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 2007
Week Four
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- January 22: The jury in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of Scooter Libby is seated.
Lewis Libby perjury trial
The jury consists of nine women and three men, and includes a former reporter for the Washington Post who once had Bob Woodward as his editor and NBC reporter Tim Russert as his neighbor -- both Woodward and Russert are slated to testify in the trial. The presiding judge is Reggie Walton. Jury selection was difficult, with many potential jurors being excused for expressing negative feelings about the Bush administration and its policies. (MSNBC ["Fact File"]) - January 22: Senator John Warner, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and currently its ranking Republican, endorses a Senate resolution opposing the Bush escalation of troops into Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
Many of Bush's most loyal Congressional Republicans are joining Warner in backing away from Bush's policy. The measure Warner and other Senate Republicans are backing is more measured in tone and less critical than the bipartisan resolution cosponsored by fellow Republicans Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe, and Democrats Joseph Biden and Carl Levin. But Warner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have already met to discuss forging a single resolution from the two slightly disparate ones. So far five Republican senators, including Hagel, Warner, Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, and Gordon Smith, are behind the resolution; fellow Republican senators Thad Cochran, Pete Domenici, and Ted Stevens are looking for their own way to express their concerns. - Even some House Republicans, once some of Bush's staunchest supporters, have made their own skepticism clear. House Minority Leader John Boehner says he will "hold the Bush administration and the Iraqi government accountable and require the administration to report to Congress every 30 days." Boehner adds, "I support the president's plan. But we have a duty to candidly and honestly assess whether the new strategy will be effective and ultimately successful."
- The bipartisan resolution sponsored by Biden, Levin, Snowe, and Coleman states that "the Senate disagrees with the 'plan' to augment our forces by 21,500." It continues, "Our overall military, diplomatic and economic strategy should not be regarded as an 'open-ended' or unconditional commitment, but rather as a new strategy that hereafter should be conditioned upon the Iraqi government's meeting benchmarks that must be specified by the administration." And the House Republicans benchmarks represent their own clear break from administration policy. Under that proposal, every 30 days the White House would have to present Congress clear measurements showing the Iraqi government's progress in purging insurgents and terrorists from its security forces, identifying the level of combat experience for Iraqi army battalions, tracking expenditures on Iraqi army equipment and measuring the effectiveness of the police force in Baghdad. The administration would also have to measure Iraqi government efforts to breed tolerance among its country's warring sects.
- House Republicans are even calling on Bush to open diplomatic negotiations with Iraq's neighbors in order to stabilize the nation. Boehner says, "We have a responsibility to reach across the aisle and to work with our Democrat counterparts to perform our obligation under the Constitution. We're a separate branch of the government. We were sent here by the American people, and we believe that proper oversight of this plan and implementation of this plan can help make it successful."
- But at least some Republicans intend to battle the legislation, including the possibility of mounting a filibuster in the Senate. Jon Kyl implores his Senate colleagues not to go through with a vote on any resolution of opposition, calling the effort "pernicious" and "very, very dangerous." (Washington Post)
- January 22: US Attorney Carol Lam, apparently ousted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for political reasons (see above items), has ordered her staff to bring indictments against Brent Wilkes before her termination date of February 15.
US Attorney firings
Wilkes has deep connections to at least three pending investigations of California's Republican Congressional delegation and possibly four. He was named in the Randy "Duke" Cunningham indictment as "Conspirator #1," was proven to have given Cunningham $500,000 in return for a huge number of Pentagon contracts for Wilkes's defense contracting company, ACDS. - But Wilkes has fingers in more Republican pies. Republican Jerry Lewis, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee, has a close relationship with a lobbyist named Bill Lowery, having authorized "hundreds of millions of dollars in federal projects for clients" of his. One of the people Lowery was in the employ of was Brent Wilkes. Lewis and Lowery have exchanged staff members on occasion. The connections between Wilkes, Lewis, and Lowery have born some very rotten fruit. And Republican John Doolittle has already admitting to helping "helped steer defense funding, totaling $37 million, to a California company, whose officials and lobbyists helped raise at least $85,000 for Doolittle and his leadership political action committee from 2002 to 2005." That company was also owned by Wilkes. And Wilkes has an interesting, if slightly more tenuous, connection between California Republican Duncan Hunter, a longshot presidential candidate, received hundreds of thousands in campaign funds from Wilkes and his companies in exchange for the usual boondoggles of government contracts. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Cunningham and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, worked closely with two local companies -- ADCS Inc. of Poway and Audre Inc. of Rancho Bernardo -- to make the Pentagon pay for converting printed documents to computer files. They and a few other lawmakers got Congress to allocate $190 million for 'automated data conversion' projects from 1993 to 2001." The Pentagon never requested the help from Wilkes's companies; a 1994 GAO report noted that the Pentagon was quite capable of handling the task itself. So instead, for one example, Cunningham steered a $9.7 million contract to ADCS to digitize documents from the Panama Canal Zone that the Pentagon considered insignificant. The San Diego Union-Tribune observes, "This isn't governance. This is looting."
- Interestingly, Wilkes was also a high school buddy of Dusty Foggo, the former senior CIA official who resigned last year amid both corruption allegations and rumors of hooker parties set up by Wilkes where he would entertain lawmakers, staff, and CIA officials with poker, alcohol, prostitutes, and more.
- Lam will not be in office to prosecute Wilkes, and it is entirely possible that her more Republican-friendly replacement will have no interest in pursuing Wilkes. But all of that remains to be seen. (Daily Kos [multiple sources])
- January 22: Bush will order an attack on Iran if he believes Iran is about ready to acquire nuclear weapons, according to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle.
War with Iran
Perle is very close to the administration, particularly to Dick Cheney. He is currently a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. At a presentation at the Herzliya Conference in Israel, Perle says that the present policy of attempting to impose sanctions on Iran will not cause it to abandon its nuclear aspirations, and unless stopped the country will become a nuclear power. Perle is contradicted by another presenter, Dr. Robert Einhorn, who until 2001 was senior advisor to the secretary of state on nuclear nonproliferation, chemical, biological and missile delivery systems. Einhorn says that of all available options, including the military one, he believes continued pressure on Iran will force its leadership to pay a political, economic or other price and conclude on its own that its nuclear aspirations were harming its interests. But Einhorn says taking the military option off the table would be foolhardy. - At the same conference, Dr. Gary Samore, Director of Studies at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, says he believes Iran is still years away from attaining nuclear weapons capability. (Ha'aretz)
- January 22: Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh makes another of his patented veiled racist attacks on the National Football League, saying,
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
"Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it." WorldGolf commentator William Wolfrum retorts, "Limbaugh, who never met a marriage he wouldn't end in divorce, apparently has come to the belief that there are dangerous social and cultural elements emanating from the NFL, apparently in the form of doo-rags and tattoos. Just something to remember from Limbaugh: If you get hooked on pills, can't stay married to save your life, and like to pump your penis full of Viagra prior to trips to the Dominican Republic, you're cool. Wear a doo rag and taunt opponents during a game of professional football, well, you're representing a gang and are part of the decay of modern society." (WorldGolf)
Cheney source of "Plamegate" smear efforts
- January 23: The Lewis Libby trial opens with statements from both the prosecution and the defense.
Lewis Libby perjury trial
The defense comes out swinging -- not so much against the charges or the prosecution, but against the White House. Libby's attorney Ted Wells says top White House officials tried to blame Libby, the former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, for the 2003 leak identifying former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, and decided to protect Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, but not Libby. Wells tells jurors that Rove "was viewed as a political genius," but in contrast, "Mr. Libby was just a staffer" and "Karl Rove was the life blood of the Republican Party." According to Davis, Libby complained "they want me to be the sacrificial lamb." Another Libby lawyer, Theodore Wells, says that Libby told him, "They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb. I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected." Cheney then personally intervened to get the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, to publicly clear Libby in the leak. Soon after, Cheney wrote a note to senior Bush advisors saying that it was wrong "to protect one staffer" -- meaning Rove -- and "sacrifice the guy who stuck his neck in the meat grinder," referring to Libby who, Davis says, was "ordered" by Cheney to refute negative stories. Libby's own notes show that he first learned of Plame's identity, not from NBC reporter Tim Russert, as he claimed, but from Cheney. - Newsweek's Michael Isikoff calls Libby's defense a "scapegoat" strategy, and says that most legal observers thought Libby would play it safe, claim ignorance, and hope for either a hung jury or a conviction to be followed by a presidential pardon. Instead, Libby's defense may end up featuring what Isikoff calls "a circular firing squad" of White House aides all testifying against one another.
- Libby is on trial for five felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, charges related to his lies to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigators and Fitzgerald's grand jury. Fitzgerald has been investigating the matter of who leaked Plame's identity as a CIA agent to the press. Libby insists, falsely, that reporters such as Russert first told him of Plame's identity on June 10 or 11, 2003 (Russert denies ever discussing Plame with Libby; Fitzgerald shows that Libby discussed Plame's identity with then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on June 7 and New York Times reporter Judith Miller on June 8). No one has been charged with any crimes directly linked to blowing Plame's covert cover. Fitzgerald says the story is a simple one: Libby lied to protect himself and his boss, Cheney, from being found out in their orchestration of "Plamegate." But Libby's lawyers call it "a twisted, complicated and dark tale," one of conspiracies, bureaucratic infighting, turf wars, backroom deals, terrorist plots (involving nuclear weapons and anthrax) against the United States, and assorted memory lapses, convenient and accidental. Not only is Libby conveniently forgetful, he is Rove's "sacrificial lamb." The Nation's David Corn writes, "A diagram of Fitzgerald's case would be a straight line: Libby sought official information, he shared this classified material with reporters, he then made up a story to hide all this from investigators. To get a graphic representation of Well's argument, take a large pot of spaghetti -- with plenty of sauce -- and hurl it against the wall. Then look at the wall."
- According to information presented by the prosecution, it was Cheney who ordered Libby to abandon protocol and procedure to attack Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was Cheney who personally wrote out the words that Libby should say when Libby spoke with Time reporter Matt Cooper. And Libby destroyed evidence -- specifically, a document from Cheney that detailed their conversations about Plame and Wilson, and how Cheney wanted the Wilson matter handled. The prosecution also reveals that Fleischer identified Plame as a CIA officer to NBC News reporter David Gregory a week before the leak appeared in Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column, and that Fleischer, during the subsequent criminal investigation, took the Fifth Amendment and demanded (and received) immunity before testifying to Fitzgerald's' grand jury. Fleischer told the grand jury that he had learned about Plame's CIA affiliation first from Libby and then from Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director -- directly implicating two more White House officials in the scandal. Gregory, though, did not report the information, and he later declined to talk to Fitzgerald about his conversation with Fleischer. Fitzgerald never subpoenaed Gregory.
- Former undersecretary of state Marc Grossman testifies for the prosecution. Grossman advised Libby on June 12, 2003, that Wilson's wife Plame worked for the CIA and, falsely, told Libby that Plame had helped arrange for her husband's trip to Niger. Libby was also told by Cheney in "early June" that Plame worked as a covert agent for the CIA. Plame's identity was bandied around among White House officials; the plan, apparently concocted by Cheney, was to blow Plame's cover as a covert CIA agent (she was then working on a secret task force helping to compile information on Iraqi WMDs, but had run a number of covert agents in Europe and the Middle East), and allege that Plame sent her husband to Niger as part of an effort to debunk the White House's allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Those allegations were quickly proven false -- see related items throughout this site. After a May 2003 column in the New York Times revealing Wilson's trip (though not naming Wilson specifically), Cheney's office, as well as officials in the CIA and the State Department, wanted to know who exactly put Wilson up to his Niger trip. According to the prosecution, Grossman recalls telling Libby that "Joe Wilson's wife works for the CIA" and that "our people say that she was involved in the organization of the trip." Libby's lawyers say Grossman was visited by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage the night before Grossman spoke with the FBI; Armitage has admitted being one of the two White House officials who leaked Plame's name to conservative columnist Robert Novak (the other being Rove). Wells says Armitage told Grossman that he spoke to Novak and he already told the FBI about Novak. Wells says "this is cooking the books."
- Fitzgerald paints a broad, ugly picture of White House officials launching an orchestrated smear effort against Wilson, whom they saw as a powerful, credible critic of the Iraq war. He says that Libby, a key member of that effort, repeatedly lied to investigators about his role in that operation. Fitzgerald says Libby learned from five people -- from Cheney to members of the CIA and State Department -- that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Libby then disclosed that fact to reporters and others in the White House. "But when the FBI and grand jury asked about what the defendant did," Fitzgerald says, "he made up a story." Libby told investigators he learned about Plame from Russert. But Fitzgerald says that was clearly a lie because Libby had already been discussing the matter inside and outside of the White House. "You can't learn something on Thursday that you're giving out on Monday," Fitzgerald says. Libby, known for his excellent memory (though Wells says Libby "was known in the office for having a bad memory"), says he didn't lie but was simply bogged down by national security issues and couldn't remember his conversations with Russert, Cooper, and Miller. Wells tries to spin Libby's defense around the September 11 attacks, saying, "He spends his day trying to connect the dots to be sure we don't have another 9/11." Libby later admits that he knew about Plame's identity before, but forgot that he knew until "reminded" by Russert -- a defense David Corn characterizes as "I forgot to remember what I had once known but had forgotten." (MSNBC, MSNBC ["Fact File"], MSNBC, The Nation, MSNBC/Think Progress [link to video])
- January 23: US troops and investigative units have found little evidence that Iran is supplying arms to Iraqi insurgents.
Iraq war and occupation
They have thoroughly searched the rugged Iraqi province of Diyala, bordering Iran, and a hotbed of Shi'ite insurgents. Americans have found some mortars and antitank mines that are clearly Iranian, but no evidence of more advanced weaponry crossing the border, and have located no Iranian agents working with their fellow Shi'ites. Bush has, in recent days, escalated his rhetoric against Iran almost to the same level as his thunderous pronouncements against Saddam Hussein in the months before the March 2003 invasion, but, like his war rhetoric against Iraq, has failed to provide evidence of his claims. And no reporters have seen any real evidence of Iranian involvement. The lack of publicly disclosed evidence is again leading to questions of whether Bush is overstating, or manufacturing, a case against Iran, and if so, to what end. "To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again," says Democratic senator John Rockefeller, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. - The accusations of Iranian meddling "illustrate what may be one of our greatest problems," says Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official and military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We are still making arguments from authority without detail and explanation. We're making them in an America and in a world where we really don't have anything like the credibility we've had in the past." It is clear that Iran is making some efforts to extend its influence among Iraqi Shi'ites, but the groups in Iraq that have received the most Iranian support are not those that have led attacks against US forces. Instead, they are nominal US allies. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the two largest parties in parliament, is believed to be the biggest beneficiary of Iranian help. The Shi'ite group was based in Iran during Hussein's reign, and Iran's Revolutionary Guard trained and equipped its Badr Brigade militia. SCIRI has strong US connections. Bush hosted the head of the party, Abdelaziz Hakim, at the White House in December, and administration officials have frequently cited Adel Abdul Mehdi, another party leader, as a person they would like to see as Iraq's prime minister. And the Islamic Dawa Party of Iraq's current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, also has strong ties to Iran. While some White House officials have loudly insisted that Iran is providing aid to the Sunni insurgents, most experts strongly doubt that is the case. What Iranian support is entering Iraq is going to organizations like SCIRI, the Dawa Party, and the Mahdi Army, which has at times mounted attacks against US forces.
- But that hasn't slowed the rhetoric from Washington. "I've come to a much darker interpretation of Iranian actions in the past 12 to 18 months," CIA Director Michael Hayden said in recent congressional testimony. Previously, Tehran's priority was to maneuver for a stable Iraq dominated by its Shi'ite majority, but that attitude has changed, he said. "There is a clear line of evidence that points out the Iranians want to punish the United States, hurt the United States in Iraq, tie down the United States in Iraq." But at least one senior intelligence official notes that because of problematic intelligence reports, these conclusions are as much speculation as anything else. Even so, that official says, "Two years ago we were debating whether this was really happening. Now the debate is over." But if it is over, it is not because of a preponderance of evidence.
- Instead, the administration and the military are both, again, playing the familiar "if you knew what we know" game, withholding documents and photographic evidence, and forcing Congressional questioners and everyone else to rely on nothing more than their assertions. Even British prime minister Tony Blair has gotten into the act, recently accusing Iran of supplying advanced weaponry to Iraqi insurgents that bore the hallmarks of either Iran or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon. But British officers stationed in Iraq at the time said they had seized no such weapons in the districts for which they had responsibility. And US military officials have not claimed any evidence for similar claims. And the same dynamic of "split," or opposing, views is forming within the US intelligence community, with military officials insisting that Iran is supplying the Iraqi insurgents with large amounts of explosives and weaponry, and State Department and CIA officials insisting that there is no evidence for those claims. And both camps admit that the Sunni insurgents in Diyala have access to large amounts of materiel left over from the Iran-Iraq war, including the kinds of shaped charges that some White House officials insist must be surreptitiously imported from Iran. And outside military analysts have questioned how many of these sorts of weapons actually come from Iran. The technology used to make them is simple and widely known in the Middle East, they note. Iran is a likely source for some of the more sophisticated devices, but other countries could also be pitching in. "A lot of rather sophisticated weapons have actually been released by Syria," said Peter Felstead, editor of Jane's Defense Weekly. Others note that smugglers could be bringing weapons across the border from Iran without government approval. (Los Angeles Times)
- January 23: In a lackluster State of the Union address, Bush asks America to give his new Iraq strategy "a chance to work."
Iraq war and occupation
He warns that failure in Iraq will have "grievous" consequences. He spends much of the address discussing a variety of economic issues, but offers little of substance and few, if any, new ideas on any fronts; he entirely fails to mention the efforts to rebuild the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Democratic senator Jim Webb garners far more "buzz" with his tough rejoinder; Webb says, among other things, that the US needs a "new direction" in Iraq. "The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military," says Webb, who has a son serving in Iraq. Of Iraq, he says the costs of war have been "staggering;" of the US economy, he says, "When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day." If Bush takes the "right kind of action," says Webb, then Democrats would join him. But, he says, "If he does not, we will be showing him the way." (BBC [link to video of Bush's speech], Crooks and Liars [link to video of Webb's response])
Bush lies about foiled terror attacks
- January 23: It just wouldn't be a Bush State of the Union address without a pack of egregrious lies, roundly ignored by the mainstream media.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Tonight, Bush lies about four "successes" in the so-called war on terror. The problem is, none of the four incidents he cites ever happened. The four are detailed by investigative reporter and activist David Swanson.- According to Bush, "We stopped an al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast." Not true. An October 8, 2005, Los Angeles Times story, headlined "Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned," cited "several counter-terrorism officials" as saying that "the plot never progressed past the planning stages.... 'To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,' said one senior FBI official.... At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities." The same newspaper, in a February 10, 2006 story, cites a "US official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism," who said that "the Library Tower plot was one of many Al Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage.... The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan that that of the president." And former CIA counterterrorism expert Michael Scheuer said, "This doesn't sound like anything that I would recall as a major threat, or as a major success in stopping it.... My impression [was that the National Security Council] culled through information to look for something that resembled a serious threat in 2002. It doesn't strike me, either as someone who was there or as someone who has followed al-Qaeda pretty closely, that this was really a serious sort of effort." According to a February 10, 2006 Washington Post story, "several US intelligence officials" said "there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk." Another senior counterterrorism official told the New York Times that same day, "There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage."
- Bush tells his listeners, "We uncovered an al-Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America." No, they didn't. An October 31, 2006, Washington Post article describes al-Qaeda's efforts as well short of "developing" and the case to tie them to the anthrax attacks in the United States as leading nowhere. A September 25, 2006, Post article describes the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks in the United States as still open, but just barely active. The Bush administration has never released any information about that investigation's possible conclusions, or of plots to launch any other anthrax attacks.
- Bush tells the audience, "Just last August, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean." Not really. British law enforcement officials arrested two dozen people at the insistence of Bush officials, but the experts looking into that supposed plot found that the supposed bombers could not have carried out the attacks they supposedly plotted. The liquid explosives they were said to have planned to use could not have been mixed together to produce anything besides a noxious goo. Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, summed this case up well: "None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time. In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms. What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year -- like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests. Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes -- which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth."
- Bush avows, "We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States." No, they didn't, unless they are talking about the cell broken up in 1995, when Bill Clinton was president. No reports of any kind have come out about this particular instance. Either Bush is revealing top-secret information that no one else has ever seen, or he is just making it up out of whole cloth.
- January 23: During his State of the Union address, Bush makes a minor omission that many Democrats find not only significant, but indicative of his insincerity about bipartisanship.
Conservative smear campaigns
Bush begins the speech on a bipartisan note, honoring the first Madam Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and calling on the country to come together. Then he says, "I congratulate the Democrat majority," dropping the last two letters from "Democratic." The dropped "-ic" is significant because. as Washington Post reporter Libby Copeland observes, "it is a semantic tactic that's been part of Republican warfare for decades. It's a little thing, a means of needling the opposition by purposefully mispronouncing its name, and of suggesting that the party on the left is not truly small-'d' democratic. The president's pronunciation was all the more striking because it was apparently not what Bush was supposed to say. The prepared speech that the White House distributed beforehand retained that precious '-ic.'" Bloggers and Democrats picked up on the omission almost immediately. "We all noticed," says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the liberal blog DailyKos. "He just clearly couldn't help himself." John Podesta, the chief of staff under Clinton and the president of the centrist-liberal Center for American Progress, says succinctly, "Like nails on a chalkboard." And Democratic strategist Paul Begala sums up the omission by saying, "He offers this olive branch. Boom, 10 seconds later, he drops the hammer, insults the party and he winks at his base.... It tells you what's in his heart. It tells you that he has no damn desire to compromise." Nonpartisan political analyst Charlie Cook is more forgiving: "I doubt if it was a conscious slight. I think it was just a force of habit." When it comes to omitting the "-ic," Republicans "have been doing it so long that they probably don't even realize they're doing it." - On January 29, Bush tells NPR's Juan Williams, ""That was an oversight. I mean, I'm not trying to needle. Look, I went into the hall saying we can work together, and I was very sincere about it. I didn't even know I did it. ...I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it. So the idea that somehow I was trying to needle the Democrats, it's just -- gosh, it's probably Texas. Who knows what it is? But I'm not that good at pronouncing words anyway." Bush's denial is hard to believe, considering how frequently and deliberately he uses the contraction to annoy Democrats, and the considerable time and energy he and his fellow Republicans have expended to paint Democrats as cowards, traitors, and unwitting (or witting) collaborators with Islamist terrorists. But apparently Democrats have chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt. Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, says, "We certainly take the president at his word," while Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has no comment on the matter. (Washington Post, Washington Post)
- January 23: The CEOs of ten major corporations join together to urge Bush to embrace mandatory ceilings on US greenhouse gas emissions in order to stem global warming.
Global warming and the environment
Bush responds by cancelling a meeting with the executives. Instead, White House press secretary Tony Snow continues to mouth the same platitudes, telling the press corps and, indirectly, the CEOs that the best way to handle "climate change" is through "innovation" -- an indirect accusation that the CEOs and their companies are responsible for fixing the problem. Many corporate leaders, feeling that some sort of regulation or tax on carbon emissions is inevitable, want the federal government to come up with a nationwide standard and avoid different regulatory standards for each state. "We can and must take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection," the executives write in a letter to Bush. In an interview later, Jeffry Sterba, chairman of PNM Resources, a New Mexico utility and one of the signees, says that it is better to act now than to be forced to act in a "precipitous way" later. The executives support a system that would create a cap on emissions, give allocations to companies based on past emissions and allow firms to trade allocations to meet gradually declining emission targets. The system, similar to one being used in Europe, would have far-reaching implications for utility rates, power plant construction, energy efficiency and American automobiles. The executives' plan would slow the growth in greenhouse gases over the next five years, then reverse that growth and cut annual emissions by 70% to 90% of today's levels in 15 years. The CEOs represent such companies as General Electric, PNM, Lehman Brothers Holdings, PG&E, Alcoa, Caterpillar, BP America, Duke Energy, DuPont and FPL Group. (Washington Post)
- January 24: Prosecutors in the Lewis Libby trial present an array of former government officials who, one after the other, testify that they had informed Libby about the identity of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.
Lewis Libby perjury trial
Libby earlier testified before a grand jury that he had learned Plame's identity from NBC reporter Tim Russert. Former CIA senior official Robert Grenier says he received an anxious phone call from Libby on June 11, 2003, asking about reports a former ambassador -- Plame's husband Joseph Wilson -- had made a trip to Africa to check on reports Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Niger for Iraq's weapons program. Libby, Grenier said, was angered irked by accounts that Wilson was telling reporters he had been sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger at the behest of the vice president's office. (Wilson is largely correct, as examination of earlier items about Wilson's trip to Niger confirm -- see the February 19, 2002 item for one example -- but Libby did not want the involvement of Cheney's office to become public knowledge.) Grenier said he promised to look into the matter, but before he could speak with Libby again, he was summoned out of a meeting with the director of the CIA by Libby seeking answers. Craig Schmall, a CIA. employee whose job was to brief Libby and Cheney, testified his notes showed Libby had spoken to him on June 14, 2003, and he was annoyed by Wilson's trip to Niger. - According to Grenier, Libby was fixated on one particular question about Wilson's trip to Niger: would the CIA release to the news media the information that Wilson's trip was supposed to answer questions raised not just by Cheney's office, but by the State Department and the Defense Department as well?
- Libby's defense lawyers spend considerable time attacking Fitzgerald's witnesses. They work to crack the credibility of prosecution witness Ari Fleischer, who demanded immunity from prosecution before he would agree to testify, and who admits to having identified Plame as a CIA agent to several reporters in the days before Novak's column was published. And the lawyers effectively demonstrate the widening rift between the CIA and the White House, asking Grenier, "Didn't you tell the FBI that you thought the White House was trying to shift blame to the CIA?" Grenier acknowledges the statement, and says, "The administration was trying to suggest that had they only known about the eminent Ambassador Wilson's [information]...it would have somehow stopped the White House from continuing on its errant path to war. I think they were trying to avoid blame for not providing [the truth] about whether or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium." (MSNBC ["Fact File"], Washington Post)
- January 24: Investigative reporter Robert Parry writes, after hearing the first day's testimony in the Lewis Libby perjury and obstruction trial, "it now appears Libby was part of an administration conspiracy involving at least seven officials, including Bush and Cheney, seeking to discredit Wilson, one of the first Washington insiders to challenge the President's misuse of intelligence to justify the preemptive war against Iraq.
Lewis Libby perjury trial
The record already reveals that three senior administration officials -- Libby, Rove and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage – had discussed Plame's CIA identity with journalists amid the campaign to undermine Wilson. As part of that tearing down of the former ambassador, administration officials claimed that Wilson's wife had helped him get the assignment to check out reports that Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, suspicions that Wilson and others concluded were unfounded." Add to the mix two other as-yet unnamed officials, who in June 2003 attempted to steer Time reporters towards asking questions about Wilson and Plame. Parry writes, "At the top of the operation to counter Wilson were Bush, who approved the partial release of a CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD, and Cheney, who dispatched Libby to meet with reporters." Bush agreed to release the selectively edited NIE in order to discredit Wilson and other Iraq war critics. (Apparently, at the time of his writing, Parry was not aware that former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer had also admitted to revealing Plame's identity to reporters.) - Why the White House would have involved Rove in discussions of a covert CIA agent's identity -- "normally considered one of the most sensitive secrets in the US government shared only with officials who have a strict need to know," Parry notes -- has gone as yet unaddressed in the trial. Parry continues, "Yet, instead of treating Plame's identity with care, senior Bush administration officials appeared to have bandied the information about, giving it to political operative Rove and then sharing it with journalists, one of whom -- right-wing columnist Robert Novak -- published a column outing Plame and thus exposing her overseas spy network." The conclusion is not difficult to reach: "The administration behavior suggests that it put protecting Bush's political flanks ahead of guarding sensitive national security secrets." And according to Libby's lawyers, protecting Rove's political hide took precedence over defending Libby. Whether by accident or design, according to Libby, he became the administration's fall guy, left to twist while more senior officials received protection. "But that argument suggests that the White House was engaged in a conscious cover-up, with Bush apparently playing a lead role," Parry notes.
- Everyone remembers Bush's September 30, 2003 statement, when he thrust out his chest and said, "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true." He also said repeatedly that anyone who had been found responsible for leaking Plame's name would be fired. Anyone who actually expected Bush to speak truthfully and keep his word in this matter wasn't aware of Bush's own complicity. Parry writes, "[E]ven as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the alleged Iraqi nuclear program and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters. Bush's behind-the-scenes role came into clearer focus later with the release of a court document citing testimony from Libby, who claimed Bush approved the selective release of intelligence in July 2003 to counter growing complaints that Bush had hyped evidence about Iraq's pursuit of yellowcake uranium in Niger. Libby testified that he was told by Cheney that Bush had approved a plan in which Libby would tell a specific New York Times reporter about the CIA's secret analysis, according to a court filing by special prosecutor Fitzgerald." Libby's conversation with Times reporter Judith Miller, occurred, in Fitzgerald's words, "only after the Vice President advised defendant [Libby] that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE," the highly classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq."
- So, as Parry writes, "In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started -- since he was involved in starting it -- he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House hand and possibly to signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge. During the opening remarks of Libby's trial, the spotlight landed on Bush's closest political adviser, Karl Rove, but the alleged sacrifice of Libby to spare Rove only makes sense if the president had some involvement in orchestrating how the cover-up was supposed to play out." (Consortium News)
- January 24: One of Britain's highest-ranking law enforcement officials, Director of Public Prosecutions Ken McDonald, says bluntly, "There is no war on terror," and calls for Downing Street to pursue a "culture of legislative restraint" in passing laws to deal with terrorism.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
He acknowledges that Britain faces a different and more dangerous threat than in the days of IRA terrorism, and that it has "all the disturbing elements of a death cult psychology." But, says McDonald, "It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes." McDonald points to the rhetoric surrounding the "war on terror," adopted by most British lawmakers after its coinage by Bush, to illustrate the risks: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers.' They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror,' just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs.' The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement." (Guardian) - January 24: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes to repudiate Bush's plan to escalate troop numbers in Iraq as "not in the national interest."
Iraq war and occupation
The committee resolution is non-binding and not expected to have any effect on Bush's policy decisions. The vote is 12-9, with 11 Democrats and Republican Chuck Hagel voting for the resolution. "We better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder," says Hagel. Chairman Joseph Biden says the legislation is "not an attempt to embarrass the president.... It's an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake with regard to our policy in Iraq." The resolution moves to the floor of the Senate for debate; Biden has said he is willing to negotiate changes in hopes of attracting support from more Republicans. House Democrats intend to hold a vote shortly after the Senate acts. Even some Republicans are uneasy about the escalation. Richard Lugar, who voted against the measure, says, "I am not confident that President Bush's plan will succeed." However, "[i]t is unclear to me how passing a nonbinding resolution that the president has already said he will ignore will contribute to any improvement or modification of our Iraq policy. The president is deeply invested in this plan, and the deployments...have already begun." Lugar says Congress must ensure that Bush officials are "planning for contingencies, including the failure of the Iraqi government to reach compromises and the persistence of violence despite US and Iraqi government efforts." (AP/Truthout) - January 24: Continuing to do battle with reality, Dick Cheney says that the Bush administration has achieved "enormous successes" in Iraq, but complains that critics and the media "are so eager to write off this effort or declare it a failure" that they are undermining US troops in a war zone.
Iraq war and occupation
The familiar, increasingly delusional, rhetoric is a strong contrast to Bush's less combative tone from his State of the Union address the night before. Cheney, being interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, becomes increasingly contentious as the interview wears on. He refuses to admit that Iraq is a "terrible situation," but merely acknowledges that there are "problems." Congressional opposition "won't stop us" from sending 21,500 more troops, but will, he growls, only "validate the terrorists' strategy." Cheney tells Blitzer, "The pressure is from some quarters to get out of Iraq. If we were to do that, we would simply validate the terrorists' strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don't have the stomach for the fight." None of Cheney's rhetoric is new, but he is apparently unused to, and unappreciative of, the newly minted resistance to his rhetoric. When Blitzer asks whether the administration's credibility had been hurt by "the blunders and the failures" in Iraq, Cheney cuts him off: "Wolf, Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. I just think it's hogwash." In fact, he says, the operation in Iraq has achieved its original mission. "What we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do. The world is much safer today because of it. There have been three national elections in Iraq. There's a democracy established there, a constitution, a new democratically elected government. Saddam has been brought to justice and executed. His sons are dead. His government is gone. If he were still there today, we'd have a terrible situation." Blitzer himself interjects, "But there is," to which Cheney retorts, "No, there is not. There is not. There's problems -- ongoing problems -- but we have in fact accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that's been here for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off. ...Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes." - Cheney is equally hardline about his Democratic opponents. Hillary Clinton would not make a good president, Cheney says, merely because "she's a Democrat. I don't agree with her philosophically and from a policy standpoint." As for the first female speaker, Nancy Pelosi? "I prefer Dennis Hastert." (Washington Post)
- January 24: Famed investigative reporter Carl Bernstein, of Watergate and All the President's Men fame, says that the Bush administration has done "far greater damage" to America than anything perpetuated by the Nixon administration; damage that was helped by inattentive and/or complicit institutions both in government and the media.
Attack on civil liberties
Bernstein says, "In the case George W. Bush, the American system has obviously failed -- tragically -- about which we can talk more in a minute. But imagine the difference in our worldview today, had the institutions -- particularly of government -- done their job to ensure that a mendacious and dangerous president (as has since been proven many times over, beyond mere assertion) be restrained in a war that has killed thousands of American soldiers, brought turmoil to the lives of millions, and constrained the goodwill towards the United States in much of the world." Comparing the disreputable members of both administrations, he says, "In terms of small-bore (but dangerous) characters like Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy with their schemes, I doubt that any presidency approaches the criminality of the Nixon White House. But the Watergate conspiracy -- to undermine the constitution and use illegal methods to hurt Nixon's political opponents and even undermine the electoral system -- was supervised by those at the very top. In the current administration we have seen from the President down -- especially Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Gonzales, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld -- a willingness to ignore the great constitutional history of the United States -- to suspend, really, many of the constitutional guarantees that have made us a nation apart, with real freedoms unknown elsewhere, unrestricted by short-term political objectives of our leaders." - Bernstein continues, "Then there are the Geneva conventions: Who would have dreamed that, in our lifetime, our leaders would permit their flagrant abuse, would authorize torture, 'renditions' to foreign-torture chambers, suspension of habeus corpus, illegal surveillance of our own citizens.... But perhaps worst, has been the lying and mendacity of the president and his men and women -- in the reasons they cited for going to war, their conduct of the war, their attempts to smear their political opponents. "Nixon and his men lied and abused the constitution to horrible effect, but they were stopped. The Bush Administration -- especially its top officials named above and others familiar to most Americans -- was not stopped, and has done far greater damage. As a [Republican] bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, 'Nobody died at Watergate.' If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush, and that our elected representatives in Congress and our judiciary had been courageous enough to do their duty and hold the President and his aides accountable."
- He calls the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame "a truly Nixonian event, a happenstance not atypical of the take-no-prisoners politics of the Bush presidency. But it pales in comparison to the larger questions of the Constitution, of life and death, of the Geneva conventions, of the expectation that our leaders -- from Condoleeza Rice to Dick Cheney, to the attorney(s) general to Paul Wolfowitz and on down and up the line speak truthfully to the American people and the Congress. They have consistently failed to do so." (Washington Post/Editor and Publisher)
- January 24: In another egregrious breach of basic voting machine security, it is revealed that Diebold, who makes the majority of electronic voting machines used throughout the US, uses a single mechanical key to unlock all of its machines.
Election fraud
Anyone with that key, or a working copy, can, within 60 seconds, place a vote-scrambling or vote-changing "hack" into the machines' software, according to an investigation by Princeton University scientists. The lock can be picked within 10 seconds, but Diebold makes it even easier -- photos of the key are available on Diebold's Web site, and those photos have been used to make working copies. The keys are readily available, as the self-same keys are used in thousands of hotel minibars and filing cabinets. (Diebold has since removed the photos from its Web site, but the photos can be viewed at the BradBlog link below. They have also removed the mechanical key locks from some machines and replaced them with "smart card" keys, also easily hacked.) Diebold spokesman Mark Radke defends the decision to use identical keys on every machine by saying ingenuously, "Can you imagine, if the wrong keys went to the wrong precincts the morning of the election, what would happen?" Interestingly, Diebold has recently been certified to deliver security services under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security. (BradBlog [link to video])
