January 2004 » Week One » Page Three » This Far and No Further

Back to January 2004 | On to January 2004: Week Two

Iraqi scientist confirms Iraq never had nuclear weapons

January 6: Iraqi rocket scientist Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi, one of Iraq's most creative and effective weapons designers, confirms that the Hussein regime never got past the planning stage for any weapons that violated the standards laid down by the UN. Tamimi freely admits to hiding the sketches and designs for several large missiles from UN inspectors, and confirms that the Hussein regime was actively involved in concealing a goodly number of illegal weapons research, designs, and plans from the UN. Tamimi, like the inspectors that have combed the country, confirms that Hussein had no cache of old weapons, nor did his regime have any programs in place to begin building new ones. The Washington Post writes: "[I]nvestigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led US scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a 'grave and gathering danger' by President Bush and a 'mortal threat' by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s. A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than US analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War."
Iraqi nuclear scientist Sabah Abdul Noor, one of the driving forces behind Iraq's planned nuclear bomb, confirms that UN inspection and destruction teams "reduced [his work] to slag" in 1991. Abdul Noor tries to explain his bafflement at suspicions that Iraq had secretly rebuilt -- "reconstituted," as the Bush administration put it in the summer and fall of 2002 -- a nuclear weapons program. He and his colleagues still know what they learned, Abdul Noor says, but their material condition is incomparably worse than it was when they began in 1987: "We would have had to start from less than zero," he says, with thousands of irreplaceable tools banned from import. "The country was cornered," he notes. "We were boycotted. We were embargoed. The truth is, we disintegrated." A number of scientists also explain that several programs, including chief nuclear scientist Khalid Ibrahim Said's notorious and suspicious "rail gun," were falsified to placate Saddam Hussein, who insisted that his scientists find new types of weapons that weren't prohibited. The rail gun, for example, came after Hussein angrily demanded some kind of defense for air attacks from US F-15s. Said gave the president an answer involving futuristic technology. He was a good enough applied physicist to understand the long odds against success, says a colleague, but the project earned him favor, prestige and a substantial budget. In every field of special weaponry, Iraqi designers and foreign investigators say, such deceit was endemic. Program managers promised more than they could deliver, or things they could not deliver at all, to advance careers, preserve jobs or conduct intrigues against rivals. Sometimes they did so from ignorance, failing to grasp the challenges they took on. Lying to an absolute ruler was hazardous, Iraqi weaponeers says, but less so in some cases than the alternatives: "No one will tell Saddam Hussein to his face, 'I can't do this,'" says an Iraqi brigadier general who supervised work on some of the technologies used in the rail gun.
Numerous other instances of this kind of internal deception, called "red-on-red deception" by David Kay's group, have been documented. Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate official Sufiyan Taha Mahmoud says that spurious programs also led to needless conflict with UN arms inspectors. "They couldn't build anything," Mahmoud says of overpromising weaponeers, "but they had to hide the documents because they related to prohibited activities." Secrecy and a procurement system based on smuggling helped those who inflated their reports. Weapons inspector George Healey says that entire programs were devised, or their design choices distorted, in order to siphon funds. "They had a system to graft money out of oil-for-food," he says, referring to the UN program that supervised Iraqi exports and imports after 1991. "What you had to have was a project -- the more expensive the better, because the more you can buy, the more you can graft out of it. You'd have difficulty believing how much that explains." Intertwined with internal deception, many analysts now believe, was deception aimed overseas. Hussein plainly hid actual programs over the years, but Kay, among others, said it appears possible he also hinted at programs that did not exist. Former chief inspector and UNMOVIC chairman Hans Blix says that he has thought long and hard over why Hussein might have exaggerated his arsenal: "You can put a sign on your door, 'Beware of the dog,' without having a dog. They did not mind looking a little bit serious and a little bit dangerous." Defectors who sold false or exaggerated stories in Washington, Iraqi and American experts said, layered on still another coat of deception. "You end up with a Picasso-like drawing -- distorted," saysIraqi biotechnologist Ali Zaag. Perhaps an Iraqi general who followed Tamimi's rocketry work sums it up best: "Saddam Hussein ordered this work, but where would we get the materials? This was the case in every field. People would prepare reports under the order of Saddam Hussein and the supervision of the people around Saddam Hussein. But it was not real." (Washington Post)
January 6: By the end of the Iraq war, the Bush administration will have poisoned hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military and civilians, far more than were poisoned under the Hussein regime. Thousands of US troops and civilian personnel, along with the military personnel from coalition countries such as Britain, are also being poisoned. In its 110,000 air raids against Iraq so far, the US A-10 Warthog aircraft launched 940,000 depleted uranium shells, and in the land offensive, its M60, M1 and M1A1 tanks fired a further 4,000 larger caliber also uranium shells. The Bush administration and the Pentagon have said that there is no danger to American troops or Iraqi civilians from breathing the uranium oxide dust produced in depleted uranium (DU) weapons explosions. That is a lie.
According to DU expert Dr. Doug Rokke, "Depleted uranium munitions (DU) have been used effectively in combat since 1973. Their destructive capabilities are absolutely superior to any other known munitions that can be fired by tanks, armored vehicles, aircraft, and rifles. In addition the ADAM and PDM, which are land mines, are essentially conventional explosives wrapped in shell containing uranium or a 'dirty bomb.' Although DU munitions are an excellent weapon, they leave a path of death, illness, and environmental contamination. The radiological and chemical toxicity are due to uranium, plutonium, neptunium, and americium isotopes within each DU bullet. We also have all of the inherent contamination from the equipment, terrain, and facilities that were destroyed. Upon the completion of the ground combat phase of the Gulf war, I was assigned by Headquarters Department of the Army and consequently the U.S. Central Command to clean up the depleted uranium contaminated US equipment and provide initial medical recommendations for all individuals who were or may have been exposed as a consequence of military actions. Our initial observations of the DU contamination can be summed simply by three words 'OH MY GOD!' Although my mission was limited to US personnel and equipment all affected persons and equipment should have been processed identically. They were not! Although I and US Army physicians assigned to the 3rd US Army Medical Command issued immediate verbal and written medical care recommendations those still have not been complied with for not only all US and coalition military DU casualties but for Iraqi military personnel and especially noncombatants, women and children, who were exposed to DU munitions contamination. A United States Defense Nuclear Agency memorandum...that was sent to our team in Saudi Arabia during March 1990 stated that quote: 'As Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), ground combat units, and civil populations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq come increasingly into contact with DU ordnance, we must prepare to deal with potential problems. Toxic war souvenirs, political furor, and post conflict clean up (host nation agreement) are only some of the issues that must be addressed. Alpha particles (uranium oxide dust) from expended rounds is a health concern but, Beta particles from fragments and intact rounds is a serious health threat, with possible exposure rates of 200 millirads per hour on contact.'"
Former British Army Sergeant George Parker, who was a member of the 1st Field Laboratory Unit, Biological-Warfare Detection Unit at Porton Down in Great Britain and whose job had been management in the Gulf War of troop protection against weapons of mass destruction, adds: "I am now aware that armed forces personnel are considered as disposable items. Something to be used, abused, and then discarded when broken. Further more, when made ill by the use of politically sensitive weapons such as DU they are an expensive embarrassment to be silenced when voicing concerns. It is my sincere and heart felt belief that until such time as the UK and US governments can properly care for ill and dying veterans of war, they should refrain from deploying members of the armed forces overseas." A 3-foot-long DU warhead from a single 120-mm tank shell produces radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. Many scientists believe that uranium oxide dust inhaled or ingested by troops in the Gulf War is the cause, or a contributing cause, of "Gulf-War Syndrome." Of the approximately 697,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Gulf during the war, more than 100,000 veterans are now chronically ill. Cancer rates in southern Iraq have increased dramatically; for example ovarian cancer in Iraqi women of the southern region has increased by 1600% And new data shows that thousands more Iraqis and Americans may have been poisoned by uranium from DU weapons explosions than Kurds killed by Hussein's gas attacks in 1988. Leaders of the October 2003 World DU/Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany criticized as decades obsolete the Pentagon models used for reassuring the public about the long-term effects of inhaling uranium oxide particles from DU weapons. Citing the Pentagon model, the official 2003 Conference Statement concluded: "The knowledge on which this [Pentagon] model is based is faulty and outdated. This is like comparing [someone] sitting in front of a fire with [them] eating a hot coal."
After the Gulf War, Iraqi and international epidemiological investigations enabled the environmental pollution due to using this kind of weapon to be associated with the appearance of new, very difficult to diagnose diseases (serious immunodeficiencies, for instance) and the spectacular increase in congenital malformations and cancer. This had been found both in the Iraqi population and also among several thousands of American and British veterans and in their children, a clinical condition now called Gulf War Syndrome. Similar symptoms to those of the Gulf War have been described for a thousand children living in Bosnia where American aviation similarly used DU bombs in 1996, the same as in the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia in 1999. It is estimated that already some 300 tons of radioactive debris from DU weapons has been deposited in target areas during the 2003 Iraq War, affecting over 250,000 Iraqis. By comparison, Saddam Hussein gassed about 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1988. But by Bush launching his war on Iraq with DU weapons of mass destruction, he multiplied the casualties to the Iraqis, and also to American troops, by factors of hundreds relative to the infamous gassing of the Kurds. Therefore, by the time American troops leave Iraq Bush will very likely have poisoned hundreds of thousands more humans than he had accused Saddam Hussein of poisoning. (Intervention Magazine)

North Korea offers to dismantle its nuclear weapons program

January 6: North Korea offers to halt its entire nuclear weapons and power programs, but the US is cautious in accepting the government's word. Secretary of State Colin Powell calls the offer a "positive step." Previous offers from North Korea have been brushed off by the US, which insists that it wants North Korea's program shut down and dismantled, not merely frozen. In exchange for freezing its nuclear program, North Korea wants the United States to take the country off of its terrorism list, lift political, economic and military sanctions, and supply heavy oil, power and other energy resources. (CNN)
January 6: Bechtel is awarded a $1.8 billion contract for for more reconstruction work in Iraq, while the Defense Department announces plans for seeking $5 billion more in rebuilding contracts. All $6.8 billion is taxpayer money provided by the Bush administration. The administration's decision to transfer sovereignty to Iraq by June 30 prompted adjustments in spending plans, Pentagon and State Department officials say. Contracts worth $4.6 billion for reconstruction will be deferred until after the transfer of power to give the administration more "flexibility" in its responses to needs that Iraqi officials identify, says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita. Bechtel outbid two other companies for the contract. (Washington Post)
January 6: In attempting to defend the CIA's intelligence assessment of Iraq's WMD programs, Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council who supervised the production of a prewar National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, says that "we judged that [Hussein] did not have nuclear weapons -- indeed, would not have them until very late in the decade." This is a far, far cry from the Bush administration's assertions that Iraq was capable of producing "mushroom clouds" in the US if Hussein wasn't immediately overthrown. Cohen insists that Iraq did possess some sort of chemical and biological weapons programs. When asked how much of a threat Iraq had posed to the United States, Cohen replies: "We, as I said, indicated that he did not have nuclear weapons. And that while he was in violation of UN resolutions, his missiles could not have reached that far. We were concerned about unmanned aerial vehicles. And at least theoretically, there was a concern at the possibility that unmanned aerial vehicles could be brought within reach of the United States and used. We were also concerned about unconventional delivery of chemical and biological weapons. The ability of Iraqi intelligence agencies to, perhaps, bring something in undetected and use it." Cohen fails to mention the most trumpeted assertion by the Bush administration, that Hussein would give a nuclear or other WMD to a terrorist group such as al-Qaeda; apparently that wasn't even a worry for the administration, contrary to their public statements. (The Nation)
January 6: Pakistan is the source of the centrifuge design technology that made it possible for Libya to make major strides in the last two years in enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons, according to Bush administration officials and other weapons experts. The sources emphasize that no evidence exists to show that the government of General Pervez Musharraf, a US ally in the struggle against terrorism, knew of the technology transfer. Musharraf promised after 9/11 that he would rein in Pakistani scientists who were selling nuclear technology around the globe. The transfer to Libya apparently took place after Musharraf's promise was made. "It has all the hallmarks of a Pakistani system," says a senior official in Washington. "These guys are now three for three as supplier to the biggest proliferation problems we have," the official adds, referring to previously disclosed Pakistani aid to the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran. One Western diplomat said Monday that some Pakistani nuclear scientists operated as though they were running "Nukes 'R' Us." A senior Bush administration official says it would be wrong to say the Pakistani government was involved in the shipment: "This is intellectual property and the technology of uranium enrichment is out there on the black market." He adds that to say the government of General Musharraf was involved would be like saying "an American drug smuggler arrested on the border was working for the United States government." Libya is working with the US, Britain, and international organizations to dismantle its emerging nuclear program. (New York Times)
January 6: Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, warns Cuba's Fidel Castro that he is "playing with fire" in Castro's supposed attempts to destabilize democracies in Central and Latin America. Noriega also includes Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in his warnings, calling on him to observe the rule of law in the run-up to a possible referendum on his presidency. Noriega accuses Castro, whom he calls "a broken-down, old dictator who doesn't cast much of a shadow," of sowing unrest in some countries in the region. He did not identify the countries. "It should be very clear to Fidel Castro that his actions have caught the attention of Latin America leaders and that his actions to destabilize Latin America are increasingly provocative to the inter-American community," Noriega says. "Those that continue in destabilizing democratically elected governments, interfering in the internal affairs of other governments, are playing with fire." Bush administration officials have expressed growing concern about ties between Castro and Chavez, who is a close friend of Castro and a vocal critic of US policies. Chavez opponents are hoping to stage a referendum, possibly this summer, that would recall the leftist leader and lawmakers who support him. US officials claim that Cuba and Venezuela are working together to oppose pro-American, democratic governments in the region with money, political indoctrination and training, such as in Ecuador and Uruguay. Venezuelan resources may have helped in the October ouster of Bolivia's elected, pro-American president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, according to the officials. Venezuelan officials accuse the US government of using slander and defamation to weaken their country. Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel demands the United States provide proof that Venezuela helped finance the ouster of Sanchez de Lozada. "If they have any evidence...they should put it on the table so we can discuss it," says Rangel. "What proof do they have of these statements?" (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
January 6: The US Army allows Halliburton subsidiary KBR to supply Iraq with gasoline without submitting the usual data to justify the cost. KBR does not have to provide price figures for the increased flow of gasoline and kerosene it buys in Kuwait and delivers to Iraqi civilian markets; Halliburton's Kuwaiti supplier, Altanmia, has refused to provide the price data required under US contracting regulations, according to an Army spokesperson. Altanmia is the only company authorized by the Kuwaiti government to sell fuel for delivery in Iraq. (Washington Post/CorpWatch

Army defends Halliburton overcharging

January 6: Unsurprisingly, the US Army official hierarchy comes to the defense of Halliburton Oil in the emerging overcharging scandal. The Army officials who are backing Halliburton's contention that it charged fair prices are going in the face of the Pentagon's own audit, which found that Halliburton grossly overcharged the military for gasoline imported from Kuwait. For the Army's part, contracting officer Gordon Sumner wrote that Halliburton subsidiary KBR "obtained adequate price competition"' for the fuel and "continued to negotiate the best price possible." Sumner wrote that Halliburton had tried to get a cheaper price but Kuwaiti gas supplier Altanmia and the Kuwaiti government refused. Sumner's memo recommended that Halliburton's future deliveries of Kuwaiti gasoline and kerosene be exempt from U.S. rules requiring the submission of cost information. Lieutenant General Robert Flowers approved that exemption the same day. Critics say Halliburton has no reason to hold down costs because of the way the Army pays for the company's services. The contract guarantees Halliburton will be reimbursed for all of its expenses, plus an additional profit equal to between 2 percent and 7 percent of those costs. In other words, if Halliburton overcharged by $61 million, its profits from that overcharging would be between $1.2 million and $4.3 million. In related news, the Army has allowed KBR to increase the supplies of fuel delivered to Iraq without giving the usual data to justify its cost. KBR does not have to provide price figures for the increased flow of gasoline and kerosene it buys in Kuwait and delivers to Iraqi civilian markets. (AP/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post)
January 6: German intelligence accuses the CIA of misinforming it about the alleged planned terror action in Hamburg on December 30. Ansar al-Islam was accused of being behind the attempt. Now German intelligence wonders if the US intelligence agency didn't plant the information in a deliberate attempt to mislead it. German police have started an investigation after the terror alarm at a Hamburg hospital December 30. So far, no evidence has been located that indicates that the terror alarm was genuine. German police who were tipped off by the CIA now doubt that the terror alarm was real. "We have not found any proof that the terror alarm was genuine, but we haven't found any evidence that states it was not," says one police officer. "It is of course possible that it was fake, but we do not know that for certain yet." (Nettavisen)
January 6: President Bush, along with a number of top administration officials, is served with a warrant from 9-11 widow Ellen Mariani in her Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) suit seeking to hold President Bush and various government officials accountable for the September 11 attacks. Mariani says, "There was ample warning of these attacks; and now I hear from news reports that Condoleezza Rice doesn't want to testify publicly under oath about all the intelligence briefings which warned about planes flying into buildings. What does she have to hide?" About the aftermath of the attacks, she says, "Our Congress created new laws to protect themselves, the White House and the insurance corporations. Insurance lobbyists even talked to representatives and senators on the afternoon of the attacks. And then Mr. Ashcroft's lawyers stalled the New York City airline and airport security lawsuits and investigations to force destitute victim families into the Federal Compensation Fund. But they had to sign an agreement promising never to sue the government about 9-11 evidence. So I decided to file another suit; but this one includes everyone." (Tom Flocco/Information Clearinghouse)
January 6: Former White House counsel John Dean believes that Attorney General John Ashcroft finally recused himself from the investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson because a knowledgeable witness may have come forward, probably through a lawyer, and contacted the FBI or the Justice Department with hard information about the leak. Dean, who admits he is writing speculatively, notes, "When the lawyer...went to the government seeking immunity for his or her client, Ashcroft would have heard that the middle-level person was offering to finger the high-level leaker. At that point, he would have realized he himself knew the high-level leaker; and decided to recuse himself from the case, and let [newly named investigative head Patrick] Fitzgerald take over." (FindLaw)
January 6: Human rights advocates and political reformers in Egypt say that the Egyptian government is actively opposing any kind of democratic reforms, bolstered by billions in US aid. Though US President Bush has declared, "The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East," the regime of Hosni Mubarak has shown little interest in democratic reforms. (Mubarak, 75 and in failing health, is preparing his son to succeed him.) Reformists point to government kidnappings, torturings, and murders of political suspects as evidence of the failure of the government to implement democracy and freedom for the Egyptian citizenry. The Washington Post reports: "sudden disappearances and brutal interrogations are one way the government deals with dissidents, according to activists. Another is to keep them on edge about their legal status. The Brotherhood is the foremost Islamic political movement here and, like all religious groups, it is banned from entering parliamentary politics, although 17 of its followers serve as independents. For years it has operated through a network of mosques, charitable institutions, labor unions and professional associations. Sometimes the authorities crack down on the Brotherhood; other times they encourage its participation." One of its leaders knows he could be arrested and detained at any time; he says, "I came out of a small prison [after serving a five-year term for political dissidence], now I'm in a big one." Few Egyptian political observers believe that Bush truly wants democratic elections, which would inevitably produce a government far more hostile to US foreign policy than the current one. Several point to the U.S. practice of "rendition" -- the surreptitious shipment of an unknown number of suspected Arab terrorists to Egypt and other countries where police routinely practice torture -- as proof of US bad faith on human rights issues. (Washington Post)
January 6: Many conservatives are not happy with the spending frenzy of the Bush administration. While Bush has repeatedly emphasized the need to slow spending, overall federal expenditures have grown to an estimated $2.31 trillion for the budget year that started October 1. That is up from $1.86 trillion in President Clinton's final year, a rate of growth not seen for any three-year period since 1989 to 1991. Spending by this administration has increased 23.7%, a figure not approached by an administration since Bush's father was President. Conservatives particularly dislike the 31.5% increase in discretionary spending by this administration. During Clinton's eight years, that spending grew an average of 3.4%. "Re-election has become the focus of Republicans in the White House and Congress. And those in power have determined the road to staying in power is paved with government spending," says the Heritage Foundations' Brian Riedl. The spending deficit under Bush has hit a record level of $374 billion; experts believe that by the end of 2004, the deficit will have reached $500 billion. "The US budget is out of control," the investment bank Goldman, Sachs &Co. recently wrote its clients, projecting large deficits for the next decade. "Any thoughts of relief thereafter are a pipe dream until political priorities adjust." (CNN)
January 6: Robert Novak, the conservative journalist who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, accuses South Dakota's Native Americans of stealing a 2002 election, remarks that many interpret as racist. "In 2002, [Republican candidate John] Thune would have been elected to the state's other Senate seat," Novak said in an exchange with Democrat James Carville on CNN's Crossfire, "but the election was stolen by stuffing ballot boxes on Indian reservations. Now, Tom Daschle [South Dakota's senior senator] may have to pay for that theft." Carville calls Novak's statement "really out there" and said American Indians are "very patriotic Americans." "Has Thune said that the Native Americans are election thieves?" Carville asks. Novak replies, "No, I said it." Thune is challenging Daschle in the 2004 elections. State Democratic Party chairwoman Judy Olson Duhamel, Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Jandreau, and Frank LaMere, treasurer of a political action committee, have all called on Novak to apologize and retract his statements. South Dakota's governor, two senators, the South Dakota secretary of state, the state Republican Party chairman, and Thune's campaign also issued statements. "I can't conceive of anyone making that debasing statement about anyone in the human race," Olson Duhamel says. "This kind of racist, insulting remark is outrageous. There's just no excuse. I call on John Thune to repudiate that, and I expect other political leaders in both parties to make statements, to join me in demanding an apology." Novak has yet to respond to any of the statements or requests.
Jandreau hammers Novak for a series of anti-Indian remarks and included an excerpt of a December 13 Crossfire transcript in which Novak said, "The Indians, they got the phony Indian votes out there." Jandreau calls Novak's accusations "outrageous, offensive and factually wrong." "Our people deserve to have a voice in the democracy you and I both cherish, just like every other American," Jandreau writes. "When people like you characterize our participation as suspect solely because you may not like the outcome, you undermine the fundamental principle upon which our great republic is built." LaMere says Novak is eager to "paint with a broad brush a whole race of people who want what every American wants, a chance to be heard and a chance to be counted. Indian people did not stuff ballot boxes on Indian reservations and to even hint at that is insensitive and irresponsible at best and blatantly racist at worst." Thune's campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, replied quickly to Olson Duhamel's call for a statement: "Robert Novak's comments were inappropriate and certainly do not reflect John Thune's commitment to work hard for the Native American vote in 2004," he says. "The accusation overall is just off the mark."
Senator Tim Johnson, who narrowly defeated Thune in 2002, issues a statement that reads in part, "For Bob Novak, a seasoned political commentator, to throw around such allegations is yellow journalism at its worst. Those that say the election was stolen have been proven wrong and are serving up sour grapes over what was a very successful grassroots effort." Daschle spokesman Dan Pfeiffer says, "The false allegations and efforts to intimidate voters on the reservations were a very dark moment in South Dakota politics." Secretary of State Chris Nelson, a Republican, says that despite Johnson's razor-thin margin of victory and the attempts at fraudulent voter registration, South Dakota's 2002 election was not compromised. "There were no stuffed ballot boxes in South Dakota's 2002 election," Nelson says. "We all know there were attempts at voter registration fraud. I'm confident our county auditors and the law enforcement of this state were able to stop that and that no illegal ballots were cast." Republican Governor Mike Rounds says, "I've made it very clear I want to compete for Native American votes. The Democratic Party did a better job than the Republican Party of activating forces on the reservations. Republicans have to work very hard at pointing out our interests at reconciliation," he says. "We've got just as good a shot as the Democrats do in convincing them we have good ideas and ways of improving life on reservations. I think that's what Native Americans are interested in." Asked whether he found Novak's statements offensive, Rounds replies, "I find it ignorant." State GOP Chairman Randy Frederick has stronger words, calling Novak's statements "appalling" and "insane." "There were problems, but they were attributable to one individual," Frederick says. "To attempt to tag an entire race is totally out of bounds, uncalled for, discriminatory and shows prejudice. Voter turnout on reservations went up. That is a good thing."
One tribal official who watched Tuesday's broadcast says she fears such charges could change that. "That is slander to the Indian people of South Dakota," says Eileen Janis of the Oglala Sioux. "I hope it doesn't make the people want to quit voting because of how we get called down for what is our right. I would like an apology. ...He's a sore loser. They should quit crying around." Political activist Mary Ann Bear Heels-McGowan says her people have suffered such slurs for generations. "We have been talked about for generations as being the savage heathens, prairie n*ggers and people that live off the government. We've listened to all of this. We're still walking around. We're survivors," she says. "I think it's a lack of education. He needs to come out here and visit us. I would send him a personal invitation." (Rapid City Journal)
January 6: The White House orders all federal agencies to stop issuing ethics waivers that allow key officials to negotiate jobs with private companies while they are shaping federal policies important to the potential employers. From now on, according to a memo sent by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, only the White House can approve such waivers. The administration says the directive is part of an overall effort to strengthen government ethics. But congressional sources and outside advocacy groups say the memo is related to the recent job change of a top presidential adviser involved in last year's overhaul of Medicare. The official, Thomas Scully, took jobs last month with a law firm and an investment company that deal with health care. Scully was contacted by several companies while he was negotiating the complicated Medicare legislation approved by Congress in November. Federal law generally bars presidential appointees such as Scully from discussing possible employment with firms involved in, or hoping to be involved in, matters handled by those officials. Scully, however, obtained a waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services, apparently without the White House's knowledge. Scully's plans to leave the government, which he freely discussed for months as he negotiated the Medicare bill, prompted criticism from several congressional Democrats and liberal advocacy groups. They said some companies that wanted to hire Scully represent clients, including drug manufacturers, that had a stake in the legislation. Card's memo suggests that parts of the government are lax in their ethics practices. It says "many agencies over time have delegated the authority to issue waivers far beneath the agency head." Some waivers, the memo says, were granted before Bush took office, leaving Cabinet secretaries vulnerable to the risk that they "would unwittingly rely on advice from an agency official that is tainted by a conflict of interest."
At issue is a law that forbids federal officials to work on matters in which they have a direct financial interest. Negotiating for a private-sector job is considered one kind of financial interest. The law, however, allows officials a waiver if they disclose their financial interest and demonstrate that the potential conflict is not "so substantial" that it would affect the integrity of their work. Scully got such a waiver last May from HHS's associate general counsel for ethics. A longtime Washington fixture in health policy circles who also worked in the first Bush administration, Scully had said openly last year that he wanted to leave the administration after the Medicare bill's completion. He said he asked for the waiver after receiving unsolicited calls from law firms offering him jobs. He said he did not begin direct negotiations until Congress passed the legislation. Scully announced his resignation in early December. He accepted a part-time position to build a health practice in the Washington office of the Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird LLP. He also agreed to work two days a week at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a New York investment firm specializing in telecommunications and health care. Scully says of the Card memo, "If I'm partly the cause for this, I feel badly.... If my noisy exit causes other people not to go into public service, it'll be a shame." He continues, "I don't blame them [the administration] a bit.... If I was the chief of staff, I wouldn't want any surprises, too." He adds, "I got the ethics ruling because I was doing it by the book." Public Citizen, which filed an ethics complaint over Scully's departure, issues a statement calling Card's memo "a tacit admission that the Scully waiver had been mishandled." Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, said the White House rules are "basically a half-step," centralizing such ethics decisions but not setting forth specific guidelines for when waivers are appropriate. (Washington Post)
January 6: Columnist James Carroll asks why a Democratic presidential candidate must distance himself from promoting peace and tolerance: "George W. Bush obscenely exploits war for his own purposes. He sponsors a paranoid assessment of what threatens America now and draws political advantage from the resulting fear. The news media propagate that fear. Pundits continue the false opposition between 'realist' and 'idealist' visions, marginalizing anyone who dares question Garrison America. Meanwhile, the unnecessary Bush war rages, and not even the steady death toll of young GIs makes much news anymore. If a Democrat running for president dares to speak the truth about these things, it is the furthest thing from shame. And before feeling gloom about next November, ask what it means if the Democrat, to win, must do what Nixon did." (Boston Globe)
January 6: A US mother's inquiry into buying her ten-year old son a copy of a Microsoft flight simulator game ends with a visit by a state trooper and concern that she might be a terrorist. Julie Olearcek, a USAF Reserve pilot made the inquiry at a Staples store in Massachusetts, which London's Register points out is "home to an earlier bout of hysteria, during the Salem witch trials." The clerk at the store deemed the inquiry suspicious, and informed the police. Shortly thereafter, Olearcek was visited by a state trooper after nightfall, who did not knock on her door, but was spotted by Olearcek nosing around her yard with a flashlight. The Staples manager insists he was merely complying with new FBI regulations that alert business owners to beware of drivers with maps, or reference books. Olearcek, who says she understand's the clerk's anxiety and confusion, says of her son, "He was disappointed because there was military stuff, but it was all fighting stuff, so I asked the clerk, and he was alarmed by us asking how to fly airplanes and said that was against the law. I said I couldn't imagine that, but, because (the clerk) was a little on edge...I left." She adds, "[W]hat saves us, is people are paying attention." The Register concludes its article with this acerbic observation: "At one time it was rare to find US citizens, in the safest and most prosperous country in the world, jumping at their own shadows. Now we only note how high." (The Register, Greenfield Recorder/Unknown News)
January 6: Conservative columnist and TV commentator George Will has repeatedly and blatantly breached the most basic of journalistic ethics; even more interestingly, when called out on it, he claims that it's no one's business but his own. Much criticism has piled onto Will for his reception of $25,000 per day to be on a board of advisers for Hollinger International, a newspaper firm controlled by magnate Conrad Black. Will has often praised Black, and Hollinger, in print, but has never divulged his financial ties to either. Will claimed in a December 22 interview by the New York Times that nothing was amiss. "Asked in the interview if he should have told his readers of the payments he had received from Hollinger, Mr. Will said he saw no reason to do so." The Times quotes Will as saying, "My business is my business. Got it?" Gilbert Cranberg, former chairman of the professional standards committee of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, responds, "When a syndicated journalist writes favorably about a benefactor, that is very much the business of Mr. Will's editors and readers." Cranberg quotes from the National Conference of Editorial Writers code of ethics, which includes provisions that "the writer should be constantly alert to conflicts of interest, real or apparent" -- including "those that may arise from financial holdings" and "secondary employment." Noting, "timely public disclosure can minimize suspicion," the code adds: "Editors should seek to hold syndicates to these standards." Will's other ethical lapses have been well documented. In October 1980, Will appeared on ABC's Nightline to praise GOP candidate Ronald Reagan's performance in a debate againt Jimmy Carter, but did not bother to inform viewers that not only had he helped coach Reagan, but had read, and used, Carter campaign documents stolen from the White House. In the 1996 presidential campaign, Will was effusive in his praise for the Dole campaign, but never revealed that his wife, Mari Maseng Will, was a senior staff member of the Dole campaign. On ABC, Will praised a Dole speech without revealing that his wife helped write it. In 2000, Will conducted an interview with candidate George W. Bush on ABC's This Week. Later it was revealed that Will met with Bush before the interview to prepare him for the questions he would ask; Will said he didn't want to "ambush him with unfamiliar material." In the meeting, Will provided Bush with a 3-by-5 card containing a crucial question he would later ask the candidate on the air. Will is ever ready to denouce others' perceived ethical lapses, with his favorite targets being African-Americans and "Clinton Democrats," but stubornly refuses to acknowledge his own. (AlterNet)

Study proves Bush administration duplicity about Iraq

January 7: A study from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace finds that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented" the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to war. The report says that these distortions, combined with intelligence failures, exaggerated the risks posed by a country that presented no immediate threat to the US, Middle East or global security, and notes that although Iraq had ambitions of producing WMDs, its capability and stockpiles of such weapons had been destroyed in 1991. The report calls for an independent commission to investigate what the US intelligence community knew, or thought it knew, about Iraq's WMD programs before the US invasion. They say that the probe should also determine whether intelligence analyses were tainted by foreign intelligence agencies or political pressure. Joseph Cirincione, director of Carnegie's non-proliferation project, says, "It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments to pre-existing policies." While inspectors are still seeking evidence of the programs in Iraq, Cirincione says, "We think it's highly unlikely that there will be any significant finds from now on." It concludes that before 2002 the US intelligence community appears to have accurately perceived Iraq's nuclear and missile programs, but overestimated the threat from chemical and biological weapons; during 2002, the interpretations of published intelligence became excessively politicized. A "dramatic shift" in intelligence assessments during the year was one sign that "the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002." According to the report, the administration misrepresented the threat in three ways. First, it presented nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as a single WMD threat, lumping together the high likelihood that Iraq had chemical weapons with the possibility that it had nuclear weapons, a claim for which there was no serious evidence. Secondly, the administration also insisted without evidence that Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, would give WMD to terrorists. Finally, officials systematically misused intelligence: "These include the wholesale dropping of caveats, probabilities and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from public statements." The report concludes that, despite what Vice President Cheney and others have continued to say, "[t]here is no evidence of any Iraqi nuclear program." The report says that the Bush administration's approach to the war was based on what it called "worst case reasoning," assuming that what intelligence agencies did not know was worse than what they did know. "Worst-case planning is valid.... [But] acting on worst-case assumptions is an entirely different matter." The San Francisco Chronicle's Ruth Rosen writes, "so now we know that the US government misled Congress and the American public. What will it take for the American people to realize they've been betrayed? Have we grown so jaded that we no longer expect the truth from our country's leaders? War is a serious matter, perhaps the most consequential decision ever made by elected leaders. Yet the Bush administration manipulated intelligence and then sent tens of thousands of young people off to war for reasons that have yet to be revealed. As a result, hundreds of soldiers have died and thousands more have been injured, and for what purpose? Some will greet all this news with a yawn. 'Haven't we heard all this before?' they will ask. 'We know there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know there never was an imminent threat. So get over it.' But I won't. And neither should you." (Financial Times, InterPress/AlterNet, San Francisco Chronicle/CommonDreams)
January 7: The International Monetary Fund warns in a report released today that the US is running up such a huge budget deficit and a ballooning trade imbalace that the foreign debt it is incurring is threatening the financial stability of the global economy. The report questions the wisdom of the Bush administration's series of tax cuts, and warns that large budget deficits pose "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world. The report notes that the net financial obligations of the United States to the rest of the world could equal 40 percent of its total economy within a few years -- "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country" that it says will play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates. White House officials dismiss the report as alarmist. Administration officials have made it clear they are not worried about the the United States' burgeoning external debt or the declining value of the dollar, which has lost nearly one-fifth of its value against the euro in 18 months and which hit new lows earlier this week. Fund officials warn that the long-term fiscal outlook was far grimmer than is acknowledged by the administration, and predict that underfinancing of Social Security and Medicare will lead to shortages as high as $47 trillion over the next several decades, or nearly 500 percent of the current gross domestic product in the coming decades. (New York Times)
January 7: US occupation authorities will begin releasing 506 low-risk security detainees this week in a gamble calculated to win the support, or at least the neutrality, of many Iraqis who opposed the American presence. Meanwhile, the coalition will increase the bounty for information leading to the capture or death of a newly identified cadre of insurgent leaders. Senior coalition officials describe both moves as an attempt to build on the momentum generated by Saddam Hussein's capture last month. "In a gesture to give impetus to those Iraqis who wish to reconcile with their countrymen, the coalition will permit some currently detained offenders to return to their homes and families," announces civilian administrator Paul Bremer. Approximately 13,000 Iraqis are currently being held by US forces. (Chicago Tribune)
January 7: White House officials are coming under increasing fire for failing to cooperate with the investigation into the outing of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson; the latest is the failure of White House staffers to comply with new Justice Department tactics in the investigation. Investigators have asked Bush administration officials to sign a waiver releasing journalists from any promises of confidentiality they made to their sources, in order to push journalists into revealing the identity of sources used by conservative columnist Robert Novak, who outed Plame using information gleaned from administration officials. As of now, Bush has failed to order the waivers to be signed. Administration spokespersons keep saying that the administration will "cooperate fully" with the investigation, but refuse to give details. Senator Charles Schumer has written Bush to ask that the waivers be mandated. "'Full cooperation' requires freeing these journalists from their obligations to protect their sources," Schumer wrote. "I hope you will do so as soon as possible." In a press statement, Schumer, who has been a strong advocate of an investigation into the leak of Wilson's wife's identity and a frequent critic of the Justice Department's efforts, notes the previous decision by the White House Counsel's office to set a deadline for complying with a Justice Department request for phone and e-mail records. "It took long enough to get the Justice Department to do the right thing with regard to this case, we shouldn't have to keep pestering the White House to cooperate," Schumer says. But even if the White House compels its staff to sign the waivers, they may have little use in the investigation. According to Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, states that have dealt with the issue of reporters' privilege have determined that the privilege rests with the journalists and not their sources. The waivers "will have no effect on the journalists' behavior whatsoever," she notes. Instead of being an effective investigative measure, Dalglish says that the waivers were more likely intended to get "political mileage" by shifting the blame for lack of progress in the case to a lack of cooperation by journalists. Throughout the course of the investigation, both Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has since recused himself from the case, have publicly suggested that the media would play a role in its success or failure, and have worked to pin the blame for the leak on the media and not on the administration officials who provided the information. (Global Security Newswire/Government Executive Magazine)
January 7: Most US soldiers are laughing off the offer of a $10,000 re-enlistment bonus. "Man, they can't pay me enough to stay here," says one infantryman in Baghdad. While active duty soldiers still in the US are divided on whether or not the bonus is reason enough to re-enlist, opinion among soldiers serving in Iraq seem adamant that the bonus isn't worth re-upping. Staff Sgt. Julian Guerrero, 38, who runs a re-enlistment program for a battalion in the 4th ID based in Tikrit, says only 10 of the battalion's 80 eligible soldiers have taken the deal so far, even though the bonus represents as much as a third of some soldiers' yearly salary. (ABC News)
January 7: American and other companies have supplied Iraq's armed forces with sophisticated weapons and military material in direct violation of American and international restrictions on trade with that country; the information is slowly being forced to the surface by a lawsuit filed by Houston lawyer Gary Pitts. A case in point is China's Huawei Technologies, a major communications company. Between 2000 and 2002, Huawei upgraded Iraq's air-defense system. Huawei's actions, which violated the international embargo against military sales to Iraq, were supported by AT&T, which helped "optimize" Huawei's products, and IBM supplied Huawei with switches, chips and processing technology. Texas Industries helped set up a lab in 1997 to train Huawei engineers and develop signal-processing systems, as did Motorola. That same year Huawei received US Department of Commerce approval to buy supercomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Huawei also purchased large amounts of telecommunications equipment from Qualcomm, again approved by the Commerce Department.
The United Nations and the United States have so far refused to disclose publicly all the companies named by Iraq in UN documents as suppliers for its weapons programs, but documents obtained by Berlin's Die Tageszeitung newspaper indicate that at least 24 American corporations have illegally done business with Iraq, including Rockwell, Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, Axel Electronics Inc. and Spectra Physics. Plenty of other countries have corporations involved in Iraqi business, including China, France, Britain, Russia, Japan, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Sweden. US corporations have been remarkably cooperative with helping Iraq's burgeoning chemical weapons industry as well. The US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta sent Iraq three shipments of West Nile virus for medical research in 1985. American Type Culture Collection, a US bioresource firm, supplied some of the initial anthrax bacilli used by Iraq to create weapons-grade anthrax between 1985 and 1989. During the same time period, ATCC also sent Iraq germs that cause meningitis, influenza, botulism, lung failure, and tetanus. Thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture deadly mustard gas, made its way to Iraq via Alcolac International, Inc., a Maryland company, since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc., and Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum and now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and energy company. (In 1988 the US Justice Department indicted Alcolac for making illegal shipments to Iran, but ignored its transactions with Iraq.) It is likely that the mustard gas used to kill thousands at Halabjah in 1988, as well as some of the toxins US soldiers were exposed to during the 1991 war, were provided to Iraq by American manufacturers.
Between 1985 and 1990, the US government approved 771 licenses for exports of biological agents, high-tech equipment and military items to Iraq, reported Democratic representative Sam Gejdenson in 1991. Those exports were valued at $1.5 billion, said Gejdenson, who was the chairman of the House Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the time. "The United States spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted.... We continued to approve this equipment until just weeks before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait," declared Gejdenson. Gejdenson also told his subcommittee that the State Department refused to impose controls on the export of biological toxins to Iraq until 1989, even though it knew Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war as well as Kurdish civilians. And, he added, the administration of the elder George Bush had lobbied, right up to "July 27, 1990 -- six days before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait," against a proposed House amendment that would have restricted agricultural credits to Iraq.
In a 1991 speech on the House floor, Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Gonzalez denounced the billions in financial support given to Hussein with assistance from both the Reagan and Bush administrations. Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), an Italian, multinational banking concern with American operations based in New York, delivered more than $4 billion in loans to Iraq, during the 1980s. Those loans, unreported to US banking officials, were funneled through BNL's Atlanta branch. The subsequent scandal eventually resulted in the conviction of several BNL employees for fraud and a fruitless investigation of officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Communications between BNL and Bush's Secretary of State, xx, and Iraqi Ambassador April Glaspie have been confirmed but led to no charges being filed. Gonzalez also reported that US officials under Reagan and Bush routinely ignored evidence that Iraq was using its weapons of mass destruction. He cited congressional testimony by Paul Freedenberg, the chief export-licensing official at the Department of Commerce during parts of both the Reagan and Bush administrations, to underscore that point. "In the summer of 1988, a number of licenses were pending with regard to technology transfers to Iraq," testified Freedenberg. "I asked for official guidance with regard to what the licensing policy would be toward Iraq, since by then there was credible evidence of the use of poison gas by the Iraqis against their own people and also against the Iranians." More would be known about corporate and governmental malfeasance except that this information is being kept under wraps. This secrecy even applies to the weapons declarations issued by Iran in 1997 and in December of 2002.
Gary Pitts, who is suing corporations that allegedly helped to arm Iraq, has found that there were only three places to get the information: the United Nations, the US government and Iraq. "The U.N. refused to disclose" either the 1997 or 2002 lists of Iraqi suppliers, Pitts says. His requests to US officials has been stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Pitts finally made a direct appeal to Iraq: "I told them that they should release the list and let the companies share the heat." He was amazed that Iraq actually agreed. Unfortunately, the Iraqis have continued to postpone the meeting as tensions between the two countries flared into open war. Pitts was able to use documentation provided by ex-UN inspector Scott Ritter to amend and update his lawsuit; currently, he is suing 68 corporations and individuals, mostly Europeans. The documentation also shows that three American nuclear-weapons labs as assisting with Iraq's nuclear-weapons program: Los Alamos, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore. One of the last meetings took place in September 1989, less than 14 months before the start of the Gulf War. (Los Angeles Weekly, Los Angeles Weekly)
January 7: Michigan congressman Nick Smith, a Republican, now says he was "mistaken" when he accused GOP operatives and fellow congressmen of offering him a $100,000 bribe for his "yea" vote on the Medicare bill in late 2003. Smith now says he was promised "aggressive and substantial support" for his son's campaign to succeed him in exchange for his vote, but says a dollar amount never was mentioned even though he said so in a radio interview. "The first offer was to give him $100,000-plus for his campaign and endorsement by national (Republican Party) leadership," Smith, who ended up voting against the bill, said during the Dec. 1 interview. Smith acknowledges that he made the statement but said he misspoke after first reading that figure in a report by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. Novak didn't identify the source of the number. "I was on the freeway in Detroit, talking on a car phone and mistakenly repeated $100,000," Smith says. "But no figure was ever offered." Still, Smith says he assumed promises of support included money for his son's campaign and probably more than $100,000. "Nobody ever mentioned exact dollars, but what people said was that there would be strong endorsements. Another member said 'Well, that could mean tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.' In my mind, substantial support means money." Political watchdog groups and Democrats have asked for a Justice Department investigation into whether Smith was the target of bribery or extortion, both criminal offenses. One group, the Campaign Legal Center, also asked the House ethics committee to look into the matter. Neither the Justice Department nor the ethics committee has announced a decision on the requests. Mark Glaze, associate legal counsel for the nonpartisan center on campaign and election law issues, says Smith's latest comments might add more urgency to the need for an official inquiry. "The job of an investigation is to get at the truth, and since we've had a shifting story line, this makes the need for the investigation even more compelling," Glaze notes. (Lansing State Journal)
January 7: Defense advisor Richard Perle, a well-known neoconservative, gives an interview to PBS's Charlie Rose that indicates the administration is gearing up for an invasion of Syria: "I think we have now demonstrated that we are not only capable of doing this [invading a Middle Eastern country], we did it in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we're ready to do it again. And if [Syria's] Bashar Assad believes he's immune, he's inviolable, it can't happen here, he may be in for a rude surprise." A day later, conservative columnist David Brooks repudiates both Perle's assertions and critics of Perle in the Weekly Standard. "The whole world" was becoming "unhinged," Brooks suggests, as he talks about "all these articles" -- articles which "came in waves" -- in which "the full-mooners" expressed the view that, among other things, the neocon Project for a New American Century was "sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission." Liberals may celebrate over the apparent dissension in the conservative ranks, but Brooks has an additional string to his bow: to discredit the notion that neoconservatives have any real say in Bush's foreign policy, a notion that has been well documented over the years. "The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy," Brooks writes. "To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles. We'd sit around the [Weekly Standard] guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge." Brooks refuses to note that the godfather of the neocon movement, William Kristol, is the editor of the Weekly Standard, and that magazine has long been the standard-bearer of the neocon agenda. More to the point, neocons such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle have long shaped the Bush foreign policy, to the point of incipient disaster. Bob Somerby writes, "Brooks makes it sound like belief in 'shadowy neocon influence' stamps you as some kind of a nut. But what is 'shadowy' about the influence exerted by a president's high-ranking officials? Whatever one thinks of Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney, they surely have influenced this president's policy. What sort of president would pick a vice-president, appoint a Defense Department, then swear to resist all their views?" (Brooks will later dismiss his ranting as a "joke," and claim to "still be on a learning curve" about the neocon influence on Bush foreign policy, a hysterically inaccurate claim considering Brooks's conservative ties and his long association with the Weekly Standard.) Like so many others, Brooks is intimating that attacks on administration neocons are actually veiled attacks on the Jewish people. Somerby, the proprietor of the invaluable Daily Howler site, documents in the rest of the article how completely, and insidiously, administration apologists such as Brooks have worked to twist criticism of neoconservatives into "attacks on Jews." (Daily Howler)
January 7: Former Nixon staffer and current Republican Kevin Phillips gives an interview to Buzzflash about his book American Dynasty, an analysis of the Bush family's political ambitions, its dynastic intent, and the corruption that has been an integral part of its makeup. He writes, "[T]his is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution." Of the Bush family history, he writes, "Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread -- not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant business cronyism. The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning. ...Three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy...deceit and disinformation have become Bush political hallmarks." Phillips argues that the Bush family's inclination to rule America as a political dynasty is perhaps the strongest challenge to American democracy this country has faced since its inception: "[D]ynasties are something that the United States came into being fighting against. We have George III in 1775 and 1776. I don't see any reason why, in the last 25 years, we should have George I and George II, and think about Jeb I and so forth. It's pernicious, almost, by definition of what America's all about. It's doubly pernicious when you start thinking about the legacy of economic politics and bias, the legacy of association with the national security state intelligence agencies, the legacy of involvement in the Middle East in a way that may send some horrible chickens coming home to roost. I just don't think there's anything good about a dynasty in this country at all."
Of the Bush family history, he says, "[W]hen you get the Bushes, you get really what amounts to a four-generation history of involvement with finance and the oil industry. That's what they've done. They haven't done much else. And their loyalties are enormous toward, first off, an economics of investors and inheritors, as opposed to workers and earners; and, secondly, a very close tie to the intelligence agencies of the military-industrial complex, of which the oil industry has become a major part. And obviously there are the ties to the oil industry and the preoccupation with the Middle East and Texas, and the price of oil. There again, that's a bias which is both economic and geographic. ...Secrecy is a hallmark of it very much, and also favoring old retainers who've often helped to keep a scandal under control. ...But in terms of talking about what the dynasty has been in terms of national security and the intelligence agencies, you really have to go back again to World War I with George H. Walker. He was very much involved with the U.S. intelligence agencies, and he was a partner of Averill Harriman, who went on to be very much involved in intelligence, too, later in World War II. They did a lot of business in Germany and Russia. The other Bush great-grandfather, Sam Bush, was the director of the Small Arms, Ammunition and Ordnance Division of the War Industries Board, and I can assure you there's a lot of intelligence of relationships with the Allies and dealings with armaments people there. It's just continued. You've got eight decades of these people having ties to the agencies. And by the time you get to George H.W. Bush in the 50s and 60s, when he was running something called Zapata Offshore Oil, there have been a number of allegations that either his company or one of its subsidiaries was an asset or a front of the CIA, and that his relationship to the CIA began well before he became the director."
Of the Bush family's sense of entitlement, and George W. Bush's belief in his divine selection, Phillips says, "[Y]ou have two phenomena here. You've got, one, the sense of being entitled to be national rulers of a sort, whether it was Prescott Bush to become a senator -- and he wanted to be president, too -- and then the subsequent generations had this sense that they were part of a ruling family. They deserved to be able to hold these offices; it had nothing much to do with election. They weren't terribly good at elections, really. Then you get the second facet, where you've got the sense of being anointed in the sense of chosen by God, which certainly Bush Sr. did not ever purport to be. But we've had some of these incredible comments that have come out of the current President. People have described how he has held himself out to feel that he was selected to play this role, and that God is talking to him. And some of the pastors he deals with have said as much. This is very, very unusual. ...You've got the sort of arrogance of the family that's entitled to rule. And you've got the presumption of having been anointed by God to play this specific role. Now, you can find other rulers in world history that have had the arrogance, and family, and the sense of being anointed by heaven to do something, but you don't look for that in the United States. That's nothing we did."
Phillips notes the history of the Bush family in helping to establish and then abandoning dictators and strongmen in other countries: "These people serve a purpose for the Bush leader in question. And when that purpose is changed by some other consideration, whether it's political advantage or the fact that the person in Nicaragua or Saudi Arabia or Panama, or whatever you're talking about, is either too ambitious or at loggerheads with what the Bushes want, then it's time to dump them. But what's amazing to me is how easily they get away with this, and how little the press will go to the trouble to portray the way in which this is a change of convenience -- dumping somebody who was built up. It isn't really pointed out the extent to which not just George Bush, but Rumsfeld and others, were involved in building up Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. He's starting to get some attention. But that's obviously a major reason why the administration doesn't want Saddam tried by a world court. They want him tried by a body in Iraq that can be controlled and will keep testimony like that out of public hearing."
Phillips says he is a loyal Republican, but that the modern, Bush-driven GOP has abandoned its historical values: "[A]s far as I'm concerned, what the Bushes represent is just totally at loggerheads with everything [the Republican Party stands for,] from Abraham Lincoln down to McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, who warned about the military-industrial complex." (Buzzflash)
January 7: Two Democratic senators are questioning why the Bush administration is soliciting contract bids for 500,000 AK-47 rifles for the Iraqi police force, when thousands upon thousands of the very same rifles sit in stockpiles throughout Iraq. "We question whether this is an efficient use of U.S. taxpayer dollars in a country already awash with AK-47s, many of which have been confiscated by coalition forces and are sitting in stockpiles," write senators Byron Dorgan and Ron Wyden to chief administrator Paul Bremer. The senators cite news reports that the captured weapons are in excellent condition, and say it will cost little to distribute them to security forces. Wyden and Dorgan say that last summer, the Coalition Provisional Authority purchased tens of thousands of AK-47 rifles and other weapons from dealers in Jordan and other countries. The senators have asked Bremer how many confiscated rifles are currently in US custody and whether they are suitable for use by Iraqi security personnel. In September 2003, the Iraqi Governing Council questioned why the occupation authority had issued a $20 million contract to buy new revolvers and Kalashnikov rifles for the Iraqi police when the US military was confiscating tens of thousands of weapons every month from abandoned arsenals. (Guardian)
January 7: A meeting of Western-state House Republicans with lobbyists and officials of various US energy and oil companies is being described as an excuse for GOP congressmen to receive campaign contributions and give exclusive access, though organizers describe the meeting as simply a "casual setting" for their members to strategize, network and share ideas with national policy leaders. "It appears as if the real purpose of this event is for well-financed lobbyists to give campaign contributions to Republican members of Congress in return for access in helping to write anti-clean air and energy legislation," says Frank O'Donnell, executive director of Clean Air Trust, a lobbying group. The major topic of discussion was the GOP's attempts to gut and rewrite the Clean Air Act. Guidelines issued by the House ethics committee warn House members "to avoid even the appearance that solicitations of campaign contributions are connected in any way with an action taken or to be taken in their official capacity." The event is described as nonpartisan, though no Democrats and only one environmental group were allowed to attend. (Great Falls Tribune)
January 7: A particularly virulent GOP attack ad calls Howard Dean and his supporters a "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show" and recommends Dean take his "freak show...back to Vermont where it belongs." The ad is from the Republican "Club for Growth," and is funded by, among others, Wall Street stockbroker Richard Gilder, former Goldman, Sachs executive Thomas Rhodes, and CNBC commentator Lawrence Kudlow. The COG was founded by Cato Institute fellows Stephen Moore and Ed Crane, the president of Cato. (Salon)
January 7: An excerpt from The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush, a book by Ann Gerhart, paints a relatively unflattering picture of the dynamic between the Bushes and their twin daughters Jenna and Barbara. While unwarranted and undeserved bashing of the Presidential children is something best left to the Republicans who still continue to lash out at Chelsea Clinton and Amy Carter, Gerhart uses the daughters as a basis for understanding the Bush family. She writes, " Jenna and Barbara have not campaigned or reined in their adolescent rebellions. They have not appeared engaged in any of the pressing issues their generation will inherit, nor shown empathy for the struggles facing their mother and their father, the president of the United States. They have not treated with respect their Secret Service details, those highly trained men and women who literally would take a bullet for them. They don't show their faces at the White House often. So far, they have shown little inclination to embrace the life of public service modeled by their parents, uncle and grandparents. They are girls born rich, blessed with intelligence, good looks, trust funds, loving parents, boundless opportunities, freedom from many of life's daily vexing challenges. Yet they persist in seeing themselves as victims of daddy's job. In this attitude, they have been subtly encouraged by their mother. Laura Bush would never permit herself to feel victimized by her husband's decisions. She regards herself as a full partner who embraced his ambitions because she wanted for him what he wanted for himself. His happiness has been as important to her as her own, or greater. No, any victimization she might have felt has all been transferred onto her girls. Once George sought political office when his girls were 12, Laura's guiding principle in mothering became 'they didn't really ask for this,' as if the life that followed for Jenna and Barbara was some disastrous, bumpy detour from the normal smooth path toward adulthood."
Gerhart describes the raising of the daughters as "indulgent," with Laura giving in to the twins' whims and George at times being barely aware of their existence. The decision to run for president caused turmoil in the family: " As the family began to discuss whether George should run for president, the girls were adamant in their opposition," writes Gerhart. "Both would be in college before the election. They would never have to live in the White House or attend school in Washington, as Chelsea Clinton had done from age 12. But that calculus didn't move them. To Jenna and Barbara, it was clear that their emancipation from the strictures of living at home would coincide exactly with the arrival of a Secret Service detail to their college dormitories. The Bushes were heartened by the way the media had been protective of Bill and Hillary Clinton's only child. 'We felt like the press had given Chelsea Clinton the opportunity to have privacy, to have a private life,' Laura said. And they determined that they would not burden their girls with heavy expectations about their role as Bushes. The only lesson they wanted to impart to their children, Bush said during the presidential campaign, was 'that I love you. I love you more than anything. And therefore, you should feel free to fail or succeed, and you can be anything you want in America.'" (It's apparent that Laura Bush is either unaware of, or chose to ignore, the relentless, vituperative attacks on Chelsea Clinton by the right-wing press, attacks that continue to this day.) Additionally, Chelsea succeeded in keeping her own peccadillos out of the press, mostly by cultivating a friendly and respectful relationship with the Secret Service agents assigned to her. "Chelsea went to parties and drank and had boyfriends just like many other teenagers -- which is what Jenna and Barbara craved -- but Chelsea had a gift for keeping her mishaps out of the public eye. She cultivated the protection and support of other adults in the White House, and she treated her Secret Service agents with respect. Accordingly, they were more inclined to protect her when she got herself in jams." Not Jenna and Barbara: "The twins, meanwhile, seemed to have decided that their agents were their enemies -- and their chauffeurs, bellhops and valets."
One story after the other hit the media: Jenna using her Secret Service agents to spring a drunken male companion from jail, Barbara escaping from her escort to attend a wrestling match, Jenna drunkenly collapsing onto a female friend while holding a cigarette, both repeatedly cited for underage drinking. The mainstream media covered these incidents, and others, but generally treated them with distance and restraint. Gerhart writes, " Even when Laura was confronted with evidence that her girls were deliberately and dangerously evasive with their agents, she seemed unwilling to correct them. The agents were told to back off. The press was blamed for the reports. The unofficial position was that the twins were just singled out for unfair attention, even after Jenna was busted for underage drinking twice in four weeks. That summer of 2001, Jenna sat in a crowded bar and tried to sweet-talk the bartender into breaking the law and serving her, but he lost his nerve when he saw the guys with the earpieces and asked her to leave. Jenna, according to an account in U.S. News & World Report, was furious. She yelled at her agents, then fled down a back alley. They gave chase, said the magazine, and when they caught up with her, she taunted them: 'You know if anything happens to me, my dad would have your ass.' But when she called her father to complain that her detail was interfering with her drinking, he sided with her agents. Not so her mother. Laura didn't want her girls to feel constrained, and the agents were ordered to pull back from traditional methods of coverage, according to the magazine's account. A few months later, when the Secret Service scrambled to grab all presidential relatives on Sept. 11, 2001, the agents couldn't find Jenna for hours."
The response from Bush officials was always the same. "If it involves the daughters and their private lives, it is a family matter," said spokesman Scott McClellan. Former press secretary Ari Fleischer repeatedly attacked reporters who asked questions -- any questions -- about the twins. On November 25, 2002, the twins turned 21. Laura threw an elaborate cowboys-and-Indians theme party, but Jenna also insisted on celebrating in her favorite bar, which she insisted have its windows covered with black paper to keep photographers from seeing inside. The indulgences continued. Both twins were regularly seen with celebrities such as fashion designer Zac Posen, rapper Sean "P-Diddy" Combs and TV celebrity Ashton Kutcher, who took them from a party back to his house. According to Kutcher, "I go upstairs to see another friend and I can smell the green [marijuana] wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is, smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah." The White House's response? According to Gerhart, "No comment, no comment, no comment." Their father says, "I love them a lot. I am impatient with them. I wanted them to be normal when they were teenagers, and I wanted them to be working ladies. I've got to slow down. I've got to allow them to become the bright young ladies that they're becoming at their own pace, and not at mine. They are beginning to realize that they've got to take some responsibility for their own lives and beginning to think about their career paths. Laura chose her career path...early. I didn't choose mine until a little late. And uh," he said, chuckling, "I never really was that worried about the career path." (, CNN)

Back to January 2004 | On to January 2004: Week Two

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

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

Written and Compiled by Black Max

January 2004, Week One

Page Three

Iraqi scientist confirms Iraq never had nuclear weapons

North Korea offers to dismantle its nuclear weapons program

Army defends Halliburton overcharging

Study proves Bush administration duplicity about Iraq

Quick Navigation Menu

2003 Month by Month

2004 Month by Month

2005 Month by Month

2006 Month by Month

2007 Month by Month

Other Pages On This Site

Copyright © 2002-2007 Max Black