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 Two
Page Two
Army MP breaks Abu Ghraib torture stories
- January 13: US military policeman Joseph Darby informs his superiors about widespread prisoner abuses going on at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. He provides photographic evidence. Darby's evidence sparks a secret investigation into prisoner abuse at the prison and at other detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The next day, at 2:30 am, agents of the Army's CID accost Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick and search his room for evidence of prisoner abuse, such as photographs or files on his computer. (Guardian, Seymour Hersh)
- January 13: The US Treasury Department opens an investigation into whether or not former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is in possession of secret documents. On the US news show 60 Minutes, O'Neill displayed documents marked "secret." O'Neill told the show's anchor that the Bush administration was preparing for war with Iraq almost from the day Bush was sworn into office, and that O'Neill never saw any evidence that Iraq possessed WMDs. O'Neill denies having any secret documents, and says that all the documents in his possession were cleared by the Treasury Department's legal counsel. O'Neill says that if he were in the place of his successor, Secretary John Snow, he too would order such an investigation, but he wonders why Snow didn't contact the senior legal counsel at the department before announcing the investigation. O'Neill says a cover page for the documents might have suggested they were classified material but said that the legal counsel's office "sent me a couple CDs, which I never opened." He said he gave them to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the book's author. "I don't think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill says, and predicts that the Treasury investigation would show that the Treasury employees who collected the materials for him had followed the law. O'Neill also backs off of some of his initial claims, saying he sometimes used overly "vivid" language and came across as more harsh and critical than he intended. Of the already-famous "blind man" quote, he says, "If I could take it back, I would take it back." As part of the barrage of attacks on O'Neill from conservative loyalists, GOP congressman Bob Ney says, "Mr. O'Neill is now as bitter as he was ineffective when he served as treasury secretary." Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, appointed by Bill Clinton and author of his own book about his time as head of the US Treasury, defends O'Neill, saying: "Cabinet members should be loyal to a president, but they have a larger loyalty to the public." GOP congressman Mark Foley says of O'Neill, "Not since Julius Caesar have I seen such a blatant stab in the back -- et tu, Mr O'Neill?" Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe accuses the White House of launching "an all-out attack on the man Bush once praised as a straight shooter," and adds: "Implied in O'Neill's allegations is that the president of the United States and his administration may have consistently lied to the American people in making the case for war against Iraq." (BBC, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Guardian)
- January 13: Military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp are planning to ask the US Supreme Court to find that the rules of the tribunals drawn up by the US government are unconstitutional. The military defense lawyers will assert that prisoners convicted in such military tribunals should have the right to appeal to civilian courts, not just the military appeals panels envisioned by President Bush. "The Constitution cannot countenance an open-ended presidential power, with no civilian review whatsoever, to try anyone the president deems subject to a military tribunal, whose rules and judges have been selected by the prosecuting authority itself," according to the legal brief, which will be filed with the Supreme Court in the following days. The court papers will be filed in connection with lawsuits brought by the families of 16 inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, who are seeking to have the detentions reviewed by civilian courts. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear their arguments. The brief contends that the denial of civilian appeals of military tribunal convictions gives the president "monarchical" powers, and that tribunal defendants would be thrown into a legal "black hole [where they] may not contest the jurisdiction, competency or even the constitutionality of the military tribunals." (Washington Post)
- January 13: Paul O'Neill's comments about the Bush administration in Ron Suskind's new book, The Price of Loyalty, is termed a "savaging" by London's Financial Times. "He has stoked the public perception of an airhead, fraternity-boy president," the Times writes. "He has fuelled suspicions of a warmongering commander-in-chief. Just 10 days after Mr Bush's inauguration and eight months before September 11 2001, removing Saddam Hussein was 'Topic A' on the president's list of priorities, according to Mr O'Neill: 'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying: "Go find me a way to do this,"' he told CBS television. He told Time magazine: 'In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction.' And Mr O'Neill's criticism has underscored the image of the oilman-turned-president with an unhealthily close relationship with corporate America. He has revealed to Mr Suskind thousands of pages of documents, including a Pentagon memo entitled 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts' that includes a list of foreign companies eyeing Iraqi oilfields and maps potential areas for exploration." The Bush administration countered by first branding O'Neill a disgruntled employee, then began investigating him for possibly having secret documents in his possession.
- Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean says of O'Neill's revelations, "Now, after the fact, we are learning new information about the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war, this time by one of his former cabinet secretaries." Fellow candidate John Kerry says, "These are very serious charges by a former high ranking Administration official. We already knew the Administration failed to focus on the threat from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. We already knew the Administration broke every promise they made to work through the UN, use the resolution to enforce inspections, build a coalition, and plan for peace. But Secretary O'Neill's revelations would mean the Administration never intended to even try to keep those promises. It would mean they were dead-set on going to war alone since almost the day they took office and deliberately lied to the American people, Congress, and the world. It would mean that for purely ideological reasons they planned on putting American troops in a shooting gallery occupying an Arab country almost alone. The White House needs to answer these charges truthfully because they threaten to shatter their already damaged credibility as never before." Former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich says, "Paul O'Neill has done the public a service by revealing the president was intent on getting rid of Saddam Hussein right from the start. No reasonable, responsible person surrenders his integrity on becoming a cabinet officer." (Financial Times)
- January 13: In the book The Price of Loyalty, Paul O'Neill speculates that he and other moderates in the Bush administration, including Christine Todd Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, "may have been there, in large part, as cover." He writes of one decision after another where conservative ideology and political maneuverings won out over more reasoned suggestions. O'Neill and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan attempted to persuade the administration to adopt stringent corporate reforms. Greenspan wrote in a memo, "There's been too much gaming of the system until it is broke. Capitalism is not working! There has been a corrupting of the system of capitalism." But O'Neill and Greenspan were unable to get the administration to consider the reforms. Bush's economic advisor Larry Lindsey dismissed the reforms with the comment, "[T]here's always the option of doing nothing." On the decision to back away from a strong plan to fight global warming, O'Neill says the decision was cynically grounded on the notion that "the [conservative political] base likes this, and who the hell knows anyway?" Comparing his time in the Bush administration and his stint in the federal government in the 1970s, O'Neill says: "The biggest difference between then and now is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], [Bush communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics." O'Neill was fired by Vice President Dick Cheney, who brought O'Neill to Bush's attention, after O'Neill objected to a third round of tax cuts. After telling O'Neill he was being dismissed, Cheney reportedly asked O'Neill to say it was his own decision to step down. "I'm too old to begin telling lies now," O'Neill says he told Cheney. O'Neill says some of his former colleagues "are nasty and they have a long memory." (Washington Post)
- January 13: The United States is sending troops and contractors to West African nations near the Sahara Desert in an attempt to keep the predominantly Muslim region from becoming overrun with Islamic terrorists. One country receiving US attention is Mauritania, an Arab-dominated Islamic republic. An anti-terror team has just arrived on site. The team will be followed in coming months by US Army experts and defense contractors, under a $100 million Bush administration anti-terror initiative for the Saharan nations of Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger. The US Pan Sahel Initiative will provide 60 days of training to military units within the four nations, coaching them in everything from desert navigation to small-unit infantry tactical skills. US troops are to do the work in Mauritania and Mali, while contractors of Los Angeles-based Pacific Architects & Engineers in Chad and Niger. "We've seen how the terrorists operate - instead of going for the obvious countries, they go for soft spots. And the spots are usually the countries that have low levels of security," says analyst Dapo Oyewole, London-based executive director of the Center for African Policy and Peace Studies. In West Africa, the isolated nation of Mauritania has been of particular concern. Dominated by the 30 percent of its population that is Arab, the country had long-standing ties to Iraq. But Mauritania's government turned sharply against Saddam Hussein and allied itself with the United States in the mid-1990s, and has arrested dozens of what it says are Islamic extremists during the Iraq war and occupation. (Washington Times)
- January 13: The international news agency Reuters has filed a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the "wrongful" arrest and apparent "brutalization" of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq. The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter crash. The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were "enemy personnel" who had opened fire on US troops and refused to release them for 72 hours. Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that the journalists were "brutalized and intimidated" by US soldiers, who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: "Let's have sex." At one point during the interrogation, according to the family of one of the staff members, a US soldier shoved a shoe into the mouth one of the Iraqis. The US troops, from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in Falluja, also made the blindfolded journalists stand for hours with their arms raised and their palms pressed against the cell wall. "They were brutalized, terrified and humiliated for three days," one source says. "It was pretty grim stuff. There was mental and physical abuse." He adds: "It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis." The US military has so far refused to apologize and has bluntly told Reuters to "drop" its complaint.
- Major General Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, claims that two US soldiers had provided sworn evidence that they had come under fire. He admitted, however, that soldiers sometimes had to make "snap judgments." "More often than not they are right," he says. On January 2 Reuters' Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani turned up at the crash site where a US Kiowa Warrior helicopter had just been shot down, killing one soldier. The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked "press." They drove off after US soldiers who were securing the scene opened fire on their Mercedes, but were arrested shortly afterwards. The soldiers also detained a fourth Iraqi, working for the American network NBC. No weapons were found, the US military admitted. Ureibi's nephew says of his uncle's capture, "He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: 'If you don't shut up we'll f*ck you.'" Simon Walker, a spokesman at Reuters head office in London, confirms that the agency had made a formal complaint to the Pentagon last Friday. He says, "We have also complained to the US military. We have complained about the detention [of our staff] and their treatment in detention. We hope it will be dealt with expeditiously." Journalists based in Baghdad have expressed concern that the US military is likely to treat other media employees in Iraq as targets. (Guardian)
- January 13: Economist Paul Krugman writes of the scathing criticisms of the Bush administration leveled by, among others, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and the Army War College: "People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism. But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College. ...I couldn't understand why, if Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn't resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest. But now he's showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration. Ron Suskind's new book The Price of Loyalty is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations -- satisfying 'the base' -- trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter.' But there are many other revelations. One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers -- it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out -- it was 'irresponsible fiscal policy.' This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.
- "Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that 'the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum,' knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only 'top-rate people,' asking his advisers, 'Didn't we already give them a break at the top?' Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001. There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good. The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist. The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a 'detour' that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?" (New York Times)
- January 13: In a devastating op-ed, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson says that the revelations of Paul O'Neill and others expose the systematic deceit of the Bush administration regarding Iraq. "Now we know," Jackson writes. "President Bush -- goaded by the political appointees in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office, aided and abetted by Secretary of State Colin Powell's willingness to sacrifice his credibility for the cause -- misled the American people and the Congress purposefully to win support for the war in Iraq. And, as a stunning ad in the recent MoveOn.org contest put it, now young American men and women 'are dying for the truth.' The lies were systematic and repeated as part of a relentless public relations campaign. We were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We 'know where they are,' attested Rumsfeld. We were told he was 'reconstituting his nuclear program,' Vice President Dick Cheney avowed, as he and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld and the president invoked the threat of a 'mushroom cloud' over America. We were told that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States because of its massive stores of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. We were told that there was a 'sinister nexus between Iraq and al-Qaeda,' as Powell told the United Nations, in a speech he claimed to have personally verified. Stunningly, all of it was a lie. And slowly the truth is coming out. There was and is no evidence of a connection to al-Qaeda, Powell admitted last week. Saddam had nothing to do with Sept. 11, the president admitted. Saddam's weapons existed only on paper, the Washington Post reports. And the administration knew this.
- "In a devastating report by weapons proliferation experts, the authoritative Carnegie Endowment for Peace states that 'with respect to nuclear and chemical weapons, the extent of the threat was largely knowable at the time. Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled, and there was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution.' So why did the intelligence assessments get worse when the overwhelming evidence was that there was no threat? Why did Powell make his dramatic speech to the UN? Why did the president tell lies in his State of the Union address? The reason was that they cooked the evidence to fit their case. In the careful words of the Carnegie experts, 'The dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, together with the creation of an independent intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002.' In reality, the commitment to attack Iraq was made long before Sept. 11. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill now tells us that the discussions at the highest level were 'all about finding a way to do it.' And Richard Haass, Bush's former director of State Department Policy Planning, concurs. He quotes Rice as saying in June 2002, about pursuing U.N. cooperation on the Iraq invasion: 'Save your breath. The president has already decided what he's going to do on this.' The possible reasons Bush wanted to get Saddam are many: to finish up what his father started; to reposition the U.S. in the Persian Gulf. He could have made the case that we should commit more than $200 billion and thousands of American casualties to secure our foothold in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Or he could have argued, as he does now, that Saddam was a vicious dictator and should be removed. But that is not the case the president, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell made. Instead, they systematically misled the American people and the Congress to gain support for a attack on a country that was not a threat to the United States. Young American men and women are in that country heroically seeking to create a new opportunity for Iraqis, who should surely be grateful. They should be applauded for their dedication and their sacrifice. But they are dying for the truth." (Chicago Sun-Times)
- January 13: Presidential candidate Wesley Clark criticizes the timing of an investigation of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and suggests Bush is more concerned with "political security" than national security. Clark calls again for a full congressional investigation into why the United States went to war in Iraq. "We don't know what the motivation was," he says. "We just don't know. We've spent $180 billion on it, we've lost 480 Americans, we've got 2,500 with life-changing injuries." Clark believes that Bush was obsessed with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and with establishing a national missile defense, in the months leading up to the 9/11 terror attacks, and did not do enough to protect the nation against such an attack. He compares the speed of the O'Neill investigation with the slow pace of an inquiry into who last summer divulged the name of a CIA official whose husband had criticized the president's Iraq policy. "They didn't wait 24 hours in initiating an investigation on Paul O'Neill," Clark says. "They're not concerned about national security. But they're really concerned about political security. I think they've got their priorities upside down." Fellow Democratic candidate Howard Dean echoes the criticism: "Paul O'Neill is not a threat to our national security," he says. "But the disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA operative undermines a key tenet of national security and is a violation of law." (San Francisco Chronicle)
- January 13: An editorial in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune notes that even if conditions are improving in Iraq, a contention which has yet to be proven, it doesn't validate the administration's invasion of Iraq, nor does it validate the methods by which the US was taken into the war. It says, "Imagine that President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell had made a case for the invasion of Iraq along the following lines: 'Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who has long oppressed the Iraqi people and threatened Iraq's neighbors. It is U.S. policy to seek regime change in Iraq, and we propose to do that now, by military force. Saddam does not pose a risk to the United States now, and any threat he eventually may pose is years or decades away. His programs for developing weapons of mass destruction have been dormant since the end of the Gulf War. We have no evidence of links between Saddam and the terrorists of Al-Qaeda or other groups capable of attacking the United States. Any invasion of Iraq is not related to the war on terrorism. Nevertheless, removing Saddam and creating a free, democratic Iraq is a worthy goal, though it will not come cheap. It will cost tens upon tens of billions of dollars raised from American taxpayers. International assistance will be minimal. Hundreds of fine young Americans will be killed in the process, and thousands will suffer debilitating wounds that will alter their lives forever. We call upon the American people to willingly shoulder those costs in the name of a free Iraq.' That, of course, isn't the case Bush and Powell made. The American people would have rejected it, and properly so. Instead, the administration's case was based on two central pillars: Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons in large quantities and was hot in pursuit of nuclear weapons; he also is closely tied in with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, to which he could at any time provide weapons of mass destruction for use against the United States or its friends. Neither of those assertions was true, and the administration had reason to know they weren't true. Indeed, according to a new book, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says that as early as January 2001 the Bush administration was talking about removing Saddam from power. Saddam had no WMD, and he had no links to al-Qaeda. The invasion of Iraq was an invasion of choice, not necessity, and it diverted US attention and resources away from the real war against terrorism."
- It concludes, "...the most sacred duty civilians have to their armed forces is to ensure they are never called to sacrifice their lives unless this nation faces a real threat. Bush must be held accountable for [Captain Kimberly] Hampton's death [the first woman pilot killed in Iraq]. Iraq was the wrong war -- for conservatives, for liberals, for all Americans." (Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune)
- January 13: While Republican politicians and operatives are publicly outraged at the advertisement on MoveOn.org that compares Bush to Hitler, they ignore the fact that conservative commentators and Republicans in general have made numerous comparisons between Democrats and Nazis for years. (The ad was submitted as part of a contest for political ads; MoveOn removed the ad from the contest after the outcry.) "This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," said RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, and calls it a "despicable tactic." at CNSNews.com. Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, called it "vile and outrageous." Republican fundraiser Brent Bozell called MoveOn "radical haters" and wrote, "Comparing an American President to the fiendish fascist architect of death camps used to be seen as beyond the pale.... Comparing American political figures or policies to Nazi Germany - unless it's the actions of the American Nazi Party or their ilk - is the first mark of a reckless kook." Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote a "screwtape Letters" homage for both NewsMax and WorldNetDaily by having Hitler "write" to a former crony that "We are winning, Julius, thanks to those American Democrats, we are winning." Craige McMillan wrote for WorldNetDaily: "And to those who disagree with [the left's] vision, they offer the alternative favored by dictators and despots the world over: the fiery ovens of Auschwitz and Treblinka, or the silent, frozen boxcars of Siberia."
- But, conservatives seem to approve of the numerous Nazi comparisons they have made against various Democrats; the nickname "Hitlery" Clinton favored by Rush Limbaugh and other commentators is just one instance. Commentator Michael Savage said on January 31, 2000: "I once wrote that 'Vac'm in the Vulva' Barbara Boxer was the reincarnation of Adolf Mengele in drag, the Nazi Angel of Death. I meant it. ...The spirit of Mengele knows well to start at the weakest point and work from there - with Clinton, Singer, Boxer or any other willing host." In his 2002 book The Savage Nation, Savage wrote, "I refuse to whistle Dixie while my country is being overrun by psycho-lib Commu-Nazi organizations like the ACLU who defend child molesters and terrorists, who trash our traditions and who silence religious speech while wrapping themselves in the flag to justify child pornography - virtual or otherwise." Newsmax columnist Norman Lieberman made plenty of hay with astonishing slanders of former president Bill Clinton and others, as in a September 1999 column: "The first sign of Bill Clinton's totalitarian inclinations became manifest during puberty when he saw a film of Adolph Hitler haranguing a Nuremberg rally, and got an erection. By age 12 Bubba was a common sight on the street corners of Little Rock, playing Deutchland Uber Alles on his ocarina. ...Like Hitler, Clinton will keep 'up-ing the ante' of his demands on the American people's freedom until they have no choice but to resist -- and then he will move in with armed and lunatic force."
- In November 2000, Lieberman wrote: "Clinton has rallied to his cause -- Boxer, Feinstein, Schumer, [Joseph] Lieberman, Waxman, Wexler, and others whose psychological profile fit those Jewish trustees at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. ...Clinton has genius for using the lemming instinct rampant in some Jews to his purpose. Further, he has a genius for surrounding himself with people who have a compelling psychological need to submit. Like Hitler, Clinton knows how to manipulate feelings of boredom, inadequacy and the more monstrous impulses of the libido. ...In Germany, in 1933, bleeding hearts like Boxer and Feinstein were forming Fair Play for Hitler committees. The Hitler/Clinton metaphor is an easy one. Had they been around in the forties, when six million Jews were being forced to inhale Zyklon B, 'Babs' and 'Di Di' would be doing overnights at Berchtesgaden." He called Clinton "the Arkansas Nazi" in 1999. In October 2000, Lieberman observed, "The media has normalized, even 'casualized,' partial-birth abortion (Clinton's attempt to revive Nazi eugenics). Devoted as the Clintons are to abortion, it is a pity Bubba's mother did not avail herself of it." In July 2000, he wrote: "Even more poignantly, we did not find a media mention that a small town in Germany recently held a mock trial of their former Fόhrer, Adolph Hitler, in which they found him guilty of murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity. They acquitted Hitler of raping Juanita Broaddrick, and joined the rest of the world in the conclusion that the real rapist is still at large."
- In January of that year he wrote: "The difference between Clinton's fascists and Hitler's fascists is Clinton's have no paradigm. The trickiest to identify are the fascists in Arkansas, but only because the people there found the Nazi salute too intricate a maneuver for them to master." In November 1999, he wrote: "If Boxer and Feinstein are determined to use the loathsome term 'confiscation' they should be prepared to pay the surviving Hitler family members a royalty. ...At the Democratic National Convention, Clinton may reasonably expect Boxer to deliver from the great state of Auschwitz, six million proxy electoral votes for his third term. Clinton will no more yield power willingly than Hitler did." In August 2000, he went after Hillary Clinton: "Incidentally, neo-Nazi students at Heidelberg University have elected Hillary Clinton their Homecoming Queen for Kristalnacht." He even used Clinton's liking for cigars as a line of attack: "Does anyone see the diabolical digit of destiny in the fact that Clinton has the same attitude about smoking as Adolph Hitler?"
- And Clinton wasn't Lieberman's only target: "[ABC's Sam] Donaldson has a hairline that Hitler tried to effect, but never quite managed to achieve." NewsMax's David Stolinsky got into the act with a November 2001 article that observed, "Clinton was invoking the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, in which the relatives of those who opposed Hitler were punished. This vengeful notion holds that the accused person's family is tainted with 'blood guilt.'" NewsMax's Richard Poe wrote in August 2002: "Tranzi stands for Transnational Progressive.... They propose abolishing nations and replacing them with a single, global government. ...The word 'Tranzi' nicely evokes the ideology it represents. It has a nasty, sneaky sound, like Commie or Nazi." Carl Limbacher wrote in September 1999: "There have been dozens of examples of the Clinton administration using Nazi-style police tactics against government whistleblowers." Phil Brennan attacked the Web site Democrats.com with the following: "There is a Web site mistakenly called democrats.com (it should be .con) -- run by a gaggle of Marxist thugs who could have taught Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels a thing or two about political slander." A NewsMax article from December 2000 wrote, "The political adviser responsible for making Al Gore a two-term vice president [Dick Morris] said Thursday night the veep is in a state of denial about his impending White House loss, comparing him to 'Hitler in the bunker.' Then he quickly withdrew the analogy to the World War II dictator."
- Gennifer Flowers, the woman who claims to have had an affair with Clinton, said about her aversion to a Hillary Clinton presidency in February 2002: "There's probably a general consensus that she's going to pursue the presidency. ...And I have to tell you that that scares me to death -- not just as an individual, but as an American citizen -- to think that these Hitler-esque propagandists could go on in politics. ...it's very, very scary." Charles Smith wrote in February 1999, "The only difference between a Communist police state and a Nazi police state is which boot -- right or left -- is on your neck. The Clinton compromise is both boots on your neck." Lee Rockwell wrote in April 1999, "Think of the Soviets in Afghanistan or the Nazis in Amsterdam. That's what the U.S. -- the government that claims to act on all our behalf -- is doing to these people, though no one in Yugoslavia ever threatened an American citizen." A July 2000 review of David Horowitz's book Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes says of the book, "In the first and largest essay in the booklet, entitled, 'Hillary Clinton and 'The Third Way,' Horowitz dismisses her use of Third Way ideology as a course of centrist moderation, but rather as a cover for her commitment to socialist ideals and political action. He notes the use of this political tactic by the Nazis in their rise to power during the 1930s, the Trotskyists to distinguish themselves from Stalinists, and the New Leftists of the 1960s to distance themselves from the horrors of the Soviet gulags." A March 2000 article by Maralyn Lois Polak attacks Clinton's former mistress: "Monica Lewinsky is not nearly as interesting as Hitler's mistress Eva Braun, the school teacher's daughter who died in a bunker with her Fuhrer boyfriend after she took cyanide and he, maybe, shot himself."
- A November 1999 article by Jon Dougherty from WorldNetDaily writes, "There are those who say that Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister, was the preeminent master of deception in the 20th century. I say President Bill Clinton, along with Attorney General Janet Reno and most of Clinton's cabinet, rank right up there with this 'master of deception.'" Dougherty also wrote, in July 1999, that "[a recent Al Gore speech] was less a political speech than a blueprint for Nazi America." WorldNetDaily editorialized in an August 2003 "Vox Day" item: "Perhaps the Democratic Party should consider a new battle cry should their most famous face decide to enter the presidential race in 2004. Sieg Hillary!" WND's Linda Bowles wrote in November 1999: "Recently, one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, the New York Post, took a poll to identify the 25 'Most Evil People' of the millennium. ...Adolf Hitler barely edged out Bill Clinton for first place, and Josef Stalin came in third. ...The injustice is not that Bill Clinton was voted in as one of the top, world-class, evil men in the last thousand years. The injustice is that, with a level playing field, he might have come in first." Tom Ambrose wrote in November 2000: "Additionally, such [pro-gun] legislation will help to prevent socialists like Al Gore from ever being able to use our military and police illegally against U.S. citizens -- just as Hitler did against his own citizens many years ago." Alan Bock write in December 2000: "Bovard starts his book with AmeriCorps, Clinton's version of Hitler's old notion of putting 'volunteer' youth in the service of the state." WND's Geoff Metcalf wrote in October 2000: "Clinton went on to say, 'And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom.' Bullfeathers! Who are these 'lot of people'? Why are freedom and liberty anathema? He said, 'When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.' Yeah, just like Hitler did, just like Stalin did."
- Gordon Prather wrote of Al Gore in July 2001: "Al Gore - the darling of the media elite - is a professed globalist. The Clinton-Gore administration was chock full of globalists. ...Quoth the globalists: 'One Folk! One Reich! One Dictatorship by the Proletariat!' (Wait a minute. Maybe that was Hitler? Or was it Lenin?)" CNS News columnist Steve Myers wrote in January 1999: "We have lost faith in the FBI and in the secrecy of the files they keep on individuals. We now know that they will remain secret unless one happens to cross paths with Mr. Clinton. We now have an idea of how it felt to be ruled by Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler." And the same outlet's Alan Caruba wrote in June 2000: "If you think Hitler was a lunatic, than you had better give some thought to Gore's views." Peter LaBarbara of the conservative organization Americans for Truth told CNS in October 1999, "Budweiser is marketing heavily to homosexuals when we know that homosexuals have a higher than average alcoholism problem. If they're going to attend an 's and m' rally, why don't they sponsor a neo-Nazi rally since there are consumers out there they should be reaching." And it's worth noting that, while the criticism of MoveOn.org was going on, the New York Post ran a column by Ralph Peters comparing Howard Dean supporters to Hitler's Brownshirts and Dean himself to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Needless to say, none of the above examples have ever been repudiated or even criticized by anyone connected with the Republican Party or the conservative movement. (ConWeb Watch)
- January 13: Comedian, pundit, and best-selling author Al Franken has signed a contract with Progress Media to host an as-yet-unnamed daily radio show, a direct competitor with the conservative talk shows aired by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others. Franken says the format of the show was still evolving, but he is certain that it wouldn't be akin to that used by his rival Rush Limbaugh, which Franken describes as "non-guested confrontation." "He has no one on the show but it's confrontation," Franken says. "His show is just him railing for three hours." Franken says he plans to use a mix of interviews, calls from listeners and scripted comedy. He said he wants to have a co-host with long experience in radio, but says that role has not been finalized. Franken's show will air directly opposite Limbaugh's show, from noon to 3 p.m. daily. (AP/San Jose Mercury News)
Bush admits to planning Iraqi invasion from outset of his administration
- January 14: In a shattering revelation, George W. Bush admits that he was mapping preparations to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as soon as he took office. Bush makes the admission in response to information from his former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill. Typically, he tries to twist the truth even as he admits his actions, this time claiming that the Clinton administration was also preparing to overthrow Hussein: "The stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear -- like the previous administration, we were for regime change," Bush says at a news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, with Mexican President Vicente Fox. "And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with [enforcing a no-fly zone over Iraq] and so we were fashioning policy along those lines." Bush claims that the events of September 11 triggered the invasion: "september the 11th made me realize that America was no longer protected by oceans and we had to take threats very seriously no matter where they may be materializing," he says. White House press secretary Scott McClellan does not deny that the first NSC meeting of the Bush administration, in January 2001, featured a discussion on how to get rid of Hussein, but McClellan attempts, with little success, to deflect questioning away from Bush's three-year lie and towards the "good things going on in Iraq." Democrats are quick to leap on Bush's statements. Presidential candidate John Kerry says that the accusation of a ready-to-go effort to oust Saddam "calls into question everything that the administration put in front of us." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
- January 14: A document found in Saddam Hussein's papers warns his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle US forces. The document appears to be a directive, written after he lost power, written by Hussein to leaders of the Iraqi resistance, counseling caution against getting too close to Islamic jihadists and other foreign Arabs coming into occupied Iraq. The document provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration's contention of close cooperation between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda terrorists. CIA interrogators have information from the top al Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam. Officials said that Saddam apparently believed that the foreign Arabs, eager for a holy war against the West, had a different agenda from the Baathists, who were eager for their own return to power in Baghdad. As a result, he wanted his supporters to be careful about becoming close allies with the jihadists. The role of foreign Arab fighters in the Iraqi resistance to the US-led occupation has been a source of debate within the US government since the fall of Baghdad in April. But military and intelligence officials now believe that the number of foreign fighters who have entered Iraq is relatively small and usually unaffiliated with native Iraqi resistance forces. As Bush sought to build a case for war with Iraq, one of the most hotly debated issues was whether Hussein was in league with bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Within the US government, several high-ranking officials at the Pentagon, who were certain that the evidence of connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda were strong and compelling, found themselves at war with analysts at the CIA who believed that the evidence showed some contacts between Baghdad and the terrorist organization, but not an operational alliance. (New York Times/Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
- January 14: Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill backs off somewhat of his assertions that the Bush administration was planning on invading Iraq within weeks of taking office, saying that account of the Bush administration's early discussions about a possible invasion of Iraq has been distorted by the media, who fell into a "red meat frenzy that's occurred when people didn't have anything except snippets." He continues, "People are trying to make a case that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually, there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be regime change in Iraq." The idea that Bush "came into office with a predisposition to invade Iraq, I think, is a total misunderstanding of the situation," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says. Bush administration officials have noted that US policy dating from the Clinton administration was to seek "regime change" in Iraq, although the Clinton plans focused on funding and training Iraqi opposition groups rather than using military force. O'Neill's original assertions are bolstered when a White House official who attended the same NSC meetings as O'Neill tells ABC News, "President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on September 11th." That official says the president's order "went beyond the Clinton administration's halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force." (CNN, ABC News)
- January 14: 62 Bulgarian soldiers on duty in Iraq have refused to continue serving after a car bomb in Karbala killed five of their compatriots. Currently, 480 Bulgarians are serving in Iraq. Reuters/Boston Globe)
- January 14: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, investigating the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case, interviews conservative columnist Robert Novak. Fitzgerald has waivers in hand that give Novak permission to discuss his conversations with three of his sources: from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, from White House political advisor Karl Rove, and from CIA spokesman Bill Harlow. Armitage and Rove are Novak's sources for Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent; Harlow asked Novak not to reveal Plame's name days before Novak's July 2003 column outing Plame as part of the White House's smear campaign against Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson. The three comprise everyone Novak spoke to before he wrote the column. Novak later says that the waivers posed a "dilemma" for him. Like other journalists, he considers the waivers meaningless, but his lawyer has already told him he has little chance of winning out in court if he refuses to testify. Novak has already spoken with FBI investigator Jack Eckenrode in October 2003 (see the related item), but in that interview, Eckenrode did not ask Novak to name his sources. Now Fitzgerald insists that Novak name names. Novak, already having proven that he has no pretense to any journalistic integrity, names his sources. "I answered questions using the names of Rove, Harlow, and my primary source [Armitage]," Novak writes in July 2006. Six weeks later, Novak will spill his guts to Fitzgerald's grand jury. But for years, Novak will deny giving any information to any prosecutors or investigators -- and mock those who did.
- Fitzgerald not only wants to know who leaked what, but wants to find out if he can bring charges against someone in the Bush administration using the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which has an almost impossibly high standard of evidence. He might also be able to use the Espionage Act to bring charges against the leakers, but the law has never been used in such a case. Conspiracy charges might successfully be brought against both the leakers and their sources. Fitzgerald does not intend to bring any charges against anyone unless he has a good chance of getting a conviction.
- Fitzgerald gets authority from assistant attorney general James Comey to expand the scope of his investigation, allowing his not only to pursue crimes directly connected to the leak, but to investigate perjury, obstruction of justice, the destruction of evidence, and related crimes.
- White House officials begin appearing before Fitzgerald's grand jury. Karl Rove testifies twice in February, and, predictably, spins the truth, acknowledging he spoke with Novak about Plame but denying he had spoken to any reporters at Time. Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, also testifies before the grand jury twice in March. (Michael Isikoff and Robert Novak)
- January 14: Don North, a veteran TV producer and journalist who was employed by SAIC to help create and run the newly formed Iraq Media Network, recently quit his post in frustration over what he calls US censorship. North says that in February 2003, when the radio network was just getting underway, it was quite successful with the Iraqi people: "The Iraqis obviously were happy to hear radio journalism that wasn't state controlled or Ba'athist or Saddam controlled, and initially, we were quite welcomed." The TV broadcast began in May 2003, to an equally popular reaction. But North says that things quickly went sour: "The Iraqis need a new voice, and somehow we have got it all mixed up. The coalition provisional authority, ambassador Bremer's organization, doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between public diplomacy, in other words telling Iraqis and the world what we Americans are trying to do in Iraq, and giving the Iraqis a voice of independence that they need themselves. That's been the problem." He continues: "[W]e immediately started clashing with coalition provisional authorities, who wanted control -- they just couldn't resist controlling the message. Unfortunately, they turned what should have been an independent voice for Iraqis -- this was our aim, to sort of make a PBS, a public broadcast radio and TV for the Iraqis. But instead, it just became a mouthpiece for the coalition, and the Iraqis didn't find it credible. They just thought of it as another voice of America, and turned to other satellite broadcasters like Al-Jazeera and Al-Alabira, Arabic stations broadcasting into Iraq. Those are the stations they're watching and not the station that was created for them. ...[S]omehow, even though we are -- ourselves are have created and have established a marvelous democracy of our own, we don't seem to be able to transfer this and export this to people who are hungry for it and really want it like the Iraqis." (Democracy Now)
- January 14: Democratic candidate Wesley Clark says that democracy itself is threatened by the Bush presidency, his most blistering attack yet on the incumbent Republican. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," Clark says. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame. They are a threat to what this nation stands for, and we need to get him out of the White House. And we're going to do it." (New York Times/Taipei Times)
- January 14: Columnist Joe Conason sums up the content of Paul O'Neill's revelations about the Bush administration in a few devastating sentences. "The White House believes that massive deficits don't matter. The White House serves the narrow interests of the wealthiest few. The White House diligently heeds oil men and coal operators. The White House willfully ignores scientists and environmentalists. The President and his advisers care about politics rather than policy. The President and his advisers prefer scripted consensus to candid debate. The President and his advisers jump at the command of corporate donors. The President won't read any document longer than three pages. The President can't discuss substantive policy issues. The Vice President is in charge." He continues: "Few of those statements are likely to surprise Americans who have been paying attention to their government for the past three years. Most fall neatly within the category of what everyone has heard or read. But this week, a high-ranking insider with a reputation for honesty validated all those unflattering assessments." (New York Observer/Working for Change)
- January 14: The torrent of bad news coming from foreign and domestic sources has meant only one response to the Bush re-election campaign: tar the Democratic opposition by challenging, in Gene Lyons's words, their "fundamental decency and humanity." A "Club for Growth" political ad running in Iowa advises Democratic front-runner Howard Dean to take his "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." (Chances are good that Vermont's neighbors in New Hampshire won't see this ad.) A syndicated column by one Peter Savodnik alleges that Democrats suffer at the polls because party "fund-raisers in Washington often take place in nightclubs filled with black people or Jewish comedians." Republicans, in contrast, go in for "sUVs, white picket fences, flags, monogamy, organized religion." Well-known conservative columnist Cal Thomas recently questioned Dean's religious faith on the grounds that his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg, is Jewish. Marrying her, Thomas wrote, was "strange at best, considering the two faiths take a distinctly different view of Jesus." And the New York Times, that supposed bastion of the "liberal media featured in the attack ad above," featured the strangest take of them all, taking a slap at candidate Wesley Clark with the anti-Semitic tarbrush. Times columnist David Brooks explains that Clark is a "fullmooner," i.e. lunatic, who is apparently "fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century.... To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles." Brooks charges that for believers in "shadowy neo-con influence" like Clark (the only individual named), "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish.' " Brooks was following the insinuative example of another conservative columnist, Joel Mowbray, who accuses retired four-star Marine General Anthony Zinni of "blam[ing the Iraq war] on the Jews." Lyons notes that, "[c]onfronted by angry readers, Brooks alibied that he was only joking. Nothing like a light-hearted accusation of anti-Semitism, after all, to liven up an election year." (Gene Lyons/Bartcop)
- January 14: The fledgling liberal radio network Progress Media has identified its first radio station, WTND-AM in Chicago. WTND is a former Spanish-language radio station that is being sold. "It is an extremely significant event for Progress Media to have clearance in the third-largest media market in the country," says network president Jon Sinton. "Combined with other markets we are close to finalizing, Progress Media will have tremendous reach right out of the box." The network has signed comedian and author Al Franken to host a three-hour weekday talk show, and signed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio to host a show about "the inner workings of corporations and how they influence our daily lives." Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications, will host a talk show about the news media. (Chicago Sun-Times)
- January 14: Conservative radio talk show host Charles Goyette is removed from his time slot by his station's owners, Clear Channel Entertainment, after making a number of statements opposing the war in Iraq. Goyette works for KFYI in Phoenix, Arizona; before the move, he anchored the afternoon drivetime slot; he now works the much less lucrative 7-10 p.m. shift. "My management didn't like my being out of step with the president's parade of national hysteria, and the war-fevered spectators didn't care to be told they were suffering illusions," writes Goyette. "so after three years, I was replaced on my primetime talk show by the Frick and Frack of Bushophiles, two giggling guys who think everything our tongue-tied president does is 'Most excellent, dude!' ...Why did this happen? Why only a couple of months after my company picked up the option on my contract for another year in the fifth-largest city in the United States, did it suddenly decide to relegate me to radio Outer Darkness? The answer lies hidden in the oil-and-water incompatibility of these two seemingly disconnected phrases: 'Criticizing Bush' and 'Clear Channel.'" Goyette describes himself as a Reagan Republican who finds Bush's justifications for the Iraqi war less than satisfying. Goyette was vilified by other talk show hosts on his own station before having his slot yanked.
- "The other KFYI talk-show hosts -- so bloodthirsty that they made Bush apologists and superhawks Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity sound moderate -- vilified me almost daily," Goyette writes. "As a former radio-station owner myself, it was a little hard to believe management would allow one of their key hosts to be trashed day in and day out on their own airwaves. After all, we sell radio time on the basis of its ability to influence people's behavior. A wiser programming approach would have been to showcase me as an object of curiosity, with a challenge to listeners to see if they could discover where I had gone wrong or how I was missing the imminent threat Iraq posed to the American people. No doubt the constant vilification I received and my heterodoxy on the war cost me audience during the interlude. It was certainly enough to get pictures of me morphing into those of the French president posted on the Free Republic Web site during the 'freedom fries' silliness. A banner there read, 'Boycott Charles Chirac Goyette at KFYI radio Phoenix, AZ! Protest against the Charles Goyette Show from 4-7pm at KFYI for his leftist subervsive [sic] Bush-bashing rants. Turn off KFYI radio for the Charles Goyette Show! No liberal scum talk shows on KFYI!' Radio does provoke people, doesn't it? ...'With you, I feel like I'm managing the Dixie Chicks,' said my program director." (American Conservative)
