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
Page Three
- January 27: Democratic senator Jack Reed says he is shocked to hear that General David Petraeus, the new top US commander in Iraq, plans on supplementing efforts to secure Baghdad by using the Iraqi Facilities Protection Service, a 150,000-man force that guards Iraqi government agencies.
Iraq war and occupation
That service is widely considered unreliable, and elements were described in July by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as "more dangerous than the militias." Reed says, "The prime minister said he wanted to get rid of the FPS as fast as possible," recalling his meeting with al-Maliki in Baghdad last summer. There are "bad elements" in FPS units that "are carrying out murders and kidnappings [and] attacking the infrastructure that they are supposedly protecting," Reed said in his trip report about what al-Maliki had told him. "Because of the FPS," he wrote, al-Maliki said that "some governmental ministries' guards are more dangerous than the militias." The FPS was formed in 2003 by order of Paul Bremer, then administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to protect the 27 Iraqi ministries and their facilities throughout Iraq. Each minister, who generally represents one of Iraq's political parties, has his or her own FPS unit, whose armed members wear military uniforms. The Iraq Study Group described FPS members as having "questionable loyalties and capabilities." It quoted an unnamed senior US official as saying that they are "incompetent, dysfunctional and subversive," with some serving the manpower needs of sectarian party militias and death squads. - Reed says that, with security being the main concern of Bush in pressing for additional US troops in Baghdad, he is "surprised" that Petraeus would describe FPS units, also known as ministerial security forces, as assisting in the protection of the city. "There are tens of thousands of contract security forces and ministerial security forces that do, in fact, guard facilities and secure institutions, and so forth," Petraeus said in testimony earlier this week, "that our forces -- coalition or Iraqi forces -- would otherwise have to guard and secure." Petraeus acknowledges that the FPS is questionable in its loyalties, saying that "some of those ministerial forces are part of the problem instead of part of the solution."
- In July, Reed spoke with General Martin Dempsey, commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, who described the FPS members, along with about 8,700 personal security guards provided to Iraqi political figures, as among "the proliferation of armed groups [presenting] a serious challenge to stability." Dempsey said the Iraqi Defense Ministry paid the salaries of the personal security details "but has no control over them." Each of the 275 members of Iraq's Council of Representatives, as its national assembly is called, is entitled to 20 guards, many of whom are chosen from within their families. Dempsey was particularly critical of the FPS, saying: "They have a reputation for gross misconduct." He specified as "particularly notorious" the FPS units associated with the ministries of transportation and health, both under the control of associates of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The FPS units employed by those ministries are "a source of funding and jobs for the Mahdi Army," Sadr's militia, according to the Iraq Study Group report.
- In Basra, Reed was told by General John Cooper, commander of the British troops in that area, that the FPS was "a major problem." In Fallujah, members of the Marine Expeditionary Force said that when they retook the hospital in Ramadi, local leaders insisted "that the FPS be barred from returning because of their corruption and unreliability." Democratic senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, upon returning from a brief trip to Iraq this month, announced that she will introduce legislation that would require -- as a condition of continued funding -- certification that the FPS and the private security contractors for the Iraqis are free of sectarian and militia influence. "Instead of cutting funding to American troops, cut the funding to the Iraqi forces and to the security forces...that we pay for to protect the members of this government," Clinton said last week. "We have to do something to get their attention in order to force them to deal with the political and the economic and the diplomatic pieces of the puzzle that confront us." (Washington Post)
- January 27: Israeli journalist Uri Avnery writes of his belief that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was murdered.
Middle East unrest
Avnery remembers discussing the matter with a member of the Israeli Knesset on the way back from Arafat's funeral in 2004, when Avnery asked if the member, Jamal Zahalka, believed Arafat was murdered. Zahalka, a doctor of pharmacology, answered "Yes!" without hesitation, Avnery recalls. He admits that at the time he had no proof, merely a hunch based on "intuition, common sense and experience." - Avnery writes that he and others who believe that Arafat was murdered received "a kind of confirmation" from Uri Dan, Ariel Sharon's loyal spokesman for nearly half a century. Just before his death, Dan published a book in France that included a report of a conversation Sharon told him about between Sharon and the current US president, George W. Bush. Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably. When Dan asked Sharon whether it had been carried out, Sharon answered: "It's better not to talk about that." Dan took this as confirmation.
- Again, this is not proof, Avnery acknowledges. But, as he notes, the intelligence services of many countries, including Israel, routinely use poisons that are all but undetectable. Avnery writes, "The Mossad tried to kill Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader, in broad daylight on a main Amman thoroughfare. He was saved only when the Israeli government was compelled to provide the antidote to the poison it had used." He also cites the recent poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, the president of the Ukraine, and the lethal poisoning of former Russian spy Aleksander Litvinenko. "And how many cases have gone undetected?" he asks.
- Avnery points out the deletorious effects of Arafat's death on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. "If Arafat were alive, there would be a clear address for negotiations with the Palestinian people," he writes. "The claimed absence of such an address serves the Israeli government as the official pretext for its refusal to start peace negotiations. Every time Condoleezza Rice or another of Bush's parrots talks about the need to 'restart the dialog' (don't mention 'negotiations') for 'the final status' or 'the permanent settlement' (don't mention 'peace'), that is the response of Tsipi Livni, Ehud Olmert & Co. Dialog? With whom? No use to talk with Mahmoud Abbas, because he is unable to impose his will on the Palestinian people. He is no second Arafat. He has no power. And we couldn't possibly talk with the Hamas government, because it belongs to Bush's 'axis of evil.' So what do you want, Condi dear?" (Gush Shalom)
- January 27: The New York Times reports that Corporal Joshua Sparling, a wounded Iraq war veteran, has an unidentified antiwar protester spit on the ground near Sparling's feet during the huge antiwar protest in Washington.
Antiwar protests
The Times reports that Sparling spat "back" at the protester. Sparling, who had just taken part in a counterdemonstration, later says of the protesters, "These are not Americans as far as I'm concerned." Unfortunately, the Times fails to give any further details of the alleged incident, though, as the media watchdog site Media Matters notes, recalls "the apocryphal tales of Vietnam War veterans being spit on as they returned to the United States." (Media Matters notes an April 30, 2005 op-ed in the Boston Globe that none of the Vietnam-era stories of veterans being spat upon by protesters can be verified.) Sparling's story is being picked up and elaborated upon by right-wing commentators like Michelle Malkin and several bloggers. But, as Media Matters notes, the Times found no witnesses to the spitting incident; indeed, reporter Ian Urbina writes the article so ambiguously that it seems Urbina himself may be the witness, though the article does not state this as the case. And, even if the spitting incident did occur, it is still an open question whether the unidentified spitter meant to spit near Sparling's feet, or merely spit to clear his throat and got uncomfortably near Sparling. Urbina's next phrase, that Sparling "spit back," certainly implies intent and retaliation. But apparently, Urbina did not bother to find any further details. Neither did he discuss the alleged incident with the Capital police, who were closely monitoring the protest. - The more Sparling continues to discuss the incident, the more questions are raised. On January 29 and again on January 30, Sparling is interviewed on two separate Fox News broadcasts, and the tale of unwarranted expectoration grows dramatically in the telling. Interviewed on the Hannity and Colmes show, Sparling claims that several people, not just one, spat at him, including a protester wearing an 82nd Airborne badge (Sparling claims that he himself was a member of the 82nd), and that he did not spit back at anyone. To his credit, he also modified his claim that the protesters are "not Americans," now claiming he meant only "the vulgar people." Sparling's tale is already growing by leaps and bounds -- the number of people who allegedly spat at him, and his own reaction, have both changed:
- SPARLING: "What we were doing, actually, was doing the anti-protest protest, and we were there with our flags, and all that happened was a fella saw me wearing my 82nd Airborne sweater, and I noticed he also had an 82nd patch on his own sleeve, and he said I was a disgrace, basically, and that I was -- that I had blood on my hands and that I had no right wearing the uniform, and he spit at me."
- ALAN COLMES: "And you spit back?"
- SPARLING: "Of course I did not."
- And the tale of Sparling's misfortune with leftists continues to expand. During the interview, Colmes asks Sparling about his claim of being "demeaned" in an airport by a woman who , and being the target of hate mail while at Walter Reed hospital. Colmes asks him, "Why do you think this always happens to you?" to which Sparling has no good response, but quickly returns to the protesters, who were, in his words, participants in "the most angry peace march that I've ever witnessed, that's for sure." And even now the story continues to grow: "And he wasn't the only person to spit at me either. There was others, but this fella here was actually on the sidewalk with me, whereas all the other ones were about 10 yards away on the other side of the road, and they weren't just spitting. They were throwing cigarette butts, they were flipping us off."
- By the next day, January 30, the story has grown into full-blown assault. Sparling first tells Fox morning hosts Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy that the protesters -- now a large group -- yelled, "'Well, you should have stayed in Iraq,' and, 'You're just a murderer,' and, 'You have blood on your hands'...[y]ou know, that kind of propaganda there." But the last is the best: "Well, you know, obviously I'm not going to judge all of them, because it wasn't everybody, and there was a couple of peaceful people that actually just walked by. But for the most part, there was just people lining the fence just screaming and jumping over it trying to get at us. A couple of folks actually were waiting for clubs to meet with me after it was over with, and the police had to stop them from bull-rushing us on the sidewalk."
- From a single allegation of expectoration to a gang of club-wielding thugs in three days? It is clear that Sparling is a particularly brazen liar, if not a very consistent one. But the reason why this is newsworthy is because Sparling's account is being accepted as documented fact by the conservative press -- who, as they have so many times before, use the imprimateur of the original story in the New York Times to "prove" their claims. It is a crude and telling, if admittedly minor, example of how an unskilled pack of lies become -- to borrow Sparling's word -- "clubs" for conservatives to wield against their liberal, antiwar opponents. (New York Times/MediaMatters, MediaMatters)
- January 28: Defense Secretary Robert Gates reveals that he has recently rescinded a rule, set in 2002, that bars involuntarily mobilization of reserve troops and military personnel beyond a "cumulative" 24-month ceiling for a wartime emergency.
Iraq war and occupation
As a result, hundreds of thousands of National Guard and Reserve members previously mobilized for tours in Iraq and Afghanistan are one again exposed to involuntary call-up under Gates's policy change. These troops, and their families, believed that the rule protected them from being called up for duty a second time, though Brigadier General James Nuttall, deputy director of the Army National Guard, says, "The reality is that most soldiers, having served once in theater, knew that this was going to be a long war and that at some point we were going to have to come back to them. ...Sacrifices have to be made by these soldiers but the fact that we shortened the mobilization for them is a huge benefit." Nuttall is referring to Gates's decision to shorten second mobilizations to 12 months. He says that out of 350,000 Army National Guard members, roughly 270,000 have deployed since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. (Montgomery Advertiser) - January 28: The Chicago Tribune prints an extensive examination of how the United States provided a vast amount of nuclear bomb-grade material spread around the world, much of it available to any terrorist or lunatic if they have the right access and the right price.
US nuclear program
The two-part series, by reporter Sam Roe, is based on an archive of the US's largely failed attempts to retrieve the uranium, provided by scientist Armando Travelli. The archive contains thousands of records and documents never before reviewed publicly. Roe also pored over congressional testimony, previously classified records, foreign and US research papers, and reports by government agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency for the report. He interviewed Travelli, who led the uranium retrieval effort for a quarter of a century, and also interviewed dozens of US and foreign scientists, nuclear reactor operators, and top energy officials in the US and in Russia. - During the Cold War, a misguided American program called "Atoms for Peace" supplied highly enriched uranium to a number of countries. The Soviet Union did the same. Many of these Cold War stockpiles still exist. Recently, the scientists who publish the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the purveyors of the so-called "Doomsday Clock," moved the hands of their iconic "clock" closer to midnight, and symbolic nuclear holocaust. (See the January 12 item above.) At the moment, around 40 tons of enriched uranium remains outside of US control, enough to make 1,400 bombs.
- For the last quarter-century, scientist Armando Travelli, of Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory, has led the US efforts to persuade friends and enemies alike to return the uranium in exchange for other, safer materials. The "Atoms for Peace" uranium was intended solely for use in civilian research reactors. But it has long been available on the black market, for "rogue" nations and third-party clients -- terrorists, lunatics, whoever -- to secure and build rough, dirty nuclear bombs. It can be found strewn all over Central Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, including some of the US uranium that now is the centerpiece of Iran's nuclear research efforts.
- Originally, around 36 nations received highly enriched uranium from the United States. In 1974, one of those nations, India, detonated a test nuclear weapon that used the US uranium, and the Americans began scrambling to get the uranium back. The 9/11 attacks gave Travelli and his team a new sense of urgency. For terrorists or rogue nations, highly enriched uranium is by far the easiest way to build a nuclear bomb. Only 55 pounds are required. Double that and terrorists would need only limited technical skill to slam two pieces together to start a chain reaction -- the same technique used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Now, in 2007, the US continues to try, and fail, to retrieve the uranium it so recklessly gave out a half-century ago. Travelli himself began working to retrieve the uranium in 1978. He figured it might take five years. He was wrong.
- In 1953, President Eisenhower approved the "Atoms for Peace" program. Then-State Department nonproliferation overseer Ellie Busick recalls, "It was the grand bargain. We were way ahead in building bombs, but we were not naive enough to think that nobody could ever do this but us." Before long, the Soviets, too, began sharing uranium and nuclear technology, and what Roe calls "a Cold War chess match" erupted, with the two superpowers and a few other nations supplying uranium and dozens of nuclear research reactors to their allies. US reactors, for instance, went to Iran, Pakistan and Colombia; Soviet reactors to Libya, Bulgaria and North Korea. Romania got two reactors, one from each. Roe writes, "Reactors became the equivalent of international status symbols; church groups funded some to win overseas converts. US firms vied for lucrative contracts, and Argonne became the heart of "Atoms for Peace" research, building foreign-bound reactors dubbed Argonauts.
- It took a while for the US to begin supplying uranium along with reactors and technology, but eventually it did happen. The Eisenhower administration decided to supply foreign nations with only low-enriched uranium, which would be far less useful to bombmakers. But in the early 1960s, when reactor operators complained about the fuel's effectiveness, the US government started providing highly enriched uranium instead. "That was dumb -- to send the easiest material in the world from which to make nuclear bombs to civilian facilities all over the world," says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear fuel expert and science adviser to the Clinton White House. America initially provided this dangerous uranium fuel with the provision that foreigners return the used material, which remained weapons-grade. But in 1964, the Johnson administration began selling the fuel with no such requirement.
- After 1974 saw India detonate a nuclear weapon, the US decided to pull an about-face and get its uranium back. In 1975, a botched raid to retrieve uranium from a South Vietnam research reactor drove American officials to mount a formal, concerted effort to retrieve bombmaking material, particularly highly enriched uranium fuel, that America had shipped overseas. President Jimmy Carter faced a diplomatic quandary: legally, the other nations owned the uranium. Instead, the US decided to offer a variety of replacement fuels that could power a reactor, but were useless for bombmaking. The problem was, those fuels didn't exist. The US turned to Travelli. He was a reputable nuclear scientist, a former MIT instructor now designing and testing advanced reactors at Argonne. Better yet, Travelli spoke fluent Italian, English, French and German. Travelli initially balked at switching career tracks to develop alternative reactor fuels, but he eventually acquiesced, and began working out of a small lab at Argonne. He began his work by trying to track down all of the research reactors given out by the US -- a daunting task, considering many were not even documented. CIA agents eventually started coming to Travelli for information, not the other way around. Travelli hung a large metallic map of the world in his office, putting green triangular magnets in spots with "Atoms for Peace" reactors.
- The first reactor, a super-secret research facility in Taiwan, took two years to shut down. Travelli realized during that awkward, maddening process that it would take him far more than three more years to shut down all the rest -- even if he could.
- The US saw the process as relatively painless: Argonne would develop new fuels, America would offer them to other nations, and the foreigners would quickly trade in their enriched uranium. The realities were far less accomodating. Some nations were recalcitrant on their own, but the biggest obstacles were American-made, beginning with the new Reagan administration in 1981. The retrieval effort was not a priority for Reagan's Cold Warriors. The Energy Department even proposed shutting down the program entirely. Though that did not happen, the program languished.
- Shortly thereafter, Travelli found himself involved in a bizarre encounter with Romanian officials under the mad regime of Nicolai Ceausescu. It took months to persuade the Romanians to agree to using the US's alternative fuels and give up their precious uranium -- but Reagan officials refused to pay for the new fuels in order to facilitate the swap. Years passed in a standoff, while secretly, Romanian scientists successfully separated plutonium from the uranium, a serious violation of international rules governing the development of nuclear weapons. Travelli and US officials didn't learn of the Romanian action until after the Berlin Wall came down and Ceausescu was executed by his own people. In 1992, seven years after the nuclear infraction, the new Romanian government voluntarily reported the case to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency, satisfied that corrective action had been taken, reported the infraction to the UN Security Council for informational purposes only -- one of just a handful of cases ever reported to the council.
- But Romania would be one of the few qualified successes of the retrieval program. Even after Romania's stunning admission, the American government refused to invest more in its effort to retrieve bomb-grade fuel worldwide. Instead, it took steps that ensured failure for several years to come.
- By 1993, Travalli had become weary and disenchanted. He and his team had retrieved bomb fuel from 19 reactors, about a quarter of the entire number of US-supplied facilities, and invented safer fuels that could be used in several dozen more. But in further cost-cutting moves, the Energy Department had eliminated his research budget, preventing him from developing other fuels needed for the remaining reactors still using highly enriched uranium. Worse, the US was refusing to stop using enriched uranium in more than a dozen reactors on American soil. In fact, in 1993, Clinton backed a plan in Tennessee to build a giant, $3 billion research reactor complex: a facility that would use bomb-grade fuel. The plan eventually was canceled, but foreigners derided America's attitude as a colossal double standard: It was one thing for the US to use bomb-grade fuel but a no-no for other countries. The foreigners began holding on to their uranium more tightly than ever. Travelli found his program mired in a bureaucratic backwater, shuttled from one agency to another. He had no success in pressuring Congressional staffers to support his program. According to retired State Department official Allan Krass, most government officials "really saw it as a bunch of guys who just wanted to get more money so that they could keep their program alive but who didn't have any good ideas and weren't making much progress."
- Travelli found his program revivified in the early 1990s, after the State Department became increasingly alarmed at reports of thieves stealing small amounts of highly enriched uranium in Russia and other former Soviet republics. Travelli proposed expanding his program to retrieve the tons of highly enriched uranium the Soviets had distributed over the last three decades? The State Department agreed, and in 1993, Travelli met with Russian officials to discuss the retrieval efforts. To his great surprise, the Russians knew all about his program, and had even copied his efforts by retrieiving some of their own nuclear fuel. "It was eerie, like meeting your long-lost twin brother," Travelli recalls. He got to know his secretive Russian counterpart, "scientific advisor" Nikolay Arkhangelsky. Eventually, Travelli proposed to Arkhangelsky that the two countries work in concert. Separately, they were failing. There were just too many reactors requiring too many kinds of fuel. But what if the US and Russia started from scratch, returned to the lab and tried to invent a single fuel that could replace bomb material in every reactor in the world? Arkhangelsky and the Russians agreed, as did the US Energy Department.
- After the 9/11 attacks, nuclear terrorism suddenly seemed plausible, with scenarios of al-Qaeda terrorist detonating nuclear bombs in American cities. At Argonne, Travelli and his team were working feverishly to retrieve the terrorists' easiest route to obtaining weapons-grade uranium, the "Atoms for Peace" uranium and the Soviet uranium still out there. To retrieve it, the Argonne scientists labored to create a new alternative fuel for nuclear reactors that would be useless for nuclear weapons. If they succeeded, the US might finally be able to secure tons of weapons-grade material. If they failed, it would set back by many years the heart of US efforts to deny terrorists access to such material -- keeping the nation, and the world, vulnerable to nuclear nightmare.
- In late 2003, Travelli found himself and his scientists sitting across a table in Moscow with a knot of Russian scientists, both sides hoping for positive results on the development of the alternative fuel. The Russians said that only minor problems remained to be solved before they could report success. The alternative fuel was based on a small amount of uranium-235, which if successful would fuel nuclear reactors but could not be used to make bombs. The experimental fuel was called "uranium-molybdenum dispersion fuel." Though the Argonne scientists had some early successes, their Russian counterparts reported less success, and treated the Americans with suspicion, even accusing Travelli's team of trying to steal their technology. And funding was still an issue: even after 9/11, and after Travelli's team had secured uranium from a facility in the unstable nation of Serbia, the Bush administration refused to give Travelli's team any serious funding. At one point, the State Department asked the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-profit group founded by Ted Turner and former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, to donate $5 million; that was more money than the government contributed to the mission. "It was embarrassing," recalls Krass.
- And disheartening news was emanating from the French scientific community, where a group of scientists was working on the same type of fuel as Travelli and the Russians. Publicly, the French were announcing success after success, and even announcing training seminars so other nationsl could learn about the new fuel and place their orders. But privately, as Travelli would learn, the fuel was not panning out in tests. Could Travelli's team's fuel have the same problems? Indeed it did, as further research proved. It seemed that success now lay in the hands of the Russians.
- In December 2003, Travelli flew to Moscow to meet with the Russians, as noted above. Travelli saw the same problems in their research as with his and the French's. The fuel was a failure.
- Things began to change for Travelli. In the summer of 2004, Energy Department officials began taking firmer control of America's effort to retrieve bomb fuel. They wanted it run out of Washington, not Chicago. They wanted the fuel work managed out of a federal lab in Idaho, not Argonne. They wanted new scientists involved, not the same group that had been leading it the last 26 years. They finally asked to double the budget. And they wanted Travelli out. Travelli was horrified and resistant, but in the end, he had little choice. He announced his resignation from his leadership position in Vienna, though he would stay on the team for eight months as an advisor. Many of his fellow scientists were appalled at Travelli's treatment. "I had never come across anyone in public service who had accomplished so much for national security with so few resources provided by the government," says Alan Kuperman, a non-proliferation expert and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who opposed Travelli's replacement.
- In July 2005, after the State Department withdrew $500,000 slated to work on the alternative fuel, Travelli resigned outright. He wrote in his resignation letter, "Fear of being fired has replaced the pursuit of excellence as a motivator for our work, and the main concern today is to satisfy every wish of frequently incompetent and unpredictable bureaucrats in Washington."
- Since Travelli's departure, six more Cold War-era reactors have been transformed to use alternative fuels -- a far faster success rate than Travelli ever accomplished, according to Energy Department officials. In December 2006, the US helped relocate nearly 600 pounds of uranium from a former East German lab to a specially secured Russian facility. The US also has spent tens of millions to bolster security at some overseas reactors, providing fences, cameras, heavy-duty doors and vaults. But, as Roe notes, "there are other signs that efforts actually have gone backward. For instance, in the most difficult cases of securing bomb fuel -- particularly in Russia, where officials are reluctant to cooperate -- the US has simply quit trying." Travelli is now working on the problem with Turner's Nuclear Threat Initiative organization, even teaming up again with Arkhangelsky. But Turner's group faces serious funding problems that make it difficult for it to accomplish anything. And Travelli, now 72, finds himself spending much of his time puttering in his garden and visiting with his sons.
- Roe concludes, "Over 26 years, Travelli and his team helped 22 nations stop using bomb-grade fuel in 33 reactors, eliminating the use of 3.3 tons and ridding the world of 120 potential nuclear weapons. But more than 100 reactors still use the dangerous fuel, with an estimated 40 tons out of US control. Travelli also spent eight years trying to develop a magic fuel. In the end, it failed. His successors continue that mission, but they are at least several years away from a solution. The metallic world map Travelli had used to carefully chart his work still hangs on the wall of a small, rarely used office on Argonne's campus. No one tends to the map anymore." (Chicago Tribune [links to documents and video], Chicago Tribune [links to documents and video])
- January 28: A Washington Post editorial calls conservative attempts to smear Barack Obama "contemptible."
Conservative smear campaigns
It notes the "fad among some conservatives to refer to [Obama] by his full name: Barack Hussein Obama. This would be merely juvenile if it weren't so contemptible." Rush Limbaugh has, as usual, sunk into the mire by twisting Obama's name into "Barack Hussein Odumbo." But mocking Obama's name is just the beginning. Insight magazine, as documented in above items, attempted to smear Obama by falsely accusing him of going to school at a radical Islamic madrassah in Indonesia, then further tried to link the smear to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Fox News eagerly leaped on the bandwagon and touted the story. The Post observes, "When the madrassa story was debunked by CNN and the Associated Press, Insight didn't even have the decency to slink away. Instead, the magazine, an offshoot of the Moonie-owned Washington Times, wrote, 'The media uproar over our reporting reveals a media establishment choosing not to ask the tough questions about Obama's Muslim past: If he was raised in a secular household (as he claims), why does he have -- or retain -- Muslim names, Barack and Hussein? ...Were his father and stepfather as secular as he says? What is the exact nature of Obama's current religious affiliation and what are the beliefs and teachings of his current church in Chicago, the Trinity United Church of Christ?' Mr. Obama's slimers seem to think such name-calling and Muslim-baiting can score points with the American people. On the contrary, Mr. Obama's multicultural background (his father was Kenyan, and he spent several years living in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather) ought to be viewed as a plus. A president with an understanding of Islam and the developing world would be welcomed by those who too often feel misunderstood and slighted by the United States." - The Post concludes, "Mr. Obama has never tried to hide his past or his family name: He has written about being educated at a predominantly Muslim school. His father, a non-practicing Muslim, was Barack Hussein Obama Sr. His grandmother is Sara Hussein Obama. The senator, however, does not use his middle name. Those who take pains to insert it when referring to him are trying, none too subtly, to stir up scary images of menacing terrorists and evil dictators. They embarrass only themselves."
- Interestingly, Fox News reporters are now complaining that the Obama presidential campaign has "frozen [them] out" refusing to give Fox News reporters interviews. One Fox reporter says that the Fox reporters who are "suffering the most did nothing wrong." It was Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy who first aired the Insight allegations about Obama's supposed education at a radical Islamist madrassah. Another source notes that a thaw of sorts may be underway, after two phone conversations between Obama and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. John Moody, vice president for news at Fox, issued this missive to staff in his daily editorial note on January 23: "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC. The urgent queue is our way of communicating information that is air-worthy. Please adhere to this." (Washington Post, Washington Post)
- January 29: While Bush and his officials insist that the "troop surge" is an essential, and carefully crafted, plan to save Iraq from chaos, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is already changing the plan in its most fundamental sense.
Iraq war and occupation
Gates not only wants to drastically speed up the deployment of the 21,500 troops to Iraq, but earlier in the week said that if things went well in Iraq, the US might not even need to deploy all 21,500 alloted troops. Gates and outgoing US commander General George Casey even said that troops could start coming home as early as the summer of 2007. Veteran foreign policy reporter William Arkin writes, "Regardless of politics and the Washington talk show, we are supposed to have confidence in this well thought out plan for Iraq when the Secretary is already making adjustments and changes? Of the speeded-up deployment, Arkin writes, "Let's see: We are in the fight of our lives, where failure isn't an option, and yet the prime architect of the new, new strategy is already admitting that he made a mistake in the design." He is also contradicting the incoming supreme commander of US forces in the region, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who recently told the Senate that he needs all the troops he can get. Gates said in response, "As long as he [Petraeus] feels he needs them, they're all going to flow" to Iraq. Arkin writes, "That's definitive, as long, that is, as nothing different happens next week to change his mind." - In a related matter, Arkin is doubly scornful of national security advisor Stephen Hadley's statement, in a January 29 op-ed in the Washington Post, that the escalation isn't really the new Iraq strategy. According to Hadley, the strategy is composed of the many steps that the United States and Iraq are taking to positively deal with the increasing anarchy and chaos on the ground, particularly in Baghdad. "Training and supporting Iraqi troops will remain our military's essential and primary mission." Arkin retorts, "The surge is exposed for what it has always been, a political sledgehammer to beat Congress and the American people into submission, while on the ground it is a feather of force, a symbol of change. (Washington Post)
- January 29: European governments are resisting Bush administration demands that they curtail support for exports to Iran and that they block transactions and freeze assets of some Iranian companies.
War with Iran
The resistance threatens to open a new rift between Europe and the United States over Iran. The administration is trying to reduce exports to Iran and cut off its financial transactions in order to continue isolating the nation. Preliminary reports indicate that the global pressure on Iran is damaging its oil production and hurting its economy. The pressure may also be contributing to the rising political dissent within Iran. At issue now is how the resolution is to be carried out, with Europeans resisting American appeals for quick action, citing technical and political problems related to the heavy European economic ties to Iran and its oil industry. "We are telling the Europeans that they need to go way beyond what they've done to maximize pressure on Iran," says a senior administration official. "The European response on the economic side has been pretty weak." The main targets are Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain, all with extensive business dealings with Iran, particularly in energy. Administration officials say that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the current head of the European Union, has been responsive. Europe has more commercial and economic ties with Iran than does the United States, which severed relations with Iran after the revolution and seizure of hostages in 1979. - "We want to squeeze the Iranians," says a European official, "[b]ut there are varying degrees of political will in Europe about turning the thumbscrews. It's not straightforward for the European Union to do what the United States wants." European officials argue that beyond the political and business interests in Europe are legal problems, because European governments lack the tools used by the Treasury Department under various American statutes to freeze assets or block transactions based on secret intelligence information.
- Many European officials believe that the United States and Saudi Arabia have an unwritten deal to keep oil production up, and prices down, to further squeeze Iran, which is dependent on oil for its economic solvency. In addition to buying oil from Iran, European countries export machinery, industrial equipment and commodities, which they say have no military application. Europeans also say that courts have overturned past efforts to stop business dealings based on secret information. (New York Times)
Bush implicated in Plame leak (read down in item)
- January 29: Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testifies for the prosecution in the trial of Lewis Libby, and becomes the second White House official to admit leaking the name of a covert CIA agent.
Lewis Libby perjury trial
According to Fleischer, Libby told him about Valerie Plame Wilson's job at the CIA over lunch on July 7, 2003, three days before Libby says he learned of Plame's identity. Libby has told FBI investigators and a grand jury that he first learned about Plame on July 10 or 11 from NBC's Tim Russert. Fleischer, testifying under an immunity agreement, insists he believed the information was not classified, though this is hard to countenance, considering Plame's extremely covert classification, her senior position with the Joint Iraqi Task Force, and Fleischer's testimony that Libby told him of Plame's position in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division. Fleischer also testifies that Libby told him during that July 7 lunch that Wilson was sent to Africa by Plame, which is untrue. Libby told Fleischer "something on the lines of 'This is hush-hush. This is on the QT. Not very many people know about this,'" Fleischer tells the jury. Fleischer says Libby's disclosure about Wilson's wife was "new to me." He says he thought the point of bringing up Wilson's wife was "nepotism at the CIA." - Fleischer says it was "odd" that he would receive such information from Libby, who was not ordinarily forthcoming with Fleischer as a "source" for Fleischer. According to Fleischer, Libby usually referred him to Condoleezza Rice for information.
- Fleischer says he heard of Plame again on July 11, 2003, from White House communications director Dan Bartlett, who was displeased reporters kept writing Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger. Fleischer recalls Bartlett saying, several days later, that Bartlett couldn't believe someone was saying Dick Cheney "sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger; his wife sent him, she works at the CIA." Bartlett's false accusations about Plame sending Wilson to Niger were the heart of the White House's campaign to vilify and discredit Wilson. Fleischer says he revealed Plame's identity, in what he calls a casual conversation, to two reporters, John Dickerson of Time and David Gregory of NBC News, and that Plame sent Wilson to Africa. Neither reporter revealed Plame's identity to the public. "I never in my wildest dreams would have thought this information was classified," Fleischer says. He testifies that he wanted to show that Cheney had no reason to know about Wilson's report on his trip to Niger because he hadn't requested the trip. He says he was "horrified" when he learned in September 2003 that the CIA was seeking a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's identity. He says that although he didn't think he had done anything wrong, he got an attorney and refused to testify before a grand jury until after he was granted immunity.
- Interestingly, Dickerson has denied receiving the information about Plame from Fleischer, though Fleischer was identified as Dickerson's source in Michael Isikoff's and David Corn's book Hubris. Corn writes in The Nation, "The defense could have used this contradiction to try to impeach Fleischer's credibility. If Fleischer falsely remembers leaking, then maybe he's also wrong about what happened during his lunch with Libby. But Libby's lawyers want Fleischer to be right about the supposed leak to Dickerson and Gregory. They are building a case -- or the innuendo -- that Tim Russert was wrong when he told Fitzgerald's grand jury that he knew nothing about Valerie Wilson when he spoke to Libby (and could not have, as Libby has claimed, told Libby anything about Wilson's wife). Libby's attorneys have said that Russert may have had knowledge about Valerie Wilson and her CIA position because he may had heard about it from colleagues at NBC News, such as David Gregory.
- Corn continues, "It's complicated, but the argument goes like this: Fleischer leaked to Gregory and Dickerson; Gregory told Russert; and Russert told Libby that reporters were hearing that Wilson's wife was CIA. (There's a side benefit to this theory: Dickerson worked with Matt Cooper at Time. Perhaps Dickerson told Cooper about Valerie Wilson, and then Cooper, rather than receiving information on her from Libby, actually passed information to Libby.) But there's at least one problem for the defense. In the indictment of Libby, Fitzgerald noted that the Russert-Libby phone call happened on July 10, 2003. Yet Fleischer's (real or not) leak to Gregory (and Dickerson) occurred on July 11, 2003. To make this part of the defense work, Libby's lawyers have to show -- or suggest -- the Libby-Russert call occurred at a later time than Fitzgerald has placed it. Dickerson is an inconvenient witness for both sides. The prosecution doesn't want him on the stand. He could impeach the credibility of its best witness so far. And the defense wants him out of the picture. He could undercut its attempt to rattle Russert. He appears to have a get-out-of-the-witness-box-free card. And the mystery of Fleischer's purported leak remains."
- Cheney's current chief of staff and Libby's successor, David Addington, testifies that Libby asked him after Wilson's July 6 New York Times article whether the president had the authority to declassify information. Addington was Cheney's counsel at the time. He says, in testimony spanning January 29 and 30, that Libby also asked whether the CIA would have records to show if it sent a CIA official's spouse on an assignment. The two were alone in Addington's office in the White House, he says, and Libby motioned with his hands for Addington to keep his voice down. Addington testifies he wondered if the questions were related to Wilson, though he didn't know about Plame at the time. Libby's questions about Bush being able to declassify information relate either to Bush's desire to leak selected portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to the press to bolster his arguments in favor of invading Iraq, or to the apparent intent to declassify Plame's covert CIA status. Addington also recalls Libby telling him in September 2003, when the leak investigation began, "I just want to tell you, I didn't do it." Addington adds, "I didn't ask what the 'it' was." Fitzgerald hopes Addington's testimony will bolster his argument that Libby was worried about whether his conversations with reporters were improper and therefore he lied to conceal them.
- On Addington's second day of testimony, defense lawyer Theodore Wells tries to advance the defense's contention that Karl Rove set up Libby as the White House fall guy. He cites notes taken by Libby during a senior staff meeting that show Rove was keen on countering Wilson's charges. Then he presents a note written by Dick Cheney when the leak investigation was underway. The White House by this point had publicly, but falsely, claimed that Rove was not involved in the leak. Cheney wanted the same for Libby. The Cheney note reads, "Has to happen today. Call out to key press saying the same thing about Scooter as Karl. Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." The note also contains talking points, written by Libby, that he and Cheney wanted Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, to recite at a press briefing: "I've talked to Libby. I said it was ridiculous about Karl [being involved in the CIA leak] and it is ridiculous about Libby. Libby was not the source of the Novak story. And he did not leak classified information." (McClellan dutifully parroted those talking points in subsequent press conferences.)
- With notes in hand, Wells asks Addington if Libby was "being hung out as a scapegoat in public?" Addington says that he had no idea. But Addington adds that after McClellan made a statement reflecting these talking points, Addington told Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, that the White House ought not to discuss criminal investigations in public. But your boss wanted this done, Bartlett told Addington. Wells is trying to bolster his earlier contention that Libby was somehow turned into a sacrificial lamb by White House powers more interested in protecting Rove. So far Wells has introduced little to support this narrative. And the evidence he references while questioning Addington indicated that the White House press office did what Cheney had asked it to do: protect Libby. Corn notes, "That's not how you hang someone out to dry."
- Cheney's notes also implicate Bush himself in being involved in the Plame leak. Bush has always said that he was never aware of any attacks by any member of his administration against Wilson or Plame. But Cheney's notes, excerpted above, call into question Bush's denials of any personal knowledge of the White House smear campaign against Wilson. The question then arises: was Bush aware that senior members of his White House leaked Plame's name to non-governmental sources? If Bush knew of the Plame outing, then he is complicit in a crime (whether or not Fitzgerald actually believes he can successfully prosecute such a crime is another matter). If Bush actually took any role in the Plame outing, then Bush himself may be guilty of criminal involvement.
- Libby's defense has already maintained that Libby is a scapegoat, thrown to the wolves to protect Karl Rove and perhaps Dick Cheney as well. "Mr. Libby, you will learn, went to the vice president of the United States and met with the vice president in private." defense lawyer Theodore Wells has already told the jury. "Mr. Libby said to the vice president, 'I think the White House...is trying to set me up. People in the White House want me to be a scapegoat.'" Wells says that Cheney's notes said, "not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others." However, Cheney's notes actually read, "not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others." The reference to "this Pres." was crossed out. "Can you make out what's crossed out, Mr. Addington?" Wells asks Addington, who responds, "It says 'the guy' and then it says, 'this Pres.' and then that is scratched through." ..."So it looks like 'this Pres.?'" Wells continues. Addington replies, "Yes sir." The "meat grinder" is the Washington press corps, Wells says. The "protect one staffer" line refers to Karl Rove. Furthermore, Cheney, in his directive to McClellan that day in September 2003, wrote that the White House spokesman needed to immediately "call out to key press saying the same thing about Scooter as Karl." As noted above, McClellan quickly moved to tell the press that neither Rove nor Libby played any part in the outing of Plame, nor were they involved in any campaign to discredit Wilson. McClellan did not mention Libby until Cheney and Libby asked him to.
- Wells also insinuates that Cheney's note is one of over 250 pages of e-mails and documents that the White House originally failed to turn over. Wells believes that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales considered the Cheney note a damning piece of evidence and thusly withheld the note under "executive privilege." Addington testifies that when subpoenas were first issued by the Justice Department in the fall of 2003, demanding documents and e-mails relating to Wilson and Plame be preserved, he was given Cheney's notes and immediately recognized the importance of what Cheney had written. Addington said he immediately discussed the matter with Gonzales and Terry O'Donnell, Cheney's counsel, but does not say whether the note was turned over to investigators in the early days of the probe.
- Addington also testifies to what has been documented elsewhere in this site, that there were internal discussions involving Bush and Cheney about declassifying for specific reporters a portion of the highly classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate as a way to counter Wilson's criticisms against the administration. That portion purportedly showed that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger to use for building an atomic bomb, a claim that Wilson had debunked when he personally traveled to Niger to investigate it a year earlier. The portions of the NIE were carefully selected to bolster the administration's case; other portions dissenting from the uranium claims were not made available to reporters. Addington testifies that Libby asked him in late June or early July 2003 if Bush has the authority to declassify information. Addington says, "And the answer I gave was, 'Of course, yes. It's clear the president has the authority to determine what constitutes a national security secret and who can have access to it.'" Bush signed an executive order in 2003 authorizing Cheney to declassify certain intelligence documents. The order was signed on March 23, four days after the start of the Iraq War and two weeks after Wilson first appeared on the administration's radar.
- Overall, Corn writes, "Wells and Jeffress are fortunate. They are not bound by memory or truth. They only have to challenge the government's case. They can do so by undermining the prosecution witnesses or by tossing out alternative (and confusing) scenarios, without having to prove any single theory of the case. Or by doing both." (MSNBC ["Fact File"], Bloomberg, AP/Sierra Times, The Nation, The Nation, Truthout)
Cheney's handwritten notes citing 'this Pres.'
- January 29: The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, gives an unusually frank interview to the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Not unexpectedly, Drumheller refuses to talk about a number of issues because of security and confidentiality agreements, but he is quite forthcoming for the questions he is able to answer. - Drumheller is unable to speak openly of the CIA's renditions programs, for which many CIA operatives and US government officials face charges in European countries, but he does admit that he had some involvement in the kidnappings of suspected Islamist terrorists. Of the rendition program, he says, "I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions, if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes." The interviewer reminds Drumheller that "[a]t the very least, you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people," to which Drumheller replies, "It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the 'dark side' we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to 'go out and get them.' His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences."
- Drumheller also says that too often, the CIA lacks clear guidance of what is and what isn't allowed in the "war on terror:" "Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality. ...From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions."
- Drumheller says that while the CIA has often worked well with its European counterparts, the Bush administration has been far less cooperative with European governments, both in general aspects of the "war on terror" and in specific instances of potential conflicts between the US and a European government. "The only way we will ever be able to protect ourselves properly is if we can get a handle on the threat in Europe, since that is the continent where fanatics can best learn their most crucial lesson: How to disappear in a Western crowd. Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists, especially since the war in Iraq has heralded an underground railroad for militants to go and fight there. It is being used for young fanatics in Europe to be smuggled into Iraq to fight Americans and, assuming they survive, to return home, where they present a more potent threat than they did before they left. Since the odds against penetrating the top of al-Qaeda are phenomenally high, we must pursue the foot soldiers. ...The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know."
- Drumheller is unusually open in his criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the issue of Iraq's WMDs. He says, "The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war." When asked about the horrendous failure of the intelligence surrounding the Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," Drumheller says, "[I]t was a centerpiece. Curveball was an Iraqi who claimed to be an engineer working on the biological weapons program. When he became an asylum-seeker in Germany, the BND [German intelligence] questioned him and produced a large number of reports that were passed here through the Defense Intelligence Agency. Curveball was a sort of clever fellow who carried on about his story and kept everybody pretty well convinced for a long time. ...There was no effort by the Germans to influence anybody from the beginning. Very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts, that there may be problems with this guy. They were very professional. I know that there are people at the CIA who think the Germans could have set stronger caveats. But nobody says: 'Here's a great intel report, but we don't believe it.' There were also questions inside the CIA's analytical section, but as it went forward, this information was seized without caveats. The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing, they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting."
- As Drumheller has said in other sources quoted throughout this site, he was horrified at the use of Curveball's information in Colin Powell's infamous February 2003 presentation to the United Nations. Drumheller says, "I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: 'Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that.' He said: 'Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that.' ...I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it." As to why the material was included: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: 'You guys must have something else,' because you always think it's the CIA. 'There is some secret thing I don`t know.' He said: 'No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this.'"
- Drumheller likes to believe that had the Germans allowed the CIA to interview Curveball before March 2004, when the Germans (and Curveball) finally relented, "Maybe the whole story would have turned out in a different way." But such a conclusion is optimistic in the extreme, and judging by his other statements in this interview alone, Drumheller knows this.
- Drumheller refuses to identify the high-ranking Iraqi source who told the CIA before the war that Iraq had no active WMD program, though others have revealed the source as Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri. (See the information in 2002 and 2003 for more about the attempt to recruit Sabri as a CIA asset.) Drumheller says, "In the beginning, the administration was very excited that we had a high-level penetration, and the president was informed. I don't think anybody else had a source in Saddam's cabinet. He told us that Iraq had no biological weapons, just the research. Everything else had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. But after a while we didn't get any questions back. Finally the administration came and said that they were really not interested in what he had to say. They were interested in getting him to defect. In the end we did get permission to get back to the source, and that came from Tenet. I think without checking with the White House, he just said: 'Okay. Go ahead and see what you can do.' ...There were a lot of ironies throughout this whole story. We went on a sort of worldwide chase after this fellow, and in the end, he was in one place, and our officer was in another country asking for permission to travel. I called up people who were controlling operations, and they said: 'Don't worry about it. It's too late now. The war is on. The next time you see this guy, it will be at a war crimes tribunal.'"
- Drumheller is somber in his assessment of the US's role in destabilizing the Middle East, and of the part the CIA -- and Drumheller himself -- played in the debacle. He says, "We made mistakes. And it may suit the White House to have people believe in a black and white version of reality -- that it could have avoided the Iraq war if the CIA had only given it a true picture of Saddam's armaments. But the truth is that the White House believed what it wanted to believe. I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more." (Der Spiegel)
- January 29: The British-Dutch oil conglomerate Shell Oil has defied US pressure to sign a $5 billion deal to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in Iran.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Shell insists that it has yet to decide whether to finalize the deal. Shell's arch-rival, BP, has declared it will not invest in Iranian oil or gas. The United Nations has imposed limited sanctions on Iran to stop it enriching uranium and Washington is pushing for harsher sanctions against a program it believes is aimed at building an atom bomb, an accusation tehran rejects. Washington has increased pressure on non-US companies in the past year not to invest in Iran and some analysts believe it could be hard for oil companies to maintain operations in both Iran and the United States, where Shell and its Spanish partner Repsol both have fields. Oil analysts Fadel Gheit says Shell is right to proceed in Iran: "This is very positive for the company because those that get in at an early stage will be rewarded. They are clearly willing to ignore Bush because he is coming to the end of his presidency and when he goes everything could change." (Guardian) - January 29: In a Newsweek interview entitled "The Man Without Doubt, " Dick Cheney reveals himself as completely unmoved by the realities of Iraq and his administration's foreign policy, and thoroughly unwilling to acknowledge any error, no matter how completely proven.
Dick Cheney
Cheney's rigid obduracy can be seen as almost pathological. Of Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki, proven unreliable and far more willing to participate in the extermination of his Sunni rivals than willing to cooperate in building a representative democracy, Cheney says simply, "At this stage, we don't have any reason to doubt him." Of Iran, he seems comfortable with the idea of beginning a potentially horrific and calamitous military confrontation with that country, justifying such an invasion by saying, "A lot of people in the area -- I don't want to attribute this to any one particular government -- but a lot of people in the area feel directly threatened. ...Most of the nations in that part of the world believe their security is supported, if you will, by the United States. They want us to have a major presence there. When we—as the president did, for example, recently -- deploy another aircraft-carrier task force to the gulf, that sends a very strong signal to everybody in the region that the United States is here to stay, that we clearly have significant capabilities and that we are working with friends and allies as well as the international organizations to deal with the Iranian threat." - Cheney continues to disparage his political opponents, even within his own party, focusing his disdain on Republican maverick Chuck Hagel: "Let's say I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it's very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved."
- Cheney continues to stick to his story of Iraq being, overall, a tremendous success, and that the war was sufficiently justified by himself and his fellows in the Bush administration: "There's no question that the struggle has gone on longer than we anticipated, especially in Baghdad. ...It does not, though, lead me to conclude that what we're doing in terms of our overall effort, taking down Saddam Hussein's regime, standing up a new democracy in Iraq, isn't a worthy objective. I think it is. I think we have made significant progress. There's still a lot more to do -- no question about it. The conflict we're involved in -- not just Iraq, but on the broader basis against al-Qaeda, against the threat that's represented by the extreme elements of Islam on a global basis now -- is going to go on for a long time. And it's not something that's going to end decisively, and there's not going to be a day when we can say, 'There, now we have a treaty, problem solved.' It's a problem that I think will occupy our successors maybe for two or three or four administrations to come. It is an existential conflict." (MSNBC)
- January 29: Legal organizations and major corporations have come out in support of the lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay after Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles "Cully" Stimson said that corporations should pressure their law firms to stop assisting the detainees.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
In a radio interview in mid-January, Stimson stated the names of a dozen law firms that volunteer their services to represent detainees, and suggested that the CEOs of the firms' corporate clients should make the lawyers "choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms." Instead of generating a wave of criticism against the lawyers, as he says he intended, Stimson himself has become a target for criticism, forcing Stimson first to apologize for his remarks and later triggering his resignation. The episode has escalated the level of public support for the legal rights of the detainees, nearly 400 of whom just marked the start of their sixth year of incarceration at the base. - Stimson, during his January 11 interview with Federal News Radio, said that the cause of detainees is "not popular" with the American people and that the list of major law firms representing the detainees is "shocking." Stimson added, "I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hurt their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms." Stimson then named about a dozen firms, including WilmerHale, and said that corporations would become outraged when they realized that their legal fees were subsidizing this kind of pro bono work. Along with the Stimson interview, a Wall Street Journal columnist quoted an unnamed US official making similar remarks in a column that also included the names of several top firms.
- Now, some lawyers for detainees are accusing the Pentagon of an organized effort to generate bad publicity for the firms. Baltimore-based lawyer William Murphy , who represents a Kuwaiti detainee, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records of communications between senior Pentagon officials and the media before the interview in a bid to uncover evidence of a smear campaign. And the Bar Association of San Francisco has asked the California State Bar to probe whether Stimson violated legal ethics by suggesting a boycott of firms representing Guantanamo Bay detainees.
- Stimson will resign on February 2. A Pentagon spokesman says "He believed it hampered his ability to be effective in this position." Stimson says his decision to resign is his own, and is not made due to pressure from his superiors.
- Charles Rudnick , a spokesman for Boston Scientific Corp., says his company supports the decision of its law firm, WilmerHale, to represent six men who were arrested in Bosnia in 2001 "because our legal system depends on vigorous advocacy for even the most unpopular causes." Brackett Denniston, senior vice president and general counsel of General Electric, says the company strongly disagrees with the suggestion that it discriminate against law firms that do such work. "Justice is served when there is quality representation even for the unpopular," Denniston says. And Verizon issues a similar statement.
- The lawyers welcome these expressions of solidarity from their paying clients. "It would seem [the Pentagon] made a miscalculation," said Stephen Oleskey, an attorney at WilmerHale in Boston who has traveled to Guantanamo Bay seven times since he took up the case in 2004. "We haven't had any clients call up and say, 'We are really deeply disturbed that you are advocating for fair hearings.' The amount of support [we have gotten] has been heartening." Oleskey adds, "As time has gone on, it has become plainer that it is an important issue for our justice system. People have been more and more interested in hearing about it. We have been asked to speak at universities, human rights groups, and churches." Michael Ratner , president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that in his early days of defending Guantanamo detainees he got hundreds of hate letters from the public every time he spoke about the issue on television. But now, he says he receives only positive feedback, especially since Stimson's remarks. "They miscalculated, that's for sure," he says. Ratner helps coordinate 500 lawyers and 120 law firms across the country to defend the detainees. (Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune)
- January 29: The liberal radio network Air America, facing bankruptcy, is rescued by a hefty investment from Manhattan real estate developer Stephen Green. Air America's star radio host, comedian Al Franken, is leaving the network to explore a 2008 Senate bid; Franken will be replaced by well-known, erudite progressive Thom Hartmann. Other personnel changes may be announced in the near future. (Huffington Post)
- January 29: Conservative pundit Dick Morris tells the audience of Fox News's Hannity & Colmes that he believes "somebody close" to the "war room" of Democratic senator and presidential candidate Hilllary Clinton "indeed planted" the discredited accusation with Insight Magazine that Senator Barack Obama, another Democratic presidential contender, attended a Muslim madrassa in his youth.
Conservative smear campaigns
Morris, who himself calls the Insight accusation against Obama "inaccurate," gives no substantiation for his assertion beyond his own "belie[f]." The smear against Clinton's campaign remains, in the words of ABC News, "unproven and unsubstantiated." Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said of the smear, "We have no connection to this story." Similarly, Obama strategist David Axelrod said he did not "believe...for a second" the allegation that Clinton's camp was behind the story. As documented in several items above, the story originated, not with the Clinton campaign, but with writers at Insight, a Web-based news magazine published by the conservative Washington Times. The article gave no information as to the authenticity of the charge except to cite anonymous sources. - Readers of this site can search for a number of similarly baseless smear attempts by Insight against Democrats. And Morris has proudly boasted of his attempt to "swift-boat" Clinton; in a January 20 syndicated column, Robert Novak wrote of Morris's panhandling for donations to fund a film "documentary" of Hillary Clinton. According to Novak, in a mailing sent out by the Presidential Coalition, a group run by Republican activist and discredited former congressional staffer David Bossie, Morris wrote: "If you liked how the Swift Boat Veterans turned the tide against John Kerry, you understand how a top Clinton aide can turn the tables and stop a Clinton-style liberal from becoming the next president of the United States." (Morris was a Clinton administration advisor until he was forced to resign after being caught hiring a prostitute to allow him to suck her toes and perform other unusual sex acts.) Morris has been caught in repeated lies against Democrats, most frequently against one or the other of the Clintons, but also against Obama. (Fox News/MediaMatters)
- January 29: Conservative radio host and blogger Mike Gallagher writes that he was sickened -- literally -- by seeing Jane Fonda, or "Hanoi Jane," in the parlance of the right, speak at the January 27 antiwar rally in Washington.
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
A legitimate reaction, one supposes, though one could be forgiven for having trouble believing that Gallagher became physically ill at the sight of Jane Fonda, or anyone else. But what is noteworthy is Gallagher's recommendation for keeping Fonda and her ilk from being heard. "Unless we speak out against the Jane Fondas and Tim Robbins and Sean 'Spiccoli' Penn[s] of the world, we will deserve them," Gallagher writes. "Until we drown their pitiful, leftist voices out with shouts of patriotism and support, this will be our fault." And how to do this? "[I]t will take another terror attack on American soil in order to render these left-leaning crazies irrelevant again. Remember how quiet they were after 9/11? No one dared take them seriously. It was the United States against the terrorist world, just like it should be." So, is Gallagher recommending that terrorists conduct another horrific attack against the US in order to shut the antiwar activists up? (Mike Gallagher)
