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
June 2003
Week Three
- June 15: Former ambassador Joseph Wilson speaks bluntly and with passion on the subject of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal to an audience at a forum held by the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, an antiwar organization. Wilson savages the Bush administration for its farrago of lies and misinformation surrounding Iraq, and hints at his own personal role in the Niger affair, saying that "that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article, is also pissed off and has every intention of ensuring that this story has legs. ...[W]hen you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair's government fall because in the UK it is a big story, there will be some ramifications, I think, here in the United States.... It is absolutely bogus for us to have gone to war the way we did." EPIC's Eric Gustafson recalls that Wilson was "pretty clear that he was referring himself as the special envoy who went to Niger." Wilson is ready to take Cheney and the White House on. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- June 15: The US launches "Operation Desert Scorpion" to flush out supporters of Saddam Hussein in north and northwestern Iraq. A respected elder Iraqi statesman, Adnan Pachachi, says the operations should be suspended while an interim Iraqi government is formed. Pachachi says that military sweeps through civilian areas with mass arrests, interrogations, and gunbattles were inflaming sentiments against the American and British occupation. (Channel NewsAsia)
- June 15: Retired General Wesley Clark says on Meet the Press, "...All of us in the community who read intelligence believe that Saddam wanted these capabilities and he had some. We struck very hard in December of '98, did everything we knew, all of his facilities. I think it was an effective set of strikes. Tony Zinni commanded that, called Operation Desert Fox, and I think that set them back a long ways. But we never believed that that was the end of the problem. I think there was a certain amount of hype in the intelligence, and I think the information that's come out thus far does indicate that there was a sort of selective reading of the intelligence in the sense of sort of building a case. ...I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein. ...[I]t came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But -- I'm willing to say it but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection.
- "...I do think there has to be an accounting for this. I think really it goes back to 9/11. We've got a set of hearings that need to be conducted to look at what happened that caused 9/11. That really hasn't been done yet. You know, a basic principle of military operations is you conduct an after-action review. When the action's over you bring people together. The commander, the subordinates, the staff members. You ask yourself what happened, why, and how do we fix it the next time? As far as I know, this has never been done about the essential failure at 9/11. Then moving beyond that, it needs to be looked at in terms of the whole intelligence effort and how it's connected to the policy effort. And these are matters that probably cannot be aired fully in public but I think that the American people and their representatives have to be involved in this. This is essential in terms of the legitimacy and trust in our elected leadership and our way of government." (MSNBC)
- Mid-June: The CIA produces a secret report flatly debunking the entire Iraq-Niger uranium claim. In a memo to CIA director George Tenet, analysts write, "[S]ince learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad." White House correspondent David Sanger, who reports for the New York Times, is unaware of the report, but is pressing the White House hard on the entire claim. Between the report and Sanger's pressure, the White House conducts a series of discussions of the matter. Opinion on how to publicly handle the mess is sharply divided. The NSC's Robert Joseph, in charge of proliferation issues, doesn't want to budge. The CIA once endorsed the claim, he says, even including it in the October 2002 NIE. "They can't walk away from the NIE, can they?" asks Condoleezza Rice, in support of Joseph's hardline position. But Tenet had warned the NSC not to use the uranium claim in the Cincinnati speech. There is plenty of blame to go around, Tenet warns, and everyone will have to share in it.
- Everyone, it seems, except Bush and his most senior officials. In January, Bush made the claim during his State of the Union address, in the now-notorious "sixteen words," but his speechwriters were careful to attribute the charge to British intelligence, who then was still insisting that they had other evidence to support the claim. But when the CIA asked to review the Brits' other evidence, they had been rebuffed -- evidence enough, according to the CIA's Tyler Drumheller, to conclude that all the British had was the same "circular reporting" stemming from the same forged Italian documents.
- And the White House is closely monitoring a political crisis in Britain. The Blair government is reeling over charges that a British white paper on Iraqi WMDs released in September had been "sexed up" by Blair officials. Blair is fending off charges of rigging evidence to promote the invasion, and is fighting back by accusing the BBC of using anonymous sources to challenge his government's credibility. White House aides worry that walking away from the uranium charge will further undermine Blair. "There was concern," a White House official recalls, "that the British government might fall." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- Mid-June: Dick Cheney addresses the annual dinner of the American Radio and Television Correspondents Association, and finishes his speech by saying, "You did well -- you have my thanks." Cheney is complimenting the American media for its willingness to cooperate with the administration on skewing and slanting its coverage of the Iraqi war. (Independent)
- Mid-June: New York Times reporter Judith Miller, formerly a star at her paper, is finding herself increasingly persona non grata for her efforts to promulgate White House and Pentagon propaganda through the prestigious newspaper. The paper is still reeling over the plagarism and fabrication scandal centered around its former reporter Jayson Blair; executive editor Howell Raines, one of Miller's biggest supporters, finds his own hold on power increasingly tenuous after the Blair scandal, the media community's increasing disenchantment with Miller, and Raines's own imperious treatment of his underlings. After returning to the United States from Iraq in late May, Miller finds her e-mail inbox stuffed with over 8,000 messages slamming her reporting of Iraq's WMD programs. Miller is being assailed on Web sites and blogs -- both left and right -- for enthusiastically and unquestioningly carrying water for the White House and the Pentagon. She has become the symbol of the American "lapdog media," which promoted and sold an unjust war to the American people.
- Miller still wants to go back to Iraq, but as the foreign editor of the paper, Roger Cohen, later recalls telling her, "there was unease, discomfort, and unhappiness" over her WMD coverage. Miller, as is her wont, complains to senior management, and Raines overrides Cohen's reluctance and orders Miller's return to Iraq. Though she returns in early June, she provides little coverage, with the notable exception of one story detailing the dispute over the claims about Iraq's supposed mobile bioweapons labs.
- Miller, imperious in her own right, calls the chief of public affairs for the US CENTCOM in Doha, Qatar, Jim Wilkinson, and lays into him. Wilkinson, once the deputy White House communications director, is awoken from sleep by Miller, who lambasts him over their agreement that military commanders can review her copy before she files it. She says now that major combat operations are over, the agreement should be null and void. Wilkinson believes that a deal is a deal. In February, Wilkinson, who had helped write the white paper that was used in the Bush speech for the UN, had found Miller's unsubstantiated tales about Iraqi defector Adnan al-Haideri useful. But now he has little use for Miller, who he recalls as being "hysterical." Miller is used to having her way with the US military, but she doesn't realize that her status has changed. She screams at Wilkinson that she will send her material directly to New York, via e-mail, without consulting with Wilkinson or anyone else. "What she was trying to do was use her diva status to roll me," Wilkinson recalls. Instead, he orders her evicted from the unit she is embedded with. "I kicked her *ss out of Iraq."
- By mid-June, Miller is back in New York. Raines and her other major supporter at the Times, Gerald Boyd, are both gone, victims of the Jayson Blair scandal. And the Times's Washington bureau launches a major investigation into what happened with their coverage of Iraq's WMDs. Miller, the center of the skewed WMD coverage, is part of the investigation, but takes little of a role. Instead, she is curious as to whether the search for Iraqi WMDs has been so bungled that, if there were weapons, the military might not have found them. This line of investigation will lead her directly into the office of Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- June 16: Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, the so-called "Ace of Diamonds" in the US military's famous deck of cards identifying the highest-ranking members of the Hussein regime, is captured, apparently after just returning from Syria with a cache of money and blank Belarussian passports. Al-Tikriti, Hussein's longtime personal secretary, is initially interrogated by one of the CIA's best Arabic translators, a woman who fully understands the nuances of the language. But al-Tikriti's information is not to the CIA's liking.
- For instance, he tells her that Hussein had not been at Dora Farms, a compound outside Baghdad, in the days before the invasion. That news is inconvenient for the CIA on many levels. For years, the CIA had lacked Iraqi "HUMINT" sources, spies and assets inside Iraq, but just before the war, an entire platoon of informants, dubbed ROCKSTARS by the CIA, were suddenly recruited. This coterie of informants, Sufi Muslims directed to aid the CIA by their leader, were paid huge sums of money in return for what they claimed was inside information about Hussein and his plans. Though the ROCKSTARS were possibly too good to be true, the CIA couldn't pass up such a potential gold mine of information after years of dearth and drought. Two days before the invasion, one of the informants reported that there was unusual activity at the Dora Farms compound, and that Hussein and perhaps his two sons were there. CIA director George Tenet personally rushed the information to the White House, and Bush ordered a strike at the compound by cruise missiles and Stealth aircraft in an attempt to kill Hussein and perhaps shorten the war. Hussein was, indeed, not there, but the CIA and the Bush administration are heavily invested in the idea that they had almost killed him; to acknowledge that the information was wrong would have cast doubt on the entire array of intelligence provided by the informants.
- Al-Tikriti reveals some other unsettling information, including the statement that Hussein had fled Baghdad by driving through a US checkpoint without being recognized. And perhaps worst of all, al-Tikriti told his interrogator that Iraq had long ago destroyed all its WMD stores. Before the war, the CIA had concluded that al-Tikriti was one of the only top regime officials who had personal release authority over the chemical and biological weapons that the US believed Iraq possessed, and therefore is one of the few who know where they are. Now he is telling his interrogator that no such weapons exist.
- Instead, the CIA decides that al-Tikriti is lying, and that his interrogator isn't pressing him hard enough. They claim that the interrogator has developed a case of "clientitis," and going too easy on the prisoner. The CIA orders her replaced. Her replacement is part of a pattern. "The people who were running things and the people who were getting promoted were politically responsive," recalls one CIA source. The interrogator's problem is not that she isn't doing her job, but that she is getting information that is politically unacceptable. (New York Times/CommonDreams, James Risen, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- June 16: In a speech to small-business owners in New Jersey, Bush asserts, "The nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history -- I call them revisionist historians is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, '98, in 2003.... And one thing is for certain: Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States." Bush refuses to address the issue of WMDs, and when asked about possible misrepresentation, distortion, or falsification of intelligence information in regards to Iraq's WMD program, he says: "We made it clear to the dictator of Iraq that he must disarm. He chose not to do so, so we disarmed him. And I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain. He is no longer a threat to the free world." His best evidence? Hussein had used chemical weapons 20 years before. The new story line is clear: the US invaded Iraq to remove Hussein as an unspecified "threat" to the US and to the world, and any questions about the WMDs that have not been found are simply "revisionism." George Orwell would be proud. (Washington Post, MSNBC, David Corn)
- June 16: A report by a group of terrorism experts at the University of Reading finds that, far from protecting America from terrorism, the US invasion of Iraq has put the country at a much higher risk of future attacks. "The invasion of Iraq has exacerbated, not mitigated, international terrorism," the study notes. As for al-Qaeda: "The frequency and reach of al-Qaeda attacks will continue to increase. ...Al-Qaeda cannot be defeated without a change in U.S. counterterrorism strategy." (University of Reading)
- June 16: Rand Beers, who served the NSC as special assistant to the President on combating terrorism until he retired on March 15 before the war on Iraq, says of the Bush administration, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure. As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out." He believes that the government's focus on Iraq has robbed domestic security of manpower, brainpower and money. He says that the Iraq war created fissures in the United States' counterterrorism alliances and could breed a new generation of al Qaeda recruits. Many of his government colleagues, he said, thought Iraq was an "ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy. I continue to be puzzled by it. Why was it such a policy priority?" The official rationale was the search for weapons of mass destruction, he said, "although the evidence was pretty qualified, if you listened carefully." As for Afghanistan, "Terrorists move around the country with ease. We don't even know what's going on. Osama bin Laden could be almost anywhere in Afghanistan." Domestically, homeland security is suffering from "policy constipation. Nothing gets done. Fixing an agency management problem doesn't make headlines or produce voter support. So if you're looking at things from a political perspective, it's easier to go to war. ...We are asking our firemen, policemen, Customs and Coast Guard to do far more with far less than we ever ask of our military." He characterizes the antiterrorism effort as nothing more than "a rhetorical policy. What else can you say -- 'We don't care about 3,000 people dying in New York City and Washington?'" Beers, who currently works for Senator John Kerry, has served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, where he replaced Oliver North as the NSC director for counterterrorism and counternarcotics. His wife describes the culture of the current administration: "It's a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."
- In March 2003, Beers quit his position on the NSC. He met with his friend, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, to discuss his decision. As Clarke recalls in his book Against All Odds, Beers told him, "They still don't get it. Instead of going all out against al-Qaeda and eliminating our vulnerabilities at home, they wanna f*ckin' invade Iraq again. We have a token US military force in Afghanistan, the Taliban are regrouping, we haven't caught bin Laden, or his deputy, or the head of the Taliban. And they aren't going to send more troops to Afghanistan to catch them or to help the government in Kabul secure the country. No, they're holding back, waiting to invade Iraq. Do you know how much it will strengthen al-Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq? There's no threat to us now from Iraq, but 70% of the American people think Iraq attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. You wanna know why? Because that's what the administration wants them to think! I can't work for these people. I'm sorry, I just can't." (Washington Post, Richard Clarke/Bill Katovsky)
- June 16: Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's cabinet on the eve of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, says that searchers in Iraq had found no sign either of equipment or a workforce for making weapons of mass destruction. "It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq," Cook tells Parliament. (BBC)
- June 16: Halliburton and its subsidiary corporation Kellogg, Brown & Root conduct a secret hiring fair at a posh Houston hotel. All recruits are required to sign a pledge promising that they will not talk to the media. (Houston Business Journals)
- June 17: Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accuses the Bush administration of "overstretching the facts" on the state of Iraq's WMD programs. Turner advises current CIA director to tread cautiously because CIA directors "can be made the fall guy" by administrations when policy judgments based on intelligence go wrong. He continued, "There is no question in my mind [policymakers] distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it." (USA Today, Daily Telegraph)
- June 17: Carl Levin, senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, accuses the CIA of deliberately misleading UN arms inspectors in an attempt to promote the invasion of Iraq. Levin says that when the UN team under Hans Blix returned to Iraq last autumn, the CIA, despite its claims to the contrary, failed to turn over its full list of 150 high or medium priority suspected weapons sites. This led to the US shutting down the inspections prematurely, opening the path for military action. "Why did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the UN inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites, when they had not?" Levin asks. "Did the CIA act in this way in order not to undermine administration policy?" Had it been known that there were still outstanding sites, he suggested, there would have been "greater public demand that the inspection process continue." (Independent/Common Dreams)
Blair official reveals plans to invade Iraq from summer of 2002
- June 18: Clare Short, Blair's former international development secretary, claims that she was briefed on a secret agreement between Blair and George W. Bush to invade Iraq. The agreement was made in the summer of 2002, and was to take place in either February or March of 2003. Short tells the Foreign Affairs Committee, which is mounting an inquiry into the events leading up to the Iraq conflict, that Blair had "used a series of half-truths, exaggerations, reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict by the spring." She claimed Blair told Bush that "we will be with you" on an unconditional basis, and that the British intelligence and diplomatic communities had privately opposed the war. She told the committee, "I believe that the prime minister must have concluded that it was honourable and desirable to back the US in going for military action in Iraq and therefore it was honourable for him to persuade us through various ruses and ways to get us there -- so for him I think it was an honourable deception." During the same evidence session, former minister Robin Cook tells the committee that Iraq did not have weaponized chemicals, nor did it possess weapons capable of being fired within 45 minutes, a claim made in the main intelligence document published last September. Cook says, "I think it would be fair to say there was a selection of evidence to support a conclusion. I fear we got into a position in which the intelligence was not being used to inform and shape policy, but to shape policy that was already settled. Cook says that the Blair administration had "a burning fixation" with weapons of mass destruction, a fixation that led Blair to reject Cook's view that the policy of containment was working. Short also claims there was a complete collapse in proper government procedure, with a small unelected group in Downing Street making the decisions without minutes, proper options papers or any written material. (Guardian)
- June 18: David Kay leaves for Baghdad to assume control of the Iraq Survey Group, the WMD hunters. His staff is disenchanted with Kay's orders to leave their cozy accomodations in Doha, Qatar and actually go into Iraq proper. "We can eat MREs and sleep in tents or whatever, but we're going forward because you can't -- you're not going to find the weapons in Doha." He orders the task force to forget the site lists and start talking to Iraqis who might know something. Kay's first order of business is to deconstruct Colin Powell's February speech to the UN and make sure everything Powell cited was covered; supposedly Powell had the best intelligence the US intelligence community could provide, and Kay wanted to make sure everything was covered. It doesn't take Kay long to find out that Powell had nothing. "The nuke story was falling apart," Kay later recalls. "We were getting a clear picture of what their nuclear capability had been, and quite frankly it was worse, much worse, than it had been in '91 at the start of the first Gulf War." And nothing was coming up to indicate that Hussein had stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, either. Kay was starting from scratch. (Bob Woodward)
- June 18: Jay Garner, the ousted head of the Iraqi reconstruction effort, agrees to meet with Rumsfeld to discuss his experiences in Iraq. "We've made three tragic decisions," he tells Rumsfeld -- de-Ba'athification, the disbanding of the Iraqi military, and getting rid of the Iraqi leadership group Garner had slated to work on providing a new government for Iraq. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people," he tells Rumsfeld. "You've got to have an Iraqi face on it." Rumsfeld looks at Garner, then says, "Well, I don't there there is anything we can do, because we are where we are." Garner believes Rumsfeld thinks he's lost it, that he's grinding a personal ax against Bremer, but he continues. "They're all reversible," he says. "We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld concludes. Rumsfeld then oversees a ceremony to award Garner the Defense Department Medal for Public Service, a medal Garner does not want. When he speaks, he says soberly, "To all of you, I'd like to say just one thing. There are problems in Iraq and there will be problems in Iraq for a while. There's always problems when you've been brutalized for thirty years and you take people out of absolute darkness and put them in the sunshine. So I think there's more goodness, far more goodness than there is badness, and the glass absolutely is half full." Putting a rosy spin on the situation that he does not believe, Garner finishes by saying of Bremer, "I think all the things he's doing are absolutely the right things."
- Rumsfeld escorts Garner to the White House to meet one last time with Bush. Garner knows that Bush doesn't want to hear anything substantial, so he spends his time with the president telling amusing yarns from his time in Iraq and saying that every Iraqi he spoke with said, "God bless Mr. George Bush and Mr. Tony Blair. Thank you for taking away Saddam Hussein." Reporter Bob Woodward writes, "Once again the aura of the presidency had shut out the most important news -- the bad news." Towards the end of their meeting, Garner compliments Bush on his choice of Bremer to head the CPA. "I didn't choose him," Bush retorts. "Rumsfeld chose him just like he chose you." Garner had been told by Rumsfeld in April that Bush, not Rumsfeld, made the choice to replace Garner with Bremer.
- Woodward asks Garner in 2006 why he didn't alert Bush to his list of three tragic mistakes, as he had Rumsfeld. Garner replies that he had informed Rumsfeld, and that it was the secretary's job to inform Bush. Besides, Garner says, Bush would have insisted that to believe it, he would have had to hear it from Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld wasn't giving that kind of information to Bush. Worse, to say that in front of Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney would have merely provoked derision from those two. "They didn't see it coming," Garner says, "As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid." (Bob Woodward)
- June 18: Conservative columnist Robert Novak is honored at an assemblage of Washington political and journalistic glitterati at the Army-Navy Club. Novak, a veteran columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a reliable outlet for information, disinformation, and propaganda on behalf of the Republican Party, is joined by, among others, Karl Rove, who wears a button proclaiming, "I'm a source not a target." Rove has been one of Novak's prime sources for over twenty years; in 1992, Rove was fired from the re-election campaign of the elder Bush after he leaked damaging information about the Texas state campaign chairman, Robert Mosbacher, to Novak, who promptly published it. Novak was useful again in 2000, when he printed a column savaging John McCain's political consultant John Weaver (a longtime rival of Rove's) at the behest of Rove. In other words, Novak is a reliable outlet for Rove to attack his political enemies, both Republican and Democratic, without leaving fingerprints. Rove and Novak are "intimately close," according to fellow journalist Al Hunt, but both are careful to keep their relationship out of the public eye. Rove will become one of Novak's sources for his July 14 column outing CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of Rove's orchestrated smear campaign against Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- June 18: Democratic senator and Presidential candidate John Kerry says Bush broke his promise to build an international coalition against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and then waged a war based on questionable intelligence: "He misled every one of us." Kerry said Bush made his case for war based on at least two pieces of U.S. intelligence that now appear to be wrong: that Iraq sought nuclear material from Africa, and that Saddam's regime had aerial weapons capable of attacking the United States with biological material. He is calling for a Congressional investigation into US intelligence on Iraq. "I will not let him off the hook throughout this campaign with respect to America's credibility and credibility to me because if he lied he lied to me personally." (AP/Common Dreams)
- June 18: US and Pakistani intelligence officials and Taliban leaders meet at a Pakistani airbase to discuss the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. At the meeting, FBI officials propose that the Taliban might have a role in the future Afghan government on four conditions: that Mullah Omar is removed as leader, that foreign combatants engaged in fighting against U.S. and allied troops is deported, that any captive allied soldiers are released, and that Afghans currently living abroad are brought into the government. The situation in Afghanistan is chaotic at best. Two factions, one a US-leaning group led by Hamid Karzai and the other a Northern Alliance-based group with sympathies to the Russians, are battling for control of Kabul. The Taliban holds sway in the area around Kandahar. Much of the country is in complete anarchy. The nominal leader of the Afghan government, Karzai, actually holds power over a very small part of Afghanistan; in October, a grand council will convene to decide who, or what group, will replace him. (American Prospect)
- June 18: US officials claim that a nighttime raid by Task Force 20 of the US Special Forces on a convoy of cars and trucks crossing the Syrian border was to stop a possible escape attempt by Saddam Hussein. According to official sources, after the group crossed the border and moved into Syrian territory, it was attacked by a US task force; five Syrians were injured and several other Syrians were briefly detained and then released. The truth is far worse. At least 80 Syrians and Iraqis, all civilians, were killed. The convoy was in fact smuggling gasoline; no Iraqi leaders were involved. Syrian border guards were actually detained and harshly interrogated for ten days. American military and diplomatic officials call the operation a fiasco. An American consultant who recently returned from Iraq says, "I don't mind so much what we did, but it's the incompetence with which we did it," while two retired CIA veterans, Vincent Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who now consult on intelligence issues, note that the attacks had been based on "fragmentary and ambiguous" information and had led to increased tension between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA director George Tenet.
- Before the invasion of Iraq, Syria had become one of the US's best sources for intelligence regarding al-Qaeda, and Tenet strongly supported Syria, against the wishes of Rumsfeld's Pentagon intelligence operatives. After September 11, Syrian leader Bashar Assad began providing a wealth of information on al-Qaeda to US intelligence, including information that allowed the US to prevent a serious attack on the US Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and another al-Qaeda operation against an American target in Ottowa. Assad told reporter Seymour Hersh in June 2003 that he was cooperating with US intelligence because of the horror of the 9/11 attack, and because he wanted to repair the rift between the US and Syria. Back-channel discussions between Syria and the CIA have been ongoing since the fall of 2002, with Syria agreeing to consider imposing some restrictions on the terrorist group Hezbollah, but these discussions have met with considerable resistance and enmity from the State Department, the Pentagon, and Israel. Assad, whose grip on the Syrian government is tenuous and whose control over Hezbollah is non-existent, refused to support the US invasion of Iraq, and shut down whatever back-channel discussions that may have still existed.
- In return, the US has consistently escalated its rhetoric against Syria. Rumsfeld has accused Syria of supplying Iraq with night-vision goggles, and implied that Iraq may have hidden some of its supposed WMDs in Syrian territory, an accusation that Syria denies and that US intelligence regards as unlikely. A rift between White House hardliners, including Rumsfeld, and Tenet developed, with the hardliners urging action against Syria, and Tenet insisting that Syria's intelligence about al-Qaeda is worth giving Syria some leeway. Tenet has apparently lost this struggle. The collapse of the liaison relationship has left many CIA operatives especially frustrated: "The guys are unbelievably pissed that we're blowing this away," says one former senior intelligence official. "There was a great channel at Aleppo. The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they [Rumsfeld and the hardliners] "want to go in there next." A Syrian foreign ministry official told Hersh, "There is no security relationship now. ...It saddens us as much as it saddens you. We could give you information on organizations that we don't think should exist. If we help you on al-Qaeda, we are helping ourselves." He added that if Washington had agreed to discuss certain key issues in a back channel, "we'd have given you more. But when you publicly try to humiliate a country it'll become stubborn." A Defense Department official says that Syria is still trying to earn America's trust by keeping Hezbollah quiet during the Iraqi invasion and its aftermath. This is "a signal to us, and we're throwing it away. The Syrians are trying to communicate, and we're not listening." It's apparent that Syria is staying quiet over the egregrious incursion into its territory, and the deaths of its civilians, for the same reasons. (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh)
- June 18: Journalist Greg Palast writes about the persecution of former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, whose political career was derailed by accusations that she was accusing the Bush administration of having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and withholding that knowledge from the American people so his business cronies could profit from the war that was sure to follow. The quotes attributed to McKinney were false, or, as Palast writes in his heated prose, "The 'quote' from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin' made up." After a recent New York Times profile of McKinney that promulgated the false accusations against McKinney, Palast phoned the author of the piece, Lynnette Clemetson, and asked her to clarify her charges. Clemetson claims, falsely, that McKinney's infamous quote comes from an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and is confirmed in House of Representative transcripts. When confronted with the truth that none of her sources are accurate, Clemetson falls back on the excuse that it was "all over the place" at the time. Palast digs out the actual quote from McKinney: "George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11." McKinney did ask discomforting questions about why the administration refused to mount an investigation after the attacks. The Times also claimed about McKinney that Atlanta's "prominent Black leaders -– including Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP and former Mayor Maynard Jackson -– who had supported Ms. McKinney in the past – distanced themselves from her this time." Palast notes that Atlanta has four internationally prominent black leaders; while two of the four, Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young, did distance themselves from her, the other two, Martin Luther King III and Julian Bond, did not. (The Times would later retract its claim about Bond. (AlterNet)
- June 19: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is requesting far more documents on the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks than the previous Congressional investigative committee. The commission does not expect the Bush administration to invoke executive privilege to keep the documents out of its hands. The previous commission was denied a number of documents by the White House, mostly for reasons involving national security and personal privilege. (AP/Fox News)
- June 19: Lawsuits against Bush and Blair, among others, have been filed in Belgium in accordance with Belgian law, which allows its judiciary to try foreigners for hunam rights violations and war crimes regardless of the country the crimes were committed in. Belgium has forwarded the lawsuits to the defendants' home countries. One lawsuit accuses Bush, Blair, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and U.S. General Tommy Franks of crimes against humanity in the recent Iraq war. A second lawsuit is against Powell, also regarding the Iraq war. A third is against Bush, Rumsfeld, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Reuters/Yahoo! News)
- June 19: New Republic writers John Judis and Spencer Ackerman write, "The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration -- with a deep interest in a given policy outcome -- nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq."
- The article is a bit murky in its reporting of the Iraq-Niger affair (see many, many related items throughout this site), and if anything, overstates the connection between the Iraq-Niger allegations and Dick Cheney. The article errs in stating that Cheney's office had received the forged documents making the allegations of a uranium deal, and errs that the documents had come from the British. Much of the information in Judis and Ackerman's article comes from former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who, while he knows a good bit about the forged documents and the putative uranium deal, is prone to make allegations that he cannot prove. The article states bluntly that Wilson, who refuses to be identified in the article, says, "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.... They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive." Wilson is correct in his statement, but Wilson's injudicious statements about Cheney's own involvement are making it seem as if Cheney himself played a larger role in sending Wilson to Niger than he actually had played. Wilson's overstatements will give Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, room to make their own sweeping, and far more fantastical, allegations about Wilson's own credibility. (The New Republic, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- June 21: Bush claims that the reason US forces can't find Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction is because the weapons were stolen by looters. (Reuters/TBR News)
- June 21: Retired general William Nash tells the Observer that the US has "lost its window of opportunity" in Iraq, and now faces a much longer occupation and much larger expenditure than it has planned for. He says the US "has failed to understand the mindset and the attitudes of the Iraqi people and the depth of hostility against the US in much of the country." He continues, "In the entire region -- and Iraq is typical -- there is a sense that America can do what it wants. So if America decides to protect the oilfields and oil ministry, it can. And if America doesn't provide electricity or water or fails to protect medical supplies, it is because they don't want to or don't care." (Trueopolis)
