THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

July 2004

Week Two

 

Pentagon will allow "enemy combatants" to challenge their status in court

• July 8: In a dramatic reversal of policy, the Pentagon announces that it will allow the 595 so-called "enemy combatants" detained at Guantanamo Bay without charge or legal representation to challenge their status in court. The Pentagon makes this hasty reversal in light of the Supreme Court's recent decision to require the detainees to challenge their status in front of a judge. The procedures announced by the Pentagon will themselves probably end up in court; for example, the Pentagon says the detainees will be allowed "personal representatives," but not lawyers, to speak up for them in court, and the detainees will present their case to a three-person military tribunal. The personal representatives will be military officers who, while not lawyers, will have access to the Pentagon files on the detainees' backgrounds. The representative will be able to share unclassified information with a detainee and will be given 30 days to file a challenge on his behalf. It was unclear whether the representative's consultations with a detainee would remain confidential. Also unknown was whether there would be public access to the proceedings. "The Supreme Court upheld the rule of law over unchecked executive authority," says Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights. "The review procedures for the detainees set up by the Department of Defense are inadequate and illegal, and they fail to satisfy the court's ruling." "Without access to a lawyer the Supreme Court's decision...would be meaningless," adds Jeffrey Fogel, the legal director of the center. "The right to habeas corpus has always included the right to legal assistance." (New York Times/Truthout)
• July 8: Federal officials reveal that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was provided detailed information about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, information that specifically discussed the political impact of Plame's outing on certain Bush officials and the criminal culpability of those officials in the revelation of Plame's undercover status. Among other information, Ashcroft was given extensive details of an FBI interview with Bush's chief political advisor Karl Rove. (Rove is a close friend and associate of Ashcroft, and managed three of Ashcroft's political campaigns.) The briefings for Ashcroft were conducted by Christopher Wray, a political appointee in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division, and John Dion, a 30-year career prosecutor who was in charge of the investigation at the time. The briefings raise questions about the appropriateness of Ashcroft's involvement in the investigation, especially given his longstanding ties to Rove. Senior federal law-enforcement officials have expressed serious concerns among themselves that Ashcroft spent months overseeing the probe and receiving regular briefings regarding a criminal investigation in which the stakes were so high for the Attorney General's personal friends, political allies, and political party. One says, "Attorneys General and US Attorneys in the past traditionally recused for far less than this." A senior federal law-enforcement official says that there appeared to be no restrictions regarding the extent of information provided Ashcroft: "Whatever the FBI knew, the Attorney General was able to know within days if he wanted to."
• Rove's interview with the FBI was highly significant because although Rove adamantly denied having leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson, he admitted to having disseminated the information after it appeared in the news media to journalists, political activists, and other administration officials in an attempt to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. At the time, Wilson was raising questions about the veracity of intelligence information used by Bush in making the case to go to war with Iraq. Additionally, Ashcroft received a briefing regarding copious notes maintained by Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. The notes, later turned over to investigators, detailed the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. The ad hoc group was set up by senior administration officials to devise strategies to win over US and international public opinion to support going to war with Iraq. Besides Libby, other regular key participants included Rove; Nicholas Calio, who was at the time the White House legislative liaison; and Deputy National Security Council Advisor Stephen Hadley. Some of those notes described efforts to discredit Wilson by the White House Iraq Group, including Rove, in July of last year as the group was struggling to counter Wilson's allegations that the White House had exaggerated the potential nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the United States. It was during that time that two senior administration officials leaked information to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a covert CIA operative. A federal law-enforcement official says that "there was serious discussion at the highest levels of the Justice Department" as to whether it was "proper" or a "good idea" for Ashcroft to receive briefings not only regarding what Rove had told the FBI, but also what other evidence existed, such as Libby's notes, that might corroborate or contradict Rove's account.
• In December 2003, Ashcroft bowed to heavy pressure from Justice Department officials, particularly Deputy Attorney General James Comey, and congressional Democrats, and named special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to handle the investigation. Fitzgerald has empaneled a grand jury, and has interviewed, among others, Bush, Cheney, and White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez. Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October that he had briefed Ashcroft on the details of the Plame investigation, but denied that Ashcroft's failure to recuse himself was compromising the integrity of the investigation. (The American Prospect)
• July 8: The Department of Defense says it is ready to defend both the Republican and Democratic conventions from terrorist attacks, after Homeland Security head Tom Ridge states flatly that there will be a terrorist attack on the US between now and the November elections. He says al-Qaeda "is moving ahead with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process." (Department of Defense)
• July 8: Using illegal parliamentary tactics reminiscent of last year's Medicare bill debacle, the House of Representatives votes down an amendment to restrict a section of the USA Patriot Act making it legal for the FBI to track Americans' reading habits. After much Republican arm-twisting, the vote ends up at 210-210, one short of the majority needed to pass the amendment; the amendment had the votes to pass after the usual 15-minute roll call, but Republicans abrogated procedure to hold the roll call open another 23 minutes while they browbeat, cajoled, and threatened 10 of their own members to change their votes. Democrats chant "shame, shame, shame," while the Republicans perform their logrolling. "The Republican leadership is out of control," says Democrat Martin Meehan. "Today's vote on the Freedom to Read Protection Act is just the latest example of a growing trend towards abusive, closed-fist partisanship on the part of Republican House leadership." Left-wing independent Bernie Sanders, the author of the amendment, calls the proceedings "an outrage" and "an insult to democracy." "You win some, and some get stolen," adds representative C.L. Otter, a Republican sponsor of the defeated provision and one of Congress' most traditionally conservative members. Another Republican, Zach Wamp, says he switched his initial "yes" vote to "no" after being shown Justice Department documents asserting that terrorists have communicated over the Internet via public library computers. The veracity of those documents has not been confirmed. "This new world we live in is going to force us to have some constraints," Wamp says. The amendment is to a $39.8 million funding bill for the Departments of State, Commerce, and Justice; Bush had threatened to veto the entire measure if the Patriot Act amendment was attached. Republicans who switched their votes to "no" include Michael Bilirakis, Rob Bishop, Jack Kingston, Marilyn Musgrave, Nick Smith, Tom Tancredo, and Wamp; Democrats who switched their votes to "yes" include Robert Cramer, Rodney Alexander, and Brad Sherman. (AP/CommonDreams, Washington Post)
• July 8: In the face of a proposed amendment to a huge House appropriations bill that would prevent the FBI and other government agents from using a secret federal intelligence court to gain access to the reading records of library or bookstore patrons as part of counterterrorism probes, Bush's Office of Management and Budget has threatened to oppose the entire spending bill if the amendment is included. The amendment will be presented for consideration by independent, progressive House member Bernie Sanders. If passed, the measure would be attached to a nearly $40 billion appropriations bill funding the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State in fiscal 2005. "If legislation were presented to the president that includes any provision that forces the courts to allow notice to criminal suspects before a search warrant is executed, the president's senior advisors would recommend that the president veto the bill," the office says in a statement. "If any other amendment that would weaken the USA Patriot Act were adopted and presented to the president for his signature," the statement adds, "the president's senior advisors would recommend a veto." Sanders retorts that he and other Americans want to fight terrorism vigorously, but they do not want the government monitoring their reading habits. "How can the president say that we are a beacon of freedom when he is working to cut back the very freedoms that Americans have fought and died for?" he asks. (AFP/CommonDreams)
• July 8: At a speech to the 2004 national convention of the ACLU, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh tells the audience that the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib. "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," he says. He tells the audience that there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher." He calls the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway, war crimes." Hersh says that the prison outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs: "They see us as a sexually perverse society." Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is "in incredible chaos," he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq. "The disaffection inside the Pentagon is extremely acute, he says, and illustrates his point with the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn't want to hear." The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information." He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government. The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity." Hersh describes the folks in charge of US policy as "neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is." Hersh, an icon of American journalism, rips the "supine" US press for meekly reporting only the news as approved by the Pentagon and the Bush administration. A transcript of the speech can be found here; both this and the source site listed just below offer links to streaming video of Hersh's speech. (Ed Cone)
• July 8: Bush is attempting to put distance between himself and former political crony Ken Lay, the former CEO of Enron now facing a raft of criminal charges stemming from the oil conglomerate's bankruptcy. Press secretary Scott McClellan dismisses Lay's close ties to Bush, telling reporters, "He was a supporter in the past and he's someone that I would also point out has certainly supported Democrats and Republicans in the past." Lay and his wife have clearly favored Republicans in their donations, giving $796,110 to Republican candidates between 1989 and 2001, and only $86,470 to Democrats, mostly local Texans. McClellan says of Lay's close friendship to Bush only that Bush desires to pursue corporate wrongdoers: "The president has made it very clear that we will not tolerate dishonesty in the boardroom. This administration worked to uncover abuses and scandals in the corporate arena. And certainly the president's concern is with those workers and other people who have been harmed by corporate wrongdoing." Lay's relationship with the Bush family dates from at least 1990 when he was co-chairman of former President Bush's economic summit for industrialized nations, which was held in Houston. Lay also was co-chairman of the host committee for the Republican National Convention when it was held in Houston in 1992. The Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit group, says the Lays have given $139,500 to George W. Bush's political campaigns over the years. Those donations were part of $602,000 that Enron employees gave to Bush's various campaigns, making Enron the leading political patron for Bush at the time of the company's bankruptcy in 2001. In addition to Lay's political campaign donations, he and his wife contributed $100,000 to Bush's 2001 inauguration. Lay also was a fund-raiser for Bush, bringing in at least $100,000 for the president's 2002 campaign. That put Lay in "Pioneer" status as one of the president's top money-raisers. (AP/CBS)
• July 8: Conservatives have flocked to echo the Republican National Committee's mischaracterization of vice presidential candidate John Edwards as "the fourth most liberal member of the Senate" (John Kerry is equally mischaracterized as "the most liberal Senator"). The characterization is based on an analysis of a mere 40 Senate votes of Edwards, all taking place within a single session of Congress. An analysis of Edwards's voting patterns over his entire tenure in Congress reveals a much more moderate Senator than Republicans, and their conservative allies are portraying. Under the headline "Edwards' Record, However, Reveals Liberal Truth," a research brief circulated by the Republican National Committee notes that Edwards was the "Fourth Most Liberal Senator In 2003," misrepresenting Edwards's voting record by ignoring key information from National Journal's vote ratings based on Edwards's five years in the Senate. Edwards's 2003 National Journal vote rating -- which gave him a liberal rating of 94.5 percent -- was based on only 40 votes from one session of Congress (due to his presidential campaign, Edwards missed 22 of the 62 Senate votes National Journal examined) and is not representative of his voting record in the Senate over the past five years, during which he has cast more than 1,000 votes. Edwards's average liberal rating for the five years he has served in the Senate (1999-2003) is 75.7 percent -- 20 points lower than his 2003 rating, which Republicans are touting. According to National Journal, in 2002, Edwards received a 63 percent rating; in 2001, he received a 68.2 percent rating; in 2000, he received an 80.8 percent rating; and in 1999, he received a 72.2 percent rating. According to a January 31, 2003, National Journal profile, "Among the other presidential contenders, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has been in the moderate-to-conservative range of Senate Democrats during his four years in the chamber." And in 2002, Edwards made National Journal's list of "Senate Centrists." The talking points have been made by, among others, the RNC's Ed Gillespie, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Fox News's Carl Cameron and Sean Hannity, the Washington Times's Bill Sammon, and talk show mavens Rush Limbaugh and Michael Graham. Republicans and conservatives will continue to echo the mischaracterization of both Kerry and Edwards throughout the campaign. (Media Matters)
• July 8: Convicted abortion clinic bomber Stephen Jordi is sentenced to five years in jail for attempted arson. Prosecutors had asked Judge James Cohn to sentence Jordi under a federal terrorism law and sought seven to 10 years, but Cohn refused, saying federal sentencing rules require that plots have an international component to be considered terrorism. Jordi had been arrested after casing several South Florida reproductive clinics, was proven to have planned to bomb a Macon, Georgia clinic. (Boston Globe)
• July 8: Liberal columnist Molly Ivins writes of Republican political operative Frank Luntz's successful strategies for "framing" political debate. Luntz is the pollster who advised Bush and other Republicans to frame all questions about Iraq and the war on terror around 9/11 -- to open every statement about those topics with a reference to the terrorist attacks. Luntz is now focusing on one of the biggest groups of undecided voters still up for grabs: working women. Luntz's appeal to these women is summed up thusly: "You have to empathize. The very first thing you have to do, it's not about issues, it's about empathy. They have to know that you care, that you understand them, that you understand the frustrations." If Bush is at a town hall meeting, Luntz would have him say, "''Now I want to talk to the ladies in the room'...'the women in the room' is how I would put it ...and you say: 'Well, I'm gonna throw this out. I want you tell me if I'm right or not. Ladies here, I'd say that your lack of free time is one of the greatest challenges.' And they'll all sit there, and they'll raise their hands, and they'll all nod yes. At that moment, you have bonded with those women." Ivins wonders how long that bonding would last if the "ladies in the room" knew that Bush's Labor Department refuses to identify and correct violations of equal pay laws, that the Labor Department repealed regulations allowing paid family leave through state unemployment funds (now it's unpaid leave only), that Labor wants to prevent millions of workers from getting overtime pay, that Bush's Justice Department has weakened enforcement of job discrimination laws and refused to pursue sex discrimination cases. The women might not like that Bush has gutted Head Start and other early childhood education programs, after-school programs, K-12 education, housing subsidies, child care, career education, services for victims of domestic violence, the nutrition program for women, infants and children (WIC) and Pell grants to help pay for college. But another part of Luntz's job is keeping unneeded information such as Ivins's out of the minds of his listeners. (Working for Change)
• July 8: An article by investigative reporter Joshua Frank concludes that the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean was torpedoed by Beltway Democrats determined to choose one of their own to run for office. Frank says that on December 9, 2003, at the same time Al Gore was endorsing Dean, Democratic insiders were meeting to determine how to sink Dean's candidacy. Political commentator Adam Nagourney speculated then, "One [theory] is that what is going on here is a proxy war between the Clintons and the Gores over the future of the Democratic Party. I think there is an element of truth to that. I don't think we want to exaggerate that." According to Frank, Nagourney was dead right. The stop-Dean movement was headed by the Democratic Leadership Council, the same conservative-leaning Democratic movement co-founded by Bill Clinton and widely seen as helping sweep Clinton into office. "[T]he great myth of the current [Howard Dean] cycle," DLC leaders Al From and Bruce Reed wrote in a May 15, 2003 memo, "is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of activists represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. What activists like Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." DLC insiders and their Democratic allies quickly began airing their own anti-Dean political ads on television, starting in Iowa before the primaries. The DLC ads emphasized Dean's pro-NAFTA stance and his endorsement by the National Rifle Association; the ads were supported by, among others, rival candidate Richard Gephardt, DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, and former representative and DLC member Robert Torricelli, who had been forced to leave office over ethical violations. But some of the strongest ties can be found in the John Kerry campaign. (Counterpunch)

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"I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." -- George W. Bush, July 9, 2004

Senate Intelligence Committee debunks claims of Iraq WMDs and al-Qaeda connections

• July 9: The Senate Intelligence Committee releases its long-awaited interim report on the US government's use of intelligence to prove its claims of Iraqi WMDs as a rationale for war; the report thoroughly debunks the claims that Iraq had WMD stockpikes or WMD programs, and also disproves any connection between the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda. The committee refuses to judge whether Bush officials pressured CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies to massage or "cherry-pick" intelligence that suited their purposes and bury the rest; instead, the committee chairman, Republican Pat Roberts, promises that the White House and Pentagon's roles would be covered in "Phase II" of the report. Without "any evidence" of administration coercion, the committee finds, the intelligence community's judgments on Iraq's weapons were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." The report says that the CIA and other agencies succumbed to "groupthink" assumptions in determining that there were WMDs in Iraq. It casts serious, if implicit, doubt on the "Curveball" intelligence about mobile bioweapons labs, and rips the entire Iraq-Niger uranium fairy tale.
• On the issue of Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda, however, the committee's findings imply that the White House, not the CIA, is to blame for making dubious claims that there were working ties between Osama bin Laden's organization and Hussein's Iraq. "The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship," the committee finds, echoing the 9/11 commission staff's finding of no "collaborative relationship" between the two. "The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al-Qaeda attack was reasonable and objective," the committee reports. "No additional information has emerged to suggest otherwise." Likewise, the report concludes: "No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ al-Qaeda in conducting terrorist attacks." Fearing just such results, Bush has moved to ensure that the committee's final report will not be issued until after the November elections. While Republicans continue to assert the White House's innocence of misrepresenting or falsifying intelligence claims, administration spokesmen such as Vice President Cheney continue to assert that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein did have ties to al-Qaeda.
• At least one Democrat on the commission says the report only tells half the story. Carl Levin charges that the Republican-dominated committee was all too willing to criticize the CIA and other intelligence agencies for their failures in gathering accurate intelligence, but refused to touch the idea that White House pressure for pre-approved conclusions shaped those intelligence failures. "As the Intelligence Committee report to be released tomorrow will indicate, the CIA intelligence was way off, full of exaggerations and errors, mainly on weapons of mass destruction," Levin says. "But it was Vice President Cheney along with other policymakers who exaggerated the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship." Roberts says the committee will analyze that question in the second phase of its investigation, called "Phase II." Roberts refuses to say when that part of the investigation will begin. (It never truly gets underway; Roberts will successfully delay and block its completion, not only until after the November 2004 election, but until the Republicans lose control of the Senate in November 2006. Senate Democrats, finding themselves in charge, will assert that the report will finally be completed in early 2007.) Roberts also succeeds in thwarting the committee's investigation of the Pentagon's Douglas Feith and his "Office of Special Plans," as well as its intent to investigate Ahmad Chalabi's influence on the intelligence community.
• It is later found that Roberts, who has long worked with the White House to downplay the administration's crimes and errors and lay the entirety of the blame on the intelligence agencies and the Democrats, pushed hard to make sure that the report blames the CIA and, if not exonerates, then ignores the White House, which itself cherrypicked, manipulated, and, with the assistance of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, outright fabricated much of the evidence used to "prove" that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to America. Roberts says that his committee's investigation should close the book on the questions of prewar intelligence: "I don't think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further."
• From the outset, the committee's investigation was structured to limit any substantive inquiry, and Democrats complain that the format is designed to limit their influence. Roberts has created four separate areas of inquiry into possible failures of Iraq intelligence: WMD, al-Qaeda links, human rights, and regional threat. The last two areas, far less controversial than the first two, are the ones overseen by Democratic staffers. The first two, with the potential for explosive revelations, are being managed -- and straitjacketed -- by GOP staffers. Roberts only allowed a single Democrat to take part in the investigation of WMD issues. And two of the committee's GOP staffers are former officials of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, not only in prime positions to keep unwelcome revelations secret, but creating a potential conflict of interest if they're called upon to investigate their own past analyses or those of former colleagues.
• When information about White House lapses and abuses came to light during the investigation, Roberts worked hard to simultaneously keep that information quiet, and to shift blame towards the CIA and the Democrats. He has repeatedly said that the inquiry was little more than an attempt by Democrats to inject partisan politics into the debate over the war, and, after CIA director George Tenet took the blame last week for Bush's State of the Union claim that Iraq had tried to acquire Nigeran uranium, accused the CIA of employing "a campaign of press leaks...to discredit the president."
• Ranking minority member Jay Rockefeller's influence over Roberts is minimal. Rockefeller is a quiet, collegial senator, without the personality to challenge the folksy, but determinedly partisan, Roberts. Worse, Rockefeller admits that his knowledge of intelligence matters is limited, which puts him at a disadvantage towards his more savvy committee colleagues. Some Democrats say that Rockefeller has allowed Roberts to "roll over him," citing Rockefeller's acquiescence to Roberts's insistence that the committee only pursue closed-door hearings as just one example.
• Interestingly, the committee questions Joseph Wilson's version of events surrounding his trip to Niger to find out whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from that country. The report notes that a colleague of his wife, then-covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, who worked with Plame in the Counterproliferation Division, had said that Plame "offered up" her husband's name as a possible person to go to Niger. Wilson later says that the CPD officer told Plame he had been misquoted in the report, and that he had written a memo to the committee correcting the statement. But, Wilson says, the officer's supervisor had refused to allow him to send the memo to the committee.
• Columnist David Corn says that the report justifiably slams the CIA for a myriad of intelligence failures, and notes that if Tenet had not already resigned, he should have been fired. However, "the report -- justifiably harsh in its evaluation of the CIA -- is part of an effort to protect Bush and his lieutenants. The political mission: make the CIA the fall guy." Corn notes that Roberts has delayed the second phase of the committee's investigation, and obstructed the committee's attempts to ascertain the role played by, among others, Douglas Feith's independent Pentagon intelligence cell and Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in shaping the intelligence assessments. Statements by Roberts indicate that he intends to continue delaying the second phase of the investigation until after the November elections.
• Corn's insights are echoed by former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, who calls the report a "DaVinci Code"-like farrago of hidden information. He decries the deal struck before the report's publication, which allowed "the belligerent Republican majority [to force] timorous Democrats to separate the inquiry into halves, leaving the question of the Bush administration's culpability for a second report, almost certainly to be filed after the election, if at all. This unholy arrangement enabled the report to put the burden of blame on the CIA. For months, Bush and his national security team escalated its rhetoric about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But there was no national intelligence estimate (NIE) until demands by Democratic senators on the intelligence committee forced its writing."
• Blumenthal continues, "What the report does not note is the name or background of the NIE's director: Robert Walpole, a former national intelligence officer on nuclear weapons, a factotum of the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. Walpole had demonstrated his bona fides in an incident that prefigures the WMD debacle, the writing of the alarmist report of the Rumsfeld commission in 1998, which asserted the ballistic missile threat from 'rogue states' was imminent. That claim, used to bolster the case for a Star Wars program, had been rejected by a similar commission two years earlier. The report also does not deal with the creation of an alternative intelligence operation inside the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans, which bypassed regular channels to send fabricated material originating mostly in Ahmed Chalabi's disinformation factory. But buried in the appendix, [Democratic] Senator John Rockefeller...included an account of an internal operation against the CIA conducted by the under-secretary of defense, Douglas Feith, an entrenched neo-conservative. While the CIA composed a report on the Iraq-al-Qaida connection, which the administration still trumpets, and for which the intelligence community could never find proof, Feith held briefings trashing the CIA on its impending report. Then, without informing the CIA, Feith's version was presented to the deputy national security adviser and vice-president.
• "Colin Powell put himself in the hands of people he hoped would protect him. Predictably, he was betrayed. Before his February 5, 2002 speech to the United Nations, making the case for WMD, Powell spent days at the CIA. He was given disinformation about mobile biological weapons laboratories, which came from Iraqi exile sources that the CIA didn't trust. The day before Powell's speech, one CIA official wanted to warn him. Another replied, 'As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what [the source] said or didn't say, and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether [the source] knows what he's talking about.' Powell was sent before the world to speak the falsehoods with CIA director George Tenet sitting behind him. Never before has a secretary of state, the highest ranking cabinet officer, been treated with such contemptuous manipulation by his own administration. The NIE was condensed to a one-page document and sent to the White House, which still refuses to release it to the committee. The full classified version contains dissenting caveats in its footnotes. But were those included in the one-page summary? And did Bush read the NIE in any form? On July 18, 2003, in an overlooked briefing to the White House press corps, 'a senior administration official' explained: 'I don't think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it. But he's familiar, intimately familiar with the case.' ...The Senate report, despite missing crucial information, still helps crack the code about Bush and his apostles. Bush is revealed as having a blithe disregard for anything that might interfere with his articles of absolute belief -- a man of faith."
• Salon's Mary Jacoby writes of the Democrat's tepid response, "The Senate Democrats' fumble on the intelligence investigation could prove a costly error for John Kerry's presidential campaign. Whether they were too credulous or too passive, Democrats failed to advance their case, and now that the report is out, it is Republicans in the Senate who, at least for the moment, are shaping the interpretation of the volatile WMD issue. Kerry and his running mate, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards (a member of the intelligence panel), must now fight to regain the political ground that their Senate colleagues have conspicuously ceded to the administration." (Washington Post, Miami Herald/NewsMine, Nation, Guardian, Salon, Raw Story, New Republic/Contrarian Review, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• July 9: Bush gives a tepid acknowledgement of the Senate committee's report, admitting that there had been "some failures" of intelligence, and remarking, "Listen, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so; the Congress thought so; the UN thought so. I'll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons.... He had the intent." But Bush is, of course, lying. UN inspectors never said there were weapons stockpiles before the invasion, and indeed, had repeatedly reported not finding any evidence of any WMDs whatsoever. Bush also fails to note that Congress had been misled by erroneous, cherrypicked, and sometimes fabricated intelligence provided to them by his White House. "They haven't found the stockpiles," Bush asserts, "but we do know he could make them." His assertion is a lie. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• July 9: American military officials confirm that the Iraqi insurgency is far larger than the administration has acknowledged, and that it is largely comprised of native Sunnis and not foreign fighters from other countries. The officials say that the guerrillas can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000 and have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of US troops that they cannot be militarily defeated. That number is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously said to be at the insurgency's core. And some insurgents are highly specialized -- one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin, and two groups of bomb-makers. Although US military analysts disagree over the exact size, the insurgency is believed to include dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams. The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state. "We're not at the forefront of a jihadist war here," says one US military official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official, who has logged thousands of miles driving around Iraq to meet with insurgents or their representatives, says a skillful Iraqi government could co-opt some of the guerrillas and reconcile with the leaders instead of fighting them. "I generally like a lot of these guys," he says. "We know who the key people are in all the different cities, and generally how they operate. The problem is getting actionable information so you can either attack them, arrest them or engage them." Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the figure of 5,000 insurgents "was never more than a wag and is now clearly ridiculous. Part-timers are difficult to count, but almost all insurgent movements depend on cadres that are part-time and that can blend back into the population."
• Most of the insurgents are fighting for a bigger role in a secular society, not a Taliban-like Islamic state, the official says. Almost all the guerrillas are Iraqis, even those launching some of the devastating car bombings normally blamed on foreigners, usually al-Zarqawi. The official says many car bombings bore the "tradecraft" of Saddam's former secret police and were aimed at intimidating Iraq's new security services. Many in the US intelligence community have been making similar points, but have encountered political opposition from the Bush administration, a State Department official in Washington says, also speaking on condition of anonymity. Civilian analysts generally agree, saying US and Iraqi officials have long overemphasized the roles of foreign fighters and Muslim extremists. Such positions support the Bush administration's view that the insurgency is linked to the war on terror. A closer examination paints most insurgents as secular Iraqis angry at the presence of US and other foreign troops. "Too much U.S. analysis is fixated on terms like 'jihadist,' just as it almost mindlessly tries to tie everything to bin Laden," Cordesman says. "Every public opinion poll in Iraq...supports the nationalist character of what is happening."
• Many guerrillas are motivated by Islam in the same way religion motivates American soldiers, who also tend to pray more when they're at war, the military official says. He says he met Tuesday with four tribal sheiks from Ramadi who "made very clear" that they had no desire for an Islamic state, even though mosques are used as insurgent sanctuaries and funding centers. "'We're not a bunch of Talibans,'" he paraphrases the sheiks as saying. At the orders of General John Abizaid, the US commander of Mideast operations, Army analysts looked closely for evidence that Iraq's insurgency was adopting extreme Islamist goals, the official says. Analysts learned that ridding Iraq of US troops was the motivator for most insurgents, not the formation of an Islamic state. The officer said Iraq's insurgents have a big advantage over guerrillas elsewhere: plenty of arms, money, and training. Iraq's lack of a national identity card system, and guerrillas' refusal to plan attacks by easily intercepted telephone calls, makes them difficult to track. "They have learned a great deal over the last year, and with far more continuity than the rotating US forces and Iraqi security forces," Cordesman says of the guerrillas. "They have learned to react very quickly and in ways our sensors and standard tactics cannot easily deal with." (AP/USA Today)
• July 9: The 105 classified annexes to the 2003 report of Major General Antonio Taguba confirm that not only was torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib carried out systematically, but was intensified by constant pressure from Washington to produce interrogation results no matter what the cost. Daily life at Abu Ghraib, the documents show, included riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, filthy conditions, sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents. Troubles inside the prison were made worse still by a military command structure that was hopelessly broken. Taguba focused mostly on the MPs assigned to guard inmates at Abu Ghraib, but the 5,000 pages of classified files in the annexes to his report show that military intelligence officers -- dispatched to Abu Ghraib by the top commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez -- were intimately involved in some of the interrogation tactics widely viewed as abusive. In her secret testimony, former prison commander Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was criticized for leadership failures in the Taguba report, said Sanchez, who placed military intelligence officers in charge of the prison, refused to provide her with the necessary resources to run Abu Ghraib and other prisons. She said that he didn't "give a flip" about soldiers, and she added this biting criticism: "I think that his ego will not allow him to accept a Reserve Brigade, a Reserve General Officer and certainly not a female succeeding in a combat environment. And I think he looked at the 800th Brigade as the opportunity to find a scapegoat...." As the top echelons fought over the command structure, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were confused over who was in charge. Weak leadership in the prison meant soldiers couldn't accomplish basic tasks, like feed their detainees, much less find someone to prosecute abuse. And without a clear chain of authority, some soldiers just ran wild. "One of the tower guards was shooting prisoners with lead balls and slingshot," a company commander testified. Soldiers ran around wearing civilian clothes, and covered latrines with so much graffiti that a commander had them painted black, and then threatened to post a guard at each location. An Army captain allegedly secretly photographed female subordinates while they were showering in outside stalls.
• The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 23, 2003, when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad,'" another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers around the wire...." Guards feared for their lives -- "the sky was black with rocks," the report said -- and a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn't know whether they were using lethal or non-lethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns. Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Captain James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Battalion. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified.
• Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of e-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The e-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn't make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt. "As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.
• Some officers told Taguba's staff that they believed the Abu Ghraib mess had its roots in an earlier case at the Camp Bucca detention center in southern Iraq last summer. The Army developed evidence that MPs viciously attacked prisoners there, including one who had his face smashed in. Four soldiers were given less than honorable discharges, but were not prosecuted. Said one major who worked at Abu Ghraib: "I'm convinced that what happened [at Abu Ghraib] would never have happened if" the Camp Bucca case had been prosecuted. (US News and World Report/Truthout)
• July 9: The CIA has decided to keep almost entirely secret the controversial October 2002 CIA intelligence estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that is the subject of today's Senate Intelligence Committee report, according to the CIA's response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The CIA's response includes a copy of the estimate, "NIE 2002-16HC, October 2002, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction," consisting almost entirely of whited-out pages. Only 14 of the 93 pages provided actually contained text, and all of the text except for the two title pages and the two pages listing National Intelligence Council members had previously been released in July 2003. At that time, CIA responded to the first round of controversy over the Niger yellowcake story by declassifying the "Key Findings" section of the estimate and a few additional paragraphs. The CIA's censorship of the estimate mirrors its apparent treatment of the Senate's own report. The Senate Intelligence Committee had previously noted, in a June 17, 2004 press release, that "[t]he Committee is extremely disappointed by the CIA's excessive redactions to the report." News accounts quoting Senate sources estimate that this excessive redaction amounted to 50% of the entire text. After a month of back-and-forth, not only did a number of Senators gain an education in the subjectivity of classification, but also the CIA retreated, to a final censorship level (by word-count) of 16%. Large sections of blacked-out discussion following the committee's Conclusions, such as the CIA's misleading of Secretary of State Colin Powell for his February 2003 United Nations speech and the CIA's misleading the public in its October 2002 white paper that left out the caveats, hedged language, and dissents in the underlying intelligence are currently under declassification review by CIA. The committee itself withheld these sections from the CIA's review until release of the report so as not to be scooped or spun. The estimate has been the subject of multiple public speeches, statements and testimony by CIA and other intelligence community officials - even more of which is published in today's Senate report. The Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, today summed up the committee's 511-page report as follows: "[T]oday we know these assessments were wrong. And, as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available evidence." National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton comments, "The CIA's continued secrecy claims on a document that has been widely and publicly discussed by top CIA officials, and now by the Senate, is wrong, unreasonable, and largely unsupported by the available evidence." (National Security Archive)
• July 9: Iraq's economy, locked in what some call a virtual death spiral, is in the spot it's in largely because of US policies and actions in that beleagured country, according to reports by international human rights and labor groups. And instead of trying to improve Iraq's economy, current US policies in Iraq are worsening the situation. A recent study by the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), a US-based human rights organization, puts the combined rate of unemployment and underemployment in Iraq at 50%. The unemployment rate itself is highest among Iraq's young males, running at an estimated 70%, nearly double the national average of 30-40%, EPIC reports. To put Iraq's high unemployment level into context for Americans, the EPIC study points out that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the US peaked at 25%. "Once that level is reached where every fourth economically active adult is searching unsuccessfully for work, then we have a social catastrophe," the report reads. Given this standard, even an Iraqi unemployment rate estimated to be 28% -- as reported by the Iraqi Ministry of Labor in December 2003 and the Brookings Institution, a centrist Washington DC think-tank, in May 2004 -- would still indicate that the country's economy is in disastrous condition, EPIC reports. EPIC, along with the British-based Trades Union Conference (TUC), says the high unemployment in Iraq is not due to lack of skill or knowledge among the country's available workforce but to the system for awarding contracts developed by US occupation administrators and the hiring practices of the largest contractors. TUC issued its report on Iraq's labor force and economy in April.
• For several decades Iraq hosted one of the most educated, skilled populations in the Middle East. Recent years of authoritarian rule by Saddam Hussein, a massive war with Iran in which the US armed both sides, plus two wars with the US and nearly 13 years of severe UN-imposed sanctions all took a heavy toll on the country's educational system and infrastructure. Many Iraqi workers nevertheless managed to avoid catastrophe through skill and determination as well the availability of government jobs and food rationing programs. Further, according to the EPIC and TUC reports, a large number of skilled Iraqi workers, many of whom were members of trade unions outlawed by Saddam, returned from exile after the US-led invasion ready to rebuild their country and organize independent labor unions. This repatriated labor has swelled the skilled workforce, negatively affecting Iraqi wages. Meanwhile, US companies, who comprise the majority of employers in Iraq, routinely refuse to hire even the most skilled Iraqi workers and companies for their own contracts. The EPIC study looks at one instance, a $2.8 billion Bechtel contract to restore Iraq's devastated water system. "Qualified Iraqi water-system engineers familiar with their own infrastructure sit idle while Bechtel engineers struggle [unsuccessfully] to repair the water systems," the study reports.
• In most cases, US companies hire Americans to supervise and manage the labor forces, and hire underpaid foreigners from India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, among other countries, to perform hard labor and menial tasks. A Washington Post article reports that while American workers typically earn salaries equivalent to, or higher than, those paid for similar jobs in the US, many foreign workers toil up to 16 hours a day for wages one-tenth or less of what their American counterparts receive. Dharmapalan Ajayakumar, a kitchen worker from India, says he earned $7 a day working in military kitchens in Iraq. He also says he was tricked into working in Iraq by a recruiting agent hired by a subcontractor for Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton contracted to provide support services for the US military. Ajayakumar and his companions say they were forced against their will to work twelve to sixteen hour days cleaning kitchens, often while suffering from nausea due to lack of clean drinking water and food. The workers also say they were not provided with adequate security in an area where attacks on US forces were common, and that bosses seized control of their passports. KBR is battling dozens of formal complaints filed by workers like Ajayakumar. (New Standard)

Primakov alleges deal between Hussein, US before invasion

• July 9: Yevgeny Primakov, the former prime minister of Russia and the former head of the Russian Secret Services, says that the US government struck a deal with Saddam Hussein's regime shortly before the March 2003 invasion. Primakov is a recognized expert on the Arab world, a friend of Hussein's, and a man with extraordinary access to classified information, all of which makes it hard to dismiss his allegations as a mere conspiracy theory. Primakov asks some disturbing questions: "Why weren't the bridges on the Tigris blown up when the American tanks approached Baghdad? Why weren't Iraqi aviation and tanks used? And where are they now?" The Americans found no WMDs. Primakov acknowledges. But where is the conventional arsenal? He continues, "Why was there an immediate ceasefire? Why was there practically no resistance a year ago?" As Russia's Foreign Minister, Primakov secretly visited Baghdad twice in the days before the invasion. He questions even the authenticity of the footage of Saddam Hussein's capture on December 14. "They showed two soldiers with guns near some palm trees close to the hole where Saddam was reportedly hiding," Primakov observes. "At that time of the year, date palms are never in bloom." Indian columnist Saeed Naqvi says Primakov's contentions mirror information he was given by a senior Iraqi cleric in Najaf, who remembers how unacceptable the initial draft constitution was to Shi'ite clerics. Some of those clerics visited Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf and came away with his purported approval. "We have come to the conclusion that the invaders have a firm script," the senior cleric told Naqvi. "We are willing to give them our opinion if we are convinced that they value our opinion. But they pretend to engage us only to implement their pre planned agenda." He then said, "Let us consider the following facts: the US troops will not leave -- occupation will not end. Two, Saddam Hussein is alive." The cleric actually used the word "mahfooz" which means "protected." "Three, the Baathists are also 'mahfooz' and are being considered as eventual 'stabilizers' of Iraq." Interim prime minister Iyad Allawi plans on using Ba'athist forces to implement the draconian laws being considered. "A Baathist general is helping in Fallujah," Naqvi writes, "so much for freedom from Baathist tyranny!" Naqvi goes on to write, "The cleric implied there may have been a last minute agreement with Saddam Hussein and the Americans before the March 2003 invasion -- exactly what Primakov is saying now. It may not be such an outlandish theory after all." Although neither Primakov's nor Naqvi's allegations are conclusive, they are interesting and disturbing in light of the events surrounding, and following, the invasion. (Indian Express)
• July 9: Three Americans have been arrested in Afghanistan for unlawfully holding eight Afghanis in a house in Kabul. The US military has denied any connection to the three men; in fact, the military sent out an e-mail to local journalists denying any connection to the first member of the group to be identified, Jonathan Idema, even before it was known that Idema and the other two Americans had been arrested. Security sources say the US military had been circulating a "wanted" style warning about Idema before that, describing him as armed and dangerous and asking that he be detained by any security forces that came across him. Idema, a former US Special Forces soldier, claims to be a security advisor, and was featured in the sensationalistic book Task Force Dagger -- The Hunt for Osama bin Laden. Idema also has a criminal record in the US. The State Department has identified Brent Bennett as another member of the group and insists that the US government "does not employ or sponsor these men." Still, exactly who they are and what they were up to is not clear. Afghan officials initially said the Americans were on their own private mission to hunt members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, outside either US or Afghan government control. There was speculation they were after al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and the $25 million reward the US government is offering for his capture. Thousands of former military personnel such as Idema are making a living in Afghanistan, most working on large security contracts. Afghan president Hamid Karzai is protected by private bodyguards from an American security contractor; a British-based private security company is helping the UN with its efforts to organize Afghanistan's planned elections. But privately, some security workers admit the prospect of multi-million-dollar rewards may have lured other former soldiers to engage in their own bounty-hunting missions. One security consultant admits "it can be very difficult to tell who is official and who is not." Afghan security agents who carried out the raid said all three Americans were dressed in typical US Special Forces garb and had US weapons. But around Kabul you often see armed Western security personnel in the same kind of "uniform" -- dark sunglasses, desert scarves and boots, carrying pistols in leg-holsters. Often they are private contractors. Contractors have also been used by the CIA to interrogate detainees in Afghanistan. The BBC concludes, "That makes it harder for the US authorities to convince people that they are not involved with people like Jonathan Idema." (BBC)

"Matrix" informational database threatens Americans' privacy

• July 9: Civil libertarians are raising warnings about a newly discovered and previously highly classified informational database sardonically called the "Matrix." the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, a federally funded program that illegally compiles billions of records on American citizens. Florida company Seisint created the database shortly after 9/11 by combining its own commercial databases with law enforcement records. Now law enforcement officials in participating states can comb the database to investigate ordinary crimes and terrorist threats. Matrix contains an unprecedented amount of information: current and past addresses and phone numbers, arrest records, real estate information, photographs of neighbors and business associates, car make, model and color, marriage and divorce records, voter registration records, hunting and fishing licenses, and more. For example, a user could identify all brown-haired divorced male residents of Minneapolis who drive a red Toyota Camry and are registered to vote. The data can then be displayed in "social networking charts," showing connections between individuals, photo line-ups and "target maps," according to internal Seisint documents obtained by a FOIA request from the American Civil Liberties Union. One of the documents boasts, "When enough insignificant data is gathered and analyzed...IT BECOMES SIGNIFICANT." Seisint sells database access to individual states. Sixteen states went through a pilot program, but after negative media coverage and concern from citizens, politicians, and even law enforcement officials, all but Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Ohio have decided to stop using Matrix. Florida law enforcement officials in particular have become enamoured of Matrix, and use them regularly, even stationing Florida state police as guards outside Seisint's Boca Raton offices. In January 2003, Florida Governor Jeb Bush met with Vice President Cheney to demonstrate how the program could be used by law enforcement, and to request additional funding. The Department of Justice obliged Seisint with $4 million in grants in 2003. The Department of Homeland Security also provided $8 million to help run Matrix, and, last year, assumed "managerial oversight and control" of the database, according to the agreement between the DHS and Seisint. Civil liberties advocates claim that the Matrix is amassing records on ordinary people that, in a worse case scenario, could be used to track "suspicious" individuals, and to round up those likely of committing a crime -- before any crime has occurred. Matrix officials dismiss these claims, arguing that the database is just a faster way to locate criminals and terrorists. Bill Shrewsbury, vice president of Seisint, says that by using Matrix, "You stop bad people quicker before they hurt someone else. It's that simple. There's no secrets here."
• The project remains under suspicion from civil liberties and privacy advocates who have expressed a number of serious concerns, including whether the database is used to conduct "data mining," a process by which data is searched to identify potential criminals or terrorists before any crime is committed. Also of concern is the company's secrecy about precisely what kind of data Matrix includes and how vulnerable the data is to being stolen, altered or misused by hackers. Seisint officials have repeatedly denied that the Matrix is used for data mining. Instead, they say, the Matrix is used to locate potential suspects immediately after a crime has occurred. But according to the documents uncovered by the ACLU, Seisint has also used data for exactly that purpose. Three days after 9/11, Seisint created a "terrorism quotient" to identify potential terrorists in the general population. Matrix was still in the development stage, but company officials used "seisint artificial intelligence," billions of public records, and public Federal Aviation Administration information -- information Matrix now contains -- to conduct the search. A January 2003 slide presentation by Seisint lists some of the criteria for identifying potential terrorists: age and gender, "what they did with their driver's license," either pilots or associations to pilots, proximity to "dirty addresses/phone numbers, investigational data, how they shipped, how they received, social security number anomalies, credit history, and ethnicity." According to Seisint's presentation, an initial search revealed 120,000 individuals with a "High Terrorist Factor" score; Seisint gave the list of names to the INS, FBI, the Secret Service, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Slides from the presentation state that it led to "several arrests within one week," and "scores of other arrests." Who was arrested, and whether they were convicted of or even charged with any actual crime remains unknown. Christopher Calabrese, program counsel for the ACLU's Technology and Liberty program, questions the usefulness of the search. "They conducted a search based on information about what already happened," he says. "If it weren't so deadly serious, it would be silly." He adds, "somebody speculates on a potential event, and adds another level of speculation. What types of activities would be necessary to execute this type of event? Those people are then de-facto suspects of a crime that has never happened, and that only exists in someone's imagination."
• Shrewsbury now denies that the terrorist identification component, the heart of Matrix, is now being used at all. "We don't use that component at all. It's not on Matrix at all." However, the basic information that was used to conduct the search is still available on Matrix, and there is no way for the public to know if such searches are being conducted. The types of data included in Matrix have also worried civil liberties and privacy activists. Finding out what exactly is in the database has been almost impossible. While the company states on its website that Seisint does not own magazine subscription lists, telephone calling records, credit card transactions or credit report trade line data, the company has refused to open its operations for verification even after requests by Senator Russ Feingold and the ACLU. The company's own documents state that, "The associative links, historical residential information, and other information, such as an individual's possible relatives and associates, are deeper and more comprehensive than other commercially available database systems presently on the market."
• Calabrese of the ACLU says using the term "public records" is a misnomer. "It's not at all clear what that means," he says, adding that Seisint seems to consider commercially available data to be "public information," though most of the public does not have access to this data. In addition, although Matrix currently operates in only five states, it has driver's license information from 15 states, motor vehicle registration from 12 states, Department of Corrections information from 33 states and sexual offender information from 27 states, according to Seisint documents. In some cases, states have sold the data to Seisint. For instance, according to the ACLU, Ohio sold its driving records to Seisint for $50,073 two years ago. In other cases, Seisint has presumably purchased this information from commercial databases, where driver's license data is readily available. Mark Zadra, Chief of investigations and Officer of Statewide Intelligence for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, says Matrix continues to use that information in its searches, even if it is not obtained directly from a particular state government. "We've had a lot of states that said, 'I won't participate in Matrix. I say, 'You are a Matrix participant because you sell your motor vehicle and criminal information anyway.'" The security of these billions of records has been among the most persistent concerns of privacy advocates. If a hacker gained access to the database, the information gained could be used for dozens of potential purposes, ranging from simply locating an individual to selling Matrix data to businesses for marketing purposes.
• Although Seisint officials argue that its data is safe, and note that the supercomputers are housed in a secure room outfitted with motion detectors, cameras, an alarm system, and an armed guard, many privacy advocates also remain concerned that the data could still be vulnerable. They argue that the extensive office security overlooks the main issue. The data, they say, is most vulnerable in the police stations around the state where it is used on a daily basis. In Florida, 1,000 law enforcement officials have access to the Matrix, and privacy activists are concerned that the data there could be hacked or physically stolen. Zadra dismisses these concerns, insisting that one would need a login ID and password to access the system, and that all system activity is logged. "step back and think about the scope of this," Calabrese says. "One thousand [access] licenses, spread out around the state, using the Matrix for God knows what." The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Lee Tien says that the majority of security proboems will come from "people on the inside, not people on the outside," and that Seisint does little to prevent this. "I think the presumption has to be that it's not secure," he says. "systems that have a lot of people who can have access to the data are inherently not secure, just based on the numbers." The ACLU is attempting to pressure the five remaining states to end their contracts with Seisint; but even if this happened, the information it compiled would still exist. "Even if you knocked it out completely, it would be pretty easy to reconstruct," Calabrese says. "You can't put the genie back in the box." (New Standard)
• July 9: While Halliburton has overcharged taxpayers for food, accepted kickbacks for oil subcontracts, and spent taxpayer money renting rooms at five-star resorts in Kuwait, among other things, the government's top watchdog, Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, has staunchly defended the company to the point of parroting Halliburton's own press releases. Schmitz has said that he believes Halliburton's problems "are not out of line with the size and scope of their contracts," and then accused the press of overemphasizing the connections between the company and its former CEO Dick Cheney, even though Vice President Cheney still collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred compensation, owns company stock options, and had his office "coordinate" Halliburton contracts in Iraq. Schmitz, like most other Bush administration officials, has little interest in anything approaching independent oversight. Bush has packed the various inspector general, comptroller, and budget officer positions in Iraq, not with skilled, non-partisan public servants, but with partisans and cronies like Schmitz. Many of these individuals have longstanding political ties with the administration and ties to the very industries and companies that they are supposed to oversee. Reporters David Sirota and Judd Legum have done some spadework as to who is who.
• Schmitz, the Defense Department's Inspector General, was appointed to his post by Bush in 2001 after the Associated Press reported the office "was caught cheating" and destroying internal documents. His office has broad jurisdiction to investigate all Pentagon contracts, both in Iraq and elsewhere. However, it appears that Schmitz was appointed for his sole qualification of political loyalty. Schmitz is the son of former California representative John Schmitz, who was a John Birch Society director. As a member of the archconservative Washington Legal Foundation, Joseph Schmitz made a name for himself as "a conservative activist" and as a lawyer for House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a court case attempting to outlaw forms of taxation. In 1992, he authored a letter to the Washington Times insinuating that the Democratic presidential nominee had connections to Russian intelligence, writing, "The KGB apparently knows more about the shady side of Bill Clinton than the American people ever will." Since he joined the Defense Department, Schmitz has been a reliable defender of administration policies. For instance, in 2002, Schmitz refused congressional entreaties to declassify a report detailing how the administration was providing inadequate training and protective gear to troops in the event of a bio-chemical attack. Schmitz's corporate background has also raised questions about his objectivity. According to the January 5, 1996, Aviation Daily newsletter, Schmitz "had a number of airline clients in his private practice" -- and as IG has subsequently refused bipartisan efforts to intervene and terminate a controversial, multi-billion–dollar Pentagon contract with Boeing. The contract would send more than $23 billion in taxpayer funds to the company, yet in return would only be allowed to lease jets, not own them. In fact, even though Schmitz himself admitted the administration "used inappropriate procurement strategies and did not use best business practices...to provide sufficient accountability" for the contract, he claimed there was "no compelling reason" to halt the deal.
• Stuart Bowen is the Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General. Bowen's job is described on the CPA's website as an "independent and objective oversight office" to monitor taxpayer money being spent on contracts. But instead of appointing someone with budget or contracting experience, the White House appointed Bowen, a Texas lawyer with longtime ties to Bush. Before being appointed Inspector General, Bowen worked directly for the President for eight years -- most recently as a White House legal counselor, and before that in the Texas governor's office. Between his time at the White House and the CPA, Bowen lobbied for Iraq contracts for the consulting firm URS Group; his connections to the Bush team landed contracts worth up to $30 million. As inspector general, Bowen oversees many of the investigations into Halliburton's misuse of taxpayer money. Yet despite evidence that the company could be bilking taxpayers, he has been only mildly critical. In fact, one of his most public statements was a call for more taxpayer money to be spent in Iraq, not more control over that money: In April he issued a report discussing "the need for more funding to accomplish the reconstruction mission." Over the years, Bowen has displayed a penchant for placing ideology and political loyalty above independent analysis. During his time in Texas, for instance, Bowen wrote a memo to Bush regarding the 1997 execution of David Wayne Spence, using what The Nation called "distortion, omissions, outright lies, and an inappropriate adversarial bent." Writing several months after the execution and using the same information Bowen used in his memo, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert concluded that Spence was "almost certainly innocent" and the case against him a "travesty." This behavior was more the rule than the exception for Bowen's office. As a 2000 study noted, one third of the 131 death penalty cases under Governor Bush involved lawyers who were later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned -- yet Bush and his legal team ignored this injustice and pushed forward with signing the highest number of death certificates in the country.
• George Wolfe is the director of the CPA's Office of Management and Budget. Appointed on March 18, 2003, Treasury official Wolfe was appointed to the CPA post. His job is supposed to include oversight of spending by the CPA. Yet Wolfe's legal background does not lend itself to any sort of oversight duties; before joining the administration, he was the top corporate lawyer at a South Carolina law firm which specialized in representing the same industries Wolfe is now supposed to be overseeing at the CPA. Wolfe's wife, Virginia, is a former spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and currently works at the public-relations firm Manning, Selvage, & Lee. Her firm now lists the US Army as one of its clients. The couple has made substantial campaign donations to Bush and Congressional Republicans.
• Andrew Natsios is the administrator of the US Agency for International Development. He heads the USAID, where he oversees the bidding process for reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Under his leadership, the Bechtel Corporation received highly lucrative Iraq contracts, totaling at least $2.83 billion since last April. They received this largesse even though Nastios had intimate knowledge of the company's poor project management record: prior to joining the Bush administration on May 21, 2001, Natsios was chief executive of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and oversaw the scandalously bloated Big Dig project -- whose chief contractor was none other than Bechtel. Under Bechtel, the cost of the Big Dig project ballooned to more than five times its original total, from $2.6 billion to a whopping $14.6 billion. According to State Senator Robert Havern, chairman of the Massachusetts Joint Transportation Committee looking into the scandalous project, "it was when Natsios was Turnpike chief that the biggest rise in costs, from $10.8 billion to $14.7 billion, took place." Lawmakers have submitted formal requests to Natsios, demanding that he release information about all the contracts his agency has awarded. But according to representative Henry Waxman, six months after the invasion not one contract had been released by Natsios for congressional review.
• Dov Zakheim is the chief financial officer of the Defense Department. Zakheim describes himself as "a very partisan person." He is also a veteran corporate lobbyist who made a career selling access to the Pentagon as CEO of the defense consultancy Systems Planning Corporation. A client named Emultek bragged in an August 1997 press release that partnering with Zakheim would provide "significant DoD exposure for the company." In 2000, he was a part of a neoconservative group nicknamed "the Vulcans" who were senior advisors to the Bush campaign. After taking office Bush appointed him to the Defense Department where "he oversaw three Department of Defense budgets, each totaling more than $300 billion, and recently proposed a 2005 budget of $401.7 billion." Zakheim resigned in April 2004 to take a lucrative position as a vice president of the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. According to a May 6, 2004 press release, he will be an officer in Booz Allen's "public sector" business.
• Norm Szydolowski, a member of the CPA Review Board, which oversees control of Iraq's oil industry, is the former vice president of ChevronTexaco. Szydolowski's former company has a lot to gain from Iraq's vast oil fields -- and it invested wisely to place one of its top executives in such a sensitive position. ChevronTexaco has contributed $515,388 in PAC money and $534,550 soft money to the GOP since 2000.
• In toto, the administration has gone out of its way to rebuff congressional investigations and cripple oversight of corporate interests in Iraq. Waxman has made numerous requests for basic information but has been virtually ignored, even as the offending parties continue to bilk taxpayers. Even when Waxman tried to call Halliburton employees to testify before Congress about contracting abuses, House Republicans blocked him. Sirota and Legum write, "The companies that charge for food that has not been served or supplies that have not been delivered should be held responsible for their misdeeds. But the administration should also be held accountable for its failure to root out the corruption. The American people are now suffering the consequences of President Bush's decision to appoint overseers who are partisan, conflicted, and unqualified. And the problems did not simply go away after the transfer of power to Iraqis on June 30 -- U.S. taxpayer-funded private contracting work is scheduled to go on indefinitely. How much more taxpayer money will be siphoned off before the Bush administration is willing to admit they have a problem?" (The American Prospect)
• July 9: Military records that supposedly could have proven George W. Bush's National Guard service during Vietnam were "inadvertently destroyed" years ago during an attempt to transfer records from deteriorating microfilm, according to the Pentagon. It says the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lieutenant Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, in Denver, during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question. "I think it's curious that the microfiche could resolve what days Mr. Bush worked and what days he was paid, and suddenly that is gone," says author James Moore. Moore adds the president could still authorize the release of other withheld records that would shed light on his service record. Among the issues still disputed is why, according to released records, Bush was suspended from flying on Aug. 1, 1972. The reason cited in the records is "failure to accomplish annual medical examination."
• Moore notes that payroll records from the Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) could readily show whether Bush served his term of duty in the Guard. Interestingly, though, key payroll records once held by DFAS are no longer available; those records happen to be from Bush's period in Alabama. FOIA requests are wending their way through the system, but may take months to produce results. The White House has never been able to produce either a document or a credible witness that First Lieutenant Bush reported for duty in Alabama, and the DFAS pay records would have confirmed its assertions that Bush was not AWOL at the time. "I continue to be amazed at this 'coincidence' that effectively hides the truth about Bush's military service," Moore writes. He continues, "...DFAS said Bush's microfilmed payroll records were lost as the agency was beginning a project to restore old files. But reporters so far have not received answers on what precipitated the restoration efforts. DFAS is a minor government agency, and it is unlikely someone working there woke up one day and proposed that the aging film be unrolled and examined for salvaging. The logical conclusion is that the decision was prompted by an external consideration. It is not totally out of the question that an energetic government employee decided to show some initiative, but if so, that worker needs to be asked why the particular years 1969 through 1972 were included in the project. Moreover, did the same three months in 1972 disappear for all of the service members whose records were on film? Or just for Lt. Bush? According to the letter accompanying the CD-ROMs [of data in response to FOIA requests], the first three months from 1969 were also lost. Bush was in flight training at that time and there is no doubt about his fulfillment of that responsibility, but an explanation would be helpful in clarifying how the records were destroyed for the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972."
• It is also worth noting that DFAS says its microfilm restoration project went bad in 1997, the same year that allegations of Bush's failure to serve first surfaced during his bid for re-election as governor of Texas. Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett, who is believed to have overseen the purge of other records concerning Bush's Guard duty, says he has seen the DFAS records and "there was nothing in there." When exactly he was able to see these now-missing records is unclear, but it seems likely Bartlett would have gone to view the records in 1998 as part of the re-election campaign and as preparation for Bush's 2000 run for the presidency. How was Bartlett able to view the supposedly destroyed records?
• Bush's staff has steadfastly refused to release his medical records; many believe that doing so would reveal the truth behind the allegations of alcohol and drug abuse that led to his suspension from flight status in 1972. Moore writes, "In spite of White House protestations that journalists are making too much of his loss of flight status, it is not a minor matter in the military when a pilot, whose training costs taxpayers close to a million dollars, has to be yanked from the cockpit," especially when there is reason to believe that said pilot was suspended for drug and alcohol problems. Bush could request his tax records from 1972 and 1973 be released -- his pay records would prove (or disprove) his contentions that he served his term. Additionally, a "master points document" from the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis would show if Bush earned the minimum number of active-duty points for days served. "If he did, the White House could long ago have printed this document from the microfiche and brandished it in front of reporters to make this matter disappear," Moore writes. "But it hasn't." Moore observes, "The master microfiche was shipped to Gen. Danny James in Arlington, Va., who now commands the Air National Guard Bureau, and certain portions were printed and released to White House reporters -- but not all of it. That microfiche should also include a board of inquiry report on Bush's grounding, explaining what happened and why such action was taken. That report has never been released to the public. What's more, the president has said he returned to Houston and served at Ellington through the first half of 1973. That, too, could be proved with the microfiche, which ought to contain an Officer Effectiveness Rating Report for those months. No one has ever produced that document, either. It would be particularly compelling because Bush's commanders wrote Denver's Air Reserve Personnel Center in May 1973 that the young pilot had 'not been observed' at his assigned base and had been transferred to Alabama a year earlier. The glaring contradiction between Bush's proclamations and the official record has never been clarified; nor has any witness ever stepped forward to say they saw Bush at the Houston base in the first half of 1973." (New York Times/CommonDreams, Salon)
• July 9: George W. Bush again refuses to address the annual NAACP convention, refusing an invitation extended twice. He is the first sitting president in eighty years to refuse to attend the convention. His spokesmen blame "scheduling commitments," but actually the blame, according to Bush, lies directly with the NAACP: according to press secretary Scott McClellan, "the current leadership of the NAACP had certainly made some rather hostile political comments about the president over the past few years." (NAACP head Julian Bond recently commented that Bush has not lived up to his promises of "compassionate conservatism.") Bush himself says, "I describe my relationship with the current leadership as basically non-existent because of their rhetoric." NAACP president Kwesi Mfume says it is "unbelievable" that he declined to speak at the convention. This will be the fourth year in a row Bush has refused to attend the NAACP's annual convention. (Reuters/Bloomberg/Chicago Tribune/The Left Coaster)
• July 9: Senators Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and Republican Charles Grassley send a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft regarding the Sibel Edmonds case. The letter asks that an unclassified version be publicly released of all or portions of the Inspector General's recently completed reports on the FBI translator program, allegations made by a former FBI contractor regarding problems in the translator unit, and information obtained by the FBI prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Leahy and Grassley were notified earlier this week that two of the reports had been completed but were classified. In 2002, the two senators had made the request to the Department of Justice Inspector General's Office that the FBI contractor's allegations be investigated. Though the letter requests a response by July 15, Ashcroft ignores the request. (Federation of American Scientists)
• July 9: Republicans have spread the lie that GOP senator John McCain, not Democrat John Edwards, was John Kerry's first choice to be his vice-presidential candidate, even though McCain has repeatedly stated that Kerry never asked him to take the slot, and Kerry insiders confirm that Kerry never seriously considered McCain. The Washington Times asserted in an op-ed that Kerry "ask[ed] Sen. John McCain, a bona fide ideological conservative, to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency. Having failed in that bid, he flip-flopped and selected John Edwards, whom National Journal rated the fourth most liberal member of the Senate last year, even more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton." (The characterization of Edwards as the Senate's "fourth most liberal member" has also been debunked; see above.) On July 7, McCain told Fox News's Tony Snow that Kerry "never offered" him the slot. The same day, CNN reporters used an RNC press release to declare that Edwards was Kerry's "fourth choice," behind McCain and Democrats Richard Gephardt and Tom Vilsack. On CNN's Live From..., co-anchor Kyra Phillips asked conservative Robert Novak, "Is it true that Gephardt was really Kerry's first choice?" Novak replied, "A lot of people say that. He likes Dick Gephardt," but moved on to assert that it was Iowa Governor Vilsack whom "Kerry was really most personally fond of." Note Novak's complete lack of sourcing for his assertions. Later in the show, co-anchor Miles O'Brien asserted, falsely, that Democrats preferred Senator Hillary Clinton as Kerry's VP choice; as his source, he cited a poll that in reality showed most Democrats favored Edwards over Clinton. (Media Matters, Media Matters)
• July 9: Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and former Democratic candidate Howard Dean spar in a 90-minute debate, marked by Dean's insistence that a vote for Nader is in reality a vote for Bush. Dean's appearance is part of an unofficial stop-Nader effort gearing up around the country to keep Nader off the ballots. Nader, who wants exposure for his progressive causes, accuses Democrats of a "smear" effort in Arizona, where an orchestrated Democratic challenge forced the Nader campaign to abandon getting on the ballot; Dean retorts that half of the signatures on Nader's Arizona petition to get on the ballot are registered Republicans who would never actually vote for Nader. As yet, Nader isn't on the ballot in any state. The viability of his candidacy will rise or fall in the next 60 days as deadlines approach in more than 40 states that require voter signatures to qualify for a place on the November ballot. In the debate, Dean reinforces Democrats' growing belief that Nader could cost Democratic nominee John Kerry the election the way many contend Nader cost Vice President Al Gore a victory in 2000. In that contest, Nader was the Green Party nominee; he's not this year. "I am desperate to send George Bush back to Crawford, Texas," Dean tells the audience at the National Press Club. He says he considers the political situation a "national emergency" and stresses that he rejected the idea of a third-party bid for himself after losing the Democratic nomination because he thought it would help elect Bush. Nader has the support of Ross Perot's disintegrating Reform Party, who has ballot lines in seven states; Nader insists he will qualify on his own for most other states. Republican organizations are working to get Nader on as many ballots as possible. Democrats have been particularly upset over Republican contributions to the Nader campaign. StopNader.com calculates from Federal Election Commission records for May that GOP contributors make up 10 percent of Nader's major donors. In the debate, Dean tells Nader that he is being "disingenuous" about the impact of his campaign when Nader said his independent bid would draw more from Republicans than Democrats. "I ask you not to turn your back on your own legacy," says Dean. Dean hammers Nader on Nader's acceptance of large contributions from Bush-Cheney supporters, as well as Nader's acceptance of support from the Oregon Family Council: "you accepted the support of a right-wing, fanatic Republican group that is antigay in order to help you get on the ballot in Oregon. ...The way to change this country is not to get into bed with right-wing antigay groups to try to get yourself on the ballot. That can't work." Nader insists that his campaign has nothing to do with any such right-wing groups, but is nonplussed when Dean asks him to return campaign contributions from Republican Richard Egan, a former Bush ambassador to Ireland: "He might be a Republican, but he just happens to believe in civil liberties, maybe. I don't even know the man. But Republicans are human beings, too." Salon reporter Mary Jacoby concludes, "Unable to offer cogent responses to Dean's charges, Nader frantically roams the countryside demanding his relevance." (Knight Ridder [cached Google copy], Salon)
• July 9: Bill Clinton gives an interview to CNN, where he weighs in on, among other topics, the Iraq invasion and his administration's handling of Osama bin Laden. On his efforts to kill or capture bin Laden, and the resistance to his wish for a special assassination mission, Clinton says, "What I wish now is that I had had a more vigorous military debate. ...People began to second-guess the fact that I didn't send the Special Forces [after bin Laden], even though, concededly, nobody knew where bin Laden was. Nobody knew. We had a general idea. After 9/11, I wished that I had had a military debate because basically the Pentagon and Gen. [Henry] Shelton [former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] were strongly opposed to it. They thought the chances of those guys getting killed were high. And that's what they signed on to do -- to risk their lives -- but they didn't want to get killed with no reasonable prospect of accomplishing the missions. But I'm the commander in chief, or I was then, and they would have gone, had I ordered them to. I wish that I debated it more thoroughly." Clinton says he wishes he had sent in Special Forces troops to find bin Laden after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, instead of leaving it to the incoming Bush administration: "[A]fter the USS Cole was bombed, do I wish I had ordered the Special Forces in, and the answer to that is, I would have done it in a heartbeat, with Special Forces and more, with or without international support, once I got the CIA and FBI finding that Osama bin Laden did it. I just assumed he did from the day it happened, and everyone else did. But it wasn't until after I left office that the CIA made a finding. If they had given me a finding beforehand, I would have gone after him." Clinton says that he believes his policy of containment towards Saddam Hussein, and not a military overthrow and subsequent occupation, was the right one: "I basically believe that the policy that I inherited, which was basically to keep Saddam Hussein in a box and under sanctions, unless and until he fully complied with the UN resolutions, was the right policy. It wasn't so great for the Iraqis, but he didn't present a substantial threat to anyone else." He compares the Iraqi invasion to the US-led invasion of Bosnia and Kosovo: "First of all, we had a very different situation because NATO wasn't with us in Iraq and the Russians didn't come into Iraq. Keep in mind, the Russians nominally opposed what we did in Bosnia and Kosovo, but they knew we were right, and they came in and helped us with postwar planning.... So we lost a lot of soldiers there after the mission was declared accomplished in Iraq, hundreds of them. And it made [former Army Chief of Staff] General [Eric] Shinseki -- whose military career was cut short because he committed candor testifying before Congress that we needed more troops -- it made General Shinseki look like a seer, like he knew what he was predicting, so you can say we needed more troops there. But it was a constant to-and-fro because we had troops in other parts of the world. We already had 15,000 troops in Afghanistan, which is clearly not enough for us within any confidence to look like we're going to stabilize the whole country or find bin Laden or his top lieutenants. So we got 15,000 there, 140,000 or more in Iraq already. I think the main thing is we should have moved more quickly to internationalize it. And we should have moved early on to let the United Nations have more say in the political decisions, opening the contracts up to people other than Americans and their allies and basically, say, 'OK, Saddam's gone now. We need everybody's help to make it right.'" (CNN)
• July 9: The British daily newspaper The Guardian profiles Lila Lipscomb, the mother profiled so emotionally in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Lipscomb, a traditionally patriotic and religious mother of four sons, lost her son Michael in Iraq, and became, almost serendipitously, a prime focus of Moore's film. "Michael Moore said he'd already been around America interviewing all different types of people [for the film]," she recalls. "It was the most incredible experience; he was sitting in our living room and all of a sudden, during the talking and sharing, a tear fell from his eye. His producer said afterwards, 'Michael found it, he found it, he found what the movie was going to be about!'" Lipscomb, a conservative Democrat, says her son's death triggered a political awakening in her: "I instilled in my children, as it was instilled in me that, regardless of who is elected the president of the United States of America, it is the position that you honor. It doesn't matter if they are Republican or Democrat. Boy, what an awakening. ...My son got sent into harm's way by a decision made by the president of the United States that was based on a lie. Would my son still be here today if I had had my uprising then?" In traditional Moore fashion, the film follows Lipscomb on her fruitless visit to the White House to ask someone in authority why her son had to die for a lie (a journey echoed a year later by another bereaved mother, Cindy Sheehan); the film also shows Lipscomb being upbraided by a conservative who accuses her of "staging" the tragedy of her son's death. "My son is dead," she tells her attacker. "That is not staged." Of her White House visit, she says thinly, "When I go to Washington DC as an American citizen I have a right, I have a right to go to the White House and I'll not stop until that right is given back to us. My son's blood paid for that White House, and I can't go in? That's my White House. I'm furious." What would she say to Bush if she met him? "God have mercy." She shakes her head. "God have mercy." Lipscomb has joined the antiwar organization Military Families Speak Out, and, though she believes she is now under government surveillance, says she has experienced a tremendous outpouring of support from around the globe. The most surprising letter came from a man Lipscomb knew only slightly, who had sold her her house. "It was a full-page, handwritten letter from a man - that in itself is unique. He said he'd seen the film and when he got home he had to write. He had always been a very strong Republican, but his views are now changed." (Guardian/Truthout)
• July 9: Theodore Sorensen, the special counsel to President Kennedy from 1961, to 1963, gives the commencement speech to the 2004 graduates of the New School in New York City. Sorensen gives a heartfelt lamentation based on the Biblical quote, "There is a time to laugh, and a time to weep." Sorensen tells the graduates, "Today I weep for the country I love, the country I proudly served, the country to which my four grandparents sailed over a century ago with hopes for a new land of peace and freedom. I cannot remain silent when that country is in the deepest trouble of my lifetime." "For me the final blow was American guards laughing over the naked, helpless bodies of abused prisoners in Iraq," he says, but America's problems reach far beyond that low point. "The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul," Sorensen writes, "is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us. The stain on our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity, will not quickly wash away. Last week, a family friend of an accused American guard in Iraq recited the atrocities inflicted by our enemies on Americans, and asked: 'Must we be held to a different standard?' My answer is yes. Not only because others expect it. We must hold ourselves to a different standard. Not only because God demands it, but because it serves our security. Our greatest strength has long been not merely our military might but our moral authority. Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values. We were world leaders once -- helping found the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and programs like Food for Peace, international human rights and international environmental standards. The world admired not only the bravery of our Marine Corps but also the idealism of our Peace Corps. Our word was as good as our gold. At the start of the Cuban missile crisis, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, President Kennedy's special envoy to brief French President de Gaulle, offered to document our case by having the actual pictures of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba brought in. 'No,' shrugged the usually difficult de Gaulle: 'The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me.' Eight months later, President Kennedy could say at American University: 'The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate...we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.'"
• Those days are now gone, says Sorensen. "What has happened to our country?" he asks. "We have been in wars before, without resorting to sexual humiliation as torture, without blocking the Red Cross, without insulting and deceiving our allies and the UN, without betraying our traditional values, without imitating our adversaries, without blackening our name around the world. ...Today some political figures argue that merely to report, much less to protest, the crimes against humanity committed by a few of our own inadequately trained forces in the fog of war, is to aid the enemy or excuse its atrocities. But Americans know that such self-censorship does not enhance our security. Attempts to justify or defend our illegal acts as nothing more than pranks or no worse than the crimes of our enemies, only further muddies our moral image. Thirty years ago, America's war in Vietnam became a hopeless military quagmire; today our war in Iraq has become a senseless moral swamp. No military victory can endure unless the victor occupies the high moral ground. Surely America, the land of the free, could not lose the high moral ground invading Iraq, a country ruled by terror, torture and tyranny -- but we did. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein -- politically, economically, diplomatically, much as we succeeded in isolating Qaddafi, Marcos, Mobutu and a host of other dictators over the years -- we have isolated ourselves. We are increasingly alone in a dangerous world in which millions who once respected us now hate us."
• Sorensen concludes with a message of qualified hope: "some among us scoff that the war on jihadist terror is a war between civilization and chaos. But they forget that there were Islamic universities and observatories long before we had railroads. So do not despair. In this country, the people are sovereign. If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness. In particular, you -- the class of 2004 -- have the wisdom and energy to do it. Start soon. In the words of the ancient Hebrews: 'The day is short, and the work is great, and the laborers are sluggish, but the reward is much, and the Master is urgent.'" (Information Clearinghouse)
• July 9: Liberal commentator Max Blumenthal dismisses Disney's "alternative to Fahrenheit 9/11, a film titled America's Heart and Soul, as "a right-wing anti-government commercial insidiously cloaked in a 'Morning in America' aesthetic." The film will do extremely poorly at the box office and will virtually disappear. Blumenthal writes, "After reading a half-dozen reviews that presented the movie as a 'patriotic' counterpoint to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, I wanted to see what the fuss was all about for myself. While I was prepared for a blatant whitewash of America's complex cultural tableau, I was nearly shaken out of my seat by what I witnessed: a right-wing anti-government commercial insidiously cloaked in a 'Morning in America' aesthetic that is calculated to deceive the viewer into believing that George W. Bush's 'era of personal responsibility' has been enthusiastically ushered in -– and that it's working." The movie is a disturbingly simplistic amalgamation of political, economic, and racial stereotypes, systematically designed to tug at the heartstrings and evoke patriotic sensibilities without going into the kind of detail that would mar the pretty picture of right-wing Americana it tries to paint. Despite the fact that Disney has turned to right-wing marketers such as MoveAmericaForward to promote the film, it opened last week to dismal returns; Blumenthal concludes, "For a movie that preaches success as the ultimate American virtue, its failure is a rebuke. Indeed, like the neoconservative hawk who eluded military service or the moralizing fundamentalist who sleeps with hookers, America's Heart and Soul is unable to live up to its own lofty standards." (AlterNet)
• July 9: A furor belatedly erupts over a nasty comment California's Secretary of Education, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, made to a 6-year old white girl. On July 1, at a photo-op at the Santa Barbara Central Library, the girl, Isis D'Luciano, asked Riordan if he knew her name meant "Egyptian goddess." Riordan retorted, "It means stupid dirty girl." The girl indignantly repeated her statement, and Riordan backpedaled, saying, "Hey, that's nifty." After the videotape of Riordan's statement was broadcast on California television newscasts, Riordan, a Republican, became the target of harsh criticism. The Sacramento Bee wrote that California "shouldn't have an education secretary who makes offensive, damaging remarks to young children for no apparent reason." Alice Huffman, president of the California chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, adds, "He's the governor's top person on education, which means we would expect him to have some love and respect for children. I think he is the wrong man for the job. There is no way for him to explain this away." Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who named Riordan to his Cabinet, issued a statement calling his appointee's remark "unacceptable in any context." Riordan's spokespeople say that their man has repeatedly apologized for his comment and considers the matter closed. Riordan, a venture capitalist who started a foundation supporting literacy, has a reputation for awkward, perhaps insensitive remarks and behavior. As mayor, he once greeted hunger strikers outside his office eating a hamburger. In a speech to school administrators earlier this year, he told a story about a nun physically disciplining a student that startled some in the audience. Interested readers can go here to view the clip. (CBS, Sacramento Bee/CommonDreams)

 

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