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
Page Two
- July 18: The 9/11 commission will report that Iran, not Iraq, was involved in helping the 9/11 terrorists carry out their attack on the US. It accuses the Iranian government of complicity with al-Qaeda and of providing safe havens for the terrorists before they carried out their attacks between October 2000 and February 2001. The accusation is based on information elicited from detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and from NSA electronic intercepts. The accusations play into the Bush administration's apparent plans to foment some kind of military intervention in Iran. (Daily Telegraph)
- July 18: A US government official says that, if Bush is re-elected in November, he intends to foment regime change in Iran. "If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran," the official says. The statement comes as Iran announces it has eradicated all active al-Qaeda cells operating within its borders. (Sunday Herald/Truthout)
- July 18: Former Army general Thomas Keane, the recently retired acting Army Chief of Staff, says that the Bush administration was "seduced by Iraqi exiles" who fed eager officials lies about Iraqi WMDs and predicted a joyous, flower-tossing reception for American troops after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Keane says, "When I look back on it myself, having participated and contributed to [the war planning], one of the things that happened to us...is many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be" after the war. Committee member Ike Skelton, a Democrat, interjects, "'We're all going to be treated as liberators,'" and Keane replies, "That's correct. So therefore the intellectual capital to prepare ourselves properly for an insurgency was not there." Keane is highly critical of the Pentagon's planning for war, and says the civilian leadership failed to recognize that an insurgency was growing until the late summer of 2003: "We did not see [the insurgency] coming, and we were not properly prepared to deal with it." He says, "The conventional wisdom was that we would have a stability operation that would be more akin to what we were doing in Kosovo, but on a larger scale. And we would be very much involved in political and physical reconstruction, and maybe some law and order, in the absence of a competent police." But the "much more serious problem," Keane says, "was being organized improperly to deal with an insurgency." Keane replaced General Eric Shinseki after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forced Shinseki to retire in June 2003, when Shinseki publicly stated that the Iraqi occupation required "hundreds of thousands" more US troops than Rumsfeld was willing to commit. (Stars and Stripes/Truthout)
- July 18: Ironically, a small State Department intelligence analysis bureau with little funding and no surveillance capability has now been proven to have been far more correct in its analysis of Iraq's WMD programs, and its anticipated response to a US invasion, than the CIA or DIA. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) is virtually the only agency that does not report to either the White House or the Pentagon. Its approach is purely analytical, so that it owes no allegiance to particular agents, imagery or intercepts. It shuns the worst-case plans sometimes sought by military commanders. As a result, its results are far more objective and less politically motivated than those from other, more visible agencies. "They are willing to take on the accepted analysis and take a second, harder look," says Alfred Cumming, a former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is now an intelligence and national security specialist at the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress. Unlike other intelligence bureaus, the INR has a staff of older, far more experienced analysts, most of whom come from academic instead of political backgrounds and have developed a strong expertise in their various regions of the world.
- "They have a reputation for having personnel who have skills in one specific area, as opposed to being utility infielders," says Republican senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Roberts's committee praised the INR for dissenting against the CIA and other agencies in saying that rumors of Iraq's revitalized nuclear armaments program were unreliable. Among other recent successes was a classified report in 2003 that criticized the Bush administration view that a victory in Iraq would help spread democracy across the Arab world. It also predicted correctly that Turkey might not permit American troops to cross its territory en route to Iraq and dismissed as "highly dubious" a British contention, now discredited, that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from Niger. Predictably, with the INR singled out for praise among the criticisms being leveled at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon, the small agency is now being targeted for criticism by Bush administration and Pentagon officials. "The analysts at INR are a curmudgeonlike group who delight in being different and getting to the body of something and not caring what other people think," says Carl Ford Jr., a former career CIA official who led the INR from 2001 until he retired in late 2003. Notably, Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to solicit any input from INR analysts before his notorious UN presentation of February 6, 2003, where he presented a farrago of half-truths and lies from other intelligence agencies to bolster the Bush administration's case for war. (New York Times/Ladlass)
- July 18: Tony Blair admits that his story of the discovery of 400,000 Iraqi bodies discovered in mass graves was wildly inflated. The actual number is around 5,000. The claims by Blair, in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves. In that publication, "Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves," produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from November 20, 2003: "We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves." The USAID website quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion and states: "If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II." A Blair spokesman says: "While experts may disagree on the exact figures, human rights groups, governments and politicians across the world have no doubt that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and their remains are buried in sites throughout Iraq." (Guardian)
- July 18: The Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi orders the reopening of an Iraqi newspaper forcibly closed by US troops four months ago, an action that prompted a firestorm of insurgent reprisals. Allawi is believed to have ordered the reopening of the Shi'ite newspaper Al Hawzi as a conciliatory gesture to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. (New York Times/ULAW)
- July 18: Former president Bill Clinton warns that the Bush administration needs to stop interfering in the upcoming Australian elections. "[I]t's probably going to backfire because most people don't like outsiders telling them how to vote," he tells the Australian press. In recent weeks, American officials, including Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, have weighed in on Australian politics, notably by criticizing Opposition Leader Mark Latham's pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq by Christmas. The upcoming elections will decide whether or not Bush's ally John Howard will remain as Australia's prime minister. (Sydney Morning Herald)
False accusations against Joseph Wilson may be used to delay Plame investigation indictments until after elections
- July 19: Erroneous information from the Valerie Plame Wilson leak investigation could be used as an excuse by the Justice Department to delay any possible indictments until after the November elections. A Senate Intelligence Committee report falsely suggests that former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, was pushed by Plame to investigate the claims that Niger was supplying Iraq with "yellowcake" uranium, claims that the Bush administration used to bolster its case for war against Iraq and that were later proven to be false. Wilson is also accused of embellishing his role in the uranium investigation. Though Wilson has successfully repudiated the claims, Republicans are seizing on the claims to discredit Wilson and refurbish the reputation of the Bush administration, which has been heavily tarnished by the leak investigation and by Wilson's repeated attacks on the administration following the outing of his wife as a CIA agent. Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie calls Wilson "a liar" who has made "allegations against the president that have now been proven false." Gillespie adds that Wilson "is an adviser to the Kerry campaign" who has been "entirely discredited." While Gillespie is trying desperately to spin gold from straw, the renewed controversy may well prompt special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to delay his conclusions, and any following indictments, until after the elections. "I think this [Senate report] was an effort on behalf of the Republicans to discredit Mr. Wilson by showing why the White House outed his wife and maybe head off an indictment. Nice try, but the law says you don't out a clandestine operative no matter what the reason," says Larry Johnson, one of a group of former CIA officers that has pushed for indictments in the case. Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert intelligence officer with the intention of damaging national security. It is also a felony for any US official with a security clearance to disclose an intelligence officer's identity to anyone not authorized to receive such information. The prospect of Bush administration officials being charged with felonies -- and possibly treason -- during an election campaign is one Bush campaign officials and Republicans in general strongly wish to avoid. Dozens of Bush officials, including Bush and Vice President Cheney, have been interviewed, and a number of reporters have been subpoenaed to testify in front of a grand jury. Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who publicly outed Plame, refuses to say whether or not he has been subpoenaed. Under Justice Department guidelines, prosecutors must show they have pursued nearly all other means of obtaining information before calling a reporter before a grand jury, a Justice Department official says. Because it is considered a last resort, sending subpoenas to journalists may indicate the investigation is winding down.
- Investigative journalist Joe Conason believes that the Republican assault on Wilson is part of their efforts to distract voters from the real issues surrounding the election. "Republican Senators and spinners are seeking to discredit Mr. Wilson," he writes, "so that nobody will spend too much time talking about the total implosion of the President's rationale for going to war. ...If doubt can be cast on Mr. Wilson's veracity, that somehow absolves the President's errors and misleading exaggerations." (Wall Street Journal, New York Observer/Working for Change)
- July 19: Anticipating legal battles surrounding possible vote-tally problems in November, John Kerry's campaign is setting up a nationwide legal network to handle legal problems and file possible lawsuits. "A million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry told the NAACP convention on July 15. "Well, we're not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law." The Bush-Cheney team also plans to have extensive legal monitoring of elections and results, and is training its poll observers "how to promote ballot access to all qualified voters" -- and, presumably, how to challenge and attempt to deny voting to those it feels unqualified. "It's about people who somehow can't register, or can't vote, or their vote isn't counted, and it's done not frontally, but through legal manipulations" says Kerry campaign lawyer Robert Bauer. (New York Times/Truthout)
- July 19: A US grand jury subpoenas Halliburton Co for information about its Cayman Islands unit's work in Iran, where US companies are forbidden to do business. Halliburton subsidiary KBR, formerly called Kellogg Brown & Root, is also under investigation by the Justice Department for overcharging the government for food and fuel services in Iraq; currently KBR holds government contracts worth over $18 billion. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, says the probe into possible sanctions violations should address the role of former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney: "The question must be asked: did this possible violation occur between 1995 and 2000 while Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton?" He adds that he finds Halliburton's ties with Iran "outrageous" and "unconscionable." The Justice Department investigation relates to a subsidiary called Halliburton Products & Services Ltd., an oil field services company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. In a 2003 report, the company said the subsidiary "performs between $30 [million] and $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran." Criminal violations for corporations in violation of the sanctions can range up to $500,000, with penalties for individuals of up to $250,000 and 10 years in jail. (Reuters/Truthout, Washington Post)
- July 19: House Republicans block a move by 11 Democrats to bring a UN monitoring team to the US to monitor the November 2004 elections, calling it a politically-motivated election-year stunt. In return, Democrats are working to make the issue of fair and impartial elections a matter of high public interest. Republican Steve Buyer said on July 16, "Imagine on Election Day you get up, you have your breakfast, you grab your coffee and your Danish, and you are going to go to the voting booth. When you show up, you are curious because you see a white van out there that says the UN beside it and little blue helmets. The United Nations has arrived; we are going to ensure the integrity of the American electoral process.... I don't think so." Florida Democrat Corrinne Brown furiously rebutted Buyer, retorting, "I come from Florida where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it does not happen again. Over and over again, after the election, when you stole the election, you came back here and said get over it." An irate Buyer had Brown's remarks removed from the record, and Brown was officially repudiated by a House vote of 219-187. The House then voted to block the UN from conducting any monitoring. Democrats continue their efforts to make voting an issue. (Washington Post)
- July 19: The US media has refused to report on the story of Iraqi Prime Minister Iwad Allayi murdering six Iraqi prisoners just before his US-backed ascension to the post. The story broke in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald and has garnered tremendous press in other parts of the world. The story says that Allawi wanted to show Iraqi police how it should treat insurgents. Meanwhile, former British foreign minister Robin Cook is urging the International Red Cross to investigate the alleged murders. "These are dreadful allegations," says Cook. "It is vital that they are cleared up one way or another, and that needs an independent inquiry. An international body such as the Red Cross would be best able to give authority to the investigation that the situation now demands." A Red Cross spokesman says that so far, his organization has been unable to get any information about the murders from either Iraqi, British, or American sources. (Daily Times/CommonDreams, Sydney Morning Herald)
- July 19: The Republican National Committee has come under fire for its recent announcement that the GOP convention to anoint George W. Bush as its presidential candidate will be held in New York City, from August 30 through September 2. It is the latest such a convention has been held in recent memory, and critics say that New York, a traditionally Democratic stronghold and a routine target of moralistic criticism from right-wing pundits, and the late date are designed to exploit the city's connection to 9/11. "It seems quite clear why [Bush] has chosen New York," says resident Dawn Peterson, who lost her brother in the World Trade Center attack. "The decision to be here seems to be directly related to September the 11th. ...They are using New York City." RNC representatives call the notion of trying to link the convention to the 9/11 disaster "silly." Others disagree. "The Bush administration has taken any opportunity it could to grandstand on the heels of the tragedy of Sept. 11," says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "They've used it to erode civil liberties across the board." Using New York to hold the GOP event is "the lowest kind of politics," adds William Epunbi, whose group, CounterConvention, is planning to stage anti-war and anti-Bush protests during the ceremonies. "As someone who stood on the street on Sept. 11 and watched its dust settle around me, I find it revolting," Epunbi says. "But it's gonna backfire, I think. The country is going to see right through it." Another anti-Bush group, the A31 Action Coalition, calls the convention "a shameless effort to exploit the tragedy of 9/11 [and] use New York City to renominate a president whose agenda tramples on the very freedoms they claim to fight for." (San Francisco Chronicle)
- July 19: Liberal commentator and author Thom Hartmann writes about the Republican National Committee's intensive efforts to paint Democrats as Hitleresque fascists. A public outcry forced the RNC to recently remove a graphic on its Web site which interspersed pictures of Hitler and other Nazis with pictures of John Kerry and other Democrats, but the attack continues. Hartmann recalls former vice president Henry Wallace, who in 1944 wrote, "The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. ...Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases.' ...The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..." Hartmann writes, "It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places." (CommonDreams)
- July 19 - 20: Retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert "Buzz" Patterson appears as a guest on two Fox News broadcasts. Patterson, who served briefly as a low-level military aide to the Clinton White House, is the author of Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security and the newly released Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undermine Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our National Security. Both are published by conservative printing house Regnery; both are filled with lies and misstatements that have been roundly debunked. The latter book is primarily an attack piece on John Kerry, tarring both his military service and his Senate voting record. Patterson and host Sean Hannity engage in a smear session against Kerry, with Hannity echoing and prodding Patterson. Patterson says in part, " He's voted against every major weapons system that the military.... Every single one of them." Hannity chimes in: "And when they say he didn't, these are slanted votes, that's a lie. He was dead set against them." "Every single one of them over his 20 years in Senate," says Patterson. "Wanted $7 billion in intelligence cuts after the first Trade Center bombing," Hannity continues. Patterson says on another Fox show, Fox and Friends, that Kerry spent "twenty years voting against every single major weapons system that the military is fighting the war on terror with today," and that Kerry "served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for eight years, never voted for an increase of funding, voted for cuts three times, voted for cuts during the 1990s during the war on terror." All of these allegations have been roundly refuted, with Kerry having voted for $4.43 trillion in defense spending over his time in the Senate, but continue to be hammered into the American consciousness. (More specific refutations can be found elsewhere in this site.)
- Patterson says on the two shows, "[H]e did not vote for a single military pay raise, for example, voting against pay raises 12 times," and that Kerry "voted against every single military pay raise, on 12 separate occasions." This is an arrant lie. Kerry has consistently supported military pay raises, voting in 1999 for a nearly 5% increase in the "monthly basic pay for members of the uniformed services," and for defense budgets in 2002 and 2003 that increased military pay.
- Perhaps his most egregrious allegations come against Kerry's wartime service record. In his second book, Reckless Disregard, which has become a centerpiece of the attack strategy of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Patterson wrote that during the war, after Kerry charged a Vietcong position, he returned from the battle "armed with a Super 8 video camera he had purchased at the post exchange at Cam Ranh Bay, and reenacted the skirmish on film." This film cannot be located, Kerry flatly denies any such thing happened, and everyone serving with Kerry during that or any other mission denies that Kerry had ever done such a thing. While Kerry did record hours of footage on a Super 8 camera, he is in very few frames; almost all of the footage is "home movie"-like footage of comrades and friends relaxing, clowning for the camera, and recording messages to loved ones at home. No battle footage, real or simulated, was ever recorded by Kerry.
- But there is a clear reason why Patterson is making such unfounded, slanderous allegations: he wants George W. Bush to win re-election so badly that he is even willing to allege that Muslim terrorists are hoping for Kerry to win the presidency. As he wrote in his most recent book, "[P]olitical expediency is politics as usual for the Democratic Party. And in election year 2004, every terrorist cell, every terrorist hiding in a spider hole or cave complex, every phony business front used to launder terrorist money and every rogue state willing to sponsor terrorism will be watching the results, hoping for the party of political expediency to win again." (Media Matters, Huffington Post)
- July 20: The Bush economic recovery has been skewed towards high-income Americans, leaving middle- and lower-incomes Americans without job recoveries or income increases. The Wall Street Journal reports, "Upper-income families, who pay the most in taxes and reaped the largest gains from the tax cuts President Bush championed, drove a surge of consumer spending a year ago that helped to rev up the recovery. Wealthier households also have been big beneficiaries of the stronger stock market, higher corporate profits, bigger dividend payments and the boom in housing. Lower- and middle-income households have benefited from some of these trends, but not nearly as much. For them, paychecks and day-to-day living expenses have a much bigger effect. Many have been squeezed, with wages under pressure and with gasoline and food prices higher." "To date, the [recovery's] primary beneficiaries have been upper-income households," concludes Dean Maki, a JP Morgan Chase (and former Federal Reserve) economist who has studied the ways that changes in wealth affect spending. In research he sent to clients this month, Maki said, "Two of the main factors supporting spending over the past year, tax cuts and increases in [stock] wealth, have sharply benefited upper income households relative to others." The perception of a fast-lane/slow-lane recovery has become a central political issue. This year's stronger job market has led Democrats to shift their emphasis: away from the argument that Bush policies have failed to produce jobs and toward the idea that the expansion's fruits haven't been widely shared. "They're telling people this is the best economy we've had," Senator John Kerry recently told a campaign crowd in Charleston, West Virginia. "What does it mean when you don't have any health care at all?" Hands started popping up throughout the audience, as Kerry paused to point to each one. "Too many people in Washington have no sense at all about what's happening," he says. His running mate, Senator John Edwards, speaks of "Two Americas," one "that does the work, another America that reaps the rewards." Bush critics argue that the economy is producing jobs mainly in low-paying industries like restaurants and temporary work. Bush counters that his opponents have been pessimistically distorting the economic statistics, ignoring the gains. (Wall Street Journal)
- July 20: Former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger is the subject of a Justice Department probe over accusations that he took secret documents from the National Archives while reviewing Clinton administration records for the 9/11 commission in 2003. Berger is accused of taking, among others, drafts of a Clinton administration "after-action" report on efforts to thwart the so-called "millennium plot," a suspected al-Qaeda attack planned around the New Year's holiday in 1999. Berger says that he "inadverdently" took the documents, and once contacted by the Archives, returned them except for a few that he "accidentally discarded." The documents in question are copies, not originals. Witnesses say that they saw Berger place some documents inside his jacket, and one claims to have seen Berger stuffing documents into his socks; Berger acknowledges placing handwritten notes into his jacket, but denies stuffing anything into his socks. Former White House lawyer Lanny Davis challenges that last claimant to come forward: "I suggest that person is lying," says Davis. "And if that person has the guts, let's see who it is who made the comment that Sandy Berger stuffed something into his socks." Berger had legal access to the National Archives to examine the documents. He has also stepped down from his unpaid position with the Kerry campaign as a national security advisor. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle says he finds the timing of the DOJ's announcement "very curious, given this has been under way now for this long. Somebody leaked it, obviously, with intent, I think, to do damage to Mr. Berger, and I think that's unfortunate." Meanwhile, Bush spokesman Terry Holt accuses Berger, without evidence, of possibly providing the Kerry campaign with classified information. "This appears to be a partisan attempt to divert attention away from the 9/11 commission report," says Kerry spokesman Phil Singer. "Instead of using the report's recommendations to learn how we can improve our homeland security, Republicans are playing politics with an inquiry." The Justice Department has been investigating these claims for months.
- Most political observers from both camps wonder why Berger would bother stealing those documents. Though Republican senator Rick Santorum accuses Berger of providing classified documents about port security to John Kerry for Kerry's use at a photo op in October 2003 (an accusation with no evidence behind it), liberal political commentator Josh Marshall writes, soberly enough, "The thought that Kerry needed Sandy Berger to pilfer one of Richard Clarke's after-reports about the millenium terror alerts to get whatever boilerplate he discussed at this particular press conference is truly ridiculous. And Santorum must know it."
- On July 30, Berger will be cleared of any wrongdoing. All the original documents in question are where they are supposed to be, and all material Berger was responsible for sharing with the 9/11 commission was properly shared. Daniel Marcus, general counsel of the 9/11 Commission, says the panel has been assured twice by the Justice Department that no originals were missing and that all of the material Berger had access to had been turned over to the commission. "We are told that the Justice Department is satisfied that we've seen everything that the archives saw," and "nothing was missing," he says. The wild allegations of Berger stuffing documents into his socks proves to be lies. Naturally, the mainstream press, which has had a field day at Berger's expense, is curiously silent over the news of his clearing of any wrongdoing. (CNN, Talking Points Memo, Wall Street Journal/Eschaton)
- July 20: Computer programmer Teresa Hummel is trying to warn New York Democrats of the strong possibility that the Bush campaign could electronically steal the November election. "Anything in a computer can be changed," she says, as part of her demonstration of how simple it is to reprogram a voting machine. "The [electronic machines] are being sold as a panacea, on the basis that you can trust them. The people selling them are lying." (Village Voice)
- July 20: Veteran Republican attack operative David Bossie, who with his organization Citizens United, was a key player in the effort to destroy Bill Clinton (see previous pages for many references to Bossie), has resurfaced as a point man for the Bush campaign's attack on John Kerry. He has recently published a quickie attack biography on Bush's presidential opponent, called The Many Faces of John Kerry, timed to come out just before the Democratic national convention. In May, Bossie published an equally quick and equally spurious book, Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11, which portrays Bossie, falsely, as a national security expert, and blames the Clinton administration for 9/11. Bossie's Citizens United has recently filed a complaint with the FCC trying to claim that advertisements for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 should be considered political ads for the Kerry campaign and thusly violate federal campaign laws. As always, the media has cooperated with Bossie's attempt to smear both Clinton and Kerry, with CBS agreeing to air a Bossie-produced attack ad during Clinton's recent interview on 60 Minutes. (Glenn Ivey, who as Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes's legal counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, battled Bossie during the congressional Whitewater investigation, calls Bossie the Whitewater investigation's "driving force;" one of Ivey's former congressional colleagues labels Bossie "a lunatic." Bossie "made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps," recalls Democratic strategist James Carville. Carville's former partner Paul Begala adds, "Pat Moynihan had that wonderful phrase about defining deviancy downward. Now we're defining credibility downward if we take David Bossie seriously. There are a lot of credible critics of Democrats. David Bossie is not one of them." And Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, co-author of the reference book on Whitewater, The Hunting of the President, says of Bossie and his ilk, "We've evolved into celebrity journalists. We judge them by Hollywood standards; if you're big enough, it doesn't matter why or how you got big in the first place. Now the same is true with political operatives. The fact that Bossie's name is known and he's achieved a certain celebrity status trumps the fact that he achieved that celebrity status by making sh*t up and twisting evidence to vilify Democratic politicians. He's a modern-day Donald Segretti." (Segretti is the former Nixon campaign lawyer hired to criminally sabotage the 1972 McGovern campaign, and the one responsible for bringing the term "ratf*cking" into the political lexicon.)
- Current media mavens have as yet failed to remind their audiences that Bossie was fired by the Bush campaign in 1998 for doctoring audiotapes that Bossie then played for reporters, saying that the tapes were evidence of Clinton's criminal activities. Bossie has also boasted of feeding lies and misinformation to reporters such as the New York Times's Jeff Gerth and ABC producer Chris Vlasto over Whitewater, and is responsible for leaking the Starr commission's final Whitewater report to the Times. The Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time that the press "has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization [Citizens United] without identifying the group as the source of their information." Ivey explains the media's failure to distance itself from the shamelessly mendacious Bossie by saying, "If you look at how the press covered Bossie's ethical lapses and compare it with how they covered ethical issues raised about the Clinton administration, he really got kid gloves -- because reporters were the ones he had been feeding information to." Bossie also had a cozy relationship with at least four of the Republicans powering Congress's push to investigate Clinton: former senators Lauch Faircloth and Alfonse D'Amato, and representatives Dan Burton and Jim Leach. Bossie actually served as Faircloth's personal aide on the Senate Whitewater Committee and as Burton's chief investigator on the Government Reform Committee. Bossie routinely funnelled sensational, and false, leads to Leach's press spokesman, Joe Pinder, as well as personally to D'Amato. And it was Bossie who suggested to Burton that he re-enact the death of former White House deputy counsel Vince Foster by shooting bullets into a melon in the backyard of Burton's Indiana home.
- Reporter Eric Boehlert writes, "It's hard to imagine that if a high-level Washington operative with a rap sheet like Bossie's even existed on the left, he or she would be celebrated by the Democratic Party or courted by the press the way Bossie has been." And he quotes Paul Begala: "There are kooks on the left, no doubt about it, people who believe Bush is guilty of murder. The difference is, journalists don't pay attention to kooks on the left, and neither do Democrats." Bossie spent the early post-Clinton years trying and failing to slander one Democrat after another; his attack book on Al Gore, Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore, apparently had little impact on the 2000 election. He leapt on the Gary Condit bandwagon in the summer of 2001, appearing repeatedly on pundit shows to accuse Condit of murdering his missing intern Chandra Levy (the murder was later proven to be the work of a serial killer working the Washington, DC area). He also joined the right's anti-France campaign. But in early 2004 Bossie resurfaced with a television ad attacking Kerry as "another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts;" Bossie claimed that the ad was merely a counter to the Democrats' "hate-filled speech and vitriol" towards Bush. Though the spot, garnered little TV airplay, it got him noticed by the mainstream media again, who welcomed him back into the fold as yet another anti-Kerry pundit. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews announced on his show Hardball, "Let me go to David Bossie. That ad is great, by the way." In June, Bossie boasted to the Washington Times that he is "one of the few people who actually know the facts about Whitewater, Travelgate, campaign finances and the Monica Lewinsky affair," with the Times failing to note just how often and how thoroughly Bossie had been discredited. Bossie is now riding the right's hysteria surrounding Fahrenheit 9/11 as far as it will take him. He says of Moore that the filmmaker "never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. He doesn't exactly have a track record of credibility. His reputation as a liar are well documented." Boehlert responds, "For those who have watched Bossie wrestle with the truth over the years, that's a curious claim for him to make." (Salon)
- July 20: The Senate votes on whether to endorse judicial nominee William Myers, a former beef and mining industry lobbyist described by environmental groups as the most anti-environmental judicial nominee ever to be named. Earthjustice's Glenn Sugameli says, "Nearly every public statement he has ever made and every professional action he has ever taken has been for the benefit of the mining and beef industries at the expense of our nation's public lands, clean air and water, and wildlife, and to the detriment of the rights of Native Americans." As a Ninth Circuit judge, Myers would have the power to impose his extreme views on nine Western states that collectively contain 75% of America's public lands, along with the homes and lands of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans. As a lawyer and lobbyist for the mining and beef industries, Myers unsuccessfully argued in Supreme Court briefs that Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act safeguards were unconstitutional. As the Interior Department's chief lawyer, Myers continued to promote these special interests -- in one of his two formal decisions, he cleared the way for a previously rejected cyanide heap-leach gold mine that would pollute the environment and destroy the Quechan Indian Tribe's sacred sites. In November 2003, a federal judge held that Myers' legal opinion badly misinterpreted the law. "As his opinions as Interior Solicitor demonstrate, Mr. Myers sees nothing wrong with using his public office to advance his personal agenda, which matches that of the mining and beef industries who employed him for most of his career," says Sugameli. "Worse, he is willing to twist the law to reach the result he'd like to see." Democrats will successfully thwart the Senate's endorsement of Myers, but Bush will renominate him on February 14, 2005. (Earthjustice, Judging the Environment)
- July 20: Former British ambassador to Libya Oliver Miles says that the situation in Iraq is not improving, as both Bush and Blair assert, but is steadily deteriorating towards civil war. After listing the myriad and largely unaddressed problems facing Iraq and its occupiers, Miles writes, "Unless we really want to rebuild the British empire, under our flag or the stars and stripes, the only sensible objective now is disengagement in as good order as possible. No scramble to get out, but send no more troops and look for every opportunity to build up Iraqi prestige, authority and responsibility." (Guardian)
- July 20: Beleagured California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger calls his Democratic opponents "girlie men" for blocking his state budget proposals, and later refuses to apologize even as critics say his statement was homophobic and sexist. "If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers...if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men," he tells a partisan crowd in Ontario, California. The reference is to an old Saturday Night Live skit that lampooned the governor, then an actor and bodybuilder. State Senator Sheila Kuehl, a Democrat and a member of the state legislature's Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus, says Schwarzenegger is resorting to "blatant homophobia." Kuehl adds, "It uses an image that is associated with gay men in an insulting way, and it was supposed to be an insult. That's very troubling that he would use such a homophobic way of trying to put down legislative leadership. ...It's ironic that the governor would try to find a metaphor for weakness when his real problem is that we're being too strong." Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Democrat, says that while he isn't upset by the remark, his 13-year-old daughter is. "she's a young girl who knows the governor and really likes him a lot and didn't find the term to be a positive term, and finds it to be derogatory," Nunez says. "It was no question a very, very insensitive comment to make. I personally am not intimidated or threatened by it, but I think it really is beneath Governor Schwarzenegger." (AP/China Daily, AP/Fox News)
- July 20: Author and columnist William Rivers Pitt writes that the biggest story the American mainstream is refusing to cover is the torturing of Iraqi children in prisons throughout Iraq. The reports, covered extensively by foreign media sources and American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, are shocking. German TV magazine Report Mainz recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross that over 100 children are imprisoned in US-controlled detention centers, including Abu Ghraib: "Between January and May of this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal in the report. The report also covers eyewitness testimony from US army sergeant Samuel Provance, formerly stationed at Abu Ghraib. Provance says he saw US interrogators go after a teenaged girl; only when the girl's clothing was half ripped off did military police stop the interrogation. Provance also saw a 16-year old boy tortured by being soaked with freezing water, smeared with frozen mud, and presented to his weeping father, also being held prisoner. Hersh recently told an ACLU convention of the horrific images of young boys being sodomized, images of which have been videotaped but never released to the public. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at war." Hersh described the prison scene as "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway," and that there has been, "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher." Since evidence has surfaced that the torture of prisoners was authorized by senior officials as high as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the administration has twisted its interpretation of the law inside-out in order to justify and redefine torture -- by their arguments, torture isn't really torture, and even if it is, Bush has the authority to ignore centuries of law and treaty agreements prohibiting such indefensible acts. Pitt writes, "Where is the American news media? Where are the pictures? Who is responsible for this abomination? Torturing children in the name of freedom? Is this what we have become?"
- Conservative media pundit Byron York echoes the feelings of many of his reactionary colleagues when he proclaims on C-SPAN, that whatever the torture methods used in Abu Ghraib and other US military prisons, "...it is, in fact, working." York even dismisses reports of prisoners tortured to death, citing "unknown medical conditions" as an excuse. Scott McGlasson writes, "The support among conservatives for York is obvious. Not a single major conservative figure has said anything to disagree with York. They know his opinions, and clearly agree. York and his conservative comrades are beyond sick.... I want to see York defend his support for raping children in interviews. I want to see clips of York saying 'it worked,' along with the documentation showing that 'it' included raping children and other horrors. No journalist or pundit would discuss the prison abuse scandal without knowing what it was about, of course, so York knew precisely what he was talking about. This is the inescapable fact that America needs to know -- conservatives knew the stomach-turning details of the prison abuse incidents, and they still defend these practices." (Truthout, Buzzflash)
- July 20: Nicole and Jeff Rank, the couple arrested for wearing anti-Bush shirts to a 4th of July rally in Charleston, West Virginia, have received an apology from the Charleston City Council for the unlawful arrest. The apology, presented in a resolution by Councilman Harry Deitzler, said that the rights of the Ranks "to freely express themselves, as guaranteed by both the United States and West Virginia Constitutions, was directly or indirectly abridged, suppressed, or prevented by the City of Charleston." Deitzler adds, "It was a public event, not a private or a political event. Taxpayers paid to bring [the president] in on an official presidential visit. In this country...those who disagree with the government are allowed to state that disagreement." The council's apology did not place any blame on the city or the Charleston Police Department. Deitzler says he thinks the blame should be laid on the White House staff, because local police were expected to defer to federal law enforcement officers. Councilwoman Ditty Markham agrees that Charleston police are not to blame for the Ranks' arrests: "I never heard the police say [the Ranks] did anything wrong. I think they did the best they knew to do. We don't have a lot of experience dealing with the White House here." She says that she is worried about the message the incident sends out. "These kinds of incidents are the reason West Virginia has the backward reputation that it does, and it hurts our reputation and economic development efforts," she says. The Ranks say that the public response in and around Charleston has been so overwhelmingly supportive of them that they are considering moving from Houston to Charleston. (West Virginia Gazette)
- July 21: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the world is no safer than it was three years ago, refuting Bush's claims that he has made the world a safer place. "I cannot say the world is safer today than it was two, three years ago," Annan says. He also criticized the Bush administration for withholding $34 million from the UN Population Fund, reminding the press that the UNPFA saves women's lives. Bush has withheld funding from the agency for three years, accusing it of supporting China's policies of coercive abortion. A 2002 State Department investigation cleared the agency of such charges. Many see the administration's move as a bid for conservative votes in November. (Reuters/My Way News)
- July 21: The GAO reports that almost all of the $65 billion appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan military operations for the fiscal year is gone; the military is scrambling to find over $12 billion in defense funds to continue operations throughout the year. The GAO report contradicts rosy White House predictions that the military has enough money to get through the remainder of the year. The report also warns that expenditures on Iraq and Afghanistan are having a tremendously adverse effect on training, repair and maintenance, and facility restoration. The Army, which is overspending its budget by $10.2 billion for operations and maintenance, is asking the Marines and the Air Force to help cover the escalating costs of its logistics contract with Halliburton. But the Air Force is also exceeding its budget by $1.4 billion, while the Marines are coming up $500 million short. The Army is even having trouble paying the contractors guarding its garrisons outside the war zones, the report says. "George W. Bush likes to call himself a wartime president, yet in his role as commander in chief, he has grossly mismanaged the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq," says Mark Kitchens, national security spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "He went to war without allies, without properly equipping our troops and without a plan to win the peace. Now we find he can't even manage a wartime budget." According to the report, when Bush requested that money, the Pentagon assumed that troop levels in Iraq would decline from 130,000 to 99,000 by September 30, that a more peaceful Iraq would allow the use of more cost-effective but slower sea lifts to transport troops and equipment, and that troops rotating in would need fewer armored vehicles than the service members they replace. Instead, troop levels will remain at 138,000 for the foreseeable future, the military is heavily dependent on costly airlifts and the Army's force has actually become more dependent on heavily armored vehicles. The weight of those vehicles, in turn, has contributed to higher-than-anticipated repair and maintenance costs. Higher troop levels have also pushed up the cost of the Pentagon's massive logistical contract with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown &Root. The Pentagon says that the Defense Department has sufficient funds to cover the shortfalls, provided Congress gives officials more authority to transfer money among accounts, but the GAO report warns that there will be a serious downside to that approach, especially the deferral of maintenance and refurbishing plans until next year. "We believe that the deferral of these activities will add to the requirements that will need to be funded in fiscal year 2005 and potentially later years and could result in a 'bow wave' effect in future years," the report cautions. "Activities that are deferred also run the risk of costing more in future years." A "bow wave" refers to a time when deferred costs confront Congress all at once, making it impossible to meet the demands. (Washington Post)
- July 21: On the campaign trail, Bush, who led the US into two wars, says, "I want to be the peace president." He also attacks his presidential opponents, John Kerry and John Edwards, for being lawyers and for being soft on terrorism. He promises campaign audiences that his next term will be a peaceful and prosperous one. (China Daily)
- July 21: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is being challenged by Democratic representative Chris Bell, a fellow Texan, who says that DeLay "illegally solicited campaign contributions in return for legislative favors and laundered illegal corporate contributions for use in Texas elections." Bell also says that DeLay improperly used his office to solicit help from federal agencies in searching for Democratic legislators who slipped out of Texas during last year's redistricting fight. Observers doubt that Bell will get a fair hearing in the House Ethics Committee, slated to hear the case, as four of the five Republicans on the committee --Kenny Hulshof, Steven LaTourette, Judy Biggert, and Doc Hastings -- have received donations from DeLay's political action committees. Republican committee chairman Joel Hefley is a DeLay ally, but has received no donations from DeLay's ARMPAC. Author Lou Dubose, who has written an unflattering biography of DeLay soon to be published, predicts the Ethics Committee will do nothing. "For the past seven years, it's done nothing," Dubose says. (Working for Change)
- July 21: For the past four years, Thomas Griffith, Bush's nominee for the federal appeals court in Washington, has been practicing law in Utah without a law license. Griffith has been the general counsel for Brigham Young University since August 2000. Before that, he practiced law in Washington, DC, without bothering to renew his law license there. His failure to have a valid law license in Washington made it impossible for him to get a license in Utah. Nevertheless, Griffith has practiced law in violation of the law and of the most fundamental of legal ethics. Griffith says the entire license problem is an oversight, and blames his law firm's staff. But investigation shows that Griffith applied to retake the Utah bar exam -- the only way he could once again practice law in that state -- but never showed up for the exam. Griffith's DC law license expired in 1998, for failure to pay his annual dues; he claims not to have realized the lapse until November 2001. A lawyer who specializes in legal ethics says Griffith's two licensing lapses should disqualify him from a lifetime appointment to one of the nation's most important federal benches, second only to the Supreme Court. "This moves it for me from the realm of negligence to the realm of willfulness," says Mark Foster. "People who thumb their noses at the rules of the bar shouldn't be judges." Griffith is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association and was the lead counsel for the Senate during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Several of his Republican colleagues have written public letters in defense of his ethical "lapse."
- His law license is not the only stumbling block for Griffith's nomination. He will receive the lowest possible recommendation from the American Bar Association as a lawyer, and he has proven himself extremely hostile to anti-discrimination statutes such as Title IX and civil rights legislation. "A lawyer who has clearly violated state law, and who has answered serious questions about his record with assertions that simply do not wash, does not belong on the federal appeals court," says PFAW's Ralph Neas. "Neither does a lawyer who has staked out radical positions against remedies to discrimination. If this is the best the Bush administration can come up with, it's a good thing the vacancy rate on the federal courts is the lowest it has been in decades." During his first Senate hearings in November 2004, Griffith will try, and fail, to lie about his record of supporting discriminatory rulings. He will also be found to have lied on his application to the Utah bar, failing to disclose that he had twice been suspended from practicing law without a license, and failing to disclose that he had gone ahead and practiced law anyway. A columnist for a Utah newspaper will observe that Griffith "apparently thinks that rules don't apply to him." But instead of withdrawing Griffith's name and finding a qualified appointee for such a lofty judicial position after Griffith's calamitous first set of hearings, Bush will resubmit his name for consideration in March 2005. After a second contentious round of hearings, and relentless pressure from the White House, Senate Democrats cave and allow Griffith's nomination to proceed. (Washington Post, People for the American Way, White House)
- July 21: Salon writer Robert Bryce says that, with recent GOP attacks on Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards's earlier career as a trial lawyer, Dick Cheney's "disastrous" career as Halliburton's CEO bears renewed examination. As CEO, Cheney led Halliburton into financial calamity, near-bankruptcy, and repeated criminal investigations. Many experienced political observers believe that one of the driving forces behind the Iraq war was to resurrect the nearly moribund corporation. Since 2002, the company has lost almost $2 billion, with further losses expected to be reported in the next few days when it declares its second quarter revenues. The Justice Department is investigating a Halliburton subsidiary's business deals with Iran during Cheney's tenure, deals prohibited by US law because of Iran's status as a pro-terrorist nation. US and French authorities are investigating Halliburton's alleged bribes of Nigerian gas and oil officials under Cheney's leadership. Add an investigation into illegal oil deals with Kazakhstan, and the persistent charges of overbilling in virtually all of Halliburton's ventures, and it becomes clear: the only thing keeping Halliburton afloat is its lucrative government contracts in Iraq.
- The Halliburton board of directors have been candid in admitting that they chose Cheney as their CEO, not for his oil industry expertise, of which he had little, but because of his myriad of political ties, not the least of which is a longstanding relationship with the Bush family. Cheney, whose degrees are in political science, had virtually no business experience when he became CEO of Halliburton in 1995. Thomas Cruikshank, the former chairman of Halliburton, told one reporter that Cheney got the job because "he would be able to open doors around the world and to have access practically anywhere.... There was a lot that he could bring in the way of customer relationships." Cheney's biggest deal for Halliburton involved the acquisition of Dresser Industries, a venerable corporation with decades-old ties to the Bush family. What Cheney didn't care about was the tremendous amount of debt and legal liability Dresser brought to the table; because of a blizzard of asbestos-related lawsuits, Dresser nearly forced the newly responsible Halliburton into bankruptcy. "The Dresser deal will go down as one of the worst deals in the modern energy business," says a Houston-based energy analyst familiar with Halliburton. When asked if Cheney was a good CEO for Halliburton, the analyst replies, "The answer is clearly no. He knows how to make decisions. But he wasn't an energy guy. You can't find anything good that comes out of his tenure."
- Currently the firm is dividing its time between handling its enormous Iraq contracts and battling legal troubles surrounding charges of bribery of Nigerian energy officials. The company's own probe into the matter is being handled by the Houston law firm of Baker Botts, which has close ties to the Bush administration. The lawyer investigating the matter is James Doty, who represented George W. Bush when he was purchasing the Texas Rangers baseball team in the late 1980s. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched its own investigation into the Nigerian bribery scandal, and it appears that Baker Botts is representing Halliburton in that inquiry as well. If the charges are found to be factual, the company and its officials could be charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. If it is convicted under FCPA, Halliburton will be barred from bidding on federal contracts. That would mean the company would lose all future contracts with the Pentagon -- an area that is now keeping the company afloat.
- Cheney, as Secretary of Defense under the first Bush administration, steered numerous huge defense contracts towards Halliburton. When hired as Halliburton's CEO, he brought aboard a number of former high-ranking military officers, who helped him land contracts with the US military. Cheney's influence as former CEO helped Halliburton land over $8 billion worth of logistics and oil-repair contracts in Iraq. But even those lucrative contracts haven't turned into record profits -- and charges of fraud and overbilling have dogged Halliburton almost from the outset of its involvement in Iraq. A CEO of an energy research firm says that Halliburton's lack of profits, given today's high oil prices, is stunning. "How can they not be making money in a business that is minting money?" he asks. He also questions Cheney's push to get into the military contracting business: "The entitlements and all the attention on Halliburton's connections with the Pentagon and the Iraq contracts hasn't resulted in them getting anywhere. It's not repeat business. It's arguable whether they should even be in the business at all."
- While Halliburton itself is still floundering in a sea of red ink -- since 2000, its net worth has fallen by nearly half, longterm debt has quadrupled, and its liabilities more than doubled -- Cheney himself has profited handsomely. During his 58 months as CEO, he was paid $45 million. He still receives deferred payments four years after his departure; this year he will receive over $100,000. (Salon)
- July 21: A scathing review from the consumer advocacy group Center for Justice and Democracy slams the Bush campaign's attempt to paint trial lawyers and tort reform as a national crisis: "It may be hard to understand why 'tort reform' is even on the national agenda at a time when insurance industry profits are booming, tort filings are declining, only 2 percent of injured people sue for compensation, punitive damages are rarely awarded, liability insurance costs for businesses are minuscule, medical malpractice insurance and claims are both less than 1 percent of all health care costs in America, and premium-gouging underwriting practices of the insurance industry have been widely exposed," it writes. The New York Times's Bob Herbert continues, "In looking at medical malpractice cases, I've been amazed by the cold-blooded attitude so many people have taken toward patients who have been seriously, and sometimes grotesquely, harmed. Referring to a Wisconsin woman who had both of her breasts removed after a laboratory mix-up mistakenly indicated she had cancer, a doctor from South Carolina told a Congressional subcommittee: 'She did not lose her life, and with the plastic surgery she'll have breast reconstruction better than she had before.'" Herbert writes, "What is needed is a nationwide crackdown on malpractice, not a campaign to roll back the rights of patients who are injured. This is another utterly typical example of the Bush administration going to bat for those who are economically and politically powerful against those who are economically and politically weak. Despite claims by the insurance industry, there is no evidence that soaring malpractice premiums are the result of sharp increases in the amounts of money paid out for malpractice claims. And, tellingly, industry executives are generally careful not to say that the tort reforms sought by the Bush administration will result in premium reductions. This is all about greed. What tort reform will lead to, not surprisingly, is an unwarranted burst of additional profits for the insurance industry, which is why the industry is sinking so much money into its unrelenting campaign for 'reform.' It would be helpful if the nation's many good doctors would blow the whistle on the insurance industry and its exploitive practices, and on the members of their own august profession who violate that essential maxim, 'First, do no harm.'" (New York Times/American Dream Forum [cached Google copy])
