THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

March 2004, Week Four

Page Four

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• March 25: White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez delivers a letter to the 9/11 commission and to the press that claims the White House was very aware of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and by Islamic terrorists before 9/11. The letter says in part, "as records made available months ago to the Commission demonstrate, the draft national Security Presidential Directive on al-Qaeda approved by Deputies and Principals before September 11, 2001, included a direction to the Department of Defense to plan for military action against: 'Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control, air and air defense, ground forces and logistics' (as well as numerous al-Qaeda targets)." This is interesting considering that the day before, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, presumably one of the key leaders of any US move against terrorist targets, told the commission that he was consumed by other military matters and "did not recall any particular terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11 other than the development of the Predator unmanned aircraft system for possible use against bin Laden." Other evidence shows conclusively that the Bush admininstration paid relatively little attention to the threat of Islamic terrorism except when it dovetailed with their own agenda, specifically eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein and deploying the "Star Wars" missile defense system.
• In April 2001, the State Department's annual terrorism report, titled "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000," noted that terrorism was a continuing problem, and that Afghanistan continued to be a safe haven for terrorist organizations. However, the report downplays Osama bin Laden's role as a guiding force behind Islamic terror groups as well as pays relatively little attention to al-Qaeda. A senior State Department official told CNN that the US government made a mistake last year by focusing too tightly on bin Laden and "personalizing terrorism...describing parts of the elephant and not the whole beast." The Bush team is now saying that they wanted to engage terrorism militarily because treating it as a crime was ineffective, yet the State Department report states otherwise. The report mentions the trial of suspects charged in the bombing of US embassies in East Africa and the Lockerbie trial as a "further victory for the international effort to hold terrorists accountable for their crimes." One of the Bush Administrations highest priorities when it took office was creating a ballistic missile defense shield. In the summer of 2001, news reports were dominated by discussions of whether the United States should withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia. Bush's advisers swarmed the media supporting the withdrawal from the ABM treaty, and discussing the importance of creating the missile defense shield. There was virtually no discussion of the threat of terrorism, except where it could be used to support missile defense. While the Bush administration is now saying that they were working on military plans to roll back terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, there is no evidence in the public record to support this contention. One possibility is that it was all done secretly, but according to Richard Clarke, this is not so. Throughout the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld appeared before Congress on a number of occasions to promote and explain the proposed defense department budget for 2002. In all of his discussions before Congress there is no discussion of new military plans to roll back terrorism. The only discussions of terrorism involve using it as an excuse to build the "star Wars" missile defense shield.
• For example, on June 28, 2001, Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to testify regarding the Fiscal Year 2002 National Defense Authorization Budget Request. He was specifically asked to explain the funding requests, and rank the various threats facing the country. He notes that the request for missile defense is $8.2 Billion, and compares that to the $11 billion requested for terrorism related issues. When asked, "Do you think the threat in this area is growing greater than in other areas of threat?" Rumsfeld replied, "I think that the threat of a major land conflict in Europe is very low. I think the threat of a major strategic nuclear exchange with Russia is very low. I think that the problem of proliferation and the advancement of technologies and the relaxed tension in the world has led to the availability of weapons of mass destruction and the ability to deliver them in a variety of ways. And because it is so difficult to cope with Western armies, navies and air forces, the nations that have an interest in dissuading us from doing things and have an interest in imposing their will on their neighbors, have looked for these asymmetric threats, from terrorism, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, I would guess down the road cyber-warfare as well, because we have vulnerabilities in those areas that distinctive compared to the vulnerabilities we have with respect to typical warfare, I would rank all of those as risks. The proliferation of cruise missiles is taking place. I worry a great deal about germ warfare and what we read in the intelligence reports about what's taking place in the world. There's no question but that the number of nations that are getting ballistic missiles is growing, and I certainly rank ballistic missile threat up among those asymmetric threats very high."
• Clearly the main concern is not the direct threat of terrorism, but the potential that terrorists might get ballistic missiles. Rumsfeld's priority is clearly defending the need for an ABM shield, not in locating and neutralizing terrorist threats of a less technological nature. Perhaps the most directly relevant example involved testimony by Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz before the House Budget Committee on July 11, 2001. When asked, "I have heard and read from other defense experts that they have very real concerns about the threat that a terrorist attack on this country with chemical or biological weapons might represent. In that regard, how would you assess that kind of threat relative to the threat of a missile attack from a rogue nation?" Wolfowitz responded, "Basically I would say they are both very serious. We spend a lot of money -- some estimates are as much as $11 billion in countering terrorist threats, and I would spend more if I thought it could be spent usefully. I was in Israel during the Gulf War. Former President Bush sent me and Undersecretary of -- Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, to persuade the Israelis to stay out of that war. I've been in a country under ballistic missile attack. It was ten years ago, Mr. Congressman, and ten years later we still don't have an effective defense against those primitive SCUD missiles that were landing on Israel. It's not what the United States does when we're serious. We didn't get to the moon that way. We didn't build Polaris submarines that way. This is a real problem. It's not a future problem. We have got to get serious about it, in my view. And we have to be serious about both. You could even frame it this way: we lost -- I'm sorry I don't remember these terrible numbers -- I think we lost 19 people to a truck bomb in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, yes. We lost 24 people to a SCUD missile in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Those are both real threats. We need to work on both of them." It's clear that while Wolfowitz recognizes the threats of both missile attacks and less technological attacks such as truck bombs, a missile defense system was the highest priority. (Democratic Underground)
• March 25: At the behest of the White House, Fox News reveals the name of an unnamed, background source for a 2002 briefing on terrorism: Richard Clarke. Clarke's briefing was provided to several news outlets, including Fox News, with the understanding that Clarke would be identified only as "an unnamed source." The White House wants Clarke's name revealed because some of the content of Clarke's briefing seems, in their judgment, to contradict some of the testimony Clarke provided to the 9/11 commission; Clarke says that during the 2002 briefing, he was merely doing what he was asked to do by administration officials in presenting information to the media that accentuated the positive and sluffed off the negative. Fox News apparently violates decades' worth of journalistic ethics, and the White House apparently violates long-standing practices, to keep sources such as Clarke unidentified. Fox recieves permission from the Bush administration to broadcast the remarks and to use Clarke's name. "We asked them to lift the rules, and for obvious reasons, they did," says Fox reporter Jim Angle. The reasons seem clear: to discredit Richard Clarke's testimony. Former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal observes that the decision is part of "Bush's radical undermining of the long-established arrangements of Washington, including the demotion of the press's own role, by breaking the off-the-record rule in order to have a weapon to use against Clarke. The new rules of the game are that there are no rules of the game." Clarke, who characterizes the Bush White House as "adept at revenge" in his book, says he welcomes the administration's efforts to publicize his briefing to the press and to declassify his earlier testimony to Congress, which are being made public in the hope of showing discrepancies between Clarke's recent attacks on the administration's terrorism policies with flattering statements he made as a White House aide. Clarke suggests that the administration declassify all e-mails, memos and all other correspondence between him and Rice, as well as her private testimony before the commission; such a move is unlikely at best. Asked about Clarke's request for the declassification, Secretary of State Colin Powell says, "My bias will be to provide this information in an unclassified manner not only to the commission, but to the American people." White House spokesman Jim Morrell said decisions on declassification "will be made in discussion with the 9/11 commission."
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that such a disclosure would be well done if the White House also released Robert Novak and five other capital reporters of any obligation to withhold the names of the "two senior administration officials" who told them that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA operative, in its attempt to punish Plame's husband, retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for debunking the president's Nigerian yellow-cake claim. Rice, a chief critic of Clarke, has said Clarke praised President Bush's anti-terror efforts while working for the president, but then began telling a different story after leaving his post and writing a book that has become a best seller since going on sale last week. Clarke's criticism cut to the heart of one of the president's reelection campaign themes: his national security credentials, not just before Sept. 11 but also since then, in Iraq and elsewhere. Clarke has suggested the president pressured aides to find an Iraq link to Sept. 11. Rice acknowledged that Bush did ask whether Iraq was involved, but denied he wanted a particular answer. "The president asked a perfectly logical question," Rice said. "This was a country with which we'd been to war a couple of times, that were firing at our airplanes in the no-fly zone. It made perfectly good sense to ask about Iraq." Blumenthal writes, "Clarke's scourging was a signal to professionals in government of what will happen if they ever in the future contradict the Bush line. Those who dare are treated as enemies of the state, as Clarke predicted he would be. Clarke's account of the failures of policymaking reflects his sense of duty. The breakdown in the credibility of Bush's presidency time and again has been defended by smear campaigns. But the press has reacted as though this event does not involve its status and craft. Not one news organization considered trying to uphold the old rule by threatening to reveal Bush administration officials who gave background briefings unless the White House repudiated its act against the accepted convention that makes informed journalism possible. The Clarke episode is symptomatic of a systematic abuse of power." (Baltimore Sun/After-Words [scroll down], AP/CBS News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Salon)
• March 25: The Bush administration's vicious attacks on Richard Clarke are both despicable and evidence of a larger pattern of hiding the truth from the public, writes former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal. He notes that fighting terrorism was an objective downgraded from virtually the moment Bush took office. "One of the first official acts of the current Bush administration was to downgrade the office of national coordinator for counterterrorism on the National Security Council -- a position held by Richard Clarke," Blumenthal writes. "Clarke had served in the Pentagon and State Department under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder, and was the first person to hold the counterterrorism job created by President Clinton. Under Clinton, he was elevated to cabinet rank, which gave him a seat at the principals' meeting, the highest decision-making group for national security. By removing Clarke from the table, Bush put him in a box where he could speak only when spoken to. No longer would his memos go to the president; instead, they had to pass though a chain of command of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who bounced each of them back. Terrorism was a Clinton issue: 'soft'" and obscure, having something to do with 'globalization,' and other trends ridiculed from the Republican party platform. 'In January 2001 the new administration really thought Clinton's recommendation that eliminating al-Qaeda be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd, like so many of the Clinton administration's actions, from their perspective,' Clarke writes in his new book, Against All Enemies. When Clarke first met Rice and immediately raised the question of dealing with al-Qaeda, she 'gave me the impression she had never heard the term before.'"
• Before Clarke went public with his views, his reputation as an apolitical, strongly committed public servant dedicated to protecting this country was unimpeachable. Now the Bush administration is trying to rework his image by "impugning his personal motives, saying he is a disappointed job-hunter, publicity-mad, a political partisan, ignorant, irrelevant -- and a liar." In contrast, Blumenthal notes, "Clarke's reputation in the Clinton White House was that he could be brusque and passionate, but also calm and single-minded. He was a complete professional, who was a master of the bureaucracy. He didn't suffer fools gladly, stood up to superiors and didn't care who he alienated. His flaw was his indispensable virtue: he was direct and candid in telling the unvarnished truth." Blumenthal notes that Clarke isn't the only national security professional who worked in both Clinton and Bush administration: General Donald Kerrick served as deputy national security adviser under Clinton and remained on the NSC into the Bush administration. Kerrick wrote his replacement, Stephen Hadley, a two-page memo shortly after Bush's inauguration. "It was classified," Kerrick says. "I said they needed to pay attention to al-Qaeda and counterterrorism. I said we were going to be struck again. They never once asked me a question, nor did I see them having a serious discussion about it.... I agree with Dick [Clarke] that they saw those problems through an Iraqi prism. But the evidence, the intelligence, wasn't there." Rice now claims about terrorism that "we were at battle stations." But Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward in Bush At War as saying that before September 11 "I was not on point.... I didn't feel that sense of urgency."
• Vice President Cheney alleges that Clarke was "out of the loop." But if he was, then the administration was either running a rogue operation or doing nothing, as Clarke testifies. Bush protests now: "And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September 11, we would have acted." But he had plenty of information. The former deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, the only member of the 9/11 commission to read the president's daily brief, revealed in the hearings that the documents "would set your hair on fire" and that the intelligence warnings of al-Qaeda attacks "plateaued at a spike level for months" before September 11. Bush is fighting public release of these PDBs, which would show whether he had marked them up and demanded action. Blumenthal writes, "The administration's furious response to Clarke only underscores his book. Rice is vague, forgetful and dissembling. Cheney is belligerent, certain and bluffing. In Clarke's account, as in the memoir of former secretary of the treasury Paul O'Neill, Bush is disengaged, incurious, manipulated by those in the circle around him; he adopts ill-conceived strategies that he has played little or no part in preparing. Bush is the Oz behind the curtain, but unlike the wizard, the special effects are performed by others. Especially on terrorism and September 11, his White House is at 'battle stations' to prevent the curtain from being pulled open. (Guardian)
• March 25: Camilo Mejia, a US Army soldier accused of desertion, gives an interview to The Nation. Mejia served with a unit that crossed into Iraq just after the invasion and then, for five months, fought in the counterinsurgency war in the Sunni Triangle, where he says he was in firefights, killed people, almost got killed, helped torture prisoners and finally had his life saved by a small-scale mutiny. Now he is a declared conscientious objector who spent five months absent without leave. Dozens of US troops have deserted or gone AWOL since the war began; most are not pursued and are allowed to quietly leave the service. But Mejia went public with his decision to desert the Army, and as a result, faces severe penalties from the military. He went AWOL in October 2003, and though desertion charges have not yet been filed, spent the next five months in hiding, never using cell phones, credit cards or the Internet for fear of being located. He was frequently on the move and survived on the good will of friends. Mejia is outspoken about his opinion of the war: "This is an immoral, unjust and illegal war," he says. "The whole thing is based on lies. There are no weapons of mass destruction, and there was no link with terrorism. It's about oil, reconstruction contracts and controlling the Middle East." Like many US troops, Mejia is a recent immigrant, but unlike many, he is from a left-leaning family; his father is an internationally famous Nicaraguan musician, Carlos Mejia Godoy, and his mother was active with radical movements in the 1980s. Mejia, however, says he used to be apolitical. When he moved to the United States as a young adult, he joined the military "to become an American and know the culture." Just before Mejia's eight years of service were up, he found himself in Iraq. "After the war people were cheering, but within a week or two they were asking when we were going to leave and getting angry. And then it became clear that nothing was getting reconstructed, people's lives weren't getting better. We had all these deadlines, for setting up the police, getting the power back on, whatever, and nothing ever got done, nothing changed or got better," Mejia explains. "And then the resistance started."
• Worse, Mejia found his officers to be glory-obsessed and intentionally reckless with the safety of their men. In particular, he says, they wanted the Army's much-coveted Combat Infantry Badge -- an award bestowed only on those who have met and engaged the enemy. "To be a twenty-year career infantry officer and not have your CIB is like being a chef and having never cooked or being a fireman and never having put out a fire," Mejia says. "These guys were really hungry, and we were the bait." In one attempt to draw enemy fire, Mejia's company, a 120-man unit divided into four platoons, was ordered to occupy key intersections in Ramadi, a notoriously violent Iraqi city, for several days running. "All the guys were really nervous. This was a total violation of standard operating procedure. They train you to keep moving, not sit in the open." Finally the enemy attacked, and a platoon in Mejia's company took casualties. When the troops were ordered to perform the exact same maneuvers again, Mejia refused. "I told them, I quit." Luckily for him the four staff sergeants of the platoon that had taken casualties also refused to go out. Technically, refusing an order in a combat situation can be charged as mutiny. But in a tense meeting with their commanding officer, the staff sergeants negotiated a new plan of action that allowed the GIs to vary the timing and movement of their patrols. After these changes, Mejia agreed to go. "We went out two hours earlier than usual, and because of that we caught these young guys setting an IED (improvised explosive device) of three mortars wrapped together." If Mejia's squad had set out according the Commanding Officers' original plan, he believes that some of the guys in his squad would have been killed. For its part, the Florida National Guard claims that Mejia was a bad sergeant and that he was not aggressive enough in engaging the enemy. Spc. Oliver Perez, who served with Mejia, disagrees. "I fought next to him in many battles. He is not a coward," says Perez, who has also said he will testify on Mejia's behalf if the Army proceeds with a court-martial.
• During another assignment, Mejia's company ran a detention camp. "They didn't call it a POW camp because it didn't meet Red Cross standards," he explains. There, intelligence officers ordered Mejia's squad to psychologically torture three suspected resistance fighters. The hooded and bound prisoners were placed in isolation, intimidated with mock executions and forced to stay awake for days at a time. "We had one guy lose his mind. He was locked in a little metal closet that we'd bang with a sledgehammer every five minutes to keep him up. He started crying and begging to lie down." When asked how the prisoners were fed and given water, Mejia somberly replies, "I don't remember how we fed them." Mejia has other stories. There's the time his squad killed a civilian who ran a checkpoint; the time they shot a demonstrator. There's the officer who forged orders so he could get his unit into combat, and the other officer who broke his own ankle to get out of combat. There is the father who wasn't allowed temporary leave even though his young daughter had been raped. And there is the GI who took shrapnel in the head and now can't talk, can't recognize his family and wakes up in the middle of the night confused and sobbing. Given the politics of the military, it is unlikely that Mejia's serious allegations about the conduct of his superiors will be investigated, let alone prosecuted, while his own decision of conscience could be treated as a criminal matter. "I'd rather do the five to ten years in prison for desertion than kill a child by mistake," says Mejia. "When you are getting shot at, you shoot back. It doesn't matter if there are civilians around. Prison ends, but you never get over killing a kid." So far this war has produced only a few AWOL convictions and one high-profile asylum case in Canada. Private Firt Class Jeremy Hinzman of the 82nd Airborne is seeking refuge north of the border on the grounds that he is a conscientious objector. Marine Reserve Lance Corporal Stephen Funk also went AWOL and claimed conscientious objector status this past April. Funk was convicted of being away without leave, demoted, forfeited two-thirds of his pay, received a bad-conduct discharge and sent to the brig for six months. Mejia, who turned himself in at a press conference on March 15, faces five to ten years in prison. Currently Mejia is in Florida with the National Guard, awaiting administrative dismissal as a recognized conscientious objector or criminal prosecution as a deserter. (The Nation)
• March 25: As an example of the relentless attempts to paint John Kerry as a "flip-flopper" on a variety of issues, Fox talk show pundit Sean Hannity claims that Kerry "voted for the $87 billion to fund the [Iraq] war before he voted against it." Unlike the other claims made by Hannity and his tribe, this claim is not a brazen lie, but it is misleading. Kerry voted for an amendment to the Iraq appropriations bill that would have paid that $87 billion by repealing some of the tax cuts the Bush administration had implemented for the nation's wealthiest citizens. The Republicans successfully defeated that amendment, and instead passed their own appropriations bill that would have added the $87 billion to the already-staggering amount of debt owed by the federal government. Kerry voted against that bill. (Fox/Al Franken)

• March 26: A previously forgotten report from April 2001, four months before 9/11, shows that the Bush administration officially declared it "a mistake" to focus "so much energy on Osama bin Laden." The report directly contradicts the White House's continued assertion that fighting terrorism was its "top priority" before the 9/11 attacks. Specifically, on April 30, 2001, CNN reported that the Bush administration's release of the government's annual terrorism report contained a serious change: "there was no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden" as there had been in previous years. When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus, "a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the US government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden." The move to downgrade the fight against al-Qaeda before 9/11 was not the only instance where the administration ignored repeated warnings that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent. Specifically, the Associated Press reported in 2002 that "President Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions." Meanwhile, Newsweek has reported that internal government documents show that the Bush administration moved to "de-emphasize" counterterrorism prior to 9/11. When "FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents" to deal with the problem, "they got shot down" by the White House. (CNN/ABC/Detroit News/Daily Misleader)
• March 26: First-hand accounts of life in Baghdad give the lie to Bush administration assertions that Iraqi civilians are more secure now than ever before. The writer, Nir Rosen, witnesses the aftermath of a murder in downtown Baghdad: the murderers shoot an unarmed man and walk away, laughing. Atempts to call the police initially fail due to malfunctions in the phone system; when the police are contacted, they refuse to come, saying the murder occurred in someone else's jurisdiction. Rosen writes, " The violence is relentless. Explosions from bombs, rocket propelled grenades and artillery as well as guns firing can be heard all day and night, but their locations are usually impossible to determine, even if you are foolish enough to search for them after dark, when gangs and wild dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the occupiers. The pace of the violence is normal and mundane, so nobody cares. Unless an explosion is perceptibly close, it is just an echo, and nobody pauses in mid-conversation or stops chewing his kabob. Nobody in the US (and certainly nobody in Iraq) even cares much about the American soldiers dying daily, as long as the numbers on any given day are low. In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya in Baghdad there are nightly RPG and mortar attacks on the US base, and the men on the street erupt in cheers and whistles at the sounds. Mosques are attacked every night and clerics killed, leading to retaliations against the opposite sect. Mosques now have armies of young volunteers wielding Kalashnikovs guarding them. Soon neighborhood mosques will unite to form neighborhood armies, to fight rival mosques or rival neighborhoods. (Even many journalists now travel with armed bodyguards; in at least one incident they returned fire, making them combatants). In the Sunni Hudheifa Mosque in Rasala one can purchase a magazine that praises Yazid, the early Muslim leader who killed Hussein, the martyr whom Shi'ites venerate and mourn for. This article would be enough to start a civil war if Shi'ites found it. 'We don't talk about civil war,' one Sunni tribal leader told me. 'We just prepare for it.'"
• Both Sunnis and Shi'ites try to deflect civil war between the sects by blaming every attack on "the Americans and the [Israeli] Jews." "The Sunnis are scared, they fear the impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq if anything resembling a democratic election takes place," Rosen writes. "sunnis view Shi'ites the way white South Africans viewed blacks, and now feel disenfranchised, seeing the barbaric heathens threatening to rule their country. Many Sunnis cling to the fiction that they are in fact the majority, and the Shi'ites are all Iranians. Shi'ites don't fear the Sunnis, they just dislike them. Shi'ites hate the Kurds now, blaming them for attempting to divide the country with their calls for federalism and autonomy. Arab Shi'ites have already started supporting Turkmen in the north, who are often Shi'ite as well, in their bloody clashes with Kurds." Ordinary Shi'ites are increasingly turning away from "moderate" religious leader al-Sistani and listening more and more to radical clerics like Muqtada Sadr, who calls for a jihad against America. As for Westerners in Iraq: "Westerners who work for the Occupation in the green zone rarely venture beyond its walls; Iraq is as alien to them as they are to Iraqis. Congressional staffers put in six months to spice up their resumes, former military or State Department officials fish for contracts with General Electric or KBR after they finish their stint. They don't have to deal with many Iraqis. In the Rashid cafeteria for military and civilian servants of the Occupation, non-Iraqis serve the food. When they do deal with Iraqis, they have interesting choices. The deputy minister of the interior has been diverting arms and stockpiling them privately. He is accompanied by two doting American intelligence agents. Perhaps he is their last hope, should all else fail. ...In the bathroom of the country director of an important D.C.-based and US-funded democratization institute I found, in the bidet by the toilet, 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Quran,' a brochure explaining that Arabic is written from right to left, and a guide to focus groups. It is from these focus group results that westerners in the green zone learn 'what Iraqis want.' The director of the institute, a motivated and well-compensated man with experience in Asia and eastern Europe, was dejected, his advice ignored by the CPA, the tribal leaders he lectures about democracy interested only in securing contracts with the Americans."
• Arguments over who is responsible for the violence are as common as they are misguided: "sunnis and Shi'ites are united in believing America and 'the Jews' are responsible for the sectarian attacks, because of the absurd belief that America wants to remain in Iraq and will provoke a civil war to serve as a pretext. The Jews are blamed for everything, because they're the Jews. The Jews are everywhere in Iraq. They are feared and loathed, the 'Jewish hands' working their evil, the 'Jewish fingers' reaching every nook and cranny, selling their drugs and pornography, defiling Islam. Americans still cling desperately to their own myths, blaming the phantom Zarqawi [suspected al-Qaeda mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] for all the attacks, because they cannot blame Saddam anymore. But the Zarqawi story seems to have worked with the press, who remain as gullible today as they were when they bought the '45 minutes' claim."
• American responses to violence are harsh and widespread: "Meanwhile over ten thousand Iraqi men are being held prisoner, and most of them are innocent. Iraqi security guards as well as American soldiers hate the explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, because they, like the rest of us who live in the area, are subject to its olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb and they must close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week, when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days though they were not carrying a bomb. Unlike the murderous accuracy of the Israeli security forces, who at least speak Arabic, the American security forces are a blunt instrument. They arrest hundreds at once, hoping somebody will know something. One morning in the village of Albu Hishma, the local US commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. ... I walked past a detainment center once where a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting 'USA, USA!' over and over. 'They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we made 'em say somethin' we liked to hear,' grinned one of the soldiers guarding them. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A sergeant later quipped that the ones who are not guilty 'will be guilty next time,' after such treatment. Some prisoners are termed 'security detainees' and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they are still a 'security risk.' Most are innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them, or because they were male. A lieutenant colonel involved in this told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, that would entail a court martial, which would imply that the United States is occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or a liberation. Even if the men are guilty, no proof will be provided to the community. There will be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public is American guilt."
• Rosen witnesses one raid on a family's house, which results in a man being beaten, shot in the hand, and detained for days; the raid was sparked by an intercepted phone call that turns out to be from a teenaged Iraqi boy discussing video games with a friend. (Reason)
• March 26: The Center for American Progress puts together a point-by-point refutation of statements made by Condoleezza Rice, organized by topic. While much of this information is available elsewhere on this site, this is a nice "quick reference."
  
  • Pre-9/11 Intelligence
  • On May 16, 2002, Rice said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." But on August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane," according to NBC News. In July 2001, the administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles.
  • In May 2002, Rice held a press conference to defend the administration from new revelations that the President had been explicitly warned about an al-Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer," reported the Washington Post. However, according to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush," says the Post. As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA."
  • Rice said on March 22, 2004, "In June and July when the threat spikes were so high...we were at battle stations."
  • According to reports by Newsweek and the Washington Post, "Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism 'the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.'" Meanwhile, the Bush Administration decided to terminate "a highly classified program to monitor al-Qaeda suspects in the United States."
  • That same day, Rice said, "The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11."
  • President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting, according to the Washington Post and Bob Woodward's book Bush at War. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11.
  • Rice said on March 22, 2004, "Our [pre-9/11 NSPD] plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived." 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick asked, "There is nothing in the NSPD that came out that we could find that had an invasion plan, a military plan," a question confirmed by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Gorelick then asked, "Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, 'Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership'?" and Armitage replied: "No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11."
  • Condi Rice on Pre-9/11 Counterterrorism Funding
  • On March 24, 2004, Rice claimed, "The president increased counterterrorism funding several-fold" before 9/11. According to internal government documents and as reported by both Newsweek and the New York Times, the first full Bush budget for FY2003 "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators" and "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants." Newsweek noted the administration "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism."
  • Richard Clarke's Concerns
  • Rice said on March 22, 2004: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to." In reality, according to both CBS and the White House itself, Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on January 24, 2001 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending al-Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11.
  • On March 22, 2004, Rice said, "No al-Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." However, on January 25th, 2001, Clarke forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, according to the 9/11 commission's own findings.
  • Response to 9/11
  • On that same day, Rice said, "The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11." The Washington Post reports, "In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks."
  • 9/11 and Iraq Invasion Plans
  • That same March day, Rice said, "Not a single National Security Council principal at that meeting recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side." The Post reported, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document marked 'TOP SECRET'" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by CBS News, which reported on September 4, 2002, that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq."
  • Iraq and WMD
  • On March 18, 2004, Rice said, "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." However, the Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat, as reported by the Guardian and the Chicago Tribune.
  • 9/11-al Qaeda-Iraq Link
  • March 22: Rice says, "The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11." Unfortunately for Rice, the BBC confirms that both the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11. President Bush sent a letter to Congress on March 19, 2003 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11." Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on September 14, 2003 that "It is not surprising that people make that connection" between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said "We don't know" if there is a connection.
  More information about Rice's lies and misstatements can be found throughout this site. (Center for American Progress)
• March 26: A former National Security Council member verifies that the disputed meeting between Richard Clarke and George Bush, in which the president urged Clarke to find a connection between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq, actually took place. "The conversation absolutely took place. I was there, but you can't name me," the witness says. "I was one of several people present. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the president had Iraq on his mind, first and foremost." The reason the former NSC member refuses to be identified is simple: he is afraid of the vengeance the Bush administration will take if his name is disclosed. Another source, a member of the Fifth Group Special Forces, verifies that shortly after 9/11, his group was yanked from its assignment to ferret out information about al-Qaeda and given new duties: getting Saddam Hussein. "The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre-position it for Iraq cannot be denied," writes the Guardian's Philip James. He continues, "Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden. Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. 'We were going nuts on the ground about that decision,' one of them recalls. 'In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pashtun or Arabic, and had no rapport.'" James also notes that Bush ordered the redeployment of spy planes away from Afghanistan and to Iraq: "Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaeda leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border." (Guardian)
• March 26: Navy Lieutenant John Oliveira, a 16-year veteran who was formerly the top public relations officer aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, used to spend his time before the television cameras defending the US invasion of Iraq. Now, having retired from service, Oliveira goes public with his actual opinions. He accuses the Bush administration of "callousness" towards the military in pursuing its goals in Iraq without regard to the cost in human lives. He says, "[A]fter Afghanistan where we went in there, the military was used in response to remove the terrorists from their positions in Afghanistan and destroy the government supported that terrorism, we went in there and failed to build a peace. Shortly after I got back from Afghanistan, I saw that the things had not changed in outlying areas. The only place that was relatively secure was Kabul. So, I saw no major improvement in Afghanistan. As things started developing for Iraq, things just weren't making sense to me. But obviously, I had taken on oath and went off to war in January of last year, and I just didn't realize at the time what kind of an impact that that would have on me once things started, when I had to get on television every day to talk to the American people and the international public and continue to sell them on the administration's policies, which I did not believe in, and as the war progressed, obviously, we discovered more things. Today we still see we haven't been able to develop the peace. So, in my perspective, I'm doing what I can to support our troops. Up until two months ago, I was one of those troops. I was unable to voice my opinion regarding the administration policies on how they were using our military. And one of the key things I say to Mr. Bush, "support our troops and join us." Because the way he's doing it is not supporting our troops, it's using them."
• Oliveira says that the stress of publicly defending a war that he knows to be indefensible drove him into a nervous breakdown. "Maybe if I had not been a spokesperson, I may have been able to deal with it a little bit better," he says. "But I started seeing -- I mean, this was back in February and March of last year, that a lot of the sailors were questioning why we were going into Iraq. And it just wasn't our junior sailors. I'm -- we were talking our senior leadership. When I put in my resignation papers about two weeks before the end of the hostilities phase, I had senior leadership look at me and say, 'John, we agree with you, but this is our job.' I understood -- I understood the oath that we took. But that just made me feel that much better about what I was doing, and what I was doing was right when I see senior leadership questioning the policies. Unfortunately, we don't have that voice to oppose those publicly." Oliveira says that when the invasion of Afghanistan began, morale in the military was very high; a year later, it has plummeted: "When we went into Afghanistan, troop moral was probably the best I had ever seen. The support from the nation was unbelievable. A year later, with pretty much the same crew, the morale was 180 degrees out. Discipline problems were backed up. People weren't giving the 110%. They were basically doing their job. People were seriously questioning -- I had never seen that before in my 16-and-a-half years where we would sit around at the table in the wardroom or around the ship listening to people talk about how -- why we were doing what we were doing. It was -- I had never seen military people and officers question it as much as I did when we went into Iraq. There's no question, morale was down. It's down even worse as we get into this quagmire that we cannot get out of, and it's almost reminiscent, I think, of those that were involved in the Vietnam War. I think a lot of those people would see many similarities with Iraq right now."
• He criticizes the administration for not adequately equipping the troops with the materials needed for them to adequately fight: "The DOD can spend billions of dollars on research of weapons systems, but they cannot provide our troops with adequate personal protection, you know, onboard ship. You know, we're trying to manage money for spare parts to keep our airplanes flying. Once again, I go back to the administration and say, that is not supporting our troops. Supporting our troops is ensuring that our young men and women have the right tools to do the job and are protected and used properly, not necessarily spending billions of dollars on research. The president has sold the American public and, another issue, which is supporting the troops, means supporting him. That does not go hand in hand." He concludes, "My concern is for our troops. I want it make sure that I know -- they know that I support them. I was very grateful for the folks that were back here in the United States and worldwide that supported us back when we went to war last year, who were voicing their opinions then at that time this war was wrong. I'm thankful for those people today. And I was thankful for them back then." (Democracy Now)
• March 26: Democratic senator Tom Daschle makes a simple request of the Bush administration regarding its conduct towards Richard Clarke: "Please ask the people around you to stop the character attacks they are waging against Richard Clarke. Ask them to stop their attempts to conceal information and confuse facts. Ask them to stop the long effort that has made the 9-11 Commission's work more difficult than it should be. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Mr. Clarke's facts, he set an eloquent example for all of us yesterday. He acknowledged to the families of the victims of September 11 that their government had failed them. He accepted responsibility for September 11. He made himself accountable and he tried, in my view, to help us understand what happened in the months and years before September 11. I couldn't be more disappointed in the White House's response. They have known for months what Mr. Clarke was going to say. Instead of dealing with it factually, they've launched a shrill attack to destroy Mr. Clarke's credibility. I know something about those attacks. On several occasions I've been on the receiving end of White House broadsides. I saw the White House's ferocity firsthand. I saw the people around the President attack John McCain, when he ran for President in 2000. I will never forget the distortions, the recklessness, and the viciousness of those attacks. They were wrong, and they impugned one of our great patriots. I saw the same viciousness two years ago, when Senator Max Cleland, a man who served when called during the Vietnam war, had his reputation and patriotism smeared in his reelection campaign. The idea that a man who gave so much to his country could be smeared by those who were willing to give so little haunted me then, as it haunts me now. There are some things that simply ought not to be done in politics, and that line was crossed by the attacks on both Senator McCain and Senator Cleland. Last year I watched the people around the President set their sights on Ambassador Joe Wilson, when he stepped forward to tell the truth about the President's claims on Iraq, Niger and uranium. The White House didn't battle Ambassador Wilson on the facts -- instead, they put his wife's life in danger by disclosing publicly that she was a deep cover agent for the CIA. That was a grossly irresponsible act done for the worst of reasons -- to avoid accountability and unwelcome political consequences. It ought never have happened. It was shameful. And it crossed a line that had never been crossed before.
• "Now, when I watch what the people around the President are trying to do to Richard Clarke, I think it's past time to say enough is enough. The President came to Washington four years ago promising to change the tone. The people around him have done that -- they've changed it for the worse. They are doing things that should never be done and have never been done before. What they need to do, what we need to do, is put politics aside and put the American people and their security first. I know how difficult that is in an election year. But we all, every one of us, needs to do that. Some things are more important than politics, and September 11 ought to be at the top of that list. We need the facts on September 11, not spin and character assassination. We need this Administration and everyone involved to follow Mr. Clarke's example and accept responsibility and accountability. We need Condoleezza Rice, who seems to have time to appear on every television show, to make time to appear publicly before the 9-11 Commission. She is not constrained by precedent from doing that, as the White House has argued. As the Congressional Research Service documented, two of her predecessors have given testimony in open session on matters much less important than September 11. I've reluctantly reached the conclusion that what really constrains Ms. Rice's full cooperation is political considerations. The September 11 families deserve better than that and, just as importantly, our country deserves better than that. There is only one person who can change what's going on at the White House, and that's the President. So I appeal to President Bush to change it. He deserves better than the tactics his staff are using. And, as I've said, the September 11 families and our country deserve better, too." (Tom Daschle/Buzzflash)
• March 26: David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else, is interviewed by Buzzflash. Johnston's thesis, which is exhaustively documented with facts and figures and illustrated with anecdotal evidence, is that the perception that the American rich are heavily taxed to benefit everyone else is a myth, and that in reality, the middle class and the upper middle class, those making $30,000 to $500,000, are heavily taxed to subsidize the super rich. Johnston spent nine years documenting and writing this book. Johnston shows that the income gap in America is far deeper than is usually imagined: for example, the top 29,000 Americans have as much income as the bottom 96 million. The tax burden for the richest Americans has been falling sharply while everyone else's has risen. Most people making $60,000 pay a larger share of their income in federal taxes than the top 400 Americans, whose average income in 2000 was $174 million each. They paid just 22 cents on the dollar in federal taxes; under the Bush tax cuts, they would pay just 17.5 cents on the dollar. In 1970, the bottom group, a third of all Americans, had more than ten times the income of that very top group, the top 1/100th of 1 percent or top 29,000. By 2000 they were equal because the bottom third's income fell while the top group's income went through the roof. Johnston shows how the tax police, the IRS, has been cut in size and then handcuffed, ordered to go after the working poor and to ignore tax cheating by the politically connected rich.
• Johnston begins by making the observation, "Athens was a tyranny at one time. And when it was a tyranny, it had a flat tax. Everybody paid the same tax. When the Athenians went to a tax based on ability to pay, democracy flourished. Your taxes are absolutely at the core of our democracy, and without taxes, there is no democracy. ...If we enacted the Steve Forbes flat tax plan, Steve Forbes would never pay taxes again for the rest of his life. Under the flat tax plan, anyone who is an inheritor of great business assets -- not financial assets, business assets; that is, someone who owns a company, not someone who owns stock in a publicly traded company -- would no longer have to pay taxes just so long as their lifetime consumption was less than the value of those assets on the day they began paying taxes under the Forbes flat tax. And it would heavily shift the burden of taxes off of high-income people and people who have asset incomes, and onto people who have those capital incomes and people who have labor incomes."
• Johnston also clarifies one of the fundamental tales of American history, often used to show America's resistance to taxation: the Boston Tea Party of 1773. "The Boston Tea Party was a demonstration in favor of a tax. What happened was that the Crown gave the East India Company an exemption from a tax. And the Colonists understood that that meant that anyone in the domestic tea business in the Colonies would be driven out of business over time, and would lose business. And so this was actually a demonstration in favor of fair and equal taxation, not giving a tax break to a favored few. ...And understanding that story and how it is mis-taught in American schools is one of the most important lessons that I hope people get -- that the issue then was not against taxation. The revolutionary call was 'no taxation without representation.'" From there, Johnston goes to modern America under Bush, who uses the misleading slogan of "tax relief" to demonize the idea of paying even the most necessary taxes, as well as to cloak the reality of the fact that, for the wealthy and the most indigent, the tax burden has shrunk over the last decade. Unfortunately, that places more and more of the tax burden squarely on the backs of the lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle classes: "Currently in America...almost half of the income in America is not currently taxed, because of deferral devices and loopholes, and explicit policies of Congress. And most of that untaxed income is not from working stiffs," he says.
• Johnston observes, "What's going on in our system is we have representation, in that we have an elected Congress, but the people who are seriously involved in politics are people with really big incomes, and large corporations. Every member of Congress will say to you, 'You can't buy my vote.' Okay, I accept that. Occasionally we get a congressman who did sell his vote, but that's not the norm. The norm is you can't buy. What you buy is access. And the only people who have real meaningful access to members of Congress are the political donor class and the professional lobbying groups in Washington. They have been very actively involved in government, when millions and tens of millions of Americans have quit voting and have quit paying attention to what's going on. ...So what we have is a small group of people within a huge economic stake in the government staying deeply involved in politics, and being able to increase their access because of our campaign contribution system, while at the same time tens of millions of other Americans were withdrawing from politics over the last 30 years, and amusing themselves with nonsense -- the glitz-mongering media. And, surprise, surprise, our government increasingly reflects the concerns and interests of those people who've stayed active in exercising their Constitutional rights. So if we want a tax system that serves all Americans, that rewards strivers, that rewards people who play by the rules, that rewards people who are trying to get ahead, we have to all exercise our duties as participants in a democracy, instead of ceding our democracy to a very narrow group of people."
• Of the tax burden, Johnston says, "[I]f you are in the top group -- if you're making $10 million or more -- you can't spend your entire income unless you're a gambling addict or, actually, I don't know how you could spend it unless you're a gambling addict, because, if you're buying oil paintings, those don't lose value unless you're a complete idiot. You mostly are investing that income, okay? Well, investing works, as anybody who got in a 401k plan knows, over the long term. Forget about the downturn of the market right now. It's a snowball. You add new contributions to the snowball and the market returns part of it to you. And pretty soon the magic of compounding interest is bigger than your contribution, and that snowball gets bigger and bigger, and your income gets bigger and bigger. So that if you are relieved of a substantial burden of taxes, and you have the capacity to save substantial amounts, you will get wealthier and wealthier. Meanwhile, people in the middle class and the upper middle class are confronted by two things. A growing share of their income is going to taxes, and we have seen falling wages for the bottom, about 40 percent, of Americans; stagnant wages for the next 40 percent of Americans; infinitesimal growth in income for the next 10 percent -- that brings us to the 90 percent percentile -- and this incredible concentration of incomes at the very top. When one-third of Americans belonged to unions, more than two-thirds of Americans benefited from that because there were employers who did not want to have unions, so they paid premium wages -- and by the way, tended to get the very best workers as a result, as classic economic theory says they should. Lots of low-level managers at companies, their wages were basically set by the unions. To the extent that we set up the rules to shrink unions, we drive down wages -- and America is the only nation in the modern world that is driving down wages. ...We are the only country in the world that is in the pursuit of lowering wages. And it's been a very successful program. So you combine all of those forces, and you can see why the data, the official government data, which were right there for anybody to report on, but nobody in Washington announced: Oh, the top 400 taxpayers -- it's actually about a thousand people when you count the spouses and children -- the top 1,000 people in America are earning more than 1 percent of the income, when 30 years earlier, it took more than 25,000 people to earn the top 1 percent of income in America. No one announced it, and, therefore, to most of the news media, it's not a story."
• Johnston discusses how the wealthy elite have maneuvered to make the tax code favor their own interests at the expense of the average American: "There's a very tricky number...to get to the real key people who do not want to pay taxes in America: the Koch brothers, the Mars family, Richard Mellon Scaife. ...The people who've been financing the anti-tax movement have hired a whole coterie of very smart people in Washington to figure out how to design arguments that favor what they want, but make it sound like it's good for you. And one of the best ones they've got is: The top 1 percent of Americans pay 37 percent of the taxes -- that's for the year 2000, more than 37 percent. Well, actually, the top 1 percent, who made 21 percent of the income, paid more than 37 percent of the income taxes. When you look at all federal taxes -- gift taxes, estate taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, excise taxes on gasoline and things like that -- the top group only pays 25 percent, which isn't much more than their 21 percent share of the income. But the measure is a bad measure. Every top businessman and every senior executive believes that if you want to make profits, you have to measure what you're doing. You have to measure, measure, measure. You have to spend a lot of money measuring. But you have to measure the right things. Well, the entry point for the top 1 percent income group in America is not much above $300,000. Because my wife works and I work, and I have this book out, I'm in that group at the moment, okay? But it goes all the way up to a couple of billion dollars of annual income. I have nothing in common with somebody who makes $10 million a year economically. And when you break down the top 1 percent, and you say what's going on here, you find out the people at the bottom of the top 1 percent -- people making $300,000 $400,000 $500,000 a year -- they are being squeezed by the system. And people who make tens of millions of dollars a year are getting enormous relief on their taxes. Who are the typical leaders in cities and towns across America? The minute you get away from Los Angeles and New York, and you go to Cincinnati, or Rochester, New York, or Anytown, America, what is the income level of the leaders of that community? $200,000 $300,000, $400,000, $500,000? There's a few people who make a million. There are one or two there who make $5 or $10 million. But for the core group, that's their income range, $200,000 to $500,000. They're being squeezed. And when your civic and local business leadership class is being squeezed it assumes the people above are being squeezed even more because that's what they see. But the people who make 10 or 100 times more are not being squeezed. And this false belief that the higher your income the bigger the share of it you pay in taxes is being exploited by people above them, so that the people at the very, very top who don't want to pay taxes can continue to benefit from tax relief. And the people down below haven't figured out that they don't have common cause with those people -- and are actually subsidizing those who make much more than they do. People who make $200,000 are very well off. But they still go to work every day. They still have mortgages on their houses. They're not in the group of people who own a private jet, and have limousines, and own six houses. That's a totally different world. And innumeracy is a fundamental part of this problem. People don't grasp the difference between $200,000 and $200 million. ...Most Americans believe we take from people at the top to benefit those below. And what I show in the book from the data is that's not the case. Our national myth -- and I use that in the classic sense of the word 'myth' -- is wrong. We take from people who make $30,000 to $500,000 to give relief to those, who make millions, or tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year."
• When asked why can't progressive Democrats show the US middle class how it's being ripped off by the Bush administration, Johnston responds, " The principal thing that's going on...is that the conservative elements in Washington have a number of large institutions, which the media generally treats as think tanks, but which I think are primarily ideological marketing organizations. They craft and hone and develop arguments that appear to the general public to be for their benefit, but that, when carefully examined, turn out repeatedly to favor the super-rich. And the Democrats and the liberals, and the moderates in the Republican Party, they don't have anything like that. There is just nothing at all like that to develop and hone arguments for them. So we end up with a situation in which the conservative anti-tax Republicans have an agenda, and the moderates and the liberals, don't have a clue. There's no heavy ideological background for them. Secondly, it's easy to be against something, and they've spent years demonizing both the tax system and the IRS. And that's a bizarre theme for conservative Republicans to be doing because I can't imagine a conservative Republican attacking law enforcement. But the IRS is the tax police. And the public needs to understand that they're the police. And if you're a businessman, and you're competing against businesses who are cheating on their taxes, and the government's not doing anything about it, you're going to get run out of business. Only when you demonize people and make them illegitimate can you get away with what is fundamentally an attack on the integrity and capacity of law enforcement. And that's what we're seeing. The people who have benefited from that are the very wealthy, highly aggressive, anti-tax crowd. They have now succeeded in having a system in which we have two tax systems in America, separate and unequal. One is for wage-earners. The government knows what you make. It takes the money out of your check before you get paid. The government even knows how much you paid in mortgage interest. You can't cheat it. It's an effective and efficient system. You can chisel; that's all you can do. But if you are a super-wealthy individual who owns assets, and owns businesses, particularly if you're able to operate on a multi-national level, you are able to engage in all sorts of complex transactions and structures to make it appear your income is not as high as it is. And there's no law enforcement going on. Your odds of being audited if you invest in a partnership -- and those are primarily the province of the very wealthy -- one in 400. I've interviewed literally more than a hundred IRS auditors, economists, historians, sociologists, appeals officers, and tax collectors, who have all told me stories of how, when they have been digging into tax returns of the politically connected rich, have been ordered by low-level supervisors to back off. And I tell in the book about this. The system is rigged for those folks."
• The IRS is much more likely to go after members of the working poor who may skip out on their taxes -- in fact, under legislation pushed by Republican Don Nickles and agreed to by former president Clinton, Congress appropriated extra money for the IRS to go after working poor "tax cheats." Meanwhile, offshore tax cheats, corporate tax shelters, and the like, are hardly ever questioned. "Now think about this for a minute. If you were in the group that doesn't want to pay taxes, and you want to shift the burden of taxes off, you create a system that constantly says that poor are the problem. And you badly design the system for the poor. You generate statistics that show mostly mistakes, but you can lump in with abuse and fraud with the emphasis on fraud in your sentences. If there's fraud -- all capital letters -- and abuse -- all capital letters -- but mostly there are just errors you can demonize the poor as unjust beneficiaries of your taxes. Then there's a fair amount of auditing of people who are in the moderately prosperous class, people who are making $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a year. They will get audited somewhat. And then you say there's no money to audit the very rich, and you set up mechanisms within the IRS that allow, behind closed doors, to shut down a lot of audits of the super rich if the audits are getting into troublesome areas. This goes on again and again and again. The audit bosses tell the front line auditors to close an issue. That's the phrase used -- the term of art -- 'close an issue.' And you have the best of all possible worlds. Then you get Congress not to investigate this favoritism for the politically connected rich, but instead Congress investigates the alleged -- and it turns out, non-existent -- abuses by the jack-booted legs of the IRS. And you also reduce radically the number of employees at the IRS who are law enforcement people. Auditors are detectives. They're just tax detectives instead of burglary detectives."
• Of taking money out of the country to protect it from taxation, Johnston says, "We have a tax system that says to people with great wealth: Move your money out of the United States. Invest it offshore where labor costs are lower, where taxes are lower, and make a higher return and get even richer. The problem is that, back in this country, you are creating economic illness. You are draining the life out of our democracy. Now those people who believe we should have a big foreign aid program should be thrilled-- you know, foreign aid has been a fraction of 1 percent of the U.S. budget, and it's mostly spent in America, buying American goods. If we give a hospital somewhere to a foreign country, they have to spend the money buying American technology and having Americans come in and build the hospital for them. We now have a very massive foreign aid program, and it's called tax cuts for the super-wealthy."
• Johnston warns, "[M]ost Americans do not understand that it is the stated policy of the Bush Administration to eliminate all taxes on capital." (Johnston defines capital as "the money that you get from dividends, rents, interest, some royalties.... And then capital gains -- that is, you buy an asset for a dollar, and you sell it for 10 dollars. That's a gain. And people think of that in the stock market, but it's true of all kinds of activities.") "Now we can decide to eliminate all taxes on capital. The Constitution allows that, and if Americans want to stop all taxes on capital, then we should do that. But the news media has not explained to people both that that's the policy and what it would mean. Fundamentally what it means is if you don't tax capital, there's only one other thing to tax: labor."
• Johnston even debunks the idea that entrepeneurs who build a business are entitled to every dime they can make from it: "We live in a society where -- and you see this in CEOs all the time -- there is the culture of what I call 'I.' How many times have you seen a CEO say: I did this. I did the following. I created this wealth. I should get paid all this money because I did this. Not the tens of thousands of people who worked for the company -- 'I.' And the fact is nobody who is wealthy in America did it on their own. Bill Gates is a wealthy man because, long before he came along, we invested in an education system that created the knowledge that made computer technology come to life in our age. Hilton Hotels, the Hilton family -- Paris Hilton running around, you know, behaving as she is -- had that money because we have political stability and peace in this country. And Conrad Hilton, in his will, talks about how he owes his fortune to that, and how bad war is for being in the hotel business. It was we as taxpayers who built highways, and airports, and we improved ports, and we have an education system, and we have honest courts, and we have a system to enforce property rights and contracts -- without those things, you can't be wealthy. Many, many wealthy people got there because of their hard work or their smarts. But many of them got there because of the family they were born into what Donald Trump calls 'the lucky sperm club.' But all of them owe that fortune, and their good fortune, in part, to the society in which we live."
• Johnston concludes, "People say to me everywhere I go to speak: Well, how would you fix this? And my answer is: I don't know. Because I'm not God. I'm not omniscient. Here's what I do know: If everybody in America will pay attention to our tax system, and you think how much money you pay in taxes, think about whether it's worth spending less time worrying about who Jennifer Lopez is sleeping with, and more about your tax dollars. If all of us paid attention and listened, and spent some time learning, we would get out of our collective wisdom a tax system that does what a good tax system should do. A good tax system greases the wheels of commerce. It rewards responsible conduct. It rewards strivers. It encourages investments in the most valuable asset we have, which is the human mind. Whereas now, we put huge economic obstacles in front of intellectual development in this country. A good tax system promotes political stability, without which there is no great wealth. And we can come up with a tax system that will do those things. Now we are going to have to come up with that tax system, or a new tax system, because the economic order has changed. Tax systems must flow from the economic order. If you live in a pirate society, the tax is what the chief pirate takes as his share of the booty. If you live in an agrarian culture, the tax is that share of the crops taken by the king to support the operation of the government. We have a tax system designed for a national industrial wage economy. It worked real well for a long time because we basically were an industrial national economy, with mostly wage earners. We are moving into a global services, assets-based world in which capital in the punch of a button moves across borders, and labor cannot, even if it wanted to -- you're not going to take a job in India, in all likelihood. So we have to have a tax system that recognizes those things and adapts to it, and that promotes the economic order instead of getting in the way of it. But what we're getting instead is a big, huge moat being put around the incomes and fortunes of those who are already rich. Of the super-wealthy in America, some of the super-high-income people don't want to pay taxes, but that's not all of those people. Many people in that group are very responsible and understand what's going on. But the narrow segment within that group that hates taxes -- that group is having enormous success in putting a moat around its money and its finances, and saying: We got ours. That's not America. That's not American. Warren Buffet the other day said that if class warfare is being waged in America, his class is very clearly winning. And he did not mean that as a good thing. I'm in favor of higher incomes, more wealth. But what we need to have is a system that creates higher incomes and more wealth, not protects those who already got theirs. ...[W]e have this current notion that if I work my whole life and I make a fortune, that my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren should also have that fortune. That's not how it works. I made the fortune. I'm entitled to it. But my children and grandchildren are not entitled to it and if we want future children to grow up and, by dint of their hard work, make new fortunes we have to create a system that allows that. Fortunes come and go. A tax system that says once you have your fortune the government will help you keep it forever by making it harder for others to build their own fortunes is a system that will, in the long run, destroy America. And that is the worst possible tax policy." (Buzzflash)
• March 26: Author David Cay Johnston exposes the lie behind the claims that the Bush administration "only" lost 3 million jobs during its tenure. In his book, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else, he writes, "The facts are that we're down 9 million jobs. You keep hearing in the news media we're down 3 million. You have about 3 million fewer jobs than we had in 2001. But during that period of time, normally we would have created about 6 million jobs. So we're really down 9 million jobs in America. And the reason we have low unemployment is lots of people have quit looking for work." (Buzzflash)
• March 26: Correspondant Daniel Schorr tells of a discussion he recently had with a Texas Democratic fundraiser, who himself lunched with former president Bill Clinton shortly after George W. Bush's January 21, 2001 inauguration. According to the fundraiser, Clinton discussed his attempt to counsel Bush that he would face five challenges in the international arena - the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the Al Qaeda terrorist threat, a nuclear-armed North Korea, the India-Pakistan confrontation, and the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq. Clinton was surprised at Bush's response. He said he disagreed with Clinton's order -- that he considered Saddam Hussein to be the primary threat that he would have to deal with. Schorr uses this story as a springboard to ask, in the wake of the Clarke testimony, just how obsessed Bush was with overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and did it interfere with his judgment in handling other, more impending crises. In his newly published book, Clarke writes that ousting Hussein was "Topic A" from the first NSC meeting, just as O'Neill had said, and there was little discussion of why the Iraqi dictator was being targeted. (Christian Science Monitor)

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