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
March 2004, Week Four
Page Two
- March 23: US engineers are busily constructing 14 permanent military bases in Iraq. The bases will not only house the thousands of American troops expected to serve in Iraq on a long-term basis, but will serve as key outposts for Bush administration policy advisers. As the US scales back its military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq provides an option for an administration eager to maintain a robust military presence in the Middle East and intent on a muscular approach to seeding democracy in the region. The number of US military personnel in Iraq, between 105,000 and 110,000, is expected to remain unchanged through 2006, according to military planners. "Is this a swap for the Saudi bases?" asks Army Brigadier General Robert Pollman, chief engineer for base construction in Iraq. "I don't know. ...When we talk about enduring bases here, we're talking about the present operation, not in terms of America's global strategic base. But this makes sense. It makes a lot of logical sense." (Chicago Tribune/GlobalSecurity)
- March 23: Former UN weapons inspector David Kay implores the Bush administration to admit that it made mistakes in Iraq, and says that it is in "grave danger" of destroying its credibility at home and abroad if it does not do so. "The cost of our mistakes...with regard to the explanation of why we went to war in Iraq are far greater than Iraq itself," he says. "We are in grave danger of having destroyed our credibility internationally and domestically with regard to warning about future events. The answer is to admit you were wrong, and what I find most disturbing around Washington...is the belief...you can never admit you're wrong." He says the US intelligence community jumped to unwarranted conclusions about Iraq's weapons programs: "When we finally do the sums on Iraq, what will turn out is that we simply didn't know what was going on, but we connected the dots -- the dots from 1991 behavior were connected with 2000 behavior and 2003 behavior, and it became an explanation and a picture of Iraq that simply didn't exist." (Reuters/Boston Globe)
- March 23: Hamas retreats from its earlier assertions that it will attack American targets as part of its revenge for the assassination of its founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi says that his group's militant activities are aimed solely at Israel. "We are inside Palestinian land and acting only inside Palestinian land," says Rantisi. "We are resisting the occupation, nothing else. Our resistance will continue just inside our border here inside our country." (AP/Kansas City Star)
- March 23: Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle registers his opposition to the Bush administration's tactics of personally attacking those who tell the truth or disagree with the administration's point of view. "I want to talk this morning about a disturbing pattern of conduct by the people around President Bush," he says to the Senate. "They seem to be willing to do anything for political purposes, regardless of the facts and regardless of what's right. I don't have the time this morning to talk in detail about all the incidents that come to mind. Larry Lindsay, for instance, seems to have been fired as the President's Economic Advisor because he spoke honestly about the costs of the Iraq War. General Shinseki seems to have become a target when he spoke honestly about the number of troops that would be needed in Iraq. There are many others, who are less well known, who have also faced consequences for speaking out. US Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers was suspended from her job when she disclosed budget problems that our nation's parks are less safe, and Professor Elizabeth Blackburn was replaced on the Council on Bioethics because of her scientific views on stem-cell research.
- "Each of these examples deserves examination, but they are not my focus today. Instead, I want to talk briefly about four other incidents that are deeply troubling. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stepped forward to criticize the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, he was immediately ridiculed by the people around the President and his credibility was attacked. Even worse, the Administration launched a government investigation to see if Secretary O'Neill improperly disclosed classified documents. He was, of course, exonerated, but the message was clear. If you speak freely, there will be consequences. Ambassador Joseph Wilson also learned that lesson. Ambassador Wilson, who by all accounts served bravely under President Bush in the early 1990s, felt a responsibility to speak out on President Bush's false State of the Union statement on Niger and uranium. When he did, the people around the President quickly retaliated. Within weeks of debunking the President's claim, Ambassador Wilson's wife was the target of a despicable act. Her identity as a deep-cover CIA agent was revealed to Bob Novak, a syndicated columnist, and was printed in newspapers around the country. That was the first time in our history, I believe, that the identity and safety of a CIA agent was disclosed for purely political purposes. It was an unconscionable and intolerable act. Around the same time Bush Administration officials were endangering Ambassador Wilson's wife, they appear to have been threatening another federal employee for trying to do his job. In recent weeks Richard Foster, an actuary for the Department of Health and Human Services, has revealed that he was told he would be fired if he told Congress and the American people the real costs of last year's Medicare bill. Mr. Foster, in an e-mail he wrote on June 26 of last year, said the whole episode had been 'pretty nightmarish.' He wrote: 'I'm no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policymakers for political purposes.' Think about those words. He would lose his job if he did his job. If he provided the information the Congress and the American people deserved and were entitled to, he would lose his job. When did this become the standard for our government? When did we become a government of intimidation?
- "And now, in today's newspapers, we see the latest example of how the people around the President react when faced with facts they want to avoid. The White House's former lead counter-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, is under fierce attack for questioning the White House's record on combating terrorism. Mr. Clarke has served in four White Houses, beginning with Ronald Reagan's Administration, and earned an impeccable record for his work. Now the White House seeks to destroy his reputation. The people around the President aren't answering his allegations; instead, they are trying to use the same tactics they used with Paul O'Neill. They are trying to ridicule Mr. Clarke and destroy his credibility, and create any diversion possible to focus attention away from his serious allegations. The purpose of government isn't to make the President look good. It isn't to produce propaganda or misleading information. It is, instead, to do its best for the American people and to be accountable to the American people. The people around the President don't seem to believe that. They have crossed a line -- perhaps several lines -- that no government ought to cross. We shouldn't fire or demean people for telling the truth. We shouldn't reveal the names of law enforcement officials for political gain. And we shouldn't try to destroy people who are out to make country safer. I think the people around the President have crossed into dangerous territory. We are seeing abuses of power that cannot be tolerated. The President needs to put a stop to it, right now. We need to get to the truth, and the President needs to help us do that." (Buzzflash)
- March 23: An interview by England's Guardian with Richard Clarke sheds some additional light on Clarke's charges that the Bush administration ignored the threat of al-Qaeda in favor of focusing on Iraq and a multi-billion dollar missile defense program. When asked about the Bush administration's strategy to eliminate al-Qaeda, he says, "We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi [Rice] on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it." Of the claim that the Bush administration worked hard on the issue, Clarke flatly states, "It's not true. I asked -- on January 24 in writing to Condi -- urgently for a meeting on cabinet level -- the principal's committee -- to review the plan and I was told I can't have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal's meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaeda was not important to them." Clarke says that when the Bush administration did invade Afghanistan to find bin Laden and other terrorists involved in 9/11, "...they kind of botched it, because all they did initially was send special forces with the Northern Alliance. They did not insert special forces to go in after Bin Laden. They let Bin Laden escape. They only went in two months after."
- Clarke says bin Laden was never a focus in the principals meetings: "It didn't come up in the principal's meetings. Between April and July only four of the 30 or 35 deputy principal meetings touched on al-Qaeda. But three of those were mainly about US-Pakistan relations, or US-Afghan relations or South Asian policy, and al-Qaeda was just one of the points. One of the meetings looked at the overall plan. It was the July one. April was an initial discussion of terrorism policy writ large and at that meeting I said we had to talk about al-Qaeda. And because it was terrorism policy writ large [Paul] Wolfowitz said we have to talk about Iraqi terrorism and I said that's interesting because there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States. There hasn't been any for 8 years. And he said something derisive about how I shouldn't believe the CIA and FBI, that they've been wrong. And I said if you know more than I know tell me what it is, because I've been doing this for 8 years and I don't know about any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US since 1993. When I said let's start talking about bin Laden, he said bin Laden couldn't possibly have attacked the World Trade Center in '93. One little terrorist group like that couldn't possibly have staged that operation. It must have been Iraq. ...There were a lot of meetings on 'Star Wars'. We had a lot of meetings about Russia policy, because Condi is a Russian specialist. There were a lot of meetings on China." But most of the meetings involved Iraq. "[I]t was central. The buzz in national security staff administration wanted to go after Iraq."
- Clarke maintains that Bush came into office with the intent to invade Iraq: "If you look at the so-called Vulcans group [Bush's pre-election foreign policy advisors] talked about publicly in seminars in Washington. They clearly wanted to go after Iraq and they clearly wanted to do this reshaping of the Middle East and they used the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse to test their theories." He believes that Bush had bought into that thinking: "I think he was. He got his international education from the Vulcans group the previous year. They were people like Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz. They were all espousing this stuff. So he probably had been persuaded. He certainly wasn't hearing any contrary view during this education process." When asked if the administration had focused more on terrorism during its first eight months, would it have made a difference, Clarke responds: "Well let me ask you: Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaeda was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi Rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. She didn't hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaeda terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others. ...I don't want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance. ...There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn't take it."
- Clarke is asked, "Condoleezza Rice argued today that when President Bush was asking you to find evidence linking September 11 to Iraq, he was simply showing due diligence, asking you to explore the options." He responds, "That's very funny. There are two ways of asking. There's: 'check every possibility -- don't assume its al-Qaeda, look at everybody.' That's due diligence. Then there's the: 'I want you to find every shred of evidence that it was Iraq and Saddam' -- and said in a very emphatic and intimidating way, and the other people who were with me got the same impression as I did. This was not due diligence. This was: 'come back with a memo that says it was an Iraqi attack.'" The interviewer notes, "stephen Hadley [deputy national security advisor] said he bounced it [the Clarke report downplaying the Iraqi connection] back saying just update this?" and Clarke responds, "Well as soon as he got it he said update it, even though it was very current. Hadley's a good lawyer, he knows how to cover his ass. He's not going to write: 'I don't like the answer.' But when your memo is immediately bounced and its got very current information and its bounced back to you and you're told to do over, its pretty clear what the implication is." Clarke believes a number of factors drove the administration's focus on Iraq: "some are ideologues -- they have a superpower vision of us reshaping the Middle East. Changing the historical balance. Condi Rice has this phrase: 'We needed to change the Middle East so terrorists would not fly aircrafts into buildings.'" Others believe that the first Bush administration left Iraq unfinished, and that this administration needs to finish the job: "...Wolfowitz and Cheney feel some guilt for having stopped the war, a couple of days early, not that we should have marched on Baghdad but at least we should have gone after the Republican Guard."
- When asked about political motives, he says, "You have to bifurcate the White House team between the national security types and the political types. For the political types like Karl Rove this has been a godsend. They ran on the war in the congressional elections two years ago. They're running on the war now. They're painting this election as a vote on terrorism, a vote against Osama bin Laden. And they're succeeding to a certain extent because 70 per cent of American people last year thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But the political benefit [is] clearly a secondary benefit." Clarke says of Iraq's WMDs: "We all believed Saddam had WMD. What I kept saying was: So what? They said he could give it to terrorists. But I said he's not that stupid. If he gave WMD to terrorists he would lose power. The question was: Is there an imminent threat or had we contained him? And I thought we had successfully contained him. I didn't see it as a first-tier issue." Clarke says that the Pentagon and Cheney's Office of Special Plans drove the policy on Iraq: "Certainly. The people in Rumsfeld's office and in Wolfowitz's operation cherry-picked intelligence to select the intelligence to support their views. They never did the due diligence on the intelligence that professional intelligence analysts are trained to do. [The OSP] would go through the intelligence reports including the ones that the CIA was throwing out. They stitched it together they would send it out, send it over to Cheney. All the stuff that a professional would have thrown out. As soon as 9/11 happened people like Rumsfeld saw it was opportunity. During that first week after September 11, the decision was made. It was confirmed by the president. We should do Afghanistan first. But the resources necessary to do a good job in Afghanistan were withheld. There was not enough to go in fast, to go in enough to secure the country. Troops were held back. There were 11,000 troops in Afghanistan. There were fewer in the whole country than police in the borough of Manhattan."
- He responds to Bush allegations that Clarke is merely airing "sour grapes" because he is a Clinton holdover: "I was a Bush [senior] holdover. I'm not a registered Democrat. I don't want a job in the Kerry admin. What I want to do is to provide the American people with a set of facts and let them draw their own conclusions." Of Bush's leadership, he says, "He doesn't like to read a lot - not terribly interested in analysis. He is very interested in getting to the bottom line. Once he's done he puts a lot of strength behind pushing it, but there's not a lot of analysis before the decision." Clarke doesn't believe Great Britain had a lot of influence on the decision to invade: "They would have done it without Britain. I don't think it made a lot of difference. I think the British were able to help Colin Powell to persuade them to go to the UN. It did go to the UN for a period of time, and it may have helped a little. It may also have forced president to issue a statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time. There hasn't been a lot of follow through, and I don't think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us. I think Blair tried to influence the decision making and thought he could do better inside, but his influence was small." While the British influence was minimal, Dick Cheney's role was: "Quite enormous. Huge. Very quietly and behind the scenes he sat in all the national security meetings chaired by Condi Rice, and no vice president had done that before. He would listen and then give his thoughts. But he bought the compromise that it was al-Qaeda first, Iraq second." (Guardian)
Medicare to go broke by 2019
- March 23: As a direct result of the Bush administration's new Medicare policies, a report by the program's trustees indicates Medicare will go broke by the year 2019. Provisions of the law that Bush signed into law in December "raise serious doubt about the sustainability of Medicare under current financing arrangements," the trustees say. The 2019 go-broke date for the Medicare trust fund, which is devoted primarily to paying beneficiaries' hospital bills, is seven years sooner than what the trustees projected last year. As they did last year, the trustees said that projected lower tax receipts devoted to the program and higher expenditures for inpatient hospital care also contributed to the growing financial problem. White House spokesman Trent Duffy says the rising cost of health care and not the prescription drug program is causing Medicare costs to swell. "It's health care costs -- over 70 percent," he insists. "Not prescription drugs." The trustees' report is based on the estimates by Medicare actuary Richard Foster. Republicans pressed for the overhaul of Medicare last year to give private insurers a much larger role in the program as a way, Bush and others said, to control long-term costs. But the government's own projections are that private managed care plans will cost taxpayers more than traditional Medicare for the foreseeable future. A big reason for an earlier insolvency date "will be a direct result of increased payments to private health plans," says Terri Shaw, an analyst with the liberal Center for American Progress. Last year, Medicare's insolvency date was moved up to 2026 from 2030. The projected insolvency date for Social Security, on the other hand, was extended to 2042, one year later than what was forecast in 2002. The 2003 report also projected that Medicare will have to begin dipping into its trust fund in 2013 to keep up with expenditures. (AP/My Way News)
- March 23: In their efforts to discredit Richard Clarke, several senior Bush officials have inadvertently proven that their own administration's contempt for any policies and ideas from the Clinton administration led to its own failure to do anything about the threat of terror attacks on the US. Condoleezza Rice said of Clarke earlier in the week, "[Clarke] was the counterterrorism czar when the al-Qaeda was strengthening in the '90s. ...And those years of dealing with al-Qaeda and trying to quote, 'roll it back' -- that was not acceptable to the president. ...The president was the one who was saying, 'When am I going have a strategy to eliminate al-Qaida?' Dick Clarke had an open door to me. ...And he used it from time to time. But we needed a strategy to deal with al-Qaeda that was different than what had been tried. We needed real military options, not pinpricks." Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh's audience, "We're operating, obviously, with a very different policy [from Clinton's]. Tending to treat these matters primarily as law enforcement problems prior to 9/11, that in no way slowed down the terrorists. ...[Clarke] was the head of counterterrorism for several years there in the '90s, and I didn't notice that they had any great success dealing with the terrorist threat." White House spokesman Scott McClellan told members of the press, "The very first major policy directive of this administration was to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate al-Qaeda -- not roll it back, as some had previously called for, but to eliminate al-Qaeda. ...[Clarke] was talking about rolling back al-Qaeda. We were focused on eliminating al-Qaeda. ...We didn't feel it was sufficient to simply roll back al-Qaeda. We pursued a policy to eliminate al-Qaeda."
- And the White House issued this statement: "The President specifically told Dr. Rice that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda, rather than simply waiting to respond. ...NSC Deputies, the second-ranking officials in the NSC departments, met frequently between March and September 2001 to decide the many complex issues involved in the development of the comprehensive strategy against al-Qaeda. ...Although the issues involved were complex, the President's team completed the new strategy in less than six months and had the strategy ready to go to the President on September 4." Slate's William Saletan writes of these statements, "Notice what these four statements dismiss: Law enforcement. Pinpricks. Rolling it back. Swatting flies. That was why Clarke couldn't get a hearing. His ideas were too partial, too ad hoc, too Clintonesque. Bush wanted a bigger approach: Comprehensive. Strategy. Eliminate. Different. His 'comprehensive strategy' was delivered on Sept. 4, 2001. Is the White House embarrassed that it spent those six months studying the 'many complex issues involved in the development of the comprehensive strategy' instead of swatting the 'flies' that would kill 3,000 Americans a week later? No. It's proud."
- Clarke told the 9/11 commission about his "roll-back" plan, "Our goal was to do that to eliminate [al-Qaeda] as a threat to the United States, recognizing that one might not ever be able to totally eliminate everybody in the world who thought they were a member of al-Qaeda. But if we could get it to be as ineffective as the Abu Nidal organization was toward the end of its existence; it didn't pose a threat to the United States. That's what we wanted. The CIA said that if they got all the resources they needed, that might be possible over the course of three years at the earliest." In his book, Clarke writes, "In general, the Bush appointees distrusted anything invented by the Clinton administration." This is supported by fellow NSC official Thomas Maertens, a Clarke ally who ran the National Security Council's nuclear nonproliferation shop under Clinton and Bush. He told the New York Times that while Clarke was "saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S.," the Bush team discounted his pleas because he had served under Clinton. "They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration," Maertens said. "so anything [the Clinton aides] did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it." The "fly-swatting, law enforcement approach" disdained by the Bush officials thwarted a December 1999 plot to unleash a major attack against Los Angeles International Airport. Clarke told 60 Minutes that in "December 1999, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI or the head of the CIA, the attorney general, had to go to the White House and sit in the meeting and report on all of the things that they personally had done to stop the al-Qaeda attack. So they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally, finding out all of the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the attorney general might have found out that there were al-Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI at lower levels knew. Never told me. Never told the highest levels in the FBI." (Note: Clarke's book says that the CIA, not the FBI, knew the information about the al-Qaeda operatives. Apparently on 60 Minutes Clarke mixed his agencies up.)
- Saletan writes, "Does this mean Clinton did an exemplary job of fighting terrorism? Hardly. Clarke has plenty of complaints about what Clinton did. Some of it was good; some of it was bad. Clinton was inconsistent. Bush is the opposite: He worships consistency. He simplifies. He can't see any good in what Clinton did, so he throws out the good with the bad. No more fly-swatting. No more law enforcement. No more pinpricks. No more reactive Cabinet meetings. As Rice put it on the Today show Monday, 'The key here was not to have a meeting. The key was to have a strategy.' Bush's approach to al-Qaeda was all or nothing. On Sept. 11, 2001, a week after his grand strategy was finished, he got his answer: Nothing." Saletan is similarly critical of the Bush administration's attempt to personally smear Clarke: "The same all-or-nothing attitude pervades the Bush team's attack on Clarke's motives. In their world, as Bush has said, you're either with us or against us. They can't fathom why a guy who worked with them for two years would openly rebuke them. He supported Bush! He lunched with Rice! He's a registered Republican! How could he turn on them? He must have been a double agent. 'His best buddy [Rand Beers] is Sen. Kerry's principal foreign policy adviser,' McClellan sneered Monday. Never mind that his best buddy, like Clarke, served Bush for two years after working under Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. To the current Bush team, there's no such thing as criticism from within. If you challenge the president, you're one of the enemy." (Slate, Washington Post [transcript of Clarke testimony])
- March 23: In light of the revelations from former counterterrorism director Richard Clarke, columnist Paul Krugman muses on the high price paid by critics of the Bush administration. He writes, "It's important, when you read the inevitable attempts to impugn the character of the latest whistle-blower, to realize just how risky it is to reveal awkward truths about the Bush administration. When General Eric Shinseki told Congress that postwar Iraq would require a large occupation force, that was the end of his military career. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV revealed that the 2003 State of the Union speech contained information known to be false, someone in the White House destroyed his wife's career by revealing that she was a CIA operative. And we now know that Richard Foster, the Medicare system's chief actuary, was threatened with dismissal if he revealed to Congress the likely cost of the administration's prescription drug plan."
- Krugman then examines Clarke's charges and the White House response: "On 60 Minutes on Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the previously unsayable: that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed 'war president,' had 'done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.' After a few hours of shocked silence, the character assassination began. He 'may have had a grudge to bear since he probably wanted a more prominent position,' declared Dick Cheney, who also says that Mr. Clarke was 'out of the loop.' (What loop? Before 9/11, Mr. Clarke was the administration's top official on counterterrorism.) It's 'more about politics and a book promotion than about policy,' Scott McClellan said. Of course, Bush officials have to attack Mr. Clarke's character because there is plenty of independent evidence confirming the thrust of his charges. Did the Bush administration ignore terrorism warnings before 9/11? Justice Department documents obtained by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, show that it did. Not only did John Ashcroft completely drop terrorism as a priority -- it wasn't even mentioned in his list of seven 'strategic goals' -- just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in counterterrorism funds. Did the administration neglect counterterrorism even after 9/11? After 9/11 the F.B.I. requested $1.5 billion for counterterrorism operations, but the White House slashed this by two-thirds. (Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has been attacking John Kerry because he once voted for a small cut in intelligence funds.)
- "Oh, and the next time terrorists launch an attack on American soil, they will find their task made much easier by the administration's strange reluctance, even after 9/11, to protect potential targets. In November 2001 a bipartisan delegation urged the president to spend about $10 billion on top-security priorities like ports and nuclear sites. But Mr. Bush flatly refused. Finally, did some top officials really want to respond to 9/11 not by going after al-Qaeda, but by attacking Iraq? Of course they did. 'From the very first moments after Sept. 11,' Kenneth Pollack told Frontline, 'there was a group of people, both inside and outside the administration, who believed that the war on terrorism...should target Iraq first.' Mr. Clarke simply adds more detail. Still, the administration would like you to think that Mr. Clarke had base motives in writing his book. But given the hawks' dominance of the best-seller lists until last fall, it's unlikely that he wrote it for the money. Given the assumption by most political pundits, until very recently, that Mr. Bush was guaranteed re-election, it's unlikely that he wrote it in the hopes of getting a political job. And given the Bush administration's penchant for punishing its critics, he must have known that he was taking a huge personal risk. So why did he write it? How about this: Maybe he just wanted the public to know the truth. (New York Times)
- March 23: The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church and a close ally of the Bush family, presides over a ceremony (described as "deeply weird" by Salon reporter John Gorenfeld) at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, awarding seven members of Congress "Crown of Peace" awards: Democratic senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Democratic representatives Danny Davis and Sanford Bishop, and Republican representatives Roscoe Bartlett, Christopher Cannon, and Curt Weldon. Resplendent in a floor-length cape and maroon robes, Moon is presented with an ornate gold crown and a lifetime achievement award. Introduced by a shofar-blowing rabbi, Moon tells his star-studded audience, made up of congressional members and a number of religious leaders, that a "new era" has come: "Open your hearts and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me." He observes that, while he is as human as anyone else, "in the context of Heaven's providence, I am God's ambassador, sent to earth with His full authority. I am sent to accomplish His command to save the world's six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created." He claims to have "restored" the sinful souls of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and claims their support in his destiny to "save the souls of everyone on Earth." Hitler and Stalin have vouched for him, he says, calling him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."
- To many observers, this bizarre scene would have looked like the apocalypse as depicted in Left Behind novels," writes Gorenfeld. Moon preaches that gays are "dung-eating dogs," Jews brought on the Holocaust by betraying Jesus, and the US Constitution should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls "Godism" -- with him in charge. (Moon is a heavy contributor to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Moon has also contributed at least $500,000 to Bush admininstration programs advocating sexual abstinence.) At least a dozen members of Congress attend the ceremonies (the Unification Church claims that 81 members attended, though that number is probably wrong). By all accounts, most of the congressmen in attendance didn't expect a coronation. Instead, they thought they were heading to an awards dinner honoring activists from their home states as "Ambassadors for Peace." A flier for the event claims an impressive who's-who of organizers, including Republicans senator Lindsey Graham, representative Roscoe Bartlett and GOP strategist Charlie Black. Democrats were named, too, including representative Harold Ford, who claims to have not even heard of the event. Democrat Davis says he is proud to be associated with Moon, and has accepted campaign funds from the Unification Church. Republican Weldon, whose office maintained he did not attend the event until they were provided photographs of him there, speaks beside a photograph of himself pinning an American flag on Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, a photo taken when Bush was praising Qaddafi for abandoning WMD programs and before he was suspected of trying to kill the leader of Saudi Arabia. The only major media outlet to report on the event is the Moon-owned Washington Times. (Working for Change, Salon)
- March 23: Truthout's William Rivers Pitt muses on George W. Bush's intention to accept the Republican presidential nomination while standing at Ground Zero in New York City: "It occurred to me," he writes after visiting the site himself, "as I tried to take in the enormity, that I could be standing on a spot where someone died instantly after jumping from a window that used to stand high above in those lost towers. The street was crowded with ghosts, and I couldn't stay long for the chill they left in their wake. As I dove into another cab, I remembered that George W. Bush wants to give his acceptance speech at the GOP nomination from that sacred, scarred place. You have to stand at Ground Zero to appreciate the staggering arrogance of anyone who would consider, for a nanosecond, using the place for political theater." Of the Iraqi war and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke's testimony, he writes: "The corner of Church St. and Vesey St. in New York City is crowded with ghosts today. The beds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are crowded with the wounded bodies of American soldiers who were sent to Iraq. The tarmac at Dover Air Force Base has held the dead bodies of almost 600 American soldiers after their final journey home from Iraq. The soil of Iraq is filled with the blood and bones of over 10,000 innocents. The halls of the White House are crowded with liars, men and women who have the blood of soldiers and civilians alike running in freshets from their fingers. I've been to the graveyard. I believe Richard Clarke." (Truthout)
- March 23: University professor and columnist Frederick Sweet writes, "When George W. Bush became the President of the United States his foremost, sworn duty was to protect our country and its people -- above all other things. Bush violated his oath of office by negligently permitting Osama bin Laden free reign to unleash al-Qaeda and the Saudi terrorists against the U.S. on 9/11." He notes that after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, Clinton decided to launch an all-out attempt to destroy al-Qaeda. "Instead of arming them like Reagan or ignoring them like George H.W. Bush, Clinton decided to destroy them. He put Richard Clarke as the first national antiterrorism coordinator in charge of coming up with a comprehensive plan to take out al-Qaeda. Their plan was ambitious: break up al-Qaeda cells and arrest their personnel, systematically attack financial support for its terrorist activities, freeze its assets, stop its funding through fake charities, give aid to government having trouble with al Qaeda, and most significantly, increase covert action in Afghanistan to eliminate the training camps and reach bin Laden himself." Sweet remembers that after the WTC bombings of 1993, Clinton managed to pass strict antiterrorism laws through Congress, but in 1995, when he tried to expand those measures after the Oklahoma City bombing, he was successfully defeated by Congressional conservatives who argues that his measures would curtail Constitutional rights. "What were these measures?" Sweet asks. "New powers to turn away terrorist suspect immigrants, and a new deportation court which could use secret evidence and hasten the deportation procedures," the same procedures implemented by Bush after 9/11.
- "Clinton responded to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by capturing, trying, convicting, and imprisoning those responsible," Sweet writes. "Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah are all currently behind bars. Nevertheless, the most vocal critics of Clinton's counterterrorism efforts to broaden the government's powers were conservatives in Congress. According to a report from Reuters on October 16, 2003, former President Bill Clinton, before leaving office in 2001, had made every effort to warn President George W. Bush that Osama bin Laden was the biggest security threat the United States faced. Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the History Channel on October 15, Clinton had said that he had tried to discuss security issues with Bush in his 'exit interview,' a formal and often candid meeting between a sitting president and the president-elect. 'In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defense,' Clinton said. 'I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden.'" Bush obviously ignored Clinton's warnings. Worse, he has paraded himself before the American people as a "war president:" "Foolishly politicking on terrorism has only served to highlight his administration's failure to achieve its central goals, while at the same time committing civil-rights abuses in its name. Bush theatrically paraded around the deck of the USS Lincoln although the war on terror (or even the war on Iraq) is obviously not over. But his shenanigans have highlighted America's weakness and blindness, not strength and resolve. Bush officials admit that Clarke's anti-terrorism plan presented in the early weeks of the administration amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."
- Clinton's plan was completed only a few weeks before the inauguration of Bush. If it had been implemented then, according to a senior Clinton official, "We would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office." Instead, Clinton left it to Bush to decide how to handle the ongoing operations against terrorism. As we now know, Bush largely abandoned the efforts to stem terror. Sweet discusses the lies promulgated by Bush and the GOP about the Clinton efforts to fight terrorism: "Clinton's record on terrorism has been misrepresented by Bush and the Republicans. Clinton no doubt had done damage to our country by lying about his misconduct with Monica Lewinsky that ended in his impeachment. But that had nothing to do with his record on dealing with terrorism. Clearly, Bush's record on terrorism is terrible, although Republican propagandist have regularly tried to shift the blame for the 9/11 tragedy to Clinton's administration. The facts are, however, between 1996 and 2000 Clinton increased federal spending on counterterrorism to more than $12 billion annually. The FBI's counterterrorism budget had been $78 million in 1996, which was increased to $609 million in 2000. Whether or not the FBI spent the money wisely was up to Louis Freeh, the Clinton-appointed, Republican director of the FBI. An investigative report in the Washington Post ...contradicts the Republicans faulting Clinton. The Sudanese government offered to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody. Not American custody. ...The Post reported on how the Clinton administration had tried to get the Saudis to accept custody of bin Laden. But they refused. There was no offer to turn bin Laden over to the US. Let's not forget that at this time Sudan had offered to help in the fight against terrorism, but only if the US lifted the economic sanctions, imposed in response to their genocidal campaign against Christians in their country. Trying to get the sanctions lifted, Sudan repeatedly offered to share its intelligence about Islamic terrorists with the US. However, the FBI and the CIA concluded that Sudan was not providing anything useful on bin Laden or al-Qaeda. Clinton had aggressively attempted to get bin Laden by ordering the bombing or missile attacks of a site where the terrorist leader was believed to be, narrowly missing him. Although he had seized an opportunity that presented itself, at the time Clinton ordered the attack, Republicans accused him of merely trying to deflect attention from his impeachment problems.
- "In 1998, Clinton signed a National Security Decision Directive authorizing an intense and ongoing effort to destroy al-Qaeda, and to either kill or arrest bin Laden. Under Clinton's presidency, the NSC and the CIA formed a special unit dedicated solely to al-Qaeda. This unit stopped several al-Qaeda plots: to blow up Los Angeles' International Airport (LAX), to bomb the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and to blow up the UN building in NYC, and an attempted attack on the Israeli embassy in Washington. One month before Clinton left office, several conservatives praised him on his antiterrorism record. For example, Robert Oakley, ambassador for counterterrorism under President Reagan, said: 'Overall, I give them very high marks.... The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which has made him stronger.' But Paul Bremer, who had had the same post under Reagan, and later chaired the National Commission on Terrorism, disagreed with Oakley. He felt that Clinton had 'correctly focused on bin Laden.' Clarke summarized the Bush administration's 'national security catastrophe' for 60 Minutes, "the tragedy here is that Americans went to their deaths in Iraq thinking they were avenging September 11th when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. For a Commander-in-Chief and his vice president to do that is unconscionable." (Intervention Magazine)
- March 23: Mike Whitney writes a rather prescient column about the failure of the US media to focus on the Clarke testimony. "His testimony will generate the perfunctory 'ooohs and ahhhs,' after which, the story will be consigned to the circular receptacle in the corner of the room," Whitney writes.
- "This is how the media operates. If they are forced to cover an 'unpleasant' story that discredits the 'great leader,' then, cover it they will. After all, the mask of credibility is what sells newsprint. But, be serious, a story like this doesn't change hearts and minds unless it is driven home every day for weeks in a front page story. That's just how public opinion is shaped, and the media executives know it. Look at the way Clinton was drawn and quartered. The media took a minor indiscretion, of no consequence to the security of the country, and they banged it up on the front page of every paper in the country for months on end until he looked like a latter-day Bluebeard. It was a well orchestrated witch hunt that overturned the popular mandate, and rendered Clinton's Presidency null and void. When the media decides its checkout time, you might as well pack your bags, as Clinton discovered. Similarly, during the Iran hostage fiasco, when Americans were held prisoner in retaliation for US support of the murderous Shah, newspapers across the country chronicled the humiliation by counting off the days in the headlines; DAY 64; NO HOSTAGES! It became the daily mantra that left the Carter Presidency in a shambles. It proved beyond a doubt that a president can be effectively deposed without ever leaving the Oval Office. Will this happen with Bush? It's absurd to even consider it. The corporate press is more aligned with this President than any of his predecessors. He's their guy. The list of crimes perpetrated by this administration would fill volumes and, yet, the media discreetly looks away. This shouldn't surprise anyone. The media operates on a 'bottom line' strategy, not in the public interest. Their goal is to make money and create a corporate friendly environment for selling widgets to the American people. They're not looking altruistically to bring the unvarnished truth to the 'unwashed.' That's the parson's job. Hubris has descended like a dark cloud over America's media giants. They've just hoodwinked their fellow countrymen into invading and occupying a defenseless third world country on the shabbiest of pretenses. So, dressing up George Bush to look like Winston Churchill should be no big task. No, Bush will not get the pasting he so richly deserves. America's public narrative is reliably controlled by an elite corps who are well adept at turning a 'sow's ear' into 'Bush at War.' Look for the dust to settle over the Clarke flap in about two weeks when Boy-George is modeling some new military jumpsuit for an adoring camera crew." (Buzzflash)
- March 23: One of the stranger attempts of the Bush campaign to tear down John Kerry is its attempt to paint him as a closet Frenchman. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans recently said publicly what his colleagues have long been saying privately, by calling Kerry "fellow of a different political stripe who looks French." A Bush advisor recently said Kerry looks French, and that he has a haughty air about him. The Republican National Committee has been sending out regular news releases about Kerry's French relatives and his popularity in France. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been known to start a speech with: "Good afternoon, or, as John Kerry might say, 'Bonjour.'" DeLay routinely criticizes Kerry's spending proposals by saying "they just didn't teach him arithmetic at the European boarding school that he went to." (Kerry attended a Swiss boarding school as a child.) The whole idea is to plug into what Bush campaign strategists see as the strong thread of anti-French sentiment running through portions of the American electorate. The Bush campaign is also having some fun "exposing" the Kerry campaign's discussions with Frehcn anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille, who specializes in "archetype research." What the GOP fails to discuss is the fact that Rapaille has been contacted by top Bush fundraisers, and was paid by Lee Atwater to advise Vice President George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. The Kerry campaign has not hired or contracted with Rapaille. Kerry's penchant for deliberation is too French, says Rapaille, and says Kerry needs to be more action-oriented. The "American way," Rapaille says, is "I shoot first, and then we discuss." Kerry's subtlety, he continued, is "too European." The Bush campaign has also mocked Kerry's multilingualism and his perceived sophistication, such as his taste for poetry and foreign wines. Kerry's response has been mostly to laugh off the insults, but he has avoided giving an interview in French to French reporters. (Washington Post, Portland Independent Media Center)
- March 23: John Kerry's yearlong surveillance by the FBI in 1971 and 1972 was wrong, but also is seen by the candidate as a "badge of honor," according to campaign spokespersons. Newly disclosed FBI files reveal that agents and informants closely followed Kerry and other leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, infiltrating meetings, recording speeches and filing reports to Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Richard Nixon. Kerry, who joined the antiwar group's leadership in late 1970 after leaving the Navy as a decorated lieutenant, was tracked by the FBI beginning in early 1971, around the time he drew national attention with his statements about war atrocities at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The Nixon White House set out to destroy him because he was a credible voice speaking up for veterans," says spokesman David Wade. "And now we learn that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was following his every move." Wade continues: "Revealed in FBI reports is the portrait of John Kerry at age 27 speaking with courage and conviction, leading veterans to Washington for peaceful protest, advocating nonviolence and moderation. That the Hoover-era FBI and Nixon White House paid such attention to John Kerry is a badge of honor and a reminder of the tumultuous pre-Watergate era before the FBI was reformed in the early 1970's." Kerry resigned from Vietnam Veterans Against the War in November 1971. He quit to run for Congress from Massachusetts after feuding with more radical leaders within the group, among them Al Hubbard, a national co-director who had met in Paris with representatives of North Vietnam. A November 19, 1971, FBI teletype marked "urgent" quoted an informant describing a group meeting six days earlier in Kansas City, at which many delegates wanted the group to take the initiative in peace efforts with North Vietnam. "John Kerry, VVAW national chairman, considered conservative by most VVAW members resigned for 'personal reasons,'" the report reads.
- The Kerry campaign released documents from his own FBI file, including memorandums dated May 24 and July 31, 1972, stating that Kerry had severed ties with the antiwar group, was pursuing a career in politics and warranted no further surveillance. "A review of subject's file indicated there is nothing to associate him with any violence or any violent-prone group or organization," said the memorandum, from the Boston FBI office. "It is being recommended that no further investigation be conducted re the subject." On the campaign trail, Kerry has often compared the Bush administration to the Nixon White House, particularly in criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft's use of the antiterrorism law. "I know what it's like to be spied on by the government, because that's what they did to me when I came back and stood up against the war," Kerry said in October. In a statement, Kerry called "surreal" the extent to which he had been followed by the FBI But he hastened to add that "today's FBI isn't the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover," which "spied on everyone from President Kennedy to Martin Luther King. The FBI of today is on the front lines of the war on terror, and it's critical that they be effective with our full support," Kerry said. "But the experience of having been spied on for the act of engaging in peaceful patriotic protest makes you respect civil rights and the Constitution even more." Kerry, in a reference to neoconservative Attorney General John Ashcroft, says that if elected he would appoint an attorney general "who respects rights" and "knows how to enforce laws in a way that balances law enforcement with our tradition of civil liberties." (New York Times)
GOP campaign talking points on environment found to be misleading and obtuse
- March 23: A memo mailed in February from the Republican Conference leadership committee to the press secretaries of each Republican in the US House of Representatives contains plenty of advice as to how to approach questions over the environment. Some of the "talking points" include the following: "Global warming is not a fact;" "Links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy;" (an interesting phrasing, and the claim that the EPA is "exaggerating" when it says that almost half of the US's rivers and streams are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming. Many Republicans find the advice less than useful: one Delaware Republican says, "If I tried to follow these talking points at a town hall meeting with my constituents, I'd be booed." In a related move, the Bush administration has hired a public relations firm to promote tax-subsidized private logging in the Sierra Nevada, a move characterized as "unprecedented" by the Associated Press. The public relations firm, OneWorld Communications, has been paid over $113,000 to convince the American public that using tax dollars to subsidize a private logging firm to triple its logging in an already-heavily logged-out area of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and allow the logging firm to keep the profits generated, is an idea that will ultimately help the forests. A Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman observes, "If the Bush administration really believed its plan would help Sierra Nevada forests rather than the timber companies that want to cut more and bigger trees, then it wouldn't have had to hire a PR firm." (The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, Palm Beach Desert Sun)
- March 23: Political writer E.J Dionne writes a scathing indictment of Supreme Court Antonin Scalia's decision not to recuse himself from an upcoming Court hearing involving his friend and duck-hunting buddy Dick Cheney and his energy task force. "My view is that Scalia should stay out of any case involving the political interests of this administration," Dionne writes. "Here, after all, is the man who played such a central role in putting Bush and Cheney into office through that abominable Bush v. Gore decision. How can the kingmaker be expected to offer a fair judgment on the king and his hand-picked deputy?" Dionne uses Scalia's own words as "the best evidence for why he should get off."
- He continues, "The 21-page Scalia memo is, in part, a heartwarming buddy story. Scalia fondly describes his tradition of going duck hunting at the camp of a friend named Wallace Carline. 'During my December 2002 visit, I learned that Mr. Carline was an admirer of Vice President Cheney,' Scalia wrote. 'Knowing that the vice president, with whom I am well acquainted (from our years serving together in the Ford administration), is an enthusiastic duck-hunter, I asked whether Mr. Carline would like to invite him to our next year's hunt. The answer was yes. ...I conveyed the invitation (with my own warm recommendation) in the spring of 2003 and received an acceptance (subject, of course, to any superseding demands on the vice president's time) in the summer. The vice president said that if he did go, I would be welcome to fly down to Louisiana with him.' Please read those paragraphs over a couple of times. Is there any doubt that this is a justice who is great friends with the person whose case he is deciding? Would a rational person doubt that, all things being equal, the judge just might tilt toward the man with whom he is so well acquainted?' Imagine you were in a bitter court fight with a former business partner. Would you want the judge in your case to be someone who went duck hunting with your opponent and flew to the hunt on your opponent's plane? Would it make you feel confident to know that the judge was in a position to issue a 'warm recommendation' that your opponent join a particular hunting expedition and thus make one of the judge's friends -- an 'admirer' of your opponent in the case -- feel good? And now consider that you, as a citizen, have a right to know with whom Cheney consulted in writing an energy bill that was overwhelmingly tilted toward the interests of an industry in which the vice president was once a central player.
- "Scalia admits that recusal might be in order 'where the personal fortune or the personal freedom of the friend is at issue.' But not to worry. What's at stake here are only Cheney's political fortunes, the interests of the industry that Cheney once worked for, and the public's right to know. No big deal. This is a scandal. Because of ideological connivance across the branches of our political system, we are abandoning the checks and balances that make our government work. Scalia put aside his own long-standing convictions on issues involving states' rights and equal protection to find a way to put Bush and Cheney in office. Now he says we shouldn't worry that he is friendly with the guy whose case he is deciding in the middle of another election campaign. Citing past rulings, Scalia wrote in his apologia that his 'recusal would be required if, by reason of the actions described above, my "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."' True, Scalia's impartiality can't be questioned. It can't even be imagined. The justice's memo makes clear that he's in the wrong line of work. A fierce ideologue and a staunch partisan ally of the administration he helped bring to power, Scalia is also very smart and engaging. He belongs in a great law school or in politics. He'd be a great commentator and not a bad comedian. But does he belong on a court where he has to pretend to believe in deciding cases on the merits? If he can't see why his behavior in this case raises such serious doubts in the minds of his adversaries, what else is he missing?" (Working for Change)
- March 23: A Mexican citizen who has lived in the US for over a decade is facing deportation; he is suing the US government to be allowed to be represented by a lawyer during the deportation hearings. So far the Department of Homeland Security has denied Ramon Torres legal representation and insists that the hearings to decide his fate be conducted in secret without Torres being allowed a lawyer. "I have a family -- two kids and a wife," Ramon Torres says. "I should at least have the right to have lawyer to defend myself." Torres was flagged upon his return from Mexico to visit his ailing grandmother when an old conviction for drug possession appeared on his record. The conviction has long since been expunged, but immigration officials say that Torres should be deported because of the legal problem. Torres hired an immigration lawyer, but his lawyer, Christopher Strawn, was denied a place in the preliminary hearings. "I was told that immigrants have no right to counsel when they have deferred inspections -- even when they pay for the attorney themselves," Strawn says. "In other words, lawyers are prohibited." Even though regulations clearly state that someone facing deportation is allowed legal representation, DHS and immigration authorities in Seattle are denying Torres the benefit of counsel. "These are fundamental rights," says immigration expert Mark Adams. "An individual does have the right to have an attorney to make sure these rights aren't forfeited. Our position requires that when someone is facing an interview that can have such severe impact, the U.S. Constitution requires that everyone receive due process under the law. In general, due process includes having an attorney there to help them navigate the immigration." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
- March 23: Radio talk show host Kevin Vandenbroek of Kalamazoo's WKZO radio has been fired after his scoop of the attempts by GOP House members to bribe Michigan representative Nick Smith to vote for the controversial Bush Medicare proposals. On December 1, 2003, Vandenbroek played a tape on the air of Smith acknowledging that he had been offered $100,000 for his 'yes' vote. "While there are some people at the station who seem to be quite proud of my coverage of Nick Smith," Vandenbroek says, "I think there were others that might have been uncomfortable that it was focusing on a member of the Republican Party." After Vandenbroek pointed out some dubious claims in Bush's February 8 Meet the Press interview, the local Republican Party complained to the station. The Bush broadcast "made the owner of the station very uncomfortable," Vandenbroek says. "I got called in and told to stay away from politics." Strike 3 was an e-mail Vandenbroek sent to the Christian right author Jefferson Scott after Scott declined to appear on Vandenbroek's show to discuss Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid. Be Intolerant is a book Scott co-authored with Ryan Dobson, son of James Dobson, chairman of the powerful Christian right organization Focus on the Family. "The straw that broke the camel's back was their contention that I violated e-mail policy," Vandenbroek explains. The e-mail was neither obscene nor offensive, but Vandenbroek was immediately fired and replaced with former sports announcer Seth Hall. WKZO's program director, Dave Jaconette, declines to give a reason for Vandenbroek's departure: "We don't comment on employee matters like that." (Slate)
