoes the feelings of many liberal Democrats when he accuses the Democratic Party, and particularly the centrist Democratic Leadership Committee, of "assassinating" the candidacy of Howard Dean. Mohaiemen dismisses the popular explanation, promulgated by the US media, that Dean's "rage" did him in, or that voters wanted a candidate of more substance. The left wing of the Democratic Party has long thought that the DLC is little more than a pale echo of the Republicans: "Republican lites," in the terminology. After the 2000 election, many Democrats accused the DLC of going too far to the right to appease voters, giving them little choice between their ever-more-centrist candidate Al Gore and "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush.
Mohaiemen writes: "Howard Dean emerged within this specific context. From day one, he positioned himself as a reformer of the Democratic party –- the man who would bring the party back to its liberal roots. Dean hit headlines by being the anti-war candidate. But even within that position, most of his criticism was of his Democratic cohorts, for cravenly accepting the Iraq war. Dean took pleasure in flaying candidates like Kerry for voting in support of the war resolution. The party took notice when Dean got up on stage and announced, 'I'm Howard Dean, and I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party!' Another part of the Dean story, and threat to the party establishment, was his style and appeal. Howard Dean has often been labeled the 'prophet of rage.' It's certainly true that he was an angry man – angry at Bush, the war, the budget deficit, the mushrooming unemployment cloud, at all things that had gone badly wrong in three short years. This anger hit a chord with the popular imagination; dissatisfaction with Bush was high and Dean was the perfect protest candidate. Another core part of Dean's appeal was his overwhelming support among young people. In 2000, one of the lowest voter turnouts was among young people. If you were under 24, you tuned out and stayed home in November. By contrast, the bulk of Howard Dean's support was among the youth of America. Energized by a strategy focused on Internet campaigning, 'Generation Dean' or 'Dean 2.0' spread across college campuses and gave a youthful aura to the man from Vermont."
Mohaiemen notes that the DLC had little use for Dean, and in fact, Dean's candidacy was a concern for them. "Of course, the DLC did not take kindly to this direct challenge. The crucial dynamic in America today is that big companies, political parties and media are powerful businesses -– and they will do anything to crush new threats. The DLC reacted with fury to the Dean candidacy, going all out to torpedo his momentum. Although Democratic nominees soon piled on the 'bash-Dean' bandwagon, earlier attacks were carried out by DLC operatives. There was even the smell of scandal when two top Democratic candidates were found sharing information about Dean in an attempt to slow him down." So, after the DLC in essence declared silent war on the Dean candidacy, the US media predictably piled on, in part because many media outlets were critical of Dean's criticism of those outlets for their all-but-total support of Bush's war in Iraq. Both Time and Newsweek ran unflattering articles on Dean in the same week. "In the end," Mohaiemen writes, "Dean threatened a troika of powerful institutions. He was a threat to the political parties (because he attacked Democrats' centrist drift), to media (because he criticized their cowardly reporting) and to big business (because he would roll back chummy tax-benefits for corporations). All three institutions responded with venom and destroyed Dean's candidacy." (Alternet)
February 18: The Bush campaign, known for going to endless lengths to dress up its candidate's appearances, goes even farther than usual in prepping for Bush's appearance before National Guard troops at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Bush's campaign has already dressed up numerous campaign appearances: it brought two fake windows emblazoned with the slogan "strengthening America's Economy" for installation at a Tampa window and door factory; in Charleston, campaign officials ordered a Coast Guard cutter to reposition itself to provide a backdrop for the president's speech; in St. Louis, on a stage designed to look like a classroom, campaign handlers wrote the words "No Child Left Behind" 10 times on a chalkboard positioned behind Bush so that the slogan would appear in virtually any camera shot. And, of course, there is the infamous staging of the May 1 "Mission Accomplished" speech. At Fort Polk, soldiers were drilled on how to greet the commander-in-chief, even practicing yelling and cheering at maximum volume. While troops are by protocol expected to come to quiet attention when their commander-in-chief appears before them, the Polk troops were ordered to cheer and shout instead when Bush took the stage. Press secretary Scott McClellan insists that the visit to Fort Polk was planned weeks in advance of the press flap about Bush's AWOL status while with the National Guard, but a base spokesman confirmed that the appearance was scheduled less than a week before, apparently just after the AWOL scandal made the national news. The AP's Terence Hunt is quite skeptical of the timing: "Bush's appearance provided a TV-ready opportunity to emphasize his national security responsibilities and leadership of the war against terror, a role the White House wants to emphasize with voters as he heads into a re-election battle." The appearance before National Guard troops isn't accidental; Bush is trying to emphasize the fact that National Guard service is just as honorable and potentially dangerous as active military duty, without noting that the situation for Guardsmen is radically different today than it was during Vietnam, when thousands of American men chose to join the Guard in order to avoid service in Vietnam. During the Polk visit, McClellan reported that Bush met with the families of seven Guard soldiers who died in Iraq, and described the meeting as tearful and 100% supportive. No one who met with Bush was allowed to speak to the press on their own. (Washington Post)
February 18: Professor of journalism Ken Light, of the University of California at Berkeley, is outraged by the transparent fakery of the photo being circulated that shows John Kerry and Jane Fonda together at an antiwar rally in the 1970s. Light took the original photo of Kerry that was morphed into the faked Kerry-Fonda photo. The doctored photo appears beneath a headline and above a caption, complete with an AP credit, as if it had originally appeared in a newspaper. As it turns out, the image, and its apparent newspaper context, were both fabricated: the photograph by merging two different images carried by the Corbis photo agency. Light took the photo at a rally in 1971; the Fonda photo was taken at a different rally in 1972, a rally which Kerry did not attend. The recent incident is, for Light, the "worst kind" of photographic alteration, "because it's a political dirty trick." He says he's "against any alteration of photography," even the photoillustrations popular in magazine design. "some people are like, 'We know it's an illusion,'" he says. "And I'm like, 'It's a slippery slope. Once you do it with illustration, do you move into news?'" (UC Berkeley News)
February 18: Rush Limbaugh's attorneys ask the Florida courts to ban prosecutors from using his medical records in their case against the talk show host. Lawyer Roy Black argues that by allowing prosecutors to view and use Limbaugh's medical records in their litigations, that the right to privacy of all Florida citizens will be threatened. The state attorney's office maintains that it has scrupulously protected Limbaugh's rights as it investigates him for alleged doctor-shopping, a third-degree felony defined as when a patient dupes two or more doctors into prescribing overlapping medications. Black has derided and challenged a number of actions performed by the state attorney's office that the office routinely performs during criminal trial preparations. (Palm Beach Post [cached Google copy])

Chalabi admits to giving false intelligence to Bush officials

February 19: Ahmad Chalabi, a current member of the Iraq Governing Council and a longtime friend of Washington neoconservatives who used Chalabi's information to promote the Iraqi invasion, now says that he and his cohorts deliberately funnelled false information to the Bush administration in order to provoke the invasion. Chalabi says that, in the best Machiavellian tradition, the ends justify the means: "We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. Our objective has been achieved. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important." Chalabi and his colleagues were given positions of leadership in post-Hussein Iraq by the US. Chalabi adds, "The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if [President Bush] wants." Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress funnelled critical intelligence information to senior officials in the Bush administration, particularly members of Vice President Cheney's and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's staff. Even though much of the information was demonstrably false, the information was used anyway to justify the war. "What the INC [Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress] told us formed one part of the intelligence picture," says a senior official in Baghdad. "But what Chalabi told us, we accepted in good faith. Now there are going to be a lot of question marks over his motives." Chalabi remains an influential member of the Iraqi Governing Council, though he has failed to develop the popular following in Iraq that his most enthusiastic sponsors once expected. At one point, Chalabi seemed to be poised to step in as Iraq's US-appointed leader, but popular opposition to Chalabi and his group of exiles has interfered with those plans. (Daily Telegraph/Washington Times)
February 19: Ten days ago, Bush endorsed and signed off on a White House economic report that promised to create 2.6 million jobs by the end of 2004. Unfortunately, Bush and his top economic advisors have already backed off on those predictions. Bush has repeatedly "distanced himself" from his own predictions, refused to answer questions about it, and used his press secretary Scott McClellan to deflect other questions. When McClellan was asked about the president's personal promise to create 2.6 million new jobs, McClellan said the president is not interested "in crunching numbers." Earlier Bush promises about job creations have proven false. As the Economic Policy Institute notes, "the administration projected that a total of 2,142,000 jobs would be created in the first seven months after [its 2003] tax cuts took effect. In fact, only 296,000 jobs were created over that period for a cumulative shortfall of 1,846,000 jobs." Neither Treasury Secretary John Snow nor Commerce Secretary Donald Evans have agreed to endorse the 2.6 million job promise. While Snow, Evans, and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao are on a campaign trip to bolster Bush's election chances in the Pacific Northwest, they "said meeting with unemployed workers was not part of their agenda," and indicated the administration refuses to back an extension of unemployment benefits. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution/ABC News/Olympian/Sun-Herald/Seattle Times/Daily Misleader)
February 19: A group of more than 60 top US scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and several science advisors to past Republican presidents, accuse the Bush administration of manipulating and censoring science for political purposes. In a 46-page report and an open letter, the scientists accuse the administration of "suppressing, distorting or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies" in several cases. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal advocacy group, organized the effort, but many of the critics aren't associated with it. White House science advisor John Marburger III calls the charges "like a conspiracy theory report, and I just don't buy that." But he added that "given the prestige of some of the individuals who have signed on to this, I think they deserve additional response, and we're coordinating something." The protesting scientists welcome his response. "If an administration of whatever political persuasion ignores scientific reality, they do so at great risk to the country," says Stanford University physicist W.H.K. Panofsky, who served on scientific advisory councils in the Eisenhower, Johnson and Carter administrations. "There is no clear understanding in the [Bush] administration that you cannot bend science and technology to policy." The report charges that administration officials have, among other things, ordered massive changes to a section on global warming in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2003 Report on the Environment; replaced a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet on proper condom use with a warning emphasizing condom failure rates; ignored advice from top Department of Energy nuclear materials experts who cautioned that aluminum tubes being imported by Iraq weren't suitable for use to make nuclear weapons; established political litmus tests for scientific advisory boards (in one case, public-health experts were removed from a CDC lead paint panel and replaced with researchers who had financial ties to the lead industry); suppressed a US Department of Agriculture microbiologist's finding that potentially harmful bacteria float in the air surrounding large hog farms; and excluded scientists who have received federal grants from regulatory advisory panels while permitting the appointment of scientists from regulated industries. "I don't recall it ever being so blatant in the past," says Princeton physicist Val Fitch, a 1980 Nobel Prize winner who served on a Nixon administration science advisory committee. (Miami Herald)
February 19: The authoritative urban legends Web site Snopes thoroughly debunks and discredits the conservative rumors that John Kerry earned any of his Vietnam medals under what it terms "fishy" circumstances. The rumor was first planted on the Internet, when an unnamed "retired admiral" writes that he served in the Mekong Delta shortly after Kerry left, and spent time working with CTF-115 swift boats, Kerry's assignment, which he characterizes as "not that dangerous." He writes that it is unheard of for anyone to spend a mere four months on active duty and receive a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple hearts. Of the Purple Hearts themselves, the anonymous writer asks, "Three Purple Hearts, but no limp. All injuries so minor that no time lost from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds. At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three purple hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy." Of the Silver Star, he gives a long explanation of why Kerry's actions were improper and should have been "relieved and reprimanded" instead of given a medal for bravery. He sums up by calling Kerry "a JFK wannabe" and says he is "real glad you or I never had this guy covering our flanks in Vietnam. I sure don't want him as Commander in Chief. I hope that somebody from CTF-115 shows up with some facts challenging Kerry's Vietnam record. I know in my gut it's wildy inflated. And fishy."
Now, here are the facts. First, contrary to the "admiral's" assertions, swift boat duty was quite dangerous. Because of the narrow waterways patrolled by the boats and their almost-total lack of protection, it was relatively common for swift boat personnel to be wounded (and killed) frequently. The Boston Globe wrote, "Under [Navy Admiral Elmo] Zumwalt's command, swift boats would aggressively engage the enemy. Zumwalt, who died in 2000, calculated in his autobiography that these men under his command had a 75 percent chance of being killed or wounded during a typical year. 'There were an awful lot of Purple Hearts -- from shrapnel, some of those might have been M-40 grenades,' said George Elliott, Kerry's commanding officer. 'The Purple Hearts were coming down in boxes. Kerry, he had three Purple Hearts. None of them took him off duty. Not to belittle it, that was more the rule than the exception.'" In his history of Kerry and Vietnam, Douglas Brinkley writes, "As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any US citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple Hearts increased as the United States started sending Swifts up rivers. Sailors -- no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships in the Gulf of Tonkin -- were starting to bleed, a lot."
Kerry's first Purple Heart, of which so much controversy has been made, was awarded after an action near a Viet Cong encampment near Cam Ranh, in which Kerry caught a piece of shrapnel in his arm. It was not a major wound, and did not cause Kerry to miss any duty -- he went back out the next day with his arm in a bandage. The second Purple Heart was earned when Kerry's boat was hit with an RPG shell; a shell fragment struck his left leg. Though Kerry's injury bloodied the deck, the wound was not enough to keep him out of combat. The "admiral's" story of how Kerry earned his Silver Star is completely inaccurate. According to Frederic Short, who was on the swift boat with Kerry that day, Kerry's actions saved all of their lives. "I probably prayed more up that creek than a Southern Baptist church does in a month," Short says. Another boatmate, Charles Gibson, also says Kerry's action saved them. "Every day you wake up and say, 'How the hell did we get out of that alive?'" he says. "Kerry was a good leader. He knew what he was doing." Kerry's commanding officer, George Elliott, says while he chastized Kerry for jumping off the boat to pursue the enemy, nevertheless, Kerry deserved the Silver Star. "I ended up writing it up for a Silver Star, which is well deserved, and I have no regrets or second thoughts at all about that," Elliott says. The Silver Star citation reads, in part, "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets, [Kerry] again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only 10 feet from the Viet Cong rocket position and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy.... The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lt. Kerry in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission." Three weeks later, Kerry earned a Bronze Star and a third Purple Heart; after suffering a serious arm injury from an exploding mine, Kerry rescued a boatmate who was overboard, injuured, and being targeted by "intense" enemy fire. This wound cost him two days of injury as well as pain for years afterwards. Four days after receiving his third shrapnel wound, Kerry asked to be reassigned to duty in the US, as per military procedure. His request was granted, and within a month he was sent to serve out the remainder of his duty in Brooklyn. He later requested an early discharge to run for a Massachusetts congressional seat; his request was granted, and Kerry was honorably discharged on January 3, 1970. (Snopes)
February 19: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, accuses the Bush administration of employing "junk science" He writes, "Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration -- aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals -- are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda." He cites the toxins released in the 9/11 attack as a prime example: "On September 13, just two days after the terror attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was 'very low' or entirely absent. On September 18 the agency said the air was 'safe to breathe.' ...We have since learned that the government was lying to us. ...In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples collected by the EPA before September 18 showed presence of asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among outside studies, one performed by scientists at the University of California, Davis, found particulates at levels never before seen in more than 7,000 similar tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose and throat problems in the months following the attack and that about half still had persistent lung and respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later."
He also cites the case of an Agriculture Department microbiologist, Dr. James Zahn: "In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick -- and that are resistant to antibiotics -- in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these 'superbugs' were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their herds. I was shocked when Zahn canceled his appearance [to a family farm conference] on the day of the conference under orders from the Agriculture Department in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from the National Pork Producers Council. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study and that he had been forced to cancel more than a dozen public appearances at local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the government in disgust." The best-known case is global warming. The Bush administration has suppressed over a dozen major government studies on global warning, as well as a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its efforts to stall action to control industrial emissions. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government's National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and by scientific teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, and a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies. Corporate interests are, of course, sacrosanct, and Vice President Dick Cheney's company, Halliburton, which has contributed $58 million to the GOP since 2000, is doubly protected.
Kennedy writes, "Halliburton is the leading practitioner of a process used in extracting oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, in which benzene is injected into underground formations. EPA scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it could contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of federal drinking water standards. A week after reporting their findings to Congressional staff members, however, they revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards. In a letter to Representative Henry Waxman, EPA officials said the change was made based on 'industry feedback.' As a favor to utility and coal industries, America's largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on children's health of mercury, finally releasing it in February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children."
He continues: "In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted 'outside' for 'inside.' She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her. In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for extinction. According to Kelly, 'The morale is very low among scientists here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the Klamath.' Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard procedure at Interior. 'It's hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the Administration's politicization of the scientific process,' he said, 'its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public.'"
Kennedy cites even more examples. He concludes, "The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, 'If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster.'" (The Nation)
February 19: First Lady Laura Bush calls the investigation into her husband's National Guard service a "witch hunt," and blames the Democrats for pursuing the story. She insists that Bush served his duty in the Texas Air National Guard. She also decried the politics of the personal attack, which she implies is being practiced solely by the Kerry campaign. (AP/Miami Herald)
February 19: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Marine who blew the whistle on the Vietnam War by released the so-called "Pentagon Papers," is appalled by the Bush campaign's attempts to tar John Kerry as a "Jane Fonda antiwar liberal" (Newt Gingrich's words) who betrayed his country by opposing the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responds with astonishment to the news of the Bush campaign's plans: "They are? Amazing! I don't even like to hear this. It makes me gag. Is this something new, I haven't heard about this? This is just obscene. I hate to hear this. The fact is that Kerry's group, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, upheld the honor of this country. ...[T]his is making my flesh crawl, to hear George Bush, who went into the National Guard to stay out of Vietnam, even though he supposedly supported the war...." Ellsberg notes that while Bush not only supported the war and wanted to prolong it, "You mean he wanted those other guys to fight it even harder. He wanted his fellow airmen, who were not in the National Guard, but in the Air Force, to put themselves much more at risk in killing people in North Vietnam, dodging SAMs [surface to air missiles], while he dodged his monthly duties in Alabama in an outfit that was preparing for war in Europe, should that arise. And of course he's at one with virtually all of the neocons in that respect. Cheney had 'other priorities' during Vietnam and apparently spent the war in a secure location somewhere, I guess in Arizona. Rumsfeld had indeed flown in the Air Force in the 1950s, so no lack of courage there, just to fly those planes takes courage. But I noticed that Rumsfeld, who's exactly my age, did not manage to use his military training in any way in Vietnam. He was too old presumably to go there as a flyer. But there were lots of jobs for him in Vietnam if had wanted, but he chose to sit out the war back here."
Ellsberg served in Vietnam in 1965 as a civilian volunteer: "I found a way to use my Marine training as an infantry company commander, and I used that training to observe troops in action in Vietnam, under fire. So for these guys, who never served in action when they had a chance, to criticize Kerry now, it's just appalling. You've got me kind of worked up, to hear about these guys attacking Kerry now, it's just an obscenity. ...That's why this has gotten me so agitated, to hear that word 'traitor' or 'betrayal' used by these people -- who frankly I do not respect. Like Kerry, I won't condemn someone like Bush for going into the National Guard. But for someone like that to condemn someone like Kerry, who behaved so much better in every respect, is just revolting. It's just disgusting, and it shows a very bad character, I would say. I'm sure Kerry felt he was doing his duty as an American, whatever his doubts about the war were before he went. By the way, the fact that he had doubts about the war before he went shows he had his feet on the ground. So did I, and so did a lot of people in the Pentagon.
"So here's Kerry going off to war to do his duty, so some other guy doesn't have to take his place. And then here are these guys, Bush and those around him, who did not expose themselves to danger during Vietnam, though in principle they agreed with the war. Kerry goes to war and sees it for himself, unlike Bush. And he learned what I did and virtually everyone who went to Vietnam would learn -- 3 million Americans went there -- that what we were doing, and what we were likely to do, had no prospect of success. And that people were killing and dying for no good enough reason. That's the minimum we learned, and that's enough to want it to stop right away. So we all came back disillusioned with the war. And I came back to a Pentagon that was filled with people who were disillusioned with the war. So then the question is, 'What to do about it?' And what Kerry and his fellow antiwar veterans did should be admired by all Americans -- they did not merely subside into disillusion and apathy, they did what they could to wake up their fellow Americans to what we had learned in Vietnam. And I respect that. The vets came back and did what they could, at risk to their own status in society, at the risk of condemnation, which they certainly did get. They obviously spoke out with unusual authority, as people who had demonstrated their patriotism -- not only in a conventional way, by going into the military, but like Kerry, with exemplary behavior as soldiers. And then he and the others came back and showed courage again as citizens, facing the condemnation of the Nixon administration and their allies. And for someone like Kerry who had obviously lived his life as a patriot, thinking of himself as patriotic, it's especially painful to be called unpatriotic and traitorous. ...I am surprised that this White House, staffed by draft dodgers or at least war dodgers, is making this into such an issue. This goes beyond chutzpah, it's frankly obscene." (Salon)

Plans for transfer of power in Iraq in flux

February 20: The Bush administration has abandoning the core idea of its plan to hold regional caucuses for an Iraqi provisional government and will instead work with the United Nations and Iraqis to develop yet another plan for the transfer of political power by June 30. The decision, forced by rejection of the caucus system by a wide range of Iraqis, means that the Coalition Provisional Authority led by the US administrator, Paul Bremer, will instead hand over authority to a caretaker government until direct elections can be held. In a meeting at the United Nations yesterday, Secretary General Kofi Annan told a gathering of diplomats with interests in Iraq that the Iraqis themselves should determine the participants and form of a caretaker government that will be credible to Iraq's disparate society. "We need to find a mechanism to create a caretaker government and...help prepare the elections later," says Annan. From Baghdad, Bremer says, "There are 133 days before sovereignty returns to an Iraqi government. Changes in the mechanism for forming an interim government are possible, but the date holds. And hold it should." As of now, no firm plans for transitioning to Iraqi self-rule have been accepted by any of the parties involved. (Washington Post)
February 20: The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war. The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior US officials and a US defense official. All spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified. The continuing support for the INC comes amid seven separate investigations into pre-war intelligence that Iraq was hiding illicit weapons and had links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. A probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee is now examining the INC's role. The decision not to shut off funding for the INC's information gathering effort could become another liability for Bush as the presidential campaign heats up and, furthermore suggests that some within the administration are intent on securing a key role for Chalabi in Iraq's political future. Chalabi, who built close ties to officials in Vice President Cheney's office and among top Pentagon officials, is on the Iraqi Governing Council, a body of 25 Iraqis installed by the United States to help administer the country following the ouster of Saddam Hussein last April. "A huge amount of what was collected hasn't panned out," says a senior administration official. "some of it has turned out to have been either wrong or fabricated." (Knight Ridder)
February 20: Troops stationed in Iraq need not expect that the transition to an Iraqi-led government will allow them to come home anytime soon, according to the Pentagon. No timeframe is being given as yet, but Pentagon officials use the phrase "long term" to describe an American military presence in Iraq. For planning purposes, the Army is assuming it will have to keep roughly 100,000 troops in Iraq for at least another two years, according to Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker. (AP/Sacramento Bee)
February 20: The CIA admits that it did not provide information about the 21 Iraqi weapons sites considered most likely to house WMDs to the United Nations, in direct contradiction of statements previously made by Bush officials. Both CIA director George Tenet and national security director Condoleezza Rice said the United States had briefed UN inspectors on all of the sites identified as "high value and moderate value" in the weapons hunt. The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible. Senator Carl Levin, who was sent a letter from the CIA containing the admission, says he now believes that Tenet had misled Congress, which he describes as "totally unacceptable." Senior administration officials say that Rice had relied on information provided by intelligence agencies when she assured Senator Levin, in a letter on March 6, 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction, missile and U.A.V.-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified." Tenet said much the same thing in testimony on Feb. 12, 2003. The acknowledgment by the agency comes after more than a year of questions from Levin. He says he believes that the Bush administration withheld the information because it wanted to persuade the American people that the United Nations-led hunt for weapons in Iraq had run its full course before the war. (New York Times)
February 20: Saudi ambassador to the US Prince Bandar, a close family friend of the Bushes, visits George W. Bush at the White House. Bandar, who has functioned as an informal mentor to Bush on foreign affairs, tells Bush that while Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia's monarchy, is committed to political and economic reforms, it would be best for Bush to tone down his rhetoric demanding change in Saudi Arabia "in order for the Saudi individual not to think that we are doing this because of pressure from the United States." Bush agrees, and lavishes praise on the Saudi royal family's supposed efforts towards democracy and reform.
More interestingly, Bush then thanks Bandar for the Saudis' efforts to flood the oil market with cheap oil, ensuring that prices will be down before the election. The Saudi efforts to keep gasoline prices down in the US will go a long way towards helping Bush win re-election, he says.
Bandar also agrees to ask Abdullah to buy 26 specially outfitted combat helicopters for Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, since it would take so long to ram such a request through Congress and would lead to questions that Bush would prefer not to ask. The cost to Saudi Arabia will be around $250 million. Abdullah agrees. This is not the first time the Sauds have picked up a "special request" for military purchases. In the 1980s, Reagan's national security advisor had asked Bandar to arrange for $22 million in covert funding for the Nicaraguan "Contras" after Congress cut off aid to that group. Reporter Bob Woodward writes, "Now the request was not, at least in this case, for covert money, but the price of friendship and doing business was higher, ten times higher." (Bob Woodward)
February 20: Families and lawyers of Britons being held without charge in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, are demanding answers as to why these prisoners have been held so long without charges being filed or visits from lawyers or family members being allowed. The Independent writes: "The images were stark and shocking. Britons, swathed in orange overalls, hooded and shackled, kneeling in front of their American captors. Others, on stretchers, being wheeled into mesh cages. None of them charged, let alone convicted, of any crime, yet facing indefinite sentences in prison." While five of the nine British prisoners arrested over two years ago in Afghanistan and Pakistan are due to be released, the other four remain, and their families and lawyers want to know why. Suhul Ahmed, the elder brother of Ruhul Ahmed, one of those being freed, says: "We are feeling great happiness and relief at the moment. He has been gone for years. But we will be asking many questions of the government. We are sure he would have been mentally disturbed by what had happened. We would like answers on why he had been away for two years. The Foreign Office have not put 100 per cent of their effort into this. I believe if they had wanted to, they could have solved this a long time ago."
Moazzam Begg is one of those not being freed. His father Azmat describes the family's disappointment and anger at his non-release: "This is just a face-saving gesture by the Americans. It was plainly illegal to keep those men there. I am desperately worried for Moazzam. I received a letter from him six months ago, and I have heard nothing since. I fear he is not in good health, and he is being tortured. I want to go to the US and take up his case, that is all I can do." Janet Paraskeva, the chief executive of the Law Society, says there is deep concern about Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, two of the men not coming back, who are likely to face an American military court. "These men have been held for over two years and their families are extremely concerned about their physical and mental health. The families and solicitors, backed by the Law Society, fear that the provisions for trials before military commissions are so severely flawed that it will not be possible to bring them up to an acceptable standard. We again call on the Government to do all it can to ensure that these men face trial in a US court, or be repatriated to the UK for trial." Raza Kazim, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, adds: "I am very concerned that it has taken them all this long time to come up with this announcement. Why have only five been brought back and not the others, when Jack Straw himself has said that military tribunals cannot possibly offer the proper legal process?"
Stephen Jakobi of Fair Trials Abroad says: "The big question is, why weren't they released at least 18 months ago? What has happened since?" There also appears to be confusion about what the future held for the returning detainees in Britain. Asked whether they could pose a security threat, David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, says: "I think you will find that no one who is returned in the announcement today will actually be a threat to the security of the British people." Tarek Dergoul, a 24-year-old former care worker from east London, of Moroccan descent, was held after US and Northern Alliance forces clashed with the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora mountains. Dergoul, who lost a hand due to shrapnel wounds, told his family when he went to Pakistan in 2001 that he intended to learn Arabic. Asif Iqbal, 20, was captured in northern Afghanistan by Northern Alliance soldiers while allegedly fighting for the Taliban. He had reportedly gone to Pakistan, accompanied by his father Mohammed, to get married. Shafiq Rusul, 25, was supposedly among Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners who mutinied in Mazar-i-Sharif. Others maintained they were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Jamal al-Harith, also known as Jamal Udeen, a 35-year-old website designer from Manchester of Jamaican descent, claims that he was on a backpacking holiday trekking from Pakistan to Iran when he was captured by the Taliban and imprisoned. Instead of freeing him, the Americans, when they came, sent him off to Cuba. (Independent [cached Google copy])
February 20: The Bush administration's decision to repatriate five Britons from their two-year detention in Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta was partially because of the administration's fear of an impending Supreme Court decision calling their detention illegal. Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, two of the detainees due to be sent back to Britain, were plaintiffs in a case due before the Supreme Court in the next few months challenging the Bush administration's right to deny detainees hearings in a US court. Washington has also made concessions in the conditions of two Australian plaintiffs in the case, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, and is believed to have invited Kuwaiti officials to discuss the remaining 12 detainees, all Kuwaitis, named on the supreme court case. "We're pleased to see some of our clients are getting out," says Michael Ratner, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the detainees before the Supreme Court. But he added: "The United States government really only started acting when the supreme court began to look into that case. What they're trying to say to the court is trust us, trust us, trust us. The reason the government is acting is to a large extent due to the judicial review." The Supreme Court shocked the government by agreeing in November to hear the detainees' case. If it rules against the government, and declares Guantanamo Bay under the jurisdiction of US courts, it would destroy the basis on which the detention center was built, over two years ago, as a means of holding prisoners in the "global war on terrorism" indefinitely without any of the restrictions and safeguards of the US court system. "It raises a concern that it is an opportunistic act to remove two plaintiffs on the supreme court case," says Gareth Peirce, a solicitor for the British detainees. (Guardian)
February 20: The British government is preparing to drop its case against Katherine Gun, a former GCHQ employee charged with leaking information about a "dirty tricks" spying operation before the invasion of Iraq. Gun is due to appear at the Old Bailey next week where she has said she will plead not guilty to breaking the Official Secrets Act. She has said her alleged disclosures exposed serious wrongdoing by the US and could have helped to prevent the deaths of Iraqis and British forces in an "illegal war." The case is potentially hugely embarrassing for the government and would open up GCHQ operations to unwelcome publicity. Also damaging and politically threatening is her plan to seek the disclosure of the full advice from the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, on the legality of the war against Iraq. Gun was arrested when it was reported that America's national security agency, GCHQ's US partner, was conducting a secret surveillance operation, bugging UN delegates' home and office telephones and emails. The NSA told GCHQ that the particular targets of an eavesdropping "surge" were the delegates from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan, the six crucial "swing votes" on the security council. A memo sent by Frank Koza, a senior NSA official, said the information from the eavesdropping would be used against the key UN delegations. In a statement when she was charged, Gun said: "Any disclosures that may have been made were justified because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government which attempted to subvert our own security services. Secondly, they could have helped prevent widescale death and casualties amongst ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war." (Guardian)
February 20: The newsmagazine LA Weekly interviews former Air Force intelligence analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, who was appalled by what she calls the "neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon" by the Office of Special Plans created by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Kwiatkowski resigned in disgust and now spends her time penning Web columns and speaking to audiences about her experiences. She says of the OSP, who was ostensibly involved in helping make policy for the Bush administration, "[D]eveloping policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that's more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon -— to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States."
She explains why she retired: "Working 20 years in the military, I'm sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia [the Pentagon organization that helped gather intelligence for the region]. This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers -- the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President's Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views -- the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer -- was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres. There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002. The discussions were ones of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong -- but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the UN and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans. General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks' predecessor -- a very well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bush's Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers."
She gives one example of how her own work was rewritten to suit the neoconservatives' purposes: "I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They'd make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, 'Just send me the file.' And I don't know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made. On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these enemies."
She insists that the decision to invade Iraq was made well before she joined NESA in the fall of 2002: "That decision was made by the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002. The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President's Office were critical in this propaganda effort -- to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for pre-emptive war. The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the US, and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress." On the issue of Iraq's putative WMDs, Kwiatkowski says, "The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn't have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent -— a billion dollars! -- by David Kay's group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn't find anything, they didn't expect to find anything."
Of the reasons why the neoconservatives wanted war, she says, "The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the US needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq. One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the US and the UK had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit. The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter -- to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important -- that is, if you hold that is America's role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in. The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 -- selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren't very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro. The US dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it's not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq's oil back to the dollar."
She wrote in a previous column that she is "bitterly disappointed" in Secretary of State Colin Powell's "capitulation" to the neoconservatives' hardline position: "He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide presentation at the UN, he totally capitulated. It meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not." She concludes by answering a question about how it feels to "turn" on her own bosses: "Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That's what it feels like. I've thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that -- at least under this administration -- turned out to be something I wasn't working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for. What I feel now is that I'm not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem." (LA Weekly/Axis of Logic)
February 20: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, the spoiler in the 2000 election, has decided to run again for president. This time he is running as an independent, not as a candidate of the Green Party. "He's felt there is a role for an independent candidate to play," says Nader spokeswoman Linda Schade. Some Democrats blame Nader for siphoning enough votes away from their candidate Al Gore in 2000 to cost them the election; they are afraid Nader may have the same effect on the Bush-Kerry election. Former Democratic candidate Howard Dean asks his supporters to work for Kerry, not for Nader, and notes that he turned down the idea of running as an independent himself. He says, "Those who truly want America's leaders to stand up to the corporate special interests and build a better country for working people should recognize that, in 2004, a vote for Ralph Nader is, plain and simple, a vote to re-elect George W. Bush. I hope that Ralph Nader will withdraw his candidacy in the best interests of the country we hope to become. Many of my supporters urged me to run as an independent, but I judged it the wrong thing to do. There is still time for Ralph Nader to stand with those in the Democratic Party who are building a progressive coalition to defeat George W. Bush. But time is running out. We can win only if we are united." (Fox News, Howard Dean)
February 20: While Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie deplores the "dirty politics" of the Kerry campaign and pledges to "stick to the truth," prominent Republicans around the country were vying to outdo each other to see who could make the most hay out of the patently false accusations that Kerry carried on an affair with a young journalist, and who could get the most mileage out of the doctored photo showing Kerry and Jane Fonda together at an early '70s antiwar rally. Talk show host Sean Hannity interviewed Matt Drudge, the source of the rumors against Kerry, and fawned that Drudge, once again, had shown up the liberal media. Fellow talk show host Rush Limbaugh festooned his Web site with a graphic of an on-the-make "John F'ing Kerry" dressed like a pimp from a 1970s blaxploitation movie, in an apparent attempt to combine a slam against Kerry with Limbaugh's usual racism. After the story was completely discredited, Limbaugh grumbled on his broadcast, "All right, now, let's watch now, my friends, the media will report this young lady's statement with headlines, breaking news, all kinds of bells and whistles, yet it ignored almost completely the information leading to the issuance of this statement. The media will accept this statement at face value, and they will move on. The fact that AP has now run this statement and did nothing or next to nothing with the original story shows how the media spins for liberals." Kerry's military career is also under attack. Two conservative publications, the National Review and the Washington Times, misquoted and revamped a statement made by Kerry in 1971 to allege that Kerry accused fellow soldiers of committing atrocities in Vietnam; a cursory examination of the entire statement shows that Kerry was reporting what others had told him, and was very clear in not personally making such allegations. And the right-wing site NewsMax calls the doctored Kerry photograph "the photo the Dems fear the most." (The photo has been determined to be the work of right-wing maniac Ted Semple, who was immediately denounced by Republican senator and fellow Vietnam veteran John McCain.)
Columnist Dan Kennedy writes, "As a political tactic, ...the Kerry story was emblematic. At a moment when George W. Bush was hunkered down over everything from his phony budget numbers (which enraged conservatives in his own party as well as Democrats), to the bloody quagmire in Iraq...to questions about his service or lack thereof in the Texas Air National Guard, Drudge's casually flung allegation managed to put Kerry on the defensive. Though there is as yet no evidence that Drudge's informant or informants were Republicans (indeed, it appears that the rumor either originated with or was spread by the now-expired Wesley Clark campaign), the eagerness of bought-and-paid-for Republican partisans such as Hannity and Limbaugh to spread this sleaze demonstrates that the Republican Attack Machine continues to operate on a hair trigger. ...The sex story was just the most sensational example of the attacks the Republicans and their allies are launching against the Kerry campaign. It wasn't the only attack. And it certainly won't be the last." (Boston Pheonix)
February 20: Columnist Jim Boyd takes umbrage at the Bush campaign complaining about "gutter politics" from the Democrats, a response mostly sparked by criticisms and investigations of Bush's National Guard service record. Boyd reminds us of the utterly unprincipaled attacks on former Democratic senator Max Cleland's character in 2000; Cleland, a triple amputee from wounds suffered in combat in Vietnam, was painted as a traitor by his draft-dodging opponent Saxby Chambliss, whose campaign was stage-managed by Bush political guru Karl Rove. Since Cleland has taken to the campaign trail stumping for John Kerry, the GOP war machine has unleashed its attack dog columnist Ann Coulter, who wrote a stunningly horrific smear of Cleland's war record, implying that Cleland lost his limbs while flailing around drunk on a US base. (Cleland was injured at Khe Sanh, the site of one of the most vicious rounds of fighting in the entire Tet Offensive.) The GOP attack machine is also focusing on Kerry, claiming that he saw a mere two months of soft duty in Vietnam. In reality, Kerry was on duty for four months, earning a Silver Star for conspicuous bravery, and was rotated home early for wounds received that earned him three Purple Hearts. Boyd reminds us of Bush's savaging of his 2000 primary opponent John McCain, when, after implying that McCain, who was a POW for years in North Vietnam, was insane because of his war experiences, the campaign used McCain's family history to slam him. His family had adopted a black child; the Bush campaign implied that McCain "fathered a black child out of wedlock," according to campaign poll questions. (Some versions had him fathering a black child with a prostitute.) Another slam focused on McCain's wife, who had battled, and won, a problem with prescription painkillers; the question asked if the voter would be comfortable with a candidate whose wife was a drug addict. Boyd concludes, "Democrats are capable of some of this, too. But for sheer effrontery, no one can hold a candle to Bush, his father and those who work for them, beginning with the late Lee Atwater and continuing through Rove. When it comes to truly gutter politics, they wrote the book -- or at least the modern version." (Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune/CommonDreams)

February 21: Saddam Hussein is visited by a delegation from the International Red Cross for the first time. He gives the delegation a letter to be delivered to his family once it is examined by US officials to ensure that it contains no hidden messages to his followers. The delegation was not allowed to comment on Hussein's treatment or medical condition. (AP/Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
February 21: The US Supreme Court agrees to hear the Jose Padilla case. Padilla, accused of being an al-Qaeda accomplice, has been held incommunicado and without charges for 20 months. The justices say they will hear arguments in the Padilla case in April when they are also scheduled to hear a similar challenge brought by Yasser Hamdi, a US-born Saudi Arabian picked up in Afghanistan in 2001. Like Padilla, Hamdi has been held incommunicado and without charges. Padilla was arrested on US soil, unlike Hamdi. Padilla's lawyers have argued from the start that it is unconstitutional to detain a U.S. citizen, arrested in his homeland and far from the combat zone, without charging him or giving him access to courts and counsel. At issue in the third case is the government's decision to hold about 660 foreign men alleged to be Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters at a military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The men are not designated as prisoners of war. Advocates for the men say they have been denied basic rights accorded under U.S. and international law. Donna Newman, Padilla's lawyer, hailed the court's decision to take his case. "All the issues should be resolved by the court," she says. "They've already accepted on the Hamdi case, so it's important that they accept on the Padilla case, so they can resolve the question of the president's authority here in this country as well as on the battlefield." In contrast, Attorney General John Ashcroft says Bush's "authority to designate individuals as enemy combatants is a vital part of the war on terrorism. The court's action today provides an opportunity to reaffirm this critical authority." And Bradford Berenson, who was associate counsel to Bush when Hamdi and Padilla were designated as enemy combatants, seems to suggest that for the Supreme Court to even consider these issues is for the court to play into the hands of terrorists. "In deciding to hear these cases, the court is playing with fire," said Berenson, now in private practice. "And if it's not careful, we could all get burned -- maybe literally." White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez argues that indefinitely detaining Hamdi and Padilla without due process or charges is necessary, and that the administration considered all the ramifications before deciding to intern them as "enemy combatants." However, Joe Onek, the director of the Constitution Project, which monitors security and legal issues, says while Gonzales helped shed light on how the administration acted, he predicts that courts will continue to be skeptical of the Padilla decision. "There is a sense that the president is making up the law" in that case, Onek says, citing the federal court ruling that only Congress could set the rules for detaining a US citizen as a combatant. (Chicago Tribune, Knight Ridder)
February 21: Prosecutors in Palm Beach County, Florida have subpoenaed records from Rush Limbaugh's doctors as part of their investigation into his illegal drug use. The prosecutors are trying to determine whether Limbaugh visited several doctors to illegally receive duplicate prescriptions of controlled narcotics. Limbaugh sought treatment for his admitted addiction to painkillers in October and has not yet been charged with a crime. They are also appealing a judge's order to keep Limbaugh's medical records sealed. (CBS News)

Back to February 2004 | On to February 2004 Week Four

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

February 2004, Week Three

Page Two

Dean drops out of presidential campaign

Chalabi admits to giving false intelligence to Bush officials

Plans for transfer of power in Iraq in flux

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