July 2004: Week Three: This Far and No Further

Back to July 2004 | On to July 2004: Week Four

Due to size considerations, this page has been divided into subpages.
Use the menu below to navigate the week's contents.

SubMenu

January 2004 Week Three, Page Two

July 15: Eminent economic John Kenneth Galbraith writes that America's corporations are the driving force behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In his book The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, Galbraith writes, "In 2003, close to half the total US government discretionary expenditure was used for military purposes. A large part was for weapons procurement or development. ...Such expenditure is not the result of detached analysis. From the relevant industrial firms come proposed designs for new weapons, and to them are awarded production and profit. In an impressive flow of influence and command, the weapons industry accords valued employment, management pay and profit in its political constituency, and indirectly it is a treasured source of political funds. The gratitude and the promise of political help go to Washington and to the defense budget. And to foreign policy or, as in Vietnam and Iraq, to war. That the private sector moves to a dominant public-sector role is apparent."
Galbraith observes that modern American corporations have shaped public perception in a myriad of arenas -- not only encouraging military expansionism across the globe, but creating a debt-driven, acquisitional consumer consciousness: "It ordains that social success is more automobiles, more television sets, a greater volume of all other consumer goods -- and more lethal weaponry. Negative social effects -- pollution, destruction of the landscape, the unprotected health of the citizenry, the threat of military action and death -- do not count as such." While war is a danger to civilized existence, it is a boon to military-corporate entities. But instead of standing up for peace and coexistence, the corporations, ever chasing the military contracts and the obscene profits that they engender, "accords legitimacy, and even heroic virtue, to devastation and death."
He writes, "As the corporate interest moves to power in what was the public sector, it serves the corporate interest. It is most clearly evident in the largest such movement, that of nominally private firms into the defense establishment. From this comes a primary influence on the military budget, on foreign policy, military commitment and, ultimately, military action. War. Although this is a normal and expected use of money and its power, the full effect is disguised by almost all conventional expression. Given its authority in the modern corporation it was natural that management would extend its role to politics and to government. Once there was the public reach of capitalism; now it is that of corporate management. In the US, corporate managers are in close alliance with the president, the vice-president and the secretary of defense. Major corporate figures are also in senior positions elsewhere in the federal government; one came from the bankrupt and thieving Enron to preside over the army. Defense and weapons development are motivating forces in foreign policy. For some years, there has also been recognised corporate control of the Treasury. And of environmental policy." Galbraith concludes, "The facts of war are inescapable -- death and random cruelty, suspension of civilized values, a disordered aftermath. Thus the human condition and prospect as now supremely evident. The economic and social problems here described can, with thought and action, be addressed. So they have already been. War remains the decisive human failure." (Guardian)
July 15: The Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, says that more abuse and torture cases from Iraq and Guantanamo are likely to be revealed in the near future. Warner says the Pentagon is, in general, doing a good job of investigating the abuses already reported. Many of the reports of abuse have been made by the International Red Cross (ICRC). The day before, Democratic representative Ellen Tauscher blasted the Defense Department for taking so long to release the ICRC documents that they were essentially useless. "I want to have a hearing on the most recent charges by the ICRC, not something that frankly is so old that it is so well reported in the press that average people know about it and is the subject of a criminal investigation, which take it out of our hands," she said. Tauscher said it would be better for Congress to know about Red Cross allegations while it is still possible for lawmakers to take corrective action. She is referring to recent ICRC charges that the US is hiding detainees in secret locations around the globe and refusing to acknowledge their existence, much less allow Red Cross or other human rights organizations to visit these prisoners. The ICRC routinely visits prisoners to check on their condition and help them get messages to their families. Terror suspects the FBI reported as captured have never turned up in detention centers, and the United States has failed to reply to demands for a list of everyone it's holding, says ICRC spokeswoman Antonella Notari.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged ordering that a detainee in Iraq be hidden, at the request of former CIA director George Tenet. The Geneva Convention requires that prisoners be identified and their families contacted. Further information, including the identities and whereabouts of other secret detainees, has been refused. Last month Senate Democrats, with the help of a few Republicans, passed legislation requiring the administration to hand over memos on prisoner treatment and interrogations. Sponsored by Democrat Patrick Leahy, the amendment to the defense authorization bill declared all US officials bound by anti-torture laws and it required Pentagon reports on interrogation techniques, the number of detainees denied POW status, Red Cross findings on US military prisons, and a schedule for trying terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. (CBS)
July 15: The US Commission on Civil Rights intends to ask the Justice Department to investigate Florida's attempt to use a list of convicted felons to purge the state's voter rolls. A similar effort in 2000 illegally disenfranchised up to 10,000 lawful voters, most of them black Democrats; Florida has agreed this year not to perform such a purge after a public outcry. The list failed to list many Hispanic felons, and disproportionately listed blacks; as in 2000, many on the list are not felons at all. "If it was intentional, it may well have been a criminal violation of the Civil Rights Act," says commissioner Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the UC-Berkeley law school. "It's not just about a sloppy database, it's not just about bureaucracy strapped for resources. It's about the deprivation of a fundamental civil right." The commission wants to know if the purge list was "engineered" by Florida officials. BBC investigative journalist Greg Palast is one of those who testify before the commission about his knowledge of voting purges. The Justice Department refuses to investigate, but the Bush administration does respond to the request -- by firing Edley and chairwoman Mary Frances Berry, who also voted for the investigation, and replacing them with more administration-friendly commissioners. (Miami Herald/Truthout, Greg Palast)
July 15: The Bush administration is refusing to hand over information about its awarding of over $1 billion in no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other companies in Iraq, repudiating repeated requests from a UN-sanctioned auditing committee. The International Advisory and Monitoring Board, or IAMB, was created by the UN Security Council in May 2003 to ensure that revenues from Iraq's oil industry were properly spent and responsibily managed during the US occupation. It includes representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An earlier audit by accounting firm KPMG shows massive mismanagement and outright theft of billions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenue, either by American firms operating within the country or by the Coalition Provisional Authority. (Washington Post)
July 15: Donald Rumsfeld's civilian advisor, Steve Herbits, writes a scathing seven-page memo entitled "Summary of Post-Iraq Planning and Execution Problems." Though the memo covers postwar planning and policies, and the disastrous reign of US administrator Paul Bremer, the real target of the memo is Herbits's friend of 37 years, Rumsfeld. The memo asks a series of tough questions:
- "Why didn't Rumsfeld supervise [Bremer] the way he did [General Tommy] Franks?"
- "Who made the decision and why didn't we reconstitute the Iraqi Army?"
- "Did no one realize we were going to need Iraqi security forces?"
- "Did no one anticipate the importance of stabilization and how best to achieve it?"
- "Why was the de-Ba'athification so wide and deep?"
Herbits compares Rumsfeld's style of management to "the Haldeman model, arrogant," referring to Nixon's notorious chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. He continues: "Indecisive, contrary to popular image. Would not accept that some people in some areas were smarter than he. ...Trusts very few people. Very, very cautious. Rubber glove syndrome," meaning that Rumsfeld didn't like to leave his fingerprints on decisions. Herbits says that Rumsfeld is "often abusive" in meetings: "He diminished important people in front of others. He had a prosecutor's interrogation style. While he was trying to improve product -- and his questioning almost always did -- his style became counterproductive.... Summary: Did Rumsfeld err with the fundamental political calculation of this adminstration not getting the post-Iraq rebuilding process right within 18 months?" (Bob Woodward)
July 15: Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes that, after careful analysis, the report on pre-invasion intelligence surrounding the invasion of Iraq paints a picture that is worse than he and his colleagues had believed: "The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The only silver lining is that the corrupter-in-chief, George Tenet, is now gone. When the former CIA Director departed Sunday, he left behind an agency on life support -- an institution staffed by sycophant managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts. The analysts are embarrassed at their own naivete in believing that the passage carved into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters -- 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free' -- held real meaning for their work. The Senate Committee report is meticulous. Its findings are a sharp blow to those of us who took pride in working in an agency where we could speak truth to power -- with career protection from retribution from the powerful, and with leaders who would face down those policymakers who tried to exert undue influence over our analysis." McGovern writes that the commission report proves that the CIA used absolute lies as part of its "evidence" of Iraqi WMDs, specifically in the case of the anonymous weapons analyst nicknamed "Joe," who falsified data that the now-infamous aluminum tubes acquired by Hussein proved that regime's intention of creating nuclear weapons. McGovern writes, "The Senate committee determined that 'Joe' deliberately skewed data to fit preconceptions regarding an Iraqi nuclear threat. 'Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?' wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected veteran expert on Iraq's work toward developing a nuclear weapon. I share his wonderment. I too am appalled -- and angry. You give 27 years of your professional life to an institution whose main mission -- to get at the truth -- is essential for orderly policy making, and then you find it has been prostituted. You realize that your former colleagues have lacked the moral courage needed to stave off the effort to enlist them as accomplices in deceiving our elected representatives into giving their blessing to an ill-conceived, unnecessary war. Even Republican stalwart Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has conceded that, had Congress known before the vote for war what his committee has now discovered, 'I doubt if the votes would have been there.'"
McGovern says that he almost became physically ill upon reading just how unreliable the Iraqi intelligence source "Curveball" was deemed, and how the CIA's senior officials dismissed those concerns. He quotes the deputy director of the task force delegated to find the truth about Iraq's WMDs: "As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about." McGovern compares the "Curveball" revelations to the disastrous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, based on equally spurious information. "It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. Sadly, in the case of Iraq, even before the war truth took a back seat to a felt need to snuggle up to power -- to stay in good odor with a president and his advisers, all well known to be hell-bent on war on Iraq."
McGovern warns against accepting the administration's spin that the country went to war based on "flawed intelligence." "Not so," he writes. "This is precisely the spin that the Bush administration wants to give to the Senate report; i. e., that the president was misled; that his decision for war was based on spurious intelligence about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But the president's decision for war had little to do with intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It had everything to do with the administration's determination to gain control of strategic, oil-rich Iraq, implant an enduring military presence there, and -- not incidentally -- eliminate any possible threat from Iraq to Israel's security." The decision was not an honest one based on honest mistakes. The decision was deliberate, and the intelligence was deliberately cooked to support that decision. (Buzzflash)
July 15: The Idaho National Guard has told soldiers to use five approved "themes" when talking to the media, including support for war in Iraq and confidence in the superiority of American troops. The suggestions were made on the front page of "snakebite," the official newsletter of the 116th Brigade Combat Team. It does not prohibit soldiers from speaking about other issues, but says that referring to the themes "adds continuity to the message we are portraying as a unit." The other messages include pride for being on active duty, eagerness to work with coalition forces and appreciation for family and employers. "Those themes are the things we feel are consistent with what we're doing. Those are the messages we want out there right now," says Captain Monte Hibbert, who wrote the article. Hibbert says he does not intend to restrict soldiers' comments to the press. But Charles Sheehan-Miles, director of the Washington-based Veterans for Common Sense, retorts that this is not the message that will be perceived by most rank-and-file soldiers. "I suspect it's going to be received with a good deal of cynicism," he says, because the military is increasingly "trying to control the message, because the leaders and the Pentagon have taken a lot of hits on the war." Val Limburg, a journalism ethics and law professor emeritus at Washington State University, said it would be unethical if soldiers were being asked to cover up something that was wrong. He said the approved themes were more of a public relations issue. Limburg wonders if the military is returning to an era when it avoided uncontrolled media contacts. "In World War Two, we had a War Department and everything was cleared by the government before it went out as news," he says. "And the press went along with that because they wanted to win the war, too." During the Cold War and as recently as the 1991 Gulf War, contact between rank-and-file service members and the media was generally taboo. Military personnel were instructed to avoid talking to news reporters and to report all contacts to their local public affairs officer. But Hibbert says the attitude has changed over time, particularly in the last decade and as news technology has changed and reporters have become "embedded" with particular units. Because of the increased contact, even the lowest privates now receive training on dealing with the media. "We actually try to give them some experience by simulating interviews and role-playing," he says. (AP/Reclaim the Media)
July 15: New Hampshire Democrats are suing the state's Republican Party over the jamming of telephones set up to take calls from Democrats seeking rides to the polls on Election Day 2002. The lawsuit also names the head of a telemarketing firm who has been charged in a separate federal investigation with conspiring to jam five telephone lines at Democratic Party offices. "Dirty politics has no place in our electoral process," says state senator Lou D'Allesandro. Election observers feel that the phone jamming may have given Republican senator John Sununu the victory over Democratic contender Jeanne Shaheen, and may have affected other races. GOP operative and telemarketer Alan Raymong has already pled guilty to charges over the phone jamming, which disrupted Democrats' Election Day efforts to drive voters to the polls. (Guardian/Neil Rogers)
July 15: Trespassing charges against two people who wore anti-Bush T-shirts to a July 4 rally at the West Virginia capitol are dropped because a city ordinance does not cover trespassing on statehouse grounds. Nicole and Jeff Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were removed from the event in handcuffs after taking off an outer layer of clothes to reveal homemade T-shirts that had Bush's name with a slash through it and the words "Love America, Hate Bush" on the back. Bush was the featured speaker at the event, which was billed as a presidential appearance. No apologies nor explanations of the arrests were offered. Nicole, who was doing environmental work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of Memorial Day flooding in the state, was released from her position by coordinating officer Lou Botta without getting another assignment, though she has not been fired. They say they are pleased with the outcome of the case and plan to return to Texas immediately. (AP/West Virginia Gazette Mail)
July 15: Former ambassador Joseph Wilson, the husband of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, writes a letter to the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which just recently released its report on pre-invasion intelligence regarding Iraq. Wilson takes issue with several points concerning him raised in the report. He proves that the report's conclusion, "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee," is demonstrably false. Wilson writes, "The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo...my wife sent to her superiors that says 'my husband has good relations with the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines, (not to mention lots of French contacts) both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.' There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD reports officer stated the 'the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name"'...and a State Department Intelligence and Research officer that the 'meeting was "apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.' In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD Reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. ...In fact, it is my understanding that the Reports Officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the 'additional comments.' I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement."
Wilson also challenges a second conclusion: "Rather that speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided." Wilson replies, "This conclusion states that I told the committee staff that I 'may have become confused about my own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that the names and dates on the documents were not correct.' At the time that I was asked that question, I was not afforded the opportunity to review the articles to which the staff was referring. I have now done so. On March 7, 2003 the Director General of the IAEA reported to the United Nations Security Council that the documents that had been given to him were 'not authentic.' His deputy, Jacques Baute, was even more direct, pointing out that the forgeries were so obvious that a quick Google search would have exposed their flaws. A State Department spokesman was quoted the next day as saying about the forgeries, 'We fell for it.' From that time on the details surrounding the documents became public knowledge and were widely reported.
"I was not the source of information regarding the forensic analysis of the documents in question; the IAEA was. The first time I spoke publicly about the Niger issue was in response to the State Department's disclaimer. On CNN a few days later, in response to a question, I replied that I believed the US government knew more about the issue than the State Department spokesman had let on and that he had misspoken. I did not speak of my trip. My first public statement was in my article of July 6 published in the New York Times, written only after it became apparent that the administration was not going to deal with the Niger question unless it was forced to. I wrote the article because I believed then, and I believe now, that it was important to correct the record on the statement in the President's State of the Union address which lent credence to the charge that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. I believed that the record should reflect the facts as the US government had known them for over a year. The contents of my article do not appear in the body of the report and is not quoted in the 'additional comments.' In that article, I state clearly that 'As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors -– they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government -– and were probably forged. (And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)'
"The first time I actually saw what were represented as the documents was when Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent handed them to me in an interview on July 21. I was not wearing my glasses and could not read them. I have to this day not read them. I would have absolutely no reason to claim to have done so. My mission was to look into whether such a transaction took place or could take place. It had not and could not. By definition that makes the documents bogus. ...I have been very careful to say that while I believe that the use of the sixteen words in the State of the Union address was a deliberate attempt to deceive the Congress of the United States, I do not know what role the President may have had other than he has accepted responsibility for the words he spoke. I have also said on many occasions that I believe the President has proven to be far more protective of his senior staff than they have been to him.
"The 'additional comments' also assert: 'The Committee found that, for most analysts the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.' In fact, the body of the Senate report suggests the exact opposite." Wilson then quotes the Senate report at length to bolster his assertion.
Wilson concludes, "I undertook this mission at the request of my government in response to a legitimate concern that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. This was a national security issue that has concerned me since I was the Deputy Chief of Mission in the US Embassy in Iraq before and during the first Gulf War. At the time of my trip I was in private business and had not offered my views publicly on the policy we should adopt towards Iraq. Indeed, throughout the debate in the runup to the war, I took the position that the US be firm with Saddam Hussein on the question of weapons of mass destruction programs including backing tough diplomacy with the credible threat of force. In that debate I never mentioned my trip to Niger. I did not share the details of my trip until May, 2003, after the war was over, and then only when it became clear that the administration was not going to address the issue of the State of the Union statement. It is essential that the errors and distortions in the additional comments be corrected for the public record. Nothing could be more important for the American people than to have an accurate picture of the events that led to the decision to bring the United States into war in Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee has an obligation to present to the American people the factual basis of that process. I hope that this letter is helpful in that effort. I look forward to your further 'additional comments.'" To date, the committee has not responded to Wilson's letter. (Buzzflash)
July 15: Worrisome, if unconfirmable, reports of various experts about Bush's mental state are swirling through the media. Some experts believe that Bush exhibits behaviors and thinking patterns characteristic of what Alcoholics Anonymous calls "dry drunks" -- persons showing impaired behavior reminiscent of heavy drinkers, though the persons in questions do not actually drink. "Though it is reported that he stopped drinking in 1986, at the age of 40," reports journalist Douglas Yates, "Bush's policies and judgment appear linked to alcohol addiction." According to AA, "dry drunks," while no longer drinkers, are not truly sober. "Dry drunks tend to extremes while also displaying increased anxiety, irritability, resentment, impulsive anger and lack of empathy," Yates reports. "They are rigid, judgmental and often present an inordinate sense of entitlement." Katherine van Wormer, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa and co-author of Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective, points to Bush's language as evidence of his possibly being a "dry drunk:" "First there were the terms -- 'crusade' and 'infinite justice.' Next came 'evil doers,' 'axis of evil,' and 'regime change'...the polarized thinking and the obsessive repetition reminded me of many of the recovering alcoholics/addicts I had treated," she writes. Other researchers cite the president's black-and-white view of the world. Although one of the first principles of leadership is the ability to consider opposing points of view, Bush refuses to muster such perspectives. Liberal author and professor of communication Mark Crispin Miller examined Bush's language for evidence of distorted thinking for his book Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder. Miller initially intended an amusing catalog of Bush's verbal gaffes. However, in reading the transcripts of his speeches, Miller realized something more serious was going on. Bush's garbled and confusing sentences may actually reveal a hidden personality disorder. Miller builds the case that Bush's gaffes occur only when he's speaking about things that mean little to him. Topics such as the poor, idealism or compassion are often twisted beyond meaning. However, writes Miller, "He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge. When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine. This is a guy who is absolutely proud of his own inflexibility and rectitude."
Psychoanalyst and author Justin Frank, who recently published Bush on the Couch, paints an even more disturbing picture. Frank believes that Bush suffers from megalomania, paranoia, a false sense of omnipotence, an inability to manage his emotions, a lifelong need to defy authority, an unresolved love-hate relationship with his father, and the repercussions of a history of untreated alcohol abuse. Not a pretty picture. Frank spends a great deal of ink on what he calls Bush's "almost pathological aversion to owning up to his infractions" -- a mind-set common to individuals Freud termed "the Exceptions," those who feel "entitled to live outside the limitations that apply to ordinary people." Bush's life shows a pattern of such behaviors -- insisting on driving while drunk, refusing to report for National Guard duty, and his refusal as president to behave according to US and international law. Bush has always been "enabled" by his rich and powerful family, who ensured that he would never have to face any repercussions, or accept any responsibility, for his actions.
Arianna Huffington writes, "[I]t doesn't help one outgrow this sense of entitlement when Daddy and his pals are always there to rescue you when you get in trouble -- whether it's keeping you out of Vietnam by bumping you to the top of the National Guard waiting list or bailing you out of lousy business deals with cushy seats on corporate boards or making sure the votes in Florida (just another limitation) aren't properly counted." Huffington also echoes the observations of Bush as a possible "dry drunk," and adds that he "has become a master of the psychological jiujitsu known as Freudian Projection." She explains, "Freudian Projection is, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a defense mechanism in which 'the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by falsely attributing to another his or her own unacceptable feelings, impulses or thoughts.'" In other words, you and I and everyone are really guilty of his own infractions.
She observes, "On the 2004 campaign trail, it's the pathologically inconsistent Bush attempting to portray John Kerry as a two-faced flip-flopper. It's become the Bush-Cheney campaign mantra. GOP talking points 1 through 100. The president's go-to laugh and applause line: 'Sen. Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue. ...My opponent clearly has strong beliefs, they just don't last very long.'" Huffington points out that Bush himself is guilty of the most egregrious flip-flops, but, true to his psychological makeup, instead accuses his current opponent of his own failings. The reversal of focus on finding Osama bin Laden, his original opposition to a Department of Homeland Security, his original opposition to the creation of a 9/11 commission, and his former support of gay rights as a states' rights issue, later reversed with his call for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, are just a few examples. There are others: "Bush supported CO2 caps, then opposed them. He opposed trade tariffs, then he didn't. Then he did again. He was against nation building, then he was OK with it. We'd found WMD, then we hadn't. Saddam was linked to Osama, then he wasn't. Then he was...sorta. Chalabi was in, then he was out. Way out. In fact, Bush's entire Iraq misadventure has been one big, costly, deadly flip-flop: We didn't need more troops, then we did. We didn't need more money, then we did. Preemption was a great idea -- on to Syria, Iran and North Korea! Then it wasn't -- hello, diplomacy! Baathists were the bad guys, then Baathists were our buds. We didn't need the U.N., then we did. And all this from a man who, once upon a time, made 'credibility' a key to his appeal." Frank concludes, "Having seen the depth and range of President Bush's psychological flaws...our sole treatment option -- for his benefit and for ours -- is to remove President Bush from office."
While such speculations are just that -- speculations -- the spectre of such a mentally disordered person in the Oval Office is profoundly troubling. (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner/NYTr, Salon)
July 15: Author Barbara Ehrenreich says that perhaps the biggest problem faced by Americans is the phenomenon of "groupthink," or, as is blamed by the Senate commission on intelligence in its report, "collective groupthink." Ehrenreich writes, "Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix 'group.' Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the 'team player' with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone 'out of step with the American people.' Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program. ...I trace the current outbreak of droidlike conformity to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism, and we began to run out of surfaces for affixing American flags. Bill Maher lost his job for pointing out that, whatever else they were, the 9/11 terrorists weren't cowards, prompting Ari Fleischer to warn (though he has since backed down) that Americans 'need to watch what they say.' Never mind that Sun Tzu says, somewhere in his oeuvre, that while it's soothing to underestimate the enemy, it's often fatal, too. And what was that group thinking in Abu Ghraib? Yes, the accused guards seem to have been encouraged to soften up their charges for interrogation, just as the operatives at Langley were pelted with White House demands for some plausible casus belli. But the alarming thing is how few soldiers demurred, and how many got caught up in the fun of it."
Groupthink has been recognized as dangerous for centuries; Ehrenreich writes, "[W]hile the capacity for groupthink is an endearing part of our legacy as social animals, it's also a common precondition for self-destruction. One thousand coalition soldiers have died because the CIA was so eager to go along with the emperor's delusion that he was actually wearing clothes. Instead of honoring groupthink resisters, we subject them to insult and abuse. Sgt. Samuel Provance III has been shunned by fellow soldiers since speaking out against the torture at Abu Ghraib, in addition to losing his security clearance and being faced with a possible court-martial. A fellow Abu Ghraib whistle-blower, Specialist Joseph Darby, was praised by the brass, but has had to move to an undisclosed location to avoid grass-roots retaliation. The list goes on. Sibel Edmonds lost her job at the FBI for complaining about mistranslations of terror-related documents from the Arabic. Jesselyn Radack was driven out of her post at the Justice Department for objecting to the treatment of John Walker Lindh, then harassed by John Ashcroft's enforcers at her next job. As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: 'We need to understand in this "land of the free and home of the brave" that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families.' This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them." (New York Times/CommonDreams)

Blair administration admits Hutton inquiry was a cover-up

July 16: A spokesman for Tony Blair admits that British intelligence agency MI6 withheld critical information about the unreliability of information about Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons programs from the Hutton inquiry commission, in order to mislead the commission into reporting that Hussein did, indeed, have such weapons. Senior sources close to last year's Hutton inquiry say they were unaware that crucial intelligence had been withdrawn, and had this been known, a number of government witnesses would have faced questions about the matter. They insist Lord Hutton knew nothing of the withheld information. During the August 2003 inquiry, Blair, MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, all failed to mention the withdrawal of intelligence. All three insisted that intelligence from agents in Iraq was believed to be reliable. Downing Street gives three reasons for not telling the Hutton inquiry: it was not relevant to the investigation into the death of Dr. David Kelly, the prime focus of the inquiry; it was only one element in the chemical and biological weapons picture; and, because validation of the intelligence and its source was continuing, it was too sensitive to make public. Angry members of Parliament are quick to accuse Blair of misleading them for political purposes. (Independent/Information Clearinghouse)

Democrats call for pre-election investigation to potential threats to voting

July 16: Democratic senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with fellow Senate Democrats Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, and representatives Nancy Pelosi, Elijah Cummings (chair of the Congressional Black Caucus), Ciro Rodriguez (chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus), Mike Honda (chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus), John Conyers, and John Larson, send a letter to the General Accounting Office asking for a thorough study of the potential problem with electronic voting machines and other threats to fair and impartial voting in all 50 states. "We already know of the potentially serious problems posed by the widespread use of electronic voting machines," reads the letter. "There are, however, other problems that have received little notice but have great potential to disrupt the election process and cause voters to be disenfranchised on November 2nd." Clinton says of the letter, "We cannot abide another fiasco like the 2000 election. Our democracy is rooted in the integrity of the election process and we should move heaven and earth to make certain the American people know their voting rights are respected and their votes are properly counted." The GAO is asked to review state-by-state policies regarding provisional voting, voter registration, voter identification at the polls, and the purging of voters from the rolls. "In recent days we've learned of new shenanigans regarding the purging of alleged felons from Florida's rolls," says Clinton. "We want to make sure that issue and these others are properly addressed nationwide." The NAACP and the League of Women Voters are among the outside organizations strongly supporting this call for a thorough survey. (Buzzflash)
July 16: Evidence surfaces that suggests the Bush administration, using the federally funded International Republican Institute (IRI), fomented the right-wing coup that toppled the democratically elected leftist government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. On Feb. 8, 2001, the IRI's senior program officer for Haiti, Stanley Lucas, appeared on the Haitian station Radio Tropicale to suggest three strategies for vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. First, Lucas proposed forcing Aristide to accept early elections and be voted out; second, he could be charged with corruption and arrested; and finally, Lucas raised dealing with Aristide the way the Congolese people had dealt with President Laurent Kabila the month before. "You did see what happened to Kabila?" Lucas asked his audience. Kabila had been assassinated. Lucas was not merely talking. Between 1998 and 2004, the IRI helped the Bush administration conduct a $3 million party-building program in Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single bloc and, according to a former U.S. ambassador there, encouraging them to reject internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in order to heighten Haiti's political crisis. Lucas himself has deep, if murky, connections with a number of Haiti's most violent right-wing paramilitary and political organizations, connections similar to those IRI has in Venezuela, where it has performed a similar function in trying to overthrow the government of Hugo Chavez. Bush reversed the Clinton administration's approach of direct engagement of the volatile Haitian political parties, instead packing the State Department with anti-Aristide ideologues and relying on Lucas and his connections to bring about regime change.
Lucas is the son of a wealthy, pro-Duvalier Haitian family; in 1987, Lucas organized a machete-wielding mob to slaughter 250 peasants protesting for land reform. He says proudly that he has been working since 1986 to train Haitian soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics. According to Bob Maguire, a leading Haiti expert at Trinity College and former State Department official, Lucas' personal history raises serious questions about IRI's integrity. ""Having this guy as your point person for Haiti, with this kind of background, is just incredibly provocative," says Maguire. "If your organization wants to have a useful, balanced program, how could you have this guy as your program officer?" IRI has long been backed by a shadowy but powerful consortium of Republican lawmakers and right-wing American business interests. The Bush administration worked hand-in-glove with the IRI, delegating Haiti policy to right-wing underlings like the assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, a former staffer to Senator Jesse Helms. Not only did Noriega collaborate with IRI to increase funding to Aristide's opponents, but as a mediator to Haiti's political crisis he appears to have routinely acquiesced with the opposition's divisive tactics. In February 2004, as insurgents went on the offensive and Haiti began descending into chaos, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the Bush administration's view of the situation at a February 10 press briefing: "Everyone's hopeful that the situation, which tends to ebb and flow down there, will stay below a certain threshold...we have no plans to do anything." Two weeks later, an international delegation was unable to broker a compromise; Aristide agreed to a power-sharing peace deal, but the rebels declined. With the insurgency sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush officials convened, but rather than send in troops to protect Aristide's government, they reversed their official position of support, asking Aristide to leave the country immediately under US stewardship. Haiti's elected leader left on a plane the following day in the company of US diplomats, bound for exile in the Central African Republic. Since the coup, the price of rice, the staple food of Haiti's poor, has quadrupled, and violence and human rights abuses have run amok.
The conservatives in the US have long supported totalitarian regimes in Haiti. In 1971, Nixon restored US support for the brutal dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, whom he considered an anticommunist counterweight to Castro's Cuba. In 1986, Duvalier's regime collapsed under a wave of popular opposition, and Aristide won Haiti's first democratic election in 1990. Aristide was ousted by a US-backed right-wing coup led by the CIA-backed FRAPH, a junta led by US-trained army official Raoul Cedras. When Aristide fled Haiti in 1991, he was given sanctuary in Washington by sympathetic liberal politicians and intellectuals, especially members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who were eager to show solidarity with the first democratically elected leader of the world's oldest black republic. In 1994, under intense pressure from congressional Democrats, President Clinton returned Aristide to power by military force. Though Aristide accepted heavy economic reforms as a condition of his return, his legacy as a liberation-theology preaching slum priest thrust to power by Haiti's poor masses fueled a perception among conservatives that he was the next Fidel Castro. After conservatives won back Congress in 1994, Helms, along with representatives Ben Gilman and Porter Goss, rammed through a series of bills ordering US troops out of Haiti, terminating a host of infrastructure-building initiatives there and imposing an embargo on lethal and nonlethal weapons to the Haitian national police force. Helms even presented a now-discredited CIA document on the Senate floor in 1995 claiming Aristide was "psychotic." Aristide's efforts to cling to power saw him resort to his own rhetorical and repressive excesses, surrounding himself with cronies and hiring armed gangs to intimidate his opponents. Meanwhile, confronted with a Clinton White House that preferred to hold its nose to Aristide's corruption and focus on building Haiti's fragile democracy, a coalition of Republicans used IRI as a Trojan horse.
From the beginning of its Haiti program, in direct contradiction of many of its own guidelines, IRI embraced reactionary political elements far more antidemocratic than Aristide. Created by Congress in 1983, IRI has an approximately $20 million annual budget granted by its bureaucratic parent, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Agency for International Development, and conservative corporate and philanthropic groups. But past IRI activity highlights an agenda for regime change far from democratic in its methods, from organizing groups that participated in a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, to hosting delegates from right-wing European parties at a September 2002 conference in Prague to rally support for war on Iraq. Its Haiti program is the brainchild of its vice president, Georges Fauriol, who is a member of the Republican National Committee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At CSIS, a conservative Washington think tank, Fauriol worked closely with Otto Reich, the Iran-Contra figure who served as the Bush administration's special envoy to the Western Hemisphere until his resignation this June. Fauriol has worked as a Latin America expert for CSIS since the days when Duvalier ruled Haiti.
By 1992, while the US-friendly Cedras' FRAPH death squads rampaged through Haiti's slums and slaughtered Aristide supporters by the thousands, IRI hired Haitian national Stanley Lucas to head its operations there. For IRI's Washington backers, Lucas meant unparalleled access to the key anti-Aristide figures on Haiti's political scene. By 1998, when IRI's "party-building" program officially began, Lucas spearheaded the training of an array of small parties at IRI meetings in Port-au-Prince. IRI's Scott characterized the seminars as benign lessons in "Democracy 101." Not so. Among invitees to IRI's seminars were members of CREDDO, the personal political platform of General Prosper Avril, the former Haitian dictator who ruled with an iron fist from 1988 to 1990, declaring a state of siege and arbitrarily torturing his opponents. Avril wrote about IRI's meetings in his 1999 memoir, The Truth About a Singular Lawsuit, describing a truce he signed "under the auspices of IRI" with his former torture victim Evans Paul. Paul became the de facto spokesman for the coalition of parties trained in 1999 by Lucas and IRI: the Democratic Convergence. Despite IRI's efforts to create a credible opposition to Aristide, the Convergence proved a lame horse; the party was blown out by Aristide's popular Lavalas party in the 2000 local and parliamentary elections. Yet questionable vote counting prompted the Clinton administration to block over $400 million in multilateral loans to Haiti.
As economic conditions deteriorated there, Convergence changed its tactics. In addition to boycotting the 2000 presidential elections, between 2000 and 2002 Convergence rejected 20 proposed power-sharing compromises designed to ease Haiti's political crisis. In 2003 the party formed an ersatz transitional government to challenge Aristide's legitimacy, and its relationship with IRI and Washington Republicans grew even cozier. From 1998 to 2002, IRI bolstered Convergence with around $2 million. In 2000, $34,994 of that money was granted to IRI from NED to junket Convergence leaders to several meetings in Washington designed "to open channels of communication" with "relevant policy makers and analysts." IRI met Convergence leaders again in February 2002 in the Dominican Republic with a delegation of congressional Republicans including Caleb McCarry, a staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign Relations Committee who, according to a former senior State Department official, "worked hand in glove with Lucas to tie funding to the opposition."
Secretary of State Colin Powell's advice to continue the Clintonian approach to Haiti was ignored. Instead, Bush and IRI worked ceaselessly to destabilize Aristide and build up Convergence as a "legitimate" right-wing opposition to Aristide. The US ambassador to Haiti, Brian Dean Curran, a Clinton appointee who had found evidence that Lucas was undermining diplomatic efforts to resolve Haiti's political crisis, became a target for Lucas. Lucas spread destructive rumors about Curran's private life, and threatened the ambassador with firing "as soon as the real US policy is enacted." Curran resigned under pressure and threats in July 2003. IRI helped form a new coalition called "Group of 184" that purported to represent the "civil society" wing of the opposition. Group of 184's power brokers were divided into two camps: its majority constitutional wing, which emphasized protests and diplomacy as the path to forcing Aristide out, and a hard-line faction quietly determined to oust Aristide by any means necessary. The constitutionalists were represented by Group of 184's spokesman and most prominent member, Andre Apaid Jr., a Haitian-American of Lebanese descent who controls one of Haiti's oldest and largest sweatshop empires. The hard-liners were led by Wendell Claude, a politician who was hell-bent on avenging the death of his brother Sylvio, a church minister burned to death by a pro-Aristide mob after the coup in 1991.
As unrest mounted, Claude tapped Guy Phillippe, a US-trained former Haitian police chief with an ugly human rights record, to lead a band of insurgents consisting almost entirely of exiled members of FRAPH death squads and former soldiers of the Haitian army, which Aristide had disbanded in 1995. For three years, they camped in Perenal, a border town in the Dominican Republic, using it as a staging point for acts of sabotage against Aristide's government, including a July 2001 hit-and-run attack on the Haitian police academy that killed five and wounded 14. Phillippe and Lucas are childhood friends, and though the two met frequently during this period, Lucas says he refused to discuss politics with his friend and political cohort. IRI helped Phillippe and Claude devise policy and tactics, but never in public; IRI spokesmen have always denied any connection between the two. Besides violating its own stated guidelines, IRI has also broken the rules of its chief funder, USAID, which forbids grantees from working with "undemocratic parties" that do not "eschew the use of violence to overthrow democratic institutions" or "have endorsed or sponsored violence in the past."
On February 29, Aristide was on his way under US guard to exile in Africa, and Phillippe was proclaiming himself "the chief" in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. In the wake of Aristide's departure, widespread looting erupted across Haiti; well-armed thugs terrorized businesses and ravaged the country's public infrastructure. Virtually every prison in the country was emptied, freeing both common criminals and human rights violators -- including Stanley Lucas' notorious cousin, Remy. Many Haiti experts, including Maguire, project the next elections there will be held sometime in the next two years. For now, Haiti's president is Gerard Latortue, a former World Bank official hailed by Jeb Bush for his "integrity and selfless service." Latortue is a puppet of Phillippe and the insurgents. Latortue's government wields little authority: According to a June 15 press release from the nonpartisan Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, in addition to many hundreds of Aristide supporters murdered inside Port-au-Prince itself, convicted criminals, former paramilitary leaders and other vigilantes retain effective control of most of the Haitian countryside. And, as it did with European governments on Iraq, the Bush administration's Haiti policy has provoked a diplomatic crisis in the Caribbean basin: Over four months after Aristide's departure from Haiti, the 15-nation Caribbean Community still refuses to recognize Latortue's government, and in June the OAS opened an investigation into Aristide's ouster. US troops handed over control of the peacekeeping mission in Haiti to the UN on June 20. "One has to be very concerned with the country's direction," says Maguire. "An awful lot of people who have been discredited in the past for abusing power and people have been climbing back into government. So far there is no sign that the new government or the US will confront these antidemocratic forces."
An April press release from the independent Haitian factory workers' union, Batay Ouvriye, made an urgent plea: "There is no person legitimately in charge anywhere. A whole series of upstarts have taken advantage of this situation to set themselves up as the authorities, as chiefs, and, in the process, the people are really suffering. THIS SITUATION CANNOT CONTINUE!" (Salon, Democracy Now)
July 16: The General Services Administration reveals that it canceled a contract with a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin to provide interrogators for the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility, after finding that the contract was awarded improperly. The November 2002 contract was canceled after GSA auditors discovered it in January 2004. Other private contractors have been contracted to provide interrogators to the military, most notably through CAIC at Abu Ghraib; one CAIC employee is the target of an Army investigation into abuse of Iraqi prisoners. "We shouldn't be doing this," says the Interior Department's Frank Quimby, whose agency, the National Business Council, was involved in the contractings. (GovExec)
July 16: Florida Democrat Corrine Brown is censored by the House of Representatives for saying on the floor of the House that the House leadership had participated in a "coup d'etat" in 2000 by stealing the election and that we would need monitoring to make sure it didn't happen again in 2004. "We were told to 'get over it,'" she says. "We will not 'get over it.'" The House leadership also demands, successfully, that her words be stricken from the Congressional Record. Brown responds in a statement, "striking my words from the House floor is just one more example of the Republican Party's attempt to try and cover up what happened during the 2000 election and of their activities this year in the state of Florida in preparation for stealing this year's election as well. What is the Republican Party so afraid of? Let me tell you what I'm afraid of: another stolen election and four more years of the Bush administration." (Buzzflash, Corrinne Brown)
July 16: Former CIA director and avowed neoconservative James Woolsey is the man who helped arrange the debriefing of an Iraqi defector who falsely claimed that Iraq had biological-warfare laboratories disguised as yogurt and milk trucks. Woolsey's efforts to persuade the US government to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein may well have sparked his decision to bring in the unreliable defector, Major Mohammad Harith, an Iraqi who was brought forward by the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. A classified Defense Department report shows that on February 11, 2002, Woolsey telephoned Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Linton Wells about the defector and told him how to contact the man, who'd been produced by an Iraqi exile group eager to oust Saddam. Wells said he passed the information to the Defense Intelligence Agency. By using his Pentagon contacts, Woolsey provided a direct pipeline to the government for Harith's information that bypassed the CIA, which for years had been highly distrustful of Chalabi's exile group. The Senate Intelligence Committee didn't address that issue last week in its 511-page report on Iraq intelligence. A representative of Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, confirms that Woolsey and other neoconservatives such as Richard Perle have brought defectors directly to the attention of Bush administration officials on the INC's behalf. Harith's testimony was used to validate the statements of another INC defector, code-named Curveball, whose stories about Iraqi WMDs have also been proven to be lies. After several meetings, a DIA debriefer concluded that some of Harith's information "seemed accurate, but much of it appeared embellished" and he apparently "had been coached on what information to provide." However, the initial DIA report failed to note these concerns, but did state that he had passed a lie detector test. Further intelligence assessments in April, May, and June 2002 found that Harith was so suspect that the DIA issued a "fabricator notice" on him. Regardless, his claim was cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and included in Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. The Senate report fails to indicate why Bush and his top officials chose to use Harith's claims when they had already been disproven.
Woolsey is an influential Washington insider, a member of Perle's Defense Policy Board, and a founder of the Project for the New American Century. He served as director of the CIA from 1993 through 1995, and has close ties with many top Bush officials. He also has long-standing ties with Chalabi and the INC. Chalabi, who has now been shown to have been a double agent for Iran, is responsible for providing dozens of defectors with spectacular but fabricated stories about Iraq's weapons programs, stories which were used to justify the US's invasion of that country. Harith caused a media splash when he did a March 2002 interview for CBS's 60 Minutes, in which he told the interviewer that he himself had purchased seven Renault refrigerated trucks for conversion into biological warfare laboratories. In a videotaped interview with INC officials, reported two weeks later by the Sunday Times of London, he said the vehicles were disguised as milk and yogurt trucks. Woolsey himself has appeared on numerous news programs and written several op-eds claiming that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax poisonings, and strongly advocated war against Saddam Hussein. (Knight-Ridder/CommonDreams)
July 16: Comedy Central's gadfly political commentator, Jon Stewart, lambasts the media for lapping up and spewing out the Republican's talking points for the day. Stewart begins his bit by telling the audience, "It's not easy keeping up with current events. As soon as you catch up, more happens. That's where conventional wisdom fits in. Conventional wisdom is the agreed upon understanding of an event or person. John Kerry is a flip flopper. George Bush has sincere heartland values and is stupid. What matters is not that the designation be true just that it be agreed upon by the media so that no further thought has to be put into it. So how is conventional wisdom arrived at? For instance, let's take the example of the addition of John Edwards to the Democratic ticket. I don't know how to feel about that. I don't know what it means. Here's how I will." He plays a snippet from a CNN reporter saying, "This is 28 pages from the Republican National Committee. It says, 'Who is Edwards? It starts off by saying a disingenuous, unaccomplished liberal.' We also saw from the Bush-Cheney camp they released talking points to their supporters." Stewart: "Talking points. That's how we learn things. But how will I absorb a talking point like 'Edwards and Kerry are out of the mainstream' unless I get it jackhammered into my skull? That's where television lends a hand." Stewart then plays a montage of commentators:
Fox News: "He stands way out of the main stream."
CNN – Terry Holt, Spokesman for Bush Camp: "...way out of the main stream."
CNN – Communication Director, Bush-Cheney: "He stands so far out of the main stream."
CNN – Lynn Cheney: "He's so out of the main stream."
CNN - Terry Holt: "They're out of the main stream."
CNN – Frank Donatelli, GOP Strategist: "...well out of the main stream."
Stewart: "I'm getting a feeling. I think, I think they're out of the main stream. But, what if I wonder why?"
CNN – Frank Donatelli: "...two of the foremost liberal senators of the US Senate."
CNN – Crossfire: "...two of the foremost liberal senators of the US Senate."
MSNBC – Ed Gillespie: "...the most liberal rated senator in the US Senate."
Hardball – Lynn Cheney: "...the most liberal senator of the Senate."
Fox News: "...who was rated as the number 1 liberal in the US Senate."
Fox News – Elizabeth Dole: "...the number 1 most liberal senator in the US Senate."
Jon Stewart: "Wow! Those guys are liberals! In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say they're the first and fourth most liberal in the whole Senate. Wow! And while we don't have any idea what that means and where those rankings come from and how they were arrived at or whether it's even true, I don't like the sounds of it. And it's certainly not something for the media to question. As a matter of fact, I would imagine people like that, liberal and out of the main stream, hang out in some pretty extreme places."
ABC – This Week – Lindsey Graham: "...talking about the hatefest."
CNN: "...Hollywood hatefest."
Fox News: "...last Thursday night's hatefest."
Pat Boone: "...Radio City Music Hall hatefest..."
Jon Stewart: "Yeah. See, out of the main stream, liberals, and hatefest. Keeping up with current events is easier than you think. Talking points -- they're true because they're said a lot."
What is perhaps most sad about this is that it takes a comedian on a self-described "fake news show" to point out the actual truth behind the onslaught orchestrated by the Republican Party and enthusiastically promulgated by the supposedly impartial news media. (Buzzflash)
July 16: Comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg blasts Republican critics who orchestrated her removal as spokesperson for the diet drink SlimFast after she made some unflattering and profane remarks about Bush at a recent Democratic fundraiser. "America's heart and soul is freedom of expression without fear of reprisal," she says in a statement. "I find all this feigned indignation about 'Bush bashing' quite disingenuous," noting the Bush administration has savagely gone after critics like former senator Max Cleland, Iraq whistleblower Joseph Wilson and ex-terrorism chief Richard Clarke. "For the Republican Party to pretend this is new to them seems a little fake. The fact that I am no longer the spokesman for SlimFast makes me sad, but not as sad as someone trying to punish me for exercising my right as an American to speak my mind." RNC chairman Ken Mehlman calls the event at New York's Radio City Music Hall a "hatefest" that proves John Kerry doesn't "share the same values" as the rest of America. Kerry has distanced himself from the event and says Goldberg does not represent his views. Mehlman has agitated for the Kerry campaign to release a video of the event, even going so far as to promise not to use the footage in ads; he is repudiated by Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, who says that he can have the video after Bush releases his military records and details of Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force. (New York Daily News)
July 16: Yoshihiro Tsurumi, a Harvard professor who taught George W. Bush at the Harvard School of Business during the early '70s, says his former student was shallow, flippant, and disrespectful to him. Tsurumi, an avowed opponent of Bush's current views and policies who was a visiting associate professor of international business at HBS between 1972 and 1976, says Bush was among 85 students he taught in a required first-year course. In the class on "Environment Analysis for Management," incorporating elements of macroeconomics, industrial policy and international business, Tsurumi says students discussed and debated case studies for 90 minutes several times a week. Tsurumi, now a professor at Baruch College in the City University of New York, says Bush scored in the bottom 10% of students in the class. He vividly remembers Bush's statements and behavior: "always very shallow," he remembers. "Whenever [Bush] just bumped into me, he had some flippant statement to make," he says. "The comments he made were revealing of his prejudice." (Tsurumi is not clear whether Bush's prejudice is economic or racial, or perhaps both.)
Tsurumi remembers Bush as a right-wing extremist, equating the 1930s New Deal with socialism and the corporation-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission with "an enemy of capitalism." Tsurumi recalls, "I vividly remember that he made a comment saying that people are poor because they're lazy." Tsurumi also says Bush displayed a sense of arrogance about his prominent family, including his father, former president George H.W. Bush. "[Bush] didn't stand out as the most promising student, but...he made it sure we understood how well he was connected," Tsurumi recalls. "He wasn't bashful about how he was being pushed upward by Dad's connections." Tsurumi says that Bush boasted about his father's political string-pulling getting him into the Texas Air National Guard and allowing him to dodge duty in Vietnam: "I asked him, 'What have you been doing? How about Vietnam?' and he said, 'Well, I've been in the National Guard in Texas.' I said, 'How did you get that? There's a 10-year waiting list.' And he said, 'Well, my dad has connections.'" And when other students were frantically scrambling for summer jobs, Tsurumi said, Bush let it be known that he was planning instead for a visit to his father in Beijing, where the senior Bush was serving at the time as the special US envoy to China. At the time, Tsurumi said his worries about his student extended no further than the boardroom. "All Harvard Business School students want to become president of a company one day," he says. "I remember saying, if you become president of a company some day, may God help your customers and employees." When he discovered that his former pupil was vying for the presidency in 2000, Tsurumi said he tried to inform the public about his experience with the then-Texas governor at HBS -- but got few results beyond hate mail. "Last election time, if you recall, the American mass media did a shameful job of vetting [the presidential candidates]," he says. This time it seems to be getting around a bit more widely. After three years of [his] dismal record, people seem more inclined to believe that all his failed leadership was apparent during the Harvard Business School years." Tsurumi recently told the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo, "I always remember two groups of students. One is the really good students, not only intelligent, but with leadership qualities, courage. The other is the total opposite, unfortunately to which George belonged." (Harvard Crimson, Le Badaud)

Iraqi prime minister murders prisoners in cold blood

July 17: Days before he was awarded control of Iraq, newly named prime minister Iyad Allawi personally executed up to six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, according to two eyewitnesses to the killings. They say the prisoners, handcuffed and blindfolded, were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs. Allawi reportedly told onlookers that each victim had killed up to 50 Iraqis and that they "deserved worse than death." As a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from Allawi's personal security team watched, Allawi shot each in the head. Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, watched the executions, and then congratulated Allawi when the job was done. Both Allawi's and al-Naqib's offices have denied that the murders occurred. One of the witnesses says that before killing the prisoners, Allawi told those around him that he wanted to send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents. "The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the Interior Minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death -- but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them." Re-enacting the killings, one witness stands three to four meters in front of a wall and swung his outstretched arm in an even arc, left to right, jerking his wrist to mimic the recoil as each bullet was fired. Then he raised a hand to his brow, saying: "He was very close. Each was shot in the head." The witnesses said seven prisoners had been brought out to the courtyard, but the last man in the line was only wounded: in the neck, says one witness; in the chest, says the other.
Allawi has a well-deserved reputation for brutality, and Middle Eastern observers say that Allawi's state-sanctioned murders signals a return to practices as carried out under Saddam Hussein.
Former CIA officer Vincent Cannisatraro recently told the New Yorker, "If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does. He was a paid Mukhabarat [intelligence] agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." Some Iraqis say that Allawi is trying to establish himself as a "strongman" in his country. Interestingly, the witnesses both agree that the shootings were justified, with one saying, "These criminals were terrorists. They are the ones who plant the bombs." One of the witnesses adds, "Any terrorists in Iraq should have the same destiny. This is the new Iraq. Allawi wanted to send a message to his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if they kill anyone -- especially, they are not to worry about tribal revenge. He said there would be an order from him and the Interior Ministry that all would be fully protected. He told them: 'We must destroy anyone who wants to destroy Iraq and kill our people.' At first they were surprised. I was scared -- but now the police seem to be very happy about this. There was no anger at all, because so many policemen have been killed by these criminals."
Though there is no exact date for the killings, they took place sometime during the third weekend in June, about a week before the midnight turnover of power, and over three weeks after Allawi was named interim prime minister. Five of the seven prisoners were Iraqis; two were possibly Syrian. All were young men. After the removal of the bodies, the officer in charge of the complex, General Raad Abdullah, is said to have called a meeting of the policemen and told them not to talk outside the station about what had happened. "He said it was a security issue," a witness says. Both eyewitnesses were interviewed separately, with neither one knowing what the other was telling the press. US ambassador John Negroponte's office says in an e-mail, "If we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed."
Allawi is known to have been one of Saddam Hussein's most trusted intelligence agents; as a Mukhabarat hit man, he has an uncounted, but high, number of murders already on his hands. He has said repeatedly that he intends to bring back many of the old, Hussein-era tactics of meting out justice, including summary executions and the chopping off of hands for lesser offenses. Many feel that Allawi executed these six prisoners in order to give himself a tough reputation for his countrymen, many of whom know little about him; they also feel that Allawi is trying to toughen up Iraq's rather weak-willed police force, many of whom are terrorized by insurgents in their areas. An Iraqi doctor claimed the killings were being discussed "all over town," and speculates, "Maybe Allawi wants to be seen like Saddam, because when Iraqis hear a rumor like this they presume it is based on fact."
Allawi himself is largely unknown in his country; for the past decade, he has spent little time in Iraq, instead cultivating friends and supporters among conservatives in the US and Britain; he also has close ties to both British and US intelligence agencies (the CIA still funds his Iraqi National Accord organization). He is known to have broken with Hussein, formerly his political patron, in 1975, likely over money matters; he is well known to be a fierce rival of fellow Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi. A senior Jordanian official who met the new Prime Minister "dozens of times" before the US invasion says he was always worried about an Allawi ascendancy. He says, "[Allawi] made it clear that he was going back to Iraq with vengeance; it was never going to be about a beauty of democracy, so much as a settling of scores. Think about it: it is the resistance that will be his downfall, so he thinks if he kills them, he will prevail." Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East, elaborates further: "He was a very effective operator and a true believer. Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he's a thug." Middle East historian Juan Cole writes, "He is infatuated with reviving the Ba'ath secret police, bringing back Saddam's domestic spies. Unlike the regular [Iraqi] army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the secret police are dirty. If they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter." As for Washington, one of the first public statements of support from that direction was, "He's our kind of bully." (Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Morning Herald)
July 17: The recently released Butler Report, which purported to investigate the claims about Iraqi WMDs made by the Blair administration, was "watered down" before its release, with damning information left out in order to protect Blair. The original version was much stronger in making connections between Blair's run-up to war with Iraq and the weak intelligence used to justify the invasion. Blair's administration has used the revised report to claim that the intelligence it presented was accurate and justified the war, a claim that is now proven to be false. "It was not his job to bring down the Government," says one inquiry member of commission head Lord Butler, "but he was not going to back Blair either." The report fails to recommend that Blair step down as the head of Britain's government, but does call for the resignation of MI6 chief John Scarlet. The revisions were made at the behest of senior Blair officials, perhaps Blair himself. (Daily Telegraph)
July 17: A senior Sunni cleric in Iraq has warned the US that if the US military does not immediately depart Iraq, the city of Ramadi "will become a graveyard for US soldiers." Sheikh Akram Ubayed Furaih, a powerful Ramadi religious leader who spent three months in US custody without charges, calls for a "jihad" against the US by both Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims in the country. Shi'ite clerics, many of whom are former supporters of the American occupation, have began to actively oppose the US presence in their country. "We refuse to submit to terrorists and the occupiers are the worst of all the terrorists," says Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Jaber al-Kafaji, speaking in the name of Shi'ite cleric and radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr. "We denounce anything that is named by the occupier." (China Daily)
July 17: Maryland district attorney general Thomas DiBagio is prohibited by his superiors at the Department of Justice from bringing any corruption cases to court without their prior approval. DiBagio, a Bush appointee, has long decried political corruption in Maryland, which has been under Democratic control for years, although he has yet to indict an elected official. The chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party, Isiah Leggett, says DiBagio should resign, and accuses him of using his office "as a political weapon to indict innocent people for political gain." DiBagio was embarrassed by a recent memo urging that his investigators bring charges before the November elections. (Washington Post)
July 17: Famed singer Linda Ronstadt is fired from her performing contract at the Aladdin hotel and casino in Las Vegas after she praised Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 during her performance. During her encore, she called Moore a "great American patriot" and "someone who is spreading the truth." Some in the audience booed Ronstadt, according to Aladdin president Bill Timmins; the disgruntled patrons then left the theatre and vandalized the venue by throwing drinks and ripping down concert posters. "It was a very ugly scene," Timmins says. Timmins says Ronstadt's "antics" forced him to have her escorted off the property, and says he will ensure that she will not perform there again. Ronstadt says in return, "I keep hoping that if I'm annoying enough to them, they won't hire me back."
Ronstadt's own statements of the events of the evening contradict Timmons's own story. She was neither booed off the stage, as Timmins has said, nor was she escorted from the venue immediately after the concert. She says she wasn't even aware that management disapproved of her comments until an hour after the show. She says she does this routinely in every concert, and always gets a mixture of cheers and boos: "I've been doing it all across the country, and I've never seen an audience response like this in my life. This country is so completely polarized." However, "[a]s soon as I start singing 'Desperado,' they love [the song] and they start cheering, which they've done all through my career. That's how that works, and then I finish the song and I leave." The story that Timmins told the Associated Press is flat wrong, she says. Her plans were originally to leave the Aladdin after the show and fly to the next city on her tour, but because of a sinus infection, she chose instead to stay the night at the Aladdin hotel, plans which never materialized after she was confronted backstage by an Aladdin employee. "This woman comes huffing up to me and says, 'I'm afraid I can't let you leave.' I said, 'What?' And she said, 'You can't leave yet because the owner is on his way over here to talk to you.'" Ronstadt refused to meet with Timmons and left for the Ritz-Carlton in her tour bus after the employee told her the Aladdin car would not be allowed to leave with her. "I thought she was going to read me my Miranda rights or make me start writing things on the blackboard," Ronstadt says. "I didn't know they were mad at me until we were gone, and I didn't know what they were mad at me about until about an hour later, when apparently they called up one of the people that was traveling with us and went, 'She's talking about Michael Moore, and this is a place for entertainment, not politics.'"
The new owner of the Aladdin has asked Ronstadt to return, and Irving Azoff, the manager of a number of headline acts, has yanked all of his entertainers from their Aladdin contracts. So why does she publicly endorse the film? "I think [celebrities] should try to get people to think," she says. "I think they need to bring information to the public. The American media has been completely hijacked by corporate interests. The news is so biased, and we've got to get it through any way that we can. Now I don't think somebody should take my word. Because I'm a singer doesn't necessarily make me an expert in world politics, though I'm well read. But I think my obligation at this point is to try to steer people into just thinking." As for being asked by some concert promoters not to mention the film during her shows at their venues, "I'll damn well say what I please, as I always have," she says. "And if they cancel my show, they'll just be doing me a favor. They'll still have to pay me, and I could use a day off. I have no idea how ticket sales are going, and I never worry about record sales."
At a sold-out concert in Los Angeles on July 20, Ronstadt receives her longest and loudest ovation for her endorsement of Moore's film. (AP/CommonDreams, Tucson Citizen)
July 17: Liberal pundit David Podvin has some fun at the expense of the conservative critics of Al Gore, who have joined to accuse Gore of being mentally ill after he criticized Bush's Iraq policies. "The roster of diagnosticians who have concluded that Gore is mentally ill reads like a 'Who's Who' of diminished capacity," Podvin writes. "Peggy Noonan, who claims that Elian Gonzalez was rescued at sea by magic dolphins on a mission from God.... G. Gordon Liddy, who bragged about improving upon the concept of sun tea by killing a rat, leaving it outside to roast in the midday swelter, and then eating it.... Ann Coulter, whose neighbors have reported seeing her argue with herself as she walks down the street.... Michael Savage, who has pledged that he will 'personally kick every Arab's ass'.... Charles Krauthammer, who has said on more than one occasion that he 'truly envies' the intellect of George W. Bush.... And then there is Rush Limbaugh, who without any apparent sense of irony insists Gore is so deranged that the former vice president should immediately be prescribed massive amounts of medication." Podvin notes that the pronoucements of the mainstream media about Gore's statements fall directly in line with the conservatives' assertions of his mental derangement, with pundits from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN denouncing Gore's statements and Fox News declaring Gore "out of touch with reality" and accused him of "ranting and raving."
He notes that the accusation of "mental illness" is one of the conservatives' tried-and-true methodologies to employ against those who challenge them: "In recent years, the roster of people who have been accused by conservatives of suffering from dementia has grown to include Anita Hill, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Ann Richards, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, George Soros, Gray Davis, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, Al Franken, Kevin Phillips, Bill Maher, Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Susan McDougal, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barbara Lee, Max Cleland, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton. Soon, John Kerry will be cast as the poster child for mental illness." (Podvin leaves out Republican John McCain, who was tarred in 2000 during the GOP primaries as being driven insane by his captivity in Vietnam.) Podvin notes, "Lust for power is the motive behind this farce in which sanity is insanity and vice versa. If conservatives can suppress the bitter truth about the comprehensive failure of the Bush administration long enough to win the election, they will finally have the ability to transform America into the country that reactionaries have always thought it should be." (Make Them Accountable)

Go to Page Two

Back to July 2004 | On to July 2004: Week Four

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

July 2004

Week Three

Due to size considerations, this page has been divided into subpages.
Use the menu below to navigate the week's contents.

SubMenu

Blair administration admits Hutton inquiry was a cover-up

Democrats call for pre-election investigation to potential threats to voting

Iraqi prime minister murders prisoners in cold blood

Quick Navigation Menu

2003 Month by Month

2004 Month by Month

2005 Month by Month

2006 Month by Month

2007 Month by Month

Other Pages On This Site

Copyright © 2002-2007 Max Black

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

July 2004

Week Three

Due to size considerations, this page has been divided into subpages.Use the menu below to navigate the week's contents.

SubMenu

Blair administration admits Hutton inquiry was a cover-up

Democrats call for pre-election investigation to potential threats to voting

Iraqi prime minister murders prisoners in cold blood

Quick Navigation Menu

2003 Month by Month

2004 Month by Month

2005 Month by Month

2006 Month by Month

2007 Month by Month

Other Pages On This Site

Copyright © 2002-2007 Max Black

Due to size considerations, this page has been divided into subpages.
Use the menu below to navigate the week's contents.