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
July 2003
Week Three
- July 15: Bush administration plans to present evidence of a massive buildup of WMDs by Syria are derailed when the CIA strenuously objects to the assessment. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a leading administration hawk, is scheduled to present the so-called evidence to the House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee, but his appearance is rescheduled for September. Bolton was expected to state the administration's position that Syria has reached the point in its weapons program where it represents a threat to the region's stability. The CIA claims that the position is exaggerated. Bolton's planned remarks cause a "revolt" among intelligence experts who thought they inflated the progress Syria has made in its weapons programs, says a U.S. official involved in the dispute. CIA objections and comments span a 35- to 40-page document. Intelligence officials are increasingly vocal about their anger at their material being misued and misrepresented by the administration: says one official, "[p]eople are fed up." Bolton's aides claim that the meeting was postponed merely due to a scheduling conflict, but other sources say the meeting was postponed because the "bitter" dispute couldn't be resolved, with the Office of Management and Budget refusing to give final approval for Bolton's appearance. Other sources say that the White House didn't want Bolton subjected to questioning about the veracity of the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Bolton's claim of May 2002 that Cuba was developing biological weapons was later proven to be false. (Miami Herald)
- July 15: Reporter David Corn discusses the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, with Joseph Wilson. Wilson is outraged over Novak's course of action, but, noting that the media hasn't yet picked up on Plame's outing, is hoping against hope that the entire outing will blow over without gaining any attention. Corn wants to write about the impact of the Novak column, and Wilson merely says, "I'm not going to tell you how to do your job." Corn then calls Novak, who tells Corn that he had been tipped off by administration officials about Plame, and he saw no problem with outing her. "I figured if they gave it to me, they'd give it to others," he says. "I'm a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it's accurate, I generally use it."
- The next day, Corn publishes an article on The Nation's Web site, titled "A White House Smear." In it he asks whether Bush officials, by revealing the name of a covert CIA agent, broke the law in order to strike back at Wilson. Corn, well versed in the details of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, discusses the possibility that Novak's sources broke the IIPA. "Will there be an inquiry?" Corn asks. This is the first article to suggest that the Plame leak may have been a federal crime. The mainstream media ignores the article, but within two days it garners over 100,000 hits, prompting other Web sites and bloggers to angrily demand explanations from both the Bush administration and from the media. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- July 15: An investigative report by the Army finds that US troops often have to buy their own equipment from private manufacturers such as L.L. Bean because their own equipment is inadequate: the Army boots can't handle the Iraqi terrain, their pistol magazines fail to push the bullets into the chamber for firing, and their field radios are too weak to reach support units just a few blocks away. One army official complains that a typical mountain climbing expedition is better outfitted than the troops fighting Bush's war. (Jim Hightower/AlterNet)
- July 15: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton calls for an independent investigation into into the veracity of President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime was building a nuclear bomb. Clinton suggests the White House may have tailored its intelligence "for a pre-ordained political outcome." The president's use of flawed information when the country is on the brink of war, she says, "goes to the very heart of the power of the presidency to lead the nation." Ari Fleischer counters, "We don't know if it's true, but nobody -- but nobody -- can say it was wrong. That is not known." Representative David Obey says, "These officials should be reminded that what is at stake is not just the credibility of one man or even the credibility of the office of the president of the United States. What we place in the balance is the credibility of the United States as a nation and as leader of the free world." Republican Senate leaders will block any such inquiry. (Buffalo News)
- July 15: Representative Henry Waxman writes a letter to the Select Committee on Intelligence demanding the answers to four questions: how did the US receive and evaluate intelligence about Iraq's attempt to purchase "yellowcake" uranium from Niger; who is responsible for the administration's repeated use of the forged information; has the administration attempted to conceal what it knows about the evidence; and why hasn't Bush dismissed or sanctioned the officials responsible for the "error." A reply answering those questions has not yet been tendered. Waxman calls for public hearings by the Intelligence Committee, which have yet to be scheduled. (Henry Waxman)
- July 15: The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Carl Levin, accuses the Bush administration of "a broad pattern of dissemblance in making its case for waging war on Iraq." Instead of the debunked claim about Iraq's attempt to buy uranium from Niger as an isolated instance, Levin says, "[t]he misleading statement about African uranium is not an isolated incident. There is a significant amount of troubling evidence that it was part of a pattern of exaggerations and misleading statements. ...The President's statement that Iraq was attempting to acquire African uranium was not a 'mistake.' It was not inadvertent. It was not a slip. It was negotiated between the CIA and the NSC. ...It was calculated. It was misleading. ...The sole purpose of that [uranium] statement was to make the American people believe that the American government believed the statement to be true, and that it was strong evidence of Iraq's attempt to obtain nuclear weapons. ...But the truth was that, at the very time the words were spoken, our government did not believe it was true." (Agence France-Press/Clari News)
- July 15: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay dismisses the questions of the Bush administration's credibility as "incredibly overblown," and suggests that the entire issue is being manufactured by Democratic presidential candidates hoping to create an election-year issue: "When you listen to the rhetoric, you start to wonder which side won. There is no margin of victory that could satisfy them. They didn't want to fight in the first place and they've spewed more rhetoric at President Bush than they ever did at Saddam Hussein. ...They think if they just get a little bit angrier, and a little bit meaner and a little bit louder the American people will start hating the president as much as they do." DeLay insists that Bush "didn't lie. He didn't mislead anybody. His statement was accurate." DeLay's statements are part of an administration effort to paint the credibility issue as nothing more than election-year politics, with departing press secretary Ari Fleischer criticizing the media for promulgating a "media feeding frenzy that misinterprets why America went to war." Journalism professor Bryce Nelson retorts, "It's much more than a media frenzy, because it does reflect on the truthfulness of the U.S. government, and whether they distorted facts to get into the war. ...The coverage is probably less than it should be." (ABC News, New York Times)
- July 15: Veteran political writer Robert Scheer writes, "On national security, the buck doesn't stop with [CIA director] Tenet, the current fall guy. The buck stops with Bush and his national security advisor, who is charged with funneling intelligence data to the president. That included cluing in the president that the CIA's concerns were backed by the State Department's conclusion that 'the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious.' ...There was no evidence for painting Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat. The proper reaction should have been to support the U.N. inspectors in doing their work in an efficient and timely fashion. We now know, and perhaps the White House knew then, that the inspectors eventually would come up empty-handed because no weapons of mass destruction program existed -- not even a stray vial of chemical and biological weapons has been discovered. However, that would have obviated the administration's key rationale for an invasion, so lies substituted for facts that didn't exist. And there, dear readers, exists the firm basis for bringing a charge of impeachment against the president who employed lies to lead us into war." (Working for Change)
- July 15: Australia's Office of National Assessments and Defence Intelligence Organisation are being pressured by Australiam Prime Minister John Howard's administration to admit that they failed to inform the administration that evidence showing Iraq was attempting to rebuild its nuclear program was weak: "Despite John Howard's claim that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons capable of 'causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale,' no evidence of their existence has been found by occupying armies searching for them. With daily reminders of what they presented publicly as a casus belli shortly before the war, increasingly discomforted politicians are looking for scapegoats among the intelligence community. In Australia, the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation are being strongarmed into admissions that they failed to pass on doubts about claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger." (The Age)
- July 15: Christian conservative Pat Robertson asks for nationwide prayer for a miracle to remove three justices from the Supreme Court so that they can be replaced by conservatives. "We ask for miracles in regard to the Supreme Court," he says on his TV show, The 700 Club. His "prayer offensive" is sparked by a recent 6-3 Court decision decriminalizing sodomy between consenting adults. In a letter published on the CBN Web site, he writes, "One justice is 83 years old, another has cancer and another has a heart condition. Would it not be possible for God to put it in the minds of these three judges that the time has come to retire?" The first judge is John Paul Stevens, the second is Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who underwent colon cancer surgery in 1999; the identity of the third justice is unclear. Stevens and Ginsberg are widely regarded as the Court's most liberal members. Some observers feel that Robertson is indirectly asking people to pray for God to strike these three justices dead. (CNN)
- Mid-July: Concern is growing within the White House communications department that the attack-Wilson strategy may be going too far. Communications director Dan Bartlett, who played his own part in pumping reporters' interest in going after Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson, now sees the strategy as unproductive and meaningless. Bartlett, according to media aide Adam Levine, "was against the idea of the wife as a talking point." But the strategy has a life of its own; Levine has already fielded more calls from reporters about the Novak column outing Plame. Karl Rove and Lewis Libby "are flacking this," the reporter tells Levine -- meaning that Rove and Libby are pushing the story. Levine tells Bartlett, "You've got to rein these guys in." Bartlett rolls his eyes. "I know, I know," he says. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- July 16: A forthcoming report from a Congressional investigation into intelligence lapses preceding the 9/11 attacks will state that US intelligence agencies failed to obtain reliable human sources inside the Afghanistan training camps run by al-Qaeda before the attacks. The lack of such sources left counterterrorism officials largely blind to al-Qaeda's specific intentions before the attacks and contributed to what the joint intelligence committees will conclude in their report was a lack of knowledge about the terrorist group even as the agencies for years collected information that showed the terror network hoped to strike inside United States. The failure of human intelligence is a new finding from a report that should provide a number of new insights into the activities of American intelligence agencies before the attacks, which have long maintained that they had adequate intelligence before the attacks. The report is due to be issued within the month, with large portions of it edited out due to concerns over security. Much of the withheld portions concern Saudi Arabia's role in the attacks. (New York Times)
- July 16: A Pentagon committee led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advised President Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz's committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate's intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue. Spokesmen for Wolfowitz and CIA Director Tenet deny the claims. The claims revolve around the secret Office of Special Plans, set up in 2001 by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and headed by Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Abrum Shulsky. The OSP, which supposedly disbanded in March 2003, was set to gather intelligence on the Iraqi threat that remained uncovered by the CIA and FBI and present it to the White House. Much of the information gathered by the OSP was provided by Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who has been proven unreliable. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq. According to the sources, the OSP pushed for the mention of Iraq's putative purchase attempt of uranium in the State of the Union address as early as October 2002. (Information Clearinghouse)
- July 16: Pressure is mounting on Vice President Dick Cheney to resign amid accusations of using false evidence to build the case for war, for using his office to insist that a false claim about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from Africa to restart its nuclear programme be included in Bush's State of the Union address over the objections of CIA director George Tenet, and for knowingly misleading Congress when the administration sought its authorisation for the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein. The pressure comes largely from a group of senior intelligence officials who believe that information from the intelligence community was selectively used to support a war fought for political reasons. In an open letter to President George Bush, the group has asked that he demand Mr Cheney's resignation. (Independent)
- July 16: Senator Edward Kennedy says that US troops in Iraq are "police officers in a shooting gallery" and that they are paying the price for the "ideological pride" of the Bush administration, which has failed to secure broad international support for rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq. He warned that the situation on the ground will only deteriorate if the administration doesn't seek help from NATO and the United Nations: "It was a foregone conclusion that we would win the war. ...But pride goes before a fall, and the all-important question now is whether we can win the peace. In fact, we are at serious risk of losing it." He continued, "It's a disgrace that the case for war seems to have been based on shoddy intelligence, hyped intelligence, and even false intelligence. All the evidence points to the conclusion that they put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth." He will introduce an amendment to a Defense Department spending bill that would direct the Bush administration to deliver to Congress a plan for rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq, including a plan to win a UN resolution authorizing an international peacekeeping mission. A multinational United Nations force would have more credibility with Iraqis, some of whom view the US troops as occupiers instead of liberators, he said. A NATO peacekeeping force, meanwhile, would offer expertise in nation-building. The administration has said it would welcome troops from other nations to participate in postwar operations, but it has refused to formally ask for a multilateral force. French President Jacques Chirac dismissed any possibility that French forces would be sent to Iraq without a UN mandate. India recently refused a US request to participate in the rebuilding effort in Iraq, a snub Kennedy said would be less common if a request was made through UN and NATO channels. (Boston Globe)
- July 16: In his online column for The Nation, David Corn is the first to publicly speculate that "two senior administration officials" broke the law when they identified CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to Robert Novak. Corn writes, "Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security -- and break the law -- in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?" (Frank Rich [PDF file])
"Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our barbarity." -- Adolf Hitler
- July 16: An attempt by Democratic Senator Jon Corzine to require independent investigation of the prewar intelligence and Bush's claims of Iraqi military might is defeated in the Senate on a 51-45 vote. Corzine sought to include the amendment as part of a $386.6 billion defense spending bill. Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, a Republican, describes the proposal as "an attempt to smear the president of the United States." (Guardian)
- July 16: A Congressional investigation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans is in the works. The OSP is one of the primary sources of the intelligence that portrayed Iraq as a burgeoning nuclear threat with extensive ties to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, intelligence that has now been proven false. "The concern is they were in the cherry-picking business -- cherry-picking half-truths and rumors and only highlighting pieces of information that bolstered the administration's case for war," says Democratic Representative Ellen Tauscher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "Everything we've seen since the war has confirmed intelligence community suspicions about its [the Office of Special Plans'] sources of information," says retired State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann. "The rosy assumption about troops being greeted with flowers and hugs -- that came from that stream of intelligence. The assurance that they knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were, or that Iraq was ready to employ chemical and biological weapons in battle within 45 minutes of an order -- all of those stories have proven wrong." Thielmann is still unclear why the civilian-run office was formed. "Do they [staffers in the Office of Special Plans] have expertise in Iraqi culture? Are they missile experts? Nuclear engineers? There's no logical explanation for the office's creation except that they wanted people to find evidence to support their answers [about war]. ...There's a formal, well-established intelligence process in Washington, which Rumsfeld apparently wanted to circumvent. ...Their operation was virtually invisible to us; I don't remember seeing any of their intelligence information." He says the Office of Special Plans "had no status in the intelligence community." (Salon)
- July 16: After ABC News runs a story about declining morale among reporters being fired upon in Iraq, an official from the White House communications staff contacts Internet reporter and enthusiastic conservative supporter Matt Drudge, encouraging Drudge to push the "story" that the ABC journalist who wrote the story is both Canadian and gay. Drudge, of course, does so. (Washington Post/Paul Waldman)
- July 17: CIA Director George Tenet claims that a White House official insisted that Bush's State of the Union address include the reference to Iraq's putative nuclear weapons program, a reference that has now been proven to rest on forged evidence, according to Senator Richard Durbin of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Durbin says he knows the name of the official, but can't reveal it due to the confidentiality of the proceedings. New press secretary Scott McClellan disputes Durbin's account: "That characterization is nonsense. It's not surprising, coming from someone who was in a rather small minority in Congress who did not support the action we took." Durbin tells ABC that Tenet "certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa. ...And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth and unfortunately those sixteen words were included in the most important speech the president delivers in any given year." McClellan accuses Durbin of trying to "continue to rewrite history." Durbin observes, "The more important question is who is it in the White House who was hellbent on misleading the American people and why are they still there? ...All roads still lead back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." Tenet also tells the committee that he was not aware that Bush's speech would make a reference to Iraq's so-called nuclear program. "Members were stunned," says one Democratic senator, "because he said he basically wasn't aware of the sentence until recently." Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman says that Bush should accept some responsibility, and adds, "This president seems to be saying, 'The buck never stops here.'" Senator Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate intelligence panel and also a presidential candidate, raps, "We do not have a George Tenet problem; we have a George Bush problem." (Guardian, Washington Post, Bob Woodward)
- July 17: MSNBC identifies the official who insisted on inserting the reference to Iraq's supposed attempt to purchase uranium in the State of the Union address as Robert Joseph, a hardline staff member of the National Security Council who helps deal with the issues surrounding WMDs. According to the story, Joseph argued with Alan Foley, the CIA's weapons proliferation director, over the inclusion of the reference; Joseph prevailed and the reference was included. The question remains as to who told Joseph to push for the inclusion, since clearly Joseph does not have the authority to make such a decision himself. (The White House later claims Foley never spoke with Joseph about the claim, as noted below, and, embittered, Foley leaves the CIA soon afterwards.) Possibilities for including the reference include Joseph's boss, Condoleezza Rice, and Vice President Cheney. Joseph himself claims to remember nothing of any such exchange with Foley, and White House communications director Dan Bartlett dismisses the story as "a conspiracy theory." In retrospect, Joseph is most likely a fall guy, with the blame actually resting on Condoleezza Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley. Two other analysts for the CIA tried to raise questions about the claims, and, according to a CIA official, were "smacked down." (Salon, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Bob Woodward, James Risen)
- July 17: Bush and Blair hold a joint press conference at the Capital. Ironically, while Tony Blair says to Congress, "We promised Iraq democratic government -- we will deliver it," the news ticker at the bottom of the Fox News broadcast reports that Iraq administrator Paul Bremer is announcing that there would be no elections in Iraq until next year or later. Bush claims that Iraq has a free government, and says that is evidenced by the fact that he has just appointed Iraq's ruling council. He says of Iraq's lack of elections, "Democracy will take time to create." Blair does say that Iraq bought 270 tons of uranium from Niger in the early 1980s, but he neglects to mention that that particular purchase was authorized and facilitated by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Britain as part of their secret efforts to provide Iraq with a nuclear program. Blair also asserts that he has concrete proof that Iraq was indeed trying to purchase uranium from Niger, but he refuses to provide it. Blair adds, "Let us say one thing: if we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive." After the press conference, Bush tells a reporter that the Iraqi WMDs will be found. (Greg Palast, MSNBC, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- July 17: More information has been revealed about Dick Cheney's off-the-books "intelligence agancy," the Office of Special Plans. Set up to provide a hardline, neoconservative spin to the intelligence that already comes into the administration, the OSP assisted the administration in making its sales pitch for a war with Iraq when the intelligence supporting that push was less than credible. Ostensibly a small advisory board of less than 10 employees, the OSP hired scores of what it termed "temporary consultants." Most of these "consultants" were lawyers, congressional staffers, and analysts from the various conservative foundations and think tanks in Washington. Few had any experience in intelligence work. "Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," says one intelligence source. Another source, defense analyst John Pike, says the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends." The OSP quickly built a reputation for unreliability and ideological rigidity. "They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," says Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the State Department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September 2002. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
- The Pentagon and the DIA were often mystified by the operations of the OSP: "The iceberg analogy is a good one," says a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them." Thielmann agrees: "They were a pretty shadowy presence. Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended." Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, says, "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees." The OSP has unprecedented access to the White House, and as such, so does other organizations such as the Iraqi opposition led by rich exile Ahmad Chalabi and, more worrisomely, so does a similar ad hoc intelligence organization within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically created to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorize. "None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," claims one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms. The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
- The OSP's "product" is fed into the offices of Cheney, his chief of staff Lewis Liddy, and deputy security advisor Stephen Hadley. These officials in turn leak some OSP claims to the press, and bring others to the attention of the CIA and the State Department analysts, insisting that this or that claim be investigated immediately. (It is noteworthy to know that Abe Shulsky, a defense expert who runs the OSP office under its chief, William Luti, is a believer in a philosophy espoused by, among others, Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts have hidden meanings that only "an elite" can comprehend. Strauss taught the concept of the necessary "noble lie" to tell the people for their own good.) (Guardian, Newsweek/MSNBC)
- July 17: Time reporter Matthew Cooper finally gets to use the information he has gleaned from Lewis Libby in an Web-based article, co-written with John Dickerson and Massimo Calabresi, titled "A War on Wilson?" Cooper is late in coming across the Novak column from July 14 outing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent, but the column does not obviate the Time article because, as editor Michael Duffy says, their own article has more "pushback" from Joseph Wilson. The article asks the question: "Has the Bush administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium?" The answer: "Perhaps." The article notes that the White House has been taking "public and private whacks at Wilson," and notes the efforts by several White House officials to steer reporters towards looking at Plame. The article notes that the White House officials -- Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, though the article does not name them -- have "suggested" that Plame was "involved" in her husband's trip to Niger, a suggestion that Wilson is quoted as calling "bullsh*t." The article takes a cynical look at Rove's suggestion that Wilson's trip to Niger actually bolstered the Iraq-Niger claim, using the 1999 visit by an Iraqi official to Niger with the intent of expanding Iraq's commercial ties with that country, and with Wilson retorting, "That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant quantity of uranium as the president alleged? These guys really need to get serious." Although the article includes Libby's quote about Cheney's lack of knowledge about Wilson's fact-finding mission, it doesn't make the case for the administration, and it doesn't dwell on Plame's supposed involvement. Instead, it focuses on the White House attack campaign against Wilson, and gives Wilson the last word: "This is a smear job."
- On the other side of the political divide, the reliably conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page prints an op-ed wondering why the White House is so defensive over the infamous 16-word claim from the January State of the Union address. The op-ed is essentially a paean to Lewis Libby's integrity and the case for the Iraq-Niger claim. Like other reporters, the Journal editorialists have been shown, by Libby, carefully selected portions of the October 2002 NIE that bolster the uranium charges, and the editorial reflects that. It also continues to make the erroneous claim that British intelligence supplied the documents that form the basis for the claim (in reality, Italian intelligence supplied the documents, which are, of course, arrant forgeries.) The editorial concludes, "The decision to disarm the Iraqi dictator wasn't based on a single intelligence report but on a mountain of evidence compiled over a dozen years." Libby's efforts to get his spin out, using the NIE, had failed with the New York Times's Judith Miller. They have now succeeded with the Journal. (Time, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- July 17: Watchdog group Judicial Watch releases a statement about documents in its possession from March 2001 which show the Cheney Energy Task Force, which met secretly to determine America's energy program, used detailed maps and charts of Iraq's oilfields, pipelines, refineries, and terminals to chart its proposals, along with a list of preferred US and European corporations it thought best to manage and exploit Iraq's oil production. This is additional evidence that the Bush administration planned on taking control of Iraq's oil industry well before 9/11. (Judicial Watch)
- July 17: Senator Bob Graham says, "There's been a pattern of deceit throughout this administration. If the standard that was set by the House of Representatives relative to Bill Clinton is the new standard for impeachment, then this clearly comes within that standard." (MSNBC)
British MOD official and whistleblower David Kelly found dead under mysterious circumstances
- July 18: The body of Ministry of Defense official David Kelly is found in the woods near his home in Oxfordshire. Kelly was last seen by his family as he left to go for a walk. So far, police are treating the discovery as an "unexplained death." Kelly is widely believed to have been the source for BBC media reports that the Blair administration "sexed up" a dossier on Iraqi WMDs; the administration insists that Kelly voluntarily admitted his role as media informant, but others say that Kelly was being set up as a "fall guy" for the administration. On July 15, Kelly was grilled by the Foreign Affairs Committee on his role in the media leaks, where he denied being the source of the information. A Blair spokesperson says, "In these circumstances, people should not jump to conclusions and they should exercise restraint." Another spokesperson promises that the Ministry of Defence, who first named Kelly as the media "leak," will hold an independent investigation into Kelly's death. MP John Maples says, "There must be more to this than we had thought. I do not know what that means, I just think there is." Even though an investigation has not yet been mounted, official sources are already characterizing Kelly's death as a suicide. Many of the residents of Southmoor, Kelly's home village, believe that Kelly was hounded by the Blair administration and may have been murdered to keep his mouth shut: "I'm very angry and I think they have killed him as I think most of the village do. The awful grilling he went through before the Commons committee, I think that was wicked," says a fellow villager, who added that almost no one in the village believes Kelly committed suicide. Six months before, Kelly had predicted that he would be found "dead in the woods" if Baghdad was attacked, according to testimony elicited during the investigation of his death in late August.
- It is proven that Kelly was targeted for smearing by Blair officials in the same fashion that Joseph Wilson is being targeted by Bush officials, though Kelly is being used to get at BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. "It would f*ck Gilligan if Kelly was his source," noted Alastair Campbell, Blair's chief of communications, who had been in charge of the "sexed-up" dossier. He was hounded during his testimony by the MPs, who alternately accuse him of being Gilligan's "fall guy" and of trying himself to sabotage the Blair administration. The last e-mail Kelly sends is to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had used him as a source before and now offered him her encouragement. In the e-mail, Kelly mentions that there are "many dark actors playing games" in the situation. Hours later, he walked into the woods, where his body will later be found with the left wrist slashed. (Independent, BBC, Scotland on Sunday, Reuters/Boston Globe)
- July 18: The Bush administration releases selected portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to counter claims that it ignored warnings about forged documents being used to "prove" Iraq's attempts to restart its nuclear program. The NIE report gives some general support to the administration's claims of Iraqi ties to terrorist groups, but the support is little more than supposition: "Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qaeda...already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct." The report also predicts that a US attack could bring about just such an alliance. The NIE indicates that Iraq would join with al-Qaeda in an attack on the United States only if it "would be [Hussein's] last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him" and only "if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable." Hussein "appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical or biological weapons] against the United States fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war," the estimate reads. According to the Washington Post, Bush and Condoleezza Rice both claim that they have never read the entire NIE, and may have missed some key material; the White House responds, "The President is not a fact-checker." House Speaker Dennis Hastert attempts to pin the blame for the intelligence's unreliability on Bill Clinton, and adds, "You know, intelligence is not an exact science." Hastert says that before the terror attacks of 9/11, "we had a hard time just figuring out what was going, because our foreign intelligence was decimated. The human intelligence was decimated in 10 years before" by Clinton's proclivity not to use human rights violators and other shady individuals as intelligence operatives, he continues. No intelligence official has stepped forward to verify Hastert's analysis. Both Bush and Rice have admitted that they did not read the NIE before the speech, but merely "skimmed" it.
- Unlike Lewis Libby, the White House released portions of the NIE that showed the tremendous amount of dissent over Iraq's WMDs, including a portion that discusses the INR's findings that the Iraq-Niger claims were "highly dubious." Reporters are astounded at communications director Dan Bartlett's admission that neither Bush nor Rice bothered to read the NIE before making their pronouncements, and hammer away at Bush's assertions as late as last week that he knew of no concerns about the quality of the intelligence underlying his claims. How could Bush and Rice not have known about the dissents that are clearly there in the NIE? Bartlett's attempts to dismiss the dissents as "footnotes" that Bush and Rice did not bother to read does not fly with several reporters. Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn observe, "Bartlett was trying to defend the White House. But he was presenting a picture of a commander in chief who had shown little -- or no -- interest in sorting out the disagreements among his intelligence agencies. Bush had issued definitive public statements about the gathering menace posed by Iraq's weapons programs without ever having read the fine print. (CBS, New York Observer, Smirking Chimp, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- July 18: A senior White House official tells reporters at a background briefing that "You can't draw a conclusion that we were warned by Ambassador [Joseph] Wilson that this was all dubious. ...It's just not accurate." Of course, Wilson's information about the forged Iraq-Niger documents, and his repeated warnings to the White House of the falsity of their allegations about Iraq's putative nuclear program, have been well documented. Later, a White House spokesman will acknowledge that the allegation "should not have risen to the level of a Presidential speech," referring to Bush's direct accusation in his January State of the Union address. (Seymour Hersh)
- July 18: Under fire for the upcoming trial of two British citizens currently being held in Guantanamo Bay, Bush fuels the worries of those who feel that they will not receive a fair trial when he characterizes them as "bad people." Bush seems to take their guilt for granted in his comments to the press: "The only thing I know for certain is that they are bad people. We look forward to working with the Blair government to deal with these issues. ...These were illegal combatants. They were picked up off the battlefield aiding and abetting the Taliban. ...I am not trying to try them in front of the cameras." British MPs want the two, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, tried in Britian in the same way that American detainee John Walker Lindh was tried in an American court. (Evening Standard)
- July 18: Republican representative Bill Thomas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, takes umbrage at his Democratic colleagues' walkout in protest of what Mark Crispin Miller calls "his Soviet-style chairmanship." The Democrats refuse to vote on the bill pending in committee, and choose to "hide" in the committee's library. Thomas, in blatant violation of the Constitution, sends Capital policemen to the library to roust the Democrats and force them back into chambers. (Article I of the Constitution specifically gives Senate and House members the right to attend or not attend votes and debates at their leisure.) When the Democrats refuse to budge, Thomas once again breaches the rules of the House and calls a vote anyway; the bill passes only by the votes of the GOP majority. The Democrats are outraged. Nancy Pelosi proposes a resolution the "extraordinary breach of law and protocol." Pelosi's colleague Lloyd Doggett thunders, "My friends, this is how tyranny begins. It is our responsibility to stand against a police state, to stand in favor of open dialogue rather than to permit a bill to pass with only the votes of one party, and move toward a one-party state." Fellow congressman John Lewis says, "I never thought, as a member of Congress, that I would be threatened with arrest in the library of the Ways and Means Committee." Pelosi's resolution is defeated on a straight party-line vote. Six days later, Thomas "tearfully" apologizes, but though some of his Democratic colleagues are mollified, his apology does nothing to curb his and other GOP chairmen's wont to flaunt the rules of law and the protocols of 200 years of legislative practice to further their own ends. (Mark Crispin Miller)
- July 18: Presidential candidate Howard Dean gives a list of 16 questions that the Bush administration should answer over the Iraq debacle, in a press conference in Iowa. The questions can be found at Dean's Web site. As of this writing, none of the questions have been answered in any depth by anyone in the government. (Howard Dean)
- July 19: The Bush administration gives yet another twist to its story of how it decided to add the reference to Iraq's putative purchase of uranium from Niger to Bush's State of the Union speech. This time, the explanation is that originally the speech was worded to say that "we know" various things about Iraq: "We know that Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," and "We also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa." White House speechwriters, not senior White House officials, included the reference to uranium, according to the new story. The day before the speech, the team drafting it decided that it would be more credible to tell the public as much as possible where they got the information for their claims; the uranium claim was sourced to British intelligence. As a result, the speech was rewritten so each statement would be specifically attributed. The NSC's Robert Joseph then got clearance from the CIA to use the statement; according to the story, the CIA did not mention that it pushed Britain not to use the claim in its own reporting. The CIA disputes this account. (New York Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
- July 19: The Bush administration is considering returning to the UN to ask for additional help in sending in more soldiers and/or sharing the costs of occupying Iraq, though no specific resolutions or requests have yet been drafted. The UN is resisting putting together a UN-sponsored force to reinforce or replace American and British forces in Iraq. Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN who will go to Iraq in September as the chief British representative, says, "We've got to get around the problem that we are the occupying power, and people don't want to join the occupying powers." (Swiss Info)
- July 19: Evidence that North Korea is constructing a second uranium processing plant comes to light. North Korea has already admitted to reprocessing 8,000 spent uranium rods, creating enough weapons-grade plutonium to make about half a dozen atomic weapons. The IAEA calls North Korea's nuclear production program "the most immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime," but the Bush administration continues to downplay its seriousness. (New York Times)
- July 19: Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba comes forward to say that she is the one who turned over documents purporting to show Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger to the US Embassy in Rome. The documents are, of course, forgeries. "I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that's exactly why I was very worried," she says. "If it turned out to be a hoax, and I published it, I would have ended my career." Burba journeyed to Niger to try to check out the validity of the documents, and came home convinced that they were fakes. See the October 15, 2001 entry, and others throughout this site, for more information.(MSNBC)
- July 19: An opinion piece in the New York Times criticizes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for misrepresenting history in his defense of the chaos in post-war Iraq. Rumsfeld compares post-war Iraq to America in 1783, characterizing that period as a time of "chaos and confusion," marked by "looting, crime, mobs storming buildings, breakdown of government structures and institutions that maintained civil order, rampant inflation caused by the lack of a stable currency, supporters of the former regime roaming the streets...." In actuality, Rumsfeld is consistently wrong. America was not plagued by bands of roving guerrilla loyalists, "many of whom had fought against the Continental Army." Almost everyone who publicly took sides against the Revolution left with the evacuating British forces in 1782 and 1783. More than 100,000 refugees ended up in the West Indies, Canada or Britain itself. Nor did a "breakdown of government structures" lead to widespread theft and looting. Historians have uncovered no evidence of a crime wave in the 1780's; states and localities never descended into chaos. By mid-1777, every state had a constitution in place, under directions from from the Second Continental Congress. By the early 1780's some of those governments were being reorganized, but they never ceased to function. Iraq's lack of a stable currency was not mirrored in post-Revolution America; while Continental currency did depreciate to near-worthlessness by 1780, the states and the national government were well on the way to getting their finances under control long before the US Constitution was drafted.
- The writer, historian Mary Beth Norton, concludes, "[E]ven if one ignores Mr. Rumsfeld's factual errors, his analogy with today's Iraq seems to hold little water. For one, before independence, the American colonies had no unified government: the Revolution and its aftermath created the nation. Prewar Iraq, on the other hand, had a highly centralized economy and government, which has now collapsed. The United States won its war. Iraq lost. Iraqis must now create a new polity under the supervision of an occupying power. There was no British Paul Bremer sitting in Philadelphia and telling us what to do in the 1780's. Most important, perhaps, Americans in the 1780's had a tradition of self-governance and civil society stretching back more than 150 years, to the foundation of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1619 and continuing within the individual states. Under Saddam Hussein, any semblance of civil society in Iraq was ruthlessly suppressed for decades." Rumsfeld's attempts to equate post-war Iraq with the formation of a democratic America is obviously motivated, and transparently wrong. (New York Times)
- July 19: Accusations of torture perpetrated on Iraqis by US military personnel are being investigated by Amnesty International. One Iraqi, Khraisan al-Aballi, claims that his home was raided by American soldiers, who shot his brother Dureid, and arrested Khraisan, Dureid, and their 80-year old father. Khraisan says he was kept awake for a week in detention, stripped naked and bound hand and foot with a bag over his head. After eight days he and his father were released. Khraisan cannot get any news of his brother; American authorities say they have never heard of him. Iraqis are disturbed that one of Iraq's most notorious prisons under Hussein, Abu Graib, is once again being used, this time by Americans, and once again, queues of relatives and friends are lining up outside the gates for news of their people in detention without being given anything useful. US officials deny that any such actions are taking place. (CBS/Truthout)
- July 19: Conservative Internet tabloid news maven Matt Drudge attempts to smear ABC reporter Jeffrey Kofman, who published a recent story about the stress suffered by US soldiers in Iraq, by "outing" Kofman as openly gay and Canadian. The smear attempt goes nowhere, but is more interesting because of Drudge's own preference to haunt gay bars (Drudge denies he is homosexual, but gay journalist David Brock says that he was openly and coarsely solicited by Drudge, who offered to be his "f*ck buddy"). (Toronto Star/Matt Crispin Miller, David Brock)
- July 20: The New York Times's Judith Miller, one of the most enthusiastic media mouthpieces for the administration's unsubstantiated claims about Iraqi WMDs, reverses course, now reporting that of the "578 suspect sites in Iraq" that were believed to house WMDs (down from her March 2003 claim of over 1.400), nothing has been found. Miller blames the failure on the Pentagon, noting the "chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among various military units, and shortages from everything from gasoline to soap." She adds damningly, "To this day, whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown."
- The entire media flap over WMDs prompts yet another Orwellian flip-flop by the administration. Now, the invasion is about freeing the Iraqi people from Hussein's tyranny, and it has always been so; never, ever about WMDs. Paul Wolfowitz, who just weeks before had called those putative WMDs a "core reason" for the war, says on July 21, "I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction. I'm concerned about getting Iraq on its feet." In other words, the year-long frightfest of smoking guns and mushroom clouds is no longer operative. (Frank Rich, p.101)
- July 20: NBC's Andrea Mitchell tells former ambassador Joseph Wilson that the White House is still pushing the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to her and other reporters. "The real story," she tells him that she is being told, "is...Wilson and his wife." She later tells Newsweek that "I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that was the real story." She refuses to name her sources.
- The next day, Karl Rove, just having returned from the annual Bohemian Grove retreat in northern California, has his secretary ask White House communications aide Adam Levine for the phone number of MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews. Rove had encountered Matthews at Bohemian Grove (which is characterized by another attendee as "essentially a summer camp for rich white men" with lots of alcohol and male bonding in the woods). Rove calls Matthews and discusses Robert Novak's outing of Plame. Matthews says that Rove is not in the least apologetic, and considers the outing of Plame's CIA status as nothing more than a dust-up in a political war, with Plame a full-fledged combatant and not an innocent bystander. Matthews is surprised by Rove's ferocity, and later describes Rove as "pretty revved up on the issue." Rove tells Matthews that the Wilsons "were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back." Matthews then calls Wilson and tells him that Rove has said, "Wilson's wife is fair game."
- Right-wing columnists and commentators are loudly echoing Rove's attack strategy. Clifford May, a New York Times reporter who is a former Republican Party spokesman, says, unfairly, that Wilson is a "pro-Saudi leftist partisan with an ax to grind." And former Reagan cabinet member Casper Weinberger calls Wilson a "sloppy" investigator with a "less than stellar" record when he was an ambassador. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- July 20: Retired CIA analyst and supervisor Ray McGovern says, "Never before in my 40 years of experience in this town has intelligence been used in so cynical and so orchestrated a way." McGovern is one of several retired intelligence analysts who say they are speaking out for those who can't inside the CIA. "The Agency analysts that we are in touch with are disheartened, dispirited, angry. They are outraged." (CBS/Google [cached copy])
- July 20: Democratic Senator Bob Graham says on Meet the Press that intelligence was available that should have made Bush realize the information in the uranium report was suspect, and names Vice President Dick Cheney as the one who should have steered him away from the inclusion of the allegation in his State of the Union address. Graham says, "The vice president is the one who went to the CIA on several occasions. He asked specifically for additional information on the Niger-Iraq connection. The United States sent an experienced ambassador, who came back after a full review with a report that these were fabricated documents. ...You cannot tell me that the vice president didn't receive the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice president didn't communicate that report to the president or national security advisers to the president." (AP/Hartford Courant)
- July 20: The online edition of Newsweek reveals that the upcoming report on 9/11 from Congress "slams" the FBI for failing to investigate al-Qaeda cells in the US, "especially in the San Diego area, where two of the hijackers were living with one of the bureau's own informants." The report also shows evidence that one of the hijackers' closest associates, Omar al-Bayoumi, may have been a Saudi Arabian government agent. "The report is sure to reignite questions about whether some Saudi officials were secretly monitoring the hijackers—or even facilitating their conduct. Questions about the Saudi role arose repeatedly during last year's joint House-Senate intelligence-committees inquiry. But the Bush administration has refused to declassify many key passages of the committees' findings. A 28-page section of the report dealing with the Saudis and other foreign governments will be deleted. 'They are protecting a foreign government,' charged Sen. Bob Graham, who oversaw the inquiry." The report also criticizes the Pentagon for resisting strikes on terrorist attacks in Afghanistan before 9/11, and the CIA for failing to pass along critical intelligence information to other agencies. "The report, one congressional investigator said, 'is a scathing indictment of the FBI as an agency that doesn't have a clue about terrorism.' Furious bureau officials say the report misstates the evidence." (MSNBC)
- July 20: The San Franciso Chronicle and columnist Maureen Dowd independently document the Pentagon's intent to punish soldiers, and their units, for speaking critically of aspects of the Iraq occupation to the press, many of whom air their complaints after Bush's "bring 'em on" speech and the resulting spike in US casualties. Apparently the orders to punish the soldiers for speaking out comes from the White House. Soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division aired some complaints to Good Morning America about their disappointment at being told over and over again that they were going home, only to be told later that they were staying; one soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face," and another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit. An earlier e-mail apparently sent by soldiers from the same unit read, in part: "Our morale is not high or even low. Our morale is nonexistent. We have been told twice that we were going home, and twice we have received a 'stop' movement to stay in Iraq. ...Our men and women deserve to be treated like the heroes they are, not like farm animals. Our men and women deserve to see their loved ones again and deserve to come home." Retaliation from Washington was swift. "It was the end of the world," says one officer. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers." The unit is staying in Iraq indefinitely.
- On July 16, the US Central Command's commander, General John Abizaid, said that some of the soldiers could be punished for their remarks: "None of us that wear this uniform are free to say anything disparaging about the secretary of defense or the president of the United States. ...Whatever action may be taken, whether it's a verbal reprimand or something more stringent, is up to the commanders on the scene." One US soldier in Germany responds to the question of speaking his mind by saying, "I'm not comfortable telling you what I really think, and I'm not going to lie to you, so it's better if I just don't say anything," and another soldier says, "C'mon man. People are getting into trouble for talking to the media, and now you want me to answer questions? Yeah, right." An Apache pilot in Iraq says that sometimes the higher-ups need to hear unpleasant opinions: "It's a fine line, but criticism in and of itself does not undermine discipline. ...If no one complains, these people will think that we're all happy down here even though we've been yanked around since day one." The wife of an Apache pilot says, "Frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing Pentagon officials, generals, politicians, and people at the Defense Department continue to say that the morale of the troops is still high, when every single person knows full well that it isn't." Rumors are running rampant through the US military that other units who have soldiers speaking their minds to reporters are deliberately being turned down for scheduled rotations out of Iraq, and instead are being left in Iraq for dramatically longer periods of time. Soldiers' letters and e-mails to and from Iraq are heavily censored, and in many cases are not delivered at all, because they express opinions not sanctioned by the administration or the US military's central command. (New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, my own sources)
- July 20: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright writes in the Washington Post: "Three years ago, America had vast diplomatic capital based on the goodwill we enjoyed around the world, and vast financial capital based on our international economic leadership and a record budget surplus. Now our capital of all kinds has been dissipated and we are left with more intractable dilemmas than resources or friends." (Washington Post)
- July 21: Tony Blair continues to insist that the dossier that was "sexed up" is accurate and undoctored. He says that WMDs have not yet been found in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had mounted an "organised programme of concealment" before the war. He seems to be contradicting his statements of last week, when he said "history will forgive" the invasion even if WMDs are not found. (Independent)
- July 21: Afghanistan's ambassador to India, Masood Khalili, warns that the Taliban is reforming. A year ago, Khalili notes, "the Taliban were scared, broken and disconcerted. Now they are forming again, slowly, gradually, like a photograph developing." Kandahar's police chief Brigadier General Mohammed Akram insists that "the Taliban are stronger now than at any time since the fall of their government." The reforming Taliban, which numbers in the thousands according to one Afghan official, operate primarily out of Pakistan, and are led by many of the same men, including supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who formerly led the Taliban. They have formed an alliance with a powerful, vehemently anti-Western warlord in northeastern Afghanistan, and are apparently bent on returning to power. Meanwhile Pakistan, a supposed ally of the US, has done little or nothing to discourage the Taliban from rearming and reforming. (Time Asia)
- July 21: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says, "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." Presumably Wolfowitz is unaware of the irony of his statement. (Reuters)
- July 21: Democratic Senator John Kerry, a candidate for President, asks if "false pride" is prompting the Bush administration to delay in organizing a representative Iraqi government. He tells reporters the help of other nations was crucial in helping stabilize post-war Iraq, saying, "[M]my blood boiled over" when he read in the New York Times that some in the Bush administration might consider it humiliating to go to the United Nations for help after bypassing the world body before going to war in Iraq. "You don't make a decision about protecting your own troops and winning your objectives based on false pride. ...Lives are at stake. We need to internationalize this and we need to do it now, we need to do it openly and we need to do it in order to defuse the sense of occupation and protect the troops." (Reuters)
