March 2006: This Far and No Further

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Highlights of This Page

Guantanamo prisoners stripped of habeas corpus rights, even after Supreme Court ruled otherwise. Iraq Study Group launched. Abramoff sentenced in SunCruz corruption and fraud case.

See my Update Information page for an explanation of why this and other pages between September 2004 and September 2006 are not yet complete.

March: The Pentagon and the State Department create two new offices to focus on the destabilization and eventual replacement of the Iranian theocratic government.
War with Iran
The Pentagon is in effect recreating the old and long-discredited (and despised, in some corners) Office of Special Plans; in fact, the new bureau is in the same set of offices as the old OSP. While the Pentagon won't confirm who is in charge of the new bureau, it is known that three veterans of the OSP are with the new group -- former OSP leader Abram Shulsky, DIA analyst John Trigilio, and Iran specialist Laran Archin. Raw Story describes the new bureau as "a sea of think-tank operatives and neoconservative war hawks." On the State side, the new Iranian Affairs office is led by longtime International Republican Institute member David Denehy; his boss is the Assistant Secretart of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the vice president. (Los Angeles Times/Information Clearinghouse, Raw Story)
March: Donald Rumsfeld brings in six of the Pentagon's outside advisors to be briefed by General Richard Cody, the vice chief of staff who has just returned from Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
The six advisors include neoconservative Kenneth Adelman, once one of Rumsfeld's closest friends, and RAND's James Dobbins. Adelman asks Cody what they were measuring to see how the war is going. "What are the metrics coming back that you would say were needed to identify so we know if we're winning or losing?" Adelman asks. Cody replies that there are three: the number of Iraqi civilians killed by insurgent attacks, the amount of usable intelligence gathered from the Iraqis, and the number of competent Iraqi police and military. Cody avoids any inclusion of body counts and the number of insurgent attacks. After Rumsfeld joins the discussion, Adelman asks him the same question. "Oh, there are hundreds," Rumsfeld says airily. "It's just so complicated that there are hundreds." Dobbins presses Rumsfeld on the issue, and Rumsfeld retorts that the numbers aren't relevant anyway. "The country's not in civil war," he says. "If it were in civil war, there'd be a large number of refugees." Dobbins points out that 30,000 Iraqis have died in the last three years -- around 200 a week. "Allowing for the fact that Iraq is 15 times smaller than the United States," Dobbins says, "Iraqis for the first three years suffered the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every week. You can imagine the traumatic effect a 9/11 attack being repeated weekly would have on American society. Don't you think it's having a similar effect on Iraqi society?" Rumsfeld doesn't want to hear it. Adelman continues to insist on metrics to measure success or failure, even reminding Rumsfeld of his own words from years past that one should insist on three or four measureable items in order to get progress. Rumsfeld continues to say that the whole situation is so complicated that he can't begin to give any list. "Then you don't have any accountability," says Adelman. If Rumsfeld won't agree to any criteria, then he can't be said to have failed on any criteria. Adelman leaves as disturbed as ever. (Bob Woodward)
March: Top aides to Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld believe that Dick Cheney is becoming more withdrawn and less involved in the workings of the administration, and is retreating further from reality than ever before. Rice and Cheney have always been in agreement that Iraq must be won, whatever the cost, but Cheney, while not retreating from that position, is less involved than before. The loss of Lewis Libby as his chief of staff has crippled his effectiveness, the aides believe. If anything, Cheney is hardening his beliefs, both on Iraq and on the leadership of the administration. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Cheney believes that Bush will go down as one of the greatest presidents in American history. He even believes that two of Bush's greatest disasters, the Harriet Miers nomination and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, will turn out to be positives for Bush. Cheney rarely shares any of his feelings with anyone besides his wife, Lynne, and their daughter Liz, who both support Cheney unquestioningly. (Bob Woodward)

March 2: Bush was given a highly classified summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate in that same month
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
that warned him, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other senior White House officials that claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons programs were in doubt. Bush and other administration officials continued to push those claims for months afterward, and denied ever knowing about the doubts cast on those claims by intelligence agencies. Those claims included the assertion that aluminum tubes discovered in Iraq were for the development of nuclear weapons, and that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from Niger. Both claims have long since been disproven as false.
The disclosure that Bush was informed of the DOE and State dissents is the first evidence that Bush himself knew of the sharp debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither Bush nor Cheney told the public about the disagreement among the agencies.
Another classified report, from January 2003, summarized another NIE that focused on whether Saddam Hussein would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists. US intelligence agencies agreed that it was highly unlikely that Hussein would try to attack the US unless "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault. The State Department's intelligence agency, the INR, went even farther, doubting that Hussein was "unlikely to conduct clandestine attacks against the US homeland even if [his] regime's demise is imminent" as the result of a US invasion. Bush and his officials were informed at least four other times, beginning in the spring of 2002, that US intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States. However, in the months leading up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and Cabinet members repeatedly asserted that Hussein was likely to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States or to provide such weapons to al-Qaeda or another terrorist group. That bogus threat was one of Bush's prime justifications for invading Iraq. He cited the threat in a speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, and again on January 28, 2003, in his State of the Union address. (See the related items on those pages.)
The one-page documents prepared for Bush are known as the "President's Summary" of the much longer and more detailed National Intelligence Estimates that combine the analysis and judgments of agencies throughout the intelligence community. An NIE, according to the Web site of the National Intelligence Council -- the interagency group that coordinates the documents' production -- represents "the coordinated judgments of the Intelligence Community regarding the likely course of future events" and is written with the goal of providing "policy makers with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information -- regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to US policy." NIEs routinely include dissenting views if those are stated. The one-page summary for the president allows intelligence agencies to emphasize what they believe to be the conclusions from the broader NIE that are the most important to communicate to the commander-in-chief. The President's Summary is among the most highly classified papers in the government. Bush refused to declassify those summaries to the Senate Intelligence Committee for its review of the prewar intelligence failures, and those summaries were not referenced in the committee's March 2005 report.
As revealed by National Journal reporter Murray Waas, this Bush was aware of the intense debate within the government during the time that he, Cheney, and members of the Cabinet were citing the procurement of the tubes as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Bush and other officials have repeatedly lied about his knowledge of the claims, saying he knew nothing of the dissents. Instead, they have blamed the CIA, and indirectly blamed then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, for not revealing those dissents to them. Those blaming tactics have been proven to be lies.
One report from January 2003 contained the following: "In INR's view, Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors. INR accepts the judgment of technical experts at the US Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment and finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose. INR considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."
Bush declassified small, selected portions of the October 2002 NIE that bolstered their specious claims about Iraq's nuclear programs, and leaked them to reporters in July 2003. Later, other sections, including the INR dissent quoted above, were also declassified. But the President's Summary has not been declassified, largely because, in the words of one senior official, it is the "one document which illustrates what the president knew and when he knew it." Even Congress has not been able to see the summaries.
Bush personally read the January 2003 summary in the presence of CIA director George Tenet, and the two discussed it at length. Bush was, thusly, informed that it was the unanimous conclusion of the intelligence agencies participating in the production of the January 2003 NIE that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the US unless Iraq was attacked first. Cheney was given the same information. But Bush, Cheney, and other officials continued to insist that Hussein was likely to attack the US unless the US neutralized the "imminent threat" by invading Iraq. Many other reports stating that Hussein neither had the intent nor the capability of attacking the US were provided to Bush and Cheney. Yet they continued to make claims like Cheney's August 2002 assertion, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Cheney was deliberately lying to bolster his case for war. Bush perpetuated the same lie to the UN on September 12, 2002, when he said, "With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors." Bush went a step farther, conflating Iraq with the 9/11 attacks, though he had been informed time and again that Iraq had no involvement in the attacks. Other examples of Bush and Cheney's repeated and systematic lies to the nation about Iraq can be found throughout this site, as well as being quoted in Waas's story, which can be read in its entirety by clicking the link accompanying this item. (National Journal)
March 2: Senate Democrats are demanding that Bush stop using signing statements to ignore and flaunt the law of the land.
"Unitary executive"
"We're a government of laws, not men," says Senate minority leader Harry Reid. "It is not for George W. Bush to disregard the Constitution and decide that he is above the law." Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, accuses Bush and Dick Cheney of attempting to concentrate ever more government power in their own hands. "The Bush-Cheney administration has cultivated an insidious brand of unilateralism that regularly crosses into an arrogance of power," he says. "The scope of the administration's assertions of power is stunning, and it is chilling." And fellow Democrat Edward Kennedy adds that the Bush administration, abetted by "a compliant Republican Congress," is undermining the checks and balances that "guard against abuses of power by any single branch of government." The senators are responding to a series of articles in the Boston Globe detailing the scope of Bush's assertions that he can ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution (see the April 2006 page for related items).
As usual, the White House says that Bush is doing nothing untoward or unusual: "We follow the practice that has been followed by previous administrations," says spokeswoman Dana Perino. This, of course, is a lie. Bush has issued signing statements for over 750 different statutes, far and away a record for any US president. Worse, the Bush executive branch is usurping powers that, by the Constitution, should be in the hands of Congress and the courts.
Leahy says that because Bush's fellow Republicans control Congress, Democrats have no power to call hearings on Bush's attempt to "pick and choose which laws he deems appropriate to follow." He says, "Just as disturbing as the president's use of press releases to announce which laws he will follow is the abject failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to act as a check against this executive power grab. Until Republican leaders let Congress fulfill its oversight role, this White House will have no incentive to stop this abuse of power." (Boston Globe)
March 2: According to a Salon piece by Sidney Blumenthal, Republican leaders are quietly sending "emissaries"
Bush's foreign policies
to visit Bush in so-far futile efforts to persuade Bush to pursue a more moderate course with foreign policy; in Blumenthal's words, "like diplomats to a foreign ruler isolated in his forbidden city, to probe whether he could be persuaded to become politically flexible."
Bush has transcended stubborness, obduracy, and inflexibility to become something far worse. As Blumenthal writes, "Bush's immovability was previously perceived as the determination of a man of simple but clear convictions. But as his policies have unfolded as disastrous, his image has been turned inside out. Instead of being perceived as secure, he is seen as out of touch; instead of being acknowledged as a colossus striding events, he is viewed as driftwood carried away by the flood." Bush's most senior officials are little more than, in Blumenthal's words, "lickspittles." "Within the sanctum of the White House, his aides often handle him with flattery," he writes.
"They tell him that he is among the greatest presidents, that his difficulties are testimony to his greatness, that his refusal to change is also a sign of his greatness. The more is he flattered, the more he approves of the flatterer. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has risen along with her current of flattery. She is expert at the handwritten little note extolling his historical radiance. Karen Hughes, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was a pioneer of the flatterer's method. White House legal counsel Harriet Miers is also adept. But it is Vice President Dick Cheney who has sought and gained the most through flattery. While Bush is constantly and lavishly complimented as supreme leader, Cheney runs the show. Through his chief of staff, David Addington, he controls most of the flow of information, especially on national security, that reaches the incurious president. Bush seeks no contrary information or independent sources. He does not delve into the recesses of government himself, as Presidents Kennedy and Clinton did. He never demands worst-case scenarios. Cheney and his team oversee the writing of key decision memos before Bush finally gets to check the box indicating approval. Addington also dominates much of the bureaucracy through a network of conservative lawyers placed in key departments and agencies. The Justice Department regularly produces memos to justify the latest wrinkle in the doctrine of the 'unitary executive,' whether on domestic surveillance or torture. At the Defense Department, the counsel's office takes direction from Addington and acts at his behest to suppress dissent from the senior military on matters such as detainees or the 'global war on terror.' Tightly regulated by Cheney and Bush's own aides (who live in fear of Cheney), the president hears what he wishes to hear. They also know what particular flattery he wants to receive, and they ensure that he receives it. ...Bush prefers to soak up the flattery. He responds only to praise of himself as the warrior-president at the battlements, fighting the enemies at the gates and the defeatists within."
In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion, his aides and Cabinet ministers routinely told him that he was of a piece with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, a great war president who was presiding over a new world order. Now that Iraq is devolving into chaos, the comparisons have shifted: Bush is now like Lincoln, he is told, a "great emancipator" of Iraq and Afghanistan who is still laboring to win the war on terror and liberate the world's people. Bush and his staff have publicly embraced the comparison. "It is courage that liberated more than 50 million people from tyranny," Bush declared on Veterans Day, November 11, 2005. On May 11, 2005, Rice appeared on CNN's Larry King Live to say, "I've often wondered, in the darkest hours of the Civil War, what people were saying to Abraham Lincoln about whether this was going to turn out all right." And a month earlier, on April 20, Bush dedicated the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library in Springfield, Illinois. Segueing seamlessly from the Civil War to the war on terror, from Gettysburg to Iraq, he conflated Lincoln's struggle and his own: "Our deepest values are also served when we take our part in freedom's advance -- when the chains of millions are broken and the captives are set free, because we are honored to serve the cause that gave us birth. ...So we will stick to it; we will stand firmly by it." On January 23, 2006, at Kansas State University, in one of a series of speeches he gave to explain once again his Iraq strategy, Bush digressed into a reverie about Lincoln's troubles. "I believe in what I'm doing," he said. "And I understand politics, and it can get rough. I read a lot of history, by the way, and Abraham Lincoln had it rough. I'm not comparing myself to Abraham Lincoln, nor should you think [so] just because I mentioned his name in the context of my presidency -- I would never do that. He was a great president. But, boy, they mistreated him. He did what he thought was right."
Blumenthal quotes the archetypal political manipulater, Machiavelli, to close his examination of Bush's delusions. "It is an infallible rule," Machiavelli wrote in his chapter on flatterers, "that a prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised, unless by chance he leaves himself entirely in the hands of one man who rules him in everything, and happens to be a very prudent man. In this case he may doubtless be well governed, but it would not last long, for that governor would in a short time deprive him of the state." (Salon)

March 8: For the second time during Bush's second term, chief of staff Andrew Card goes to Bush to try to persuade the president to let him go.
Partisan Bush appointees
Bush's second term is a mess, Card knew. Iraq is a disaster. Bush's popularity ratings are plummeting. The administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina was reprehensible. Bush's plans to privatize Social Security have deadended. His plans to nominate his personal counsel, the supremely unqualified but utterly sycophantic Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court crashed after bipartisan opposition torpedoed her nomination. Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, is facing perjury charges related to the White House's outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson as an act of revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson. And just a month before, Cheney had accidentally shot a friend in the face while quail hunting in Texas. Bush's only real achievements have been the successful naming of two conservatives, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, to the Supreme Court.
"The drumbeat of change is not going to go away," Card tells Bush in a private meeting in the Oval Office. "And you should not be afraid to change me." Accepting Card's resignation would be a signal that Bush is seeking change for the better. Bush is resistant, calling Card's idea "stupid." But Card replies, "There are only five and a half people you can change and get any credit: Don Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Andy Card, Condi Rice, Dan Bartlett." Firing Bartlett, the White House communications director, won't give Bush much of a boost because few people outside of Washington know who he is, Card argues. "And you get a half credit if you change John Snow," the treasury secretary who is doing an ineffectual job after replacing the outspoken Paul O'Neill. "You won't get credit for removing him. You might get credit for putting someone else in."
Card continues, "Karl you can't touch probably," mostly because he is under investigation for his own involvement in the Plame affair, but also because of his wide knowledge of the unsavory and possibly illegal actions taken in 2000 and 2004 to elect Bush to the White House. Card has long advocated the firing of Rumsfeld, but Bush has always resisted that action. "You can't change Condi. She's the star in the administration. But, you can change me. And there's no Senate hearing. The change can happen overnight. There's no confirmation. There's nobody being grilled about past policies or future biases." Bartlett is good at his job, and Bush will get little credit for replacing him anyway. Snow's removal "wouldn't represent real change." That leaves Card. Bush is still resistant.
Two days later, Bush's former top domestic advisor Claude Allen is arrested for defrauding several Maryland stores of over $5,000. Card and Miers both had been told by Allen before his resignation in February that there was some legal misunderstanding, but Bush had not been informed by anyone, and he is livid, wanting to know how someone like Allen could be arrested without him finding out first. "Well, Mr. President," says Card, "if this is not comfortable for you, this is a perfect time to lay it all on me. Just lay it on me. This is it. Perfect." Bush again refuses. Later that evening, Card continues to make his case for his own resignation, telling Bush that it was the job of the chief of staff to handle situations like the Allen case, and if Bush didn't like the way it was handled, the obvious thing to do is to let Card go.
Bush finally agrees. On March 28, Card announces his resignation, and announces his replacement, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten.
Card lays the bulk of the blame for Iraq on the generals -- Richard Myers and Peter Pace at the Pentagon, John Abizaid and George Casey in Iraq. Had they had the gumption to stand up and tell Bush, "It's not worth it" or "The mission can't be accomplished," Card feels that Bush would have long since withdrawn. In some ways, Card is galled that the White House official most responsible for the debacle in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, is staying, while Card leaves.
In one of Bolten's first meetings with senior US officials after his ascension to the chief of the White House staff, he asks, "Where will Iraq be in six months." The reply: "About where it is today." (Bob Woodward)

March 9: Bush signs the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act into law, then
"Unitary executive"
issues a signing statement that says he does not feel obligated to obey legal requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers. The reauthorization contains several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI does not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates. However, if Bush's "logic" holds, he can -- and apparently will -- simply ignore the law's provisions.
Bush signs the bill into law with great fanfare, calling it "a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." The signing statement is released shortly thereafter with no warning and no official notice. In the statement, Bush says that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties." Bush, or more properly Bush's lawyers, write, "The executive branch shall construe the provisions...that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch...in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information...."
This is not the first time Bush has issued a signing statement that says he feels no need to obey the law. Signing statements have no legal authority, but signal how a president intends to interpret a law. Many other presidents before Bush have used signing statements, but none with the impunity and contempt for the law that Bush has displayed. In December 2005, after the New York Times revealed that Bush had broken the law by authorizing the military to conduct warrantless wiretapping on millions of Americans, Bush issued a signing statement saying that his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the law. And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security. In general, Bush uses signing statements to assert his belief in the "unitary executive," the neoconservative philosophy that a president is, in some instances, above the rule of law.
Few outside of the White House and the right-wing think tanks agree. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have noted that the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to write the laws and the executive branch the duty to "faithfully execute" them. In this case, the mainstream media has all but ignored the latest signing statement. Senate Democrat Patrick Leahy has inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection has received coverage from in the mainstream news media. Leahy says that Bush's assertion that he could ignore the new provisions of the Patriot Act -- provisions that were the subject of intense negotiations in Congress -- represent "nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law." Leahy continues, "The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word. The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so."
As in other instances of Bush's use of signing statements to assert that he is above the law, the White House dismisses Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement is simply "very standard language" that is ''used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required." White House spokeswoman Dana Perino says, "The signing statement makes clear that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution. The president has welcomed at least seven Inspector General reports on the Patriot Act since it was first passed, and there has not been one verified abuse of civil liberties using the Patriot Act."
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, says the statement may simply be "bluster" and does not necessarily mean that the administration will conceal information about its use of the Patriot Act. But he adds that the statement illustrates the administration's "mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power, and its low regard for legislative power. "On the one hand, they deny that Congress even has the authority to pass laws on these subjects like torture and eavesdropping," Golove says, "and in addition to that, they say that Congress is not even entitled to get information about anything to do with the war on terrorism." (Boston Globe)

Guantanamo prisoners stripped of habeas corpus rights, even after Supreme Court ruled otherwise

March 10: Chicago Public Radio airs a special detailing the lives and legal tribulations of several Guantanamo detainees,
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
and the larger issues surrounding their incarceration. The special closely examines the fundamental legal principle of habeas corpus, which, as the evidence shows, has been entirely abandoned by the Bush administration in the name of the war on terror. The special also examines some of the unethical, immoral, and at times inhuman torture techniques used on the detainees, most of whom are not guilty of any crime, particularly association with terrorist organizations.
Lawyer Joe Margulies, who represents several Guantanamo "enemy combatants," knows something of how the detainees are treated. Everything -- everything -- is used as a coercion for confessions and information. One of his clients, a London businessman picked up in Gambia and incarcerated in Guantanamo, couldn't understand why he never received any mail from his family; he felt abandoned and alone. Margulies eventually found that 16 letters from his family had been held back by prison officials. When they were finally delivered, they were heavily redacted; lines were blacked out such as the following declaration from his children: "We miss you, Daddy. We love you, Daddy. We're thinking of you." Margulies says loving messages from home "disrupt the sense of isolation and despair [the US military is] trying to cultivate" among the detainees. Natural light is another issue. Prisoners are taken to meet with their lawyers, out of their coffin-like boxes and to a small hut with a metal table. Such a prisoner is, according to Margulies, "shackled to an I-bolt in the floor, with his back to the door. He is forbidden to face the natural light." If he wants to see sunshine, he can perhaps receive that "privilege" as a reward for cooperation. "...[A]nything the prisoner wants, including sunlight, he's only getting with the permission of his interrogators as a reward for cooperating. And anything can be used that way." Program moderator Ira Glass says, "Prisoners who feel despair cooperate. ...That's the idea. Let's make them feel hopeless. Ever since President Bush announced the global war on terror, we've been told that this is a different kind of war, with different rules. ...And prisoners of war are different, too. So dangerous, we're told, that we keep them in an offshore facility, in as close to total secrecy as possible, to interrogate whenever we want, however long we want, using methods we have never approved for other wars." Under these new rules, Glass observes, "somebody can be locked away, basically forever, even when the government's own classified files say he is not a threat to America."
Two of the former detainees, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother, were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling jokes. The two ran a satire magazine in Pakistan that poked fun at corrupt clerics. One of their jokes about a clerical politician was a poem entitled "I Am Glad to Be A Leader." It included a line which Badr translates as "Before, I was thin and weak. Now, I have big stomach." The cleric took offense and denounced the two as al-Qaeda operatives to Pakistani authorities. They were immediately detained, turned over to the Americans, and sent to Guantanamo.
The Badr brothers were interrogated over "150 times," as Badr recalls, over a joke they told in their magazine in the mid-1990s. The then-US president Clinton had just put a $5 million bounty on the head of Osama bin Laden. So the brothers joked, in print, that they were putting a bounty on Clinton's head for 5 million in Afghani currency -- at the time, worth about $113. They wrote that Clinton's most identifiable characteristic was his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Episode host Jack Hitt says, "So after hearing the punch line explained 150 times, we finally got the joke, and sent Badr and his brother home."
Bush's explanation for the detention of people like Badr was different: "These are people who got scooped off a battlefield, attempting to kill US troops. And, uh, I want to make sure before they're released that they don't come back to kill again." Dick Cheney said that all of the prisoners in Guantanamo are "terrorists. They're bomb-makers, they're facilitators of terror, they're members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban."
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, researchers at Seton Hall's law school have found out differently. After reading the 517 case files, they determined that only 5% of the detainees were "scooped up" by American troops on the battlefield or anywhere else where they were observed fighting in any fashion. And only 8% of those detainees are classified as al-Qaeda members. Michael Donleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners. In 2004, the New York Times conducted an extensive investigation which found that, according to many high-level military intelligence and law enforcement officials, out of the nearly 600 detainees at Guantanamo, only between a dozen and two dozen could actually provide any useful information about al-Qaeda.
According to the Seton Hall study, 86% of the detainees were just given to the Americans by either the Pakistanis or Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. Many of these were turned over for bounty payments. "The problem was," says Admiral John Hutson, the Navy's top lawyers, "we were offering bounties, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 [for Taliban or al-Qaeda, respectively] and so, 'okay, fine, here's your money,' and they take them to Gitmo." Hutson, who was judge advocate general until 2000, says that the US essentially bought Badr and many other prisoners. "[W]hen you look at the economy at that part of the world, you know, that really is a kind of king's ransom." How many of the Guantanamo detainees are innocent of any terrorist ties, and were turned over to the Americans either for revenge, for spite, or for profit? Apparently a large majority.
The problem of sorting out actual POWs from everyone else taken in the so-called "fog of war" is an old one. The Geneva Conventions mandate that all captives be given what is called a "competent tribunal," an impromptu court hearing shortly after a battle, to determine whether the individual captive should be held or released. Typically, 75% to 90% of the captives are released within hours or days at most. In the 1991 Gulf War, the US captured 982 people, released 750 of them almost immediately, and kept the rest as POWs under Geneva, which guaranteed, among other things, that they wouldn't be tortured and would be released at the end of the war. But Bush's new war on terror is, for all intents and purposes, never-ending. And his administration has agreed that terror suspects, as they are not uniformed fighters serving a particular nation, do not fall under the Geneva protocols. "They do not apply where the individuals captured haven't deserved, haven't shown that they deserved these protocols," said Brian Boyle, an associate attorney general when those decisions were made. "They did not legally qualify as prisoners of war because they were not fighting in uniform, because they try to blend in with the civilian population, because they try to take cover in civilian areas."
Of course that kind of "guerrilla warfare" has been a hallmark of all 20th century conflicts, and before as well. The very same tactics are celebrated in American schoolchildren's history books when they learn about the Revolutionary War.
Another powerful argument against torture is the idea of retaliation: if you torture the members of our forces that you capture, we will turn around and torture yours. But Boyle went on to assert that he didn't think, "given the nature of the enemy we're facing, that how we treat al-Qaeda operatives that we're able to capture is going to make any difference at all in how they would treat American personnel in their custody. Wouldn't make a difference at all." Not only is Boyle's assertion dangerously wrong, but, as Hutson points out, "[T]hat argument can really take you to some dark places, I think." Hutson continues, "If we pick and choose, other countries can pick and choose whether they're going to apply the Geneva Conventions. That is a slippery slope that Secretary [Colin] Powell and others did not want us to go down, because they're looking over the next horizon. They know that this isn't the last war we're going to fight. It's not even the next to last war we're going to fight."
For all intents and purposes, "enemy combatants" and detainees such as Badr have few, if any, legal rights. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (who called the Geneva Conventions "quaint"), said those detainees had no right to appeal their detentions in the US court system. "...[Y]ou need not provide access to counsel," he said. "You need not provide the ability to challenge their detention in a criminal court. It would be like saying that Germans captured in World War II would have been provided lawyers. The truth of the matter is the rules and procedures of the criminal justice system simply do not apply in this case." Gonzales is correct -- but then. German prisoners were covered under Geneva.
In 2004 the Bush administration was stunned when the Supreme Court ruled that if enemy combatants and other detainees were not to be covered under Geneva, they had to be given some legal recourse. They had to be covered under one of the oldest and most revered principles of jurisprudence in Western law, habeas corpus..
Hitt calls habeas corpus a "primal," bedrock principle of the law, going back to the Magna Carta, where it was known as the "Great Writ." In Latin, the phrase means literally, "show me the body," and, in essence, means that a legal representation has to show just cause for a prisoner's detention. Convince a judge that you have a legal reason for keeping a prisoner in custody, or release him. The principle of habeas corpus is one of the reasons American colonists went to war with Great Britain in Colonial days, and is ensconsced in Article One of the US Constitution. Only after the 2004 Supreme Court ruling did Bush begin defending the rights of prisoners to have habeas corpus, saying grudgingly, "[W]e're now complying with the court's decision."
Bush's legal team decided to honor the Court's ruling by establishing a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT). The hearings have some extraordinary legal problems. For one, detainees are not allowed to have legal representation in a CSRT. For another, classified evidence presented to the court against the detainee is presumed to be factual; the detainee cannot challenge the evidence because he is not allowed to see it. In one CSRT, detainee Abdul Malik asked the judge, "Regarding the charge that I was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden's side -- who saw me?" The judge responded, "I don't know. ...This is the first time we've seen the evidence." Malik said, reasonably enough, "If it says 'frequently seen,' you have to prove that." But the CSRT does not have to prove anything.
The Supreme Court said that detainees do not warrant a full trial, but they must be provided three things: a lawyer, an impartial judge, and the chance to see and respond to the evidence against them. In practice, the detainees get none of these things.
Baher Azmy represents one Guantanamo detainee, a Turkish citizen named Murat Kurnaz. The Pentagon accidentally declassified Kurnaz's file with all of the "secret evidence" against him included therein. All of the evidence in the file points to Kurnaz's innocence. Azmy would never have known any of this had the Washington Post not printed a story based on the declassified files. Azmy says Kurnaz's file contains "six statements from military intelligence. That's really what the classified file is. Memos saying, 'this person was here' or 'so-and-so witnessed him....' In Kurnaz's case, there were five or six statements saying, 'There's no evidence of any connection to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or a threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded that he has no connection to al-Qaeda. There's no evidence linking him to the Taliban.' Over and over and over again." But none of this was presented at Kurnaz's CSRT; even Kurnaz himself knew nothing about it. He is still in Guantanamo.
The reason for Kurnaz's incarceration is ludicrous: a friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. But Kurnaz was detained in 2001, two years before Bilgin's supposedly committed suicide. Yet Bilgin's suicidal bombing is cited as the reason for keeping Kurnuz in Guantanamo. It gets better: Bilgin never blew himself up, and is alive, well, and living in Germany. Azmy has spoken with him, and German intelligence has confirmed his identity and his innocence of any connections to any terrorist groups. Yet Kurnuz remains in prison.
Another shocking example is that of a group of Uighurs in detention. The Uighurs are Chinese Muslims accidentally picked up in Afghanistan. The Uighurs have no connection to any Islamist terror group -- in fact, they have been opposing the Chinese communists since World War II. Hitt says, "Conservatives love the Uighurs, which is why they've been passionately defended by the National Review and the Weekly Standard." The Defense Department has long since determined that the Uighurs are not terrorists and pose no threat to Americans. The US government has said it would release them if it could find a country to send them to. At least two possible locations exist inside the US -- the city of Miami, whose fervently anti-Castro and anti-communist Cuban population would welcome them, or the large community of Uighurs living and working in Washington, DC. But Sabin Willett, a lawyer who volunteered to represent one of the Uighurs, says they will not be released any time soon. Why not?
"I'll tell you what I think the answer is," says Willett, "although no one from the government would admit this. I think the answer is that if anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them, and took their pictures, and, you know, had them on TV shows or the radio, they'd be shocked. Because they've been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists, that they're the worst of the worst. And you take a look at Adel [his client], you're gonna suddenly realize you've been lied to for a long time. He struck me when I first met him like the kind of kid your college-age kid would bring home -- his roommate, his buddy from college, home for the weekend. People who meet Adel for the first time, they walk out of the meeting and their jaws are a little unsprung. And they don't say much, because it's hitting them like a ton of bricks. You know, 'This guy's in Guantanamo?'"
"[T]his gets to the heart of habeas," says Hitt. "The whole point is that the king shouldn't have the right to just detain somebody because it would be an embarrassment to have the guy free." The Pentagon classified people like the Uighurs as "NLEC" -- No Longer Enemy Combatants. But Willett says a better classification would be "Never Was Enemy Combatant." The problem with creating an offshore legal limbo, where there's no habeas proceeding to separate the al-Qaeda fighter from the comedy writer, comes during interrogation. If we've labeled them as terrorists, then that's how they get treated.
A case in point is that of detainee Jumah al-Dossari. For a while, the government thought al-Dossari might have been a recruiter for al-Qaeda in the US, and involved with the so-called "Lackawanna Six." But none of this was brought up in al-Dossari's CSRT hearing. The government just labeled him as al-Qaeda, and as proof, merely listed the places he's been -- Afghanistan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan. The government said he was fighting in some of those places, but gave no proof, no witness statements, nothing but the unsupported allegation. One allegation is that al-Dossari was present at Tora Bora during the November 2001 battle. The government doesn't even allege that al-Dossari was involved in any fighting, just that he was there. Al-Dossari says he has never been to Tora Bora. His lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, says, "[E]ven if that allegation is true, frankly it doesn't prove anything. Absent some evidence of some involvement in terrorist activity, I simply don't know how you can call someone a terrorist."
The interrogators at Guantanamo tried numerous "techniques" out on al-Dossari, according to his lawyer. He was thrown on the ground and urinated on. Guards put lit cigarettes out on his skin. He was shocked with electricity, spat on, beaten until he vomited blood, threatened with rape and murder. Guards poured cups of scalding hot tea over his head. He was left in a frigidly air-conditioned room with only shorts and no water except the water in his toilet. He was posed for pictures wrapped in an Israeli flag, and was told he would be sent to Egypt for further torture. A female MP threw what she said was menstrual blood on his face. Much of this was, according to al-Dossari, videotaped. While none of this can be independently confirmed, other prisoners and American officials at Guantanamo have independently corroborated every detail of al-Dossari's allegations as done to other prisoners. Al-Dossari has attempted suicide more than once.
Margulies, the lawyer representing some of the detainees, says he doesn't believe that any of the Guantanamo prisoners are of any value or are even real-life terrorists. He says that the real terrorists are "in CIA custody," around 30 of them, "in black sites that we don't even know where they are. The people who are of any significance never arrived at Guantanamo.... And they said at the time that these were the worst of the worst, they were trained killers, they would gnaw through hydraulic lines to bring down the plane that was flying them to Guantanamo. ...I mean, they used the most inflammatory rhetoric, and it very quickly became apparent that they were just mistaken. And then they were stuck with this PR nightmare. And at the same time, there was this sense, this nagging sense, that maybe they really are bad and we just can't find out. Maybe they're not Afghan dirt farmers as all appearances seem to be. How do we really know? Maybe we need to use more aggressive techniques to find out. So they kept turning up the heat and using more and more coercive techniques on people who were less and less significant." Hitt says the best way to find out who is a real al-Qaeda terrorist and who is not is habeas corpus.
175 members of the British Parliament filed a friend-of-the-court briefing with the US Supreme Court arguing that the detainees' rights to habeas corpus must be protected. "As members of Parliament of Westminster, amic. [friends of the court] have a duty to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms against the misuse of public power. The due process of law is deeply rooted in Anglo-American legal and political heritage. The exercise of executive power without possibility of judicial review jeopardizes the keystone of our existence as nations, namely the rule of law, as well as the effective protection of human rights."
The brief reminded the Court of the last time the British tried to suspend habeas corpus -- in 1660, during a civil war, where the British government "created their own version of Guantanamo Bay, and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief." Even though the king's chief advisor at the time, Lord Clarendon, believed he was justified in incarcerating his era's version of domestic terrorists -- they had murdered the previous king, they had committed horrific acts of violent insurrection -- and even though only the most extreme radicals were advocating principles such as "innocent until proven guilty" and "one man, one vote," and even though London was adorned with rebel heads on pikes almost anywhere you looked -- still, the country was shocked by Clarendon's disregard for habeas corpus. In 1679, the Habeas Corpus Act was passed, and the principle has remained a foundation of the British legal system ever since. The British also noted in the brief that during World War II, Churchill wanted to suspend the rights of Nazi prisoners of war and just execute them. The Americans refused to go along with Churchill's idea.
One prisoner, 19-year old Abdullan al-Noaimi, who was sold for a bounty to the Americans, says when the guards got to know him and his fellow prisoners, their own doubts about the prisoners became increasingly clear. One guard told al-Noaimi, "I was trained that everybody here is, like, monsters. They're gonna jump from the cages and gonna, like, tear you up and everything. ...We thought it was different. We thought the American forces captured you in a battle or something." Some actually apologized to al-Noaimi for mistreating him, and told him, "If I don't follow orders, I'm going to be in your place." After four years in custody with no charges ever filed, al-Noaimi was told he could go home, if he signed a contract promising not to ever join a terrorist group, and giving the Americans permission to re-arrest him at any time. Al-Noaimi balked over the second provision. He refused to sign, and was eventually released anyway. "The government lawyer, he didn't say a mistake, like the vocabulary for mistake," al-Noaimi recalls. "Like, he said, 'We picked you up as an enemy combatant, but it turned out that you're not one, we don't say you're an enemy combatant.' He just gave me an example of a mistake, but he didn't say, 'We made a mistake.'"
Al-Noaimi says that many Americans will regard him as a terrorist no matter what he did or didn't do, simply because he was incarcerated in Guantanamo. He says, "[E]ven if I were an angel, I would be still be a terrorist to them, because it's the thing that they wanted. People don't want to take responsibility for their mistakes, that's it. They want to put it on others. It's like slaughtering a sheep, for example, and when the sheep keeps shaking and the blood's spilling all over the place, they'd scream at it and say, 'You're a bad sheep! Bad, bad sheep, because your blood came on my clothes or my dress.' You know what I'm saying? They would take you, maybe torture you, or maybe kill you, or maybe put you under so much stress, and then they would say, 'You're a bad person,' because you'd been through these things. Why did you put me through those things in the first place?" (Chicago Public Radio [PDF file])

"We, as a Congress, have to stand up to a president who acts like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution were repealed on September 11." -- Senator Russ Feingold, March 12, 2006

Iraq Study Group launched

March 15: The US Institute for Peace, a non-partisan, non-profit organization funded by the US government and chaired by Republican House member Frank Wolf, launches its Iraq Study Group,
Iraq war and occupation
mandated to begin analyzing the US occupation of Iraq and finding a way to effectively continue, and possibly end, the US military presence in that country. The ISG is headed by co-chairmen James Baker, the former Secretary of State to Bush I and a close Bush family friend and enabler, and conservative Democrat Lee Hamilton, a former House member. The other members, all well-known political figures, are four Republicans: former CIA head Robert Gates, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and former House member Alan Simpson; and four Democrats: corporate honcho and Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan, former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former senator Charles Robb. (Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger will replace Gates in November 2006 after Gates is selected to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.) 44 other staff members and researchers work for the committee. No strong voice for withdrawal from Iraq is present on the committee, and the partisanship is centered on the Republican side of the group. The ISG says from the outset that it will not issue its recommendations until after the November 7 midterm elections. Daily Kos blogger "JimPortlandOR" writes, "Since Baker has said publicly that the ISG is meeting with Bush II to find out what would be acceptable to Bush, we can't count on any strong recommendations for withdrawal to be forthcoming. [Democrats may] need to fight to prevent the Congressional Dems all lining up to endorse more of the stay-the-course (or increase troops) under some other label. This isn't going to be a group that recommends a firm timetable for withdrawal, and any short-term ([less than] 1 year) reduction of troops." (US Institute for Peace, Daily Kos)

March 16: General John Abizaid, the supreme commander of all US forces in the Middle East, gives carefully upbeat testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Iraq war and occupation
Republican senator Elizabeth Dole blames the media for the idea that Iraq is such a mess. "Now knowing the great progress that's been made, continues to be made, all the accomplishments in Iraq" she says, "it's got to be frustrating to hear accounts from our media that offer sometimes nothing but negativity and pessimism." Abizaid tactfully says that he doesn't think the media has much impact on troop morale in Iraq. Afterwards, Abizaid visits Congressman John Murtha, the conservative Democrat who has emerged as the voice of the anti-war movement, and who continues to draw headlines for his blunt assessments of Iraq and his demands for phased troop withdrawals. Abizaid raises his hand from the table, holds his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart, and tells Murtha, "We're that far apart." (Bob Woodward)

March 17: Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of a daily Christian radio show,
Religious conservatives
says that all other religions are Satanic: "Well, I would have to say as a Christian that I believe any belief system, any world view, whether it's Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or dialectical materialism for that matter, Marxism, that keeps persons captive and keeps them from coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, yes, is a demonstration of satanic power." (MediaMatters)

March 19: California Republican representatives John Doolittle, Katherine Harris, and Virgil Goode,
Randy Cunningham corruption investigation
are named by convicted fellow Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham as helping Cunningham arrange federal funding for the defense contractors who bribed him. Doolittle is particularly of interest. A member of two key committees in the House (Appropriations and Administration) and the Secretary of the House Republican Conference, Doolittle are well-positioned to help corrupt defense contractors gain funding through Congressional earmarks. While neither Doolittle, Harris, or Goode have been accused of criminal wrongdoing -- yet -- all have admitted assisting either Mitchell Wade or Brent Wilkes, co-conspirators in the Cunningham case, at a time when the two businessmen were giving them tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions.
And Doolittle received a direct monetary benefit from those contributions through commissions paid to his wife, Julie. Julie Doolittle, who has served as her husband's campaign consultant, charged his campaign as his Superior California Political Action Committee a 15 percent commission on any contribution she helped bring in.
Between 2002 and 2005, Wilkes and his associates and lobbyists gave Doolittle's campaign and political action committee $118,000, more than they gave any other politician, including Cunningham. Calculations based on federal and state campaign records suggest that Doolittle's wife received at least $14,400 of that money in commissions. Meanwhile, Doolittle helped Wilkes get at least $37 million in government contracts.
San Diego attorney Stanley Zubel, who heads Californians for a Cleaner Congress, a nonpartisan watchdog group, says that Julie Doolittle's commissions raise troubling questions about whether the congressman personally benefited from his support of Wilkes's projects. "For all practical purposes, when someone's wife earns money, then he earns money, especially in a community-property state like California," Zubel says. "He can't separate this out and say, 'This is my wife's money.' If she's getting a benefit, he's getting a benefit."
Critics question how much fundraising Julie Doolittle needed to do for the campaign. "After several years on the Appropriations Committee, John Doolittle has reached the point in his career where fundraising should be on autopilot," says Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that monitors campaign fundraising. "He shouldn't have to rely on his wife or anyone else to keep his coffers full."
Media research shows that Julia Doolittle's firm only has three other clients: Greenberg Traurig, the lobbying firm that employed Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud and tax-evasion charges; Abramoff's Washington restaurant, Signatures; and the Korea-US Exchange Council, founded by Ed Buckham, one-time chief of staff for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who has his own ties to Abramoff. The Korean group, which lobbied for improved US-Korean relations, was based at the headquarters of Buckham's Alexander Strategy Group, which dissolved in January because of negative publicity over its ties to Abramoff. Wilkes also was an Alexander Strategy client. (Richard Robinson, John Doolittle's chief of staff, insists that Julia Doolittle has other clients, but refuses to provide their names "out of respect for the privacy of the clients.")
Prosecutors in the Abramoff investigation have subpoenaed Julie Doolittle for information regarding her work for Abramoff's firm, which included planning fundraising events for his charity, the Capital Athletics Foundation. Records released by the Senate show that Abramoff used the foundation -- whose official purpose was to raise money for underprivileged children -- to bankroll some of his lobbying efforts.
Julie Doolittle launched Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions in March 2001, two months after her husband was named to the Appropriations Committee. The business, which is based at the couple's home in Oakton, Virginia, has no phone listing or Web site. The firm has no known employees other than Julie Doolittle. The congressman's office refuses to specify what, if any, previous fundraising experience she has. Within months of its opening, the firm was receiving commissions from her husband's campaign. Within the next two years, it was planning fundraising events for Abramoff and handling bookkeeping for the Korean lobbying group in Buckham's office suite, where DeLay's wife, Christine, also was working. Federal and state campaign records show that Julie Doolittle has received nearly $180,000 in commissions from her husband's political fundraising since late 2001. (A number of other politicians use their spouses as campaign consultants. The practice is legal as long as the spouse is doing legitimate campaign work at a fair market price.) "The question you have to ask [about Julia Doolittle] is whether a person has enough fundraising experience, training and skill so that an independent person -- not connected through a spousal relationship -- would hire them as a fundraiser," says Zubel.
Julie Doolittle was working at Buckham's offices in 2002 when Buckham introduced Brent Wilkes to her husband. Federal contracts for his flagship company, ADCS Inc., were drying up, partly because the Pentagon had been telling Congress it had little need for the company's document-scanning technology. So Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses. One was tied to the 2002 anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington. He called his proposed solution MailSafe -- similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time -- and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site. The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.
The MailSafe project foundered, but Wilkes had more success with PerfectWave, which offered a technology that could limit the amount of background noise transmitted over electronic communications. Doolittle has publicly admitted that he helped Wilkes get the $37 million in federal contracts for PerfectWave through the "earmark" process, in which legislators pencil in funding for specific projects. In October 2002, as Doolittle pushed for funding for PerfectWave, Wilkes and his associates donated $7,000 to his campaign and $10,000 to his political action committee. Julie Doolittle made $1,500 from Wilkes' contributions. Wilkes continued to contribute heavily to Doolittle through 2005, as he pressed the Appropriations Committee for earmarks for three other ventures: Optimum Composite Design, Pure Aqua Technologies and Acoustical Communications Systems.
In November 2003, Wilkes held a fundraising dinner for Doolittle at ADCS' headquarters in Poway that was catered by Wilkes' wife, Regina, who ran a catering company based in the corporate cafeteria. The 15 guests on Wilkes' invitation were all ADCS employees or partners on projects Wilkes was trying to get funded, together with their spouses. Over the next four months, members of the group gave a total of $50,000 to Doolittle's political action committee. Federal and state election records show that Julie Doolittle claimed commissions on most of those contributions, even though there is no evidence that she planned the fundraising dinner or encouraged the contributors to donate to her husband. No expenses related to the dinner are reflected on John Doolittle's financial records.
John Doolittle's last known meeting with Wilkes came in May 2004, when Wilkes flew to Las Vegas to attend a fundraiser for the congressman's political action committee. Wilkes used his corporate jet to bring the keynote speaker, Tom DeLay, and one of DeLay's staffers. Federal election records show that Julie Doolittle took a 15% commission for contributions made during the event at The Venetian hotel-casino, including an estimated $1,650 from the $11,000 donated by Wilkes, ADCS and Karl Gallant, a Buckham employee who was then lobbying on Wilkes' behalf. Weeks later, Wilkes's name began appearing in media reports of the Cunningham lobbying scandal, and his former cronies in Congress began distancing themselves from him.
Most politicians, including Harris and Goode, eventually returned Wilkes' contributions or donated the money to charity. But Doolittle kept the money, saying the contributions were legal, and says "the jury is still out" on whether Wilkes did anything illegal in pursuing contracts on Capitol Hill. It won't be long before just such a jury sentences Wilkes to a long jail term for his crimes. (San Diego Union-Tribune)

March 21: Bush addresses the statement of former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi,
Iraq war and occupation
who said of the carnage in Iraq, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." The death toll for civilians in Iraq is spiking at 50 to 60 a day. Bush disputes Allawi's assessment: "The Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war." Asked about the morning's events in Baghdad, which include insurgents overruning a police station, killing a score of policemen, and freeing the same number of prisoners, Bush merely says, "We have a plan for victory. I'm optimistic about being able to achieve a victory." He again says he isn't considering replacing Donald Rumsfeld, who Bush says is "doing a fine job," and calls the disastrously ineffective program of training Iraqi troops "a success." Bush's detachment from reality is palpable. (Bob Woodward)

March 27: Democrats demand that Bush withdraw his "signing statement" that asserts his "authority" to ignore parts of the USA Patriot Act that require him to provide periodic reports to Congress on how new law-enforcement tactics are being used.
"Unitary executive"
House members Jane Harman and John Conyers -- the ranking Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, respectively -- send a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking that Bush follow the law. "We ask that the administration immediately rescind this statement and abide by the law," they write. "Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight. The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight."
After some lawmakers raised concerns that the Patriot Act may pose a threat to civil liberties, Congress added a series of new oversight provisions to it. The law requires the Justice Department to keep track of how the FBI is using its expanded powers to monitor suspects and seize papers during counterterrorism investigations. The law required the administration to give Congress that information by certain dates. But Bush's signing statement, issued after he signed the Patriot Act reauthorization into law on March 9, declares that he has the authority to withhold the information from Congress if he decided that disclosing it would interfere with foreign relations, national security, or executive branch operations.
Bush endured similar criticism three months ago when, after Congress outlawed the torture of any detainee in US custody, he signed the bill into law and then issued a statement asserting that he had the power, as commander in chief, to ignore the law if he decided that using aggressive interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security. Bush routinely uses signing statements to announce his intention to ignore a law instead of vetoing it and risk a Congressional override. Such signing statements have no basis in law whatsoever.
Congressional Democrats are tired of Bush's illegal end-arounds. "The time to raise objections to laws Congress is [considering is] while they are pending," write Harman and Conyers. "Once the president signs a bill, he and all of us are bound by it." (Boston Globe)

Abramoff sentenced in SunCruz corruption and fraud case

March 29: Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, convicted along with his partner Adam Kidan of conspiracy and fraud,
Jack Abramoff scandal
is sentenced to five years and 10 months in prison, the minimum sentence allowable under federal sentencing guidelines. Kidan receives the same sentence; both are also ordered to pay $21 million in restitution. Both were convicted of committing fraud in the purchase of a fleet of gambling boats, concocting a fake $23 million wire transfer to make it appear they were contributing their own money toward the purchase of the $147.5 million SunCruz Casinos fleet. Based on that fraudulent transfer, lenders provided the pair with $60 million in financing. Abramoff tells the judge that he has "started the process of becoming a new man. I am much chastened and profoundly remorseful. I can only hope that the Almighty and those I have wronged will forgive my trespasses." Abramoff has not yet been sentenced for his guilty plea in defrauding Indian tribes and other lobbying clients out of millions of dollars; he is also cooperating in a corruption probe that could involve up to 20 Congressional Republicans, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Abramoff and Kidan are not required to report to prison for 90 days to allow them to continue cooperating with federal investigators in the Congressional corruption case, and in the murder investigation of former SunCruz owner Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, who was slain in 2001 during a power struggle over the fleet. Three men face murder charges, including one who worked for Kidan as a consultant at SunCruz and who allegedly has ties to New York's Gambino crime family. Neither Abramoff nor Kidan have been charged in the murder of Boulis. (Some of Abramoff's criminal activities as a Republican lobbyist have been documented elsewhere in this site.)
During sentencing, Abramoff's lawyers portrayed the deeply corrupt lobbyist as a devoutly religious man, generous to charities, devoted to his wife and five children, and filled with remorse over his crimes. They also sought to portray Abramoff as an innocent victim of Kidan in the SunCruz case: "After the company was purchased, Mr. Abramoff learned that some of the representations made by his partner were untrue," says one defense lawyer. Kidan's lawyers say Abramoff is as guilty as Kidan.
In September 2006, Abramoff's lawyers and prosecutors will ask for 90 more days of freedom for Abramoff in order to let him continue offering testimony and information into Congressional corruption. Republican House member Bob Ney is the first to fall; Ney will plead guilty to bribery and corruption charges next month. Aides to Ney and DeLay have also pled guilty to conspiring with Abramoff and an Interior Department official. (MSNBC, MSNBC)
March 29: By a 90-8 vote, the Senate approves scandal-inspired ethics legislation that would restrict lobbyist gift-giving and make lobbyist activities more accountable.
Congressional oversight
Critics say that the bill is riddled with loopholes that will allow "business as usual" in Washington. The vote comes just hours after lobbyist Jack Abramoff was given almost six years in prison for conspiracy and fraud convictions. The Senate bill emphasizes disclosure of lobbying contacts rather than new rules, and Republican senator Susan Collins says this increased openness would "make a big difference" in enhancing public confidence. "We cannot tackle the big issues facing our country if the public does not trust us to act in the public interest," Collins says. Under the bill, senators would no longer be able to accept gifts or meals from lobbyists and lobbyists would be required to reveal more information about their contacts with lawmakers. The bill does not bar lobbyists for paying for travel expenses for Congressmen, so lobbyists will still be able to fly Congressmen around the world in luxurious private jets. Neither does the bill establish a new office in the Senate to investigate ethical violations. The Senate defeated a proposal by Democratic senator Russ Feingold to extend the gift and meal ban to include people working at companies hiring lobbyists. "We ought to just stop the practice of dining out at the expense of others," he said in defense of his proposal, but Republicans joined with several Democrats to defeat the proposal 68-30. The Senate Ethics Committee, composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, led the fight to reject the new office as proposed by Collins and Democrat Joe Lieberman. Democrat Barack Obama says the independent office is necessary because, currently, the work of Congress "doesn't really matter because the American people perceive the entire ethics system, House and Senate, to be broken." The Senate Ethics Committee retorts that it, unlike its partisan, politicized sister committee in the House, is doing its job. Common Cause President Chellie Pingree says disappointedly, "Even as the Justice Department investigates possible corruption of at least half a dozen members of Congress, the Senate today is refusing to acknowledge that Congress -- in the eyes of the public -- has failed to police itself." (MSNBC)

March 30: Karl Rove warned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects
Election fraud
would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after a review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true. Rove's warning is revealed by National Journal reporter Murray Waas after Waas spoke with high-level government sources.
Hadley worried that if the public learned of a classified one-page summary from the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate ((NIE) dissenting from the administration's assertion that the uranium tubes were indeed part of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, the administration's credibility on the issue, and on the entire justification for the Iraq invasion, would be damaged. Three months later, during his State of the Union speech in January 2003, Bush told the nation that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in an attempt to further its development of nuclear weapons, saying, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." As documented throughout this site, both stories -- the Iraq-Niger uranium connection and the aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program -- were demonstrably false.
Hadley's review was part of a damage-control effort launched by the White House after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true. The CIA had sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate the purported procurement efforts by Iraq; he reported that they were most likely a hoax. The White House managed to duck responsibility for the claims by concealing evidence that Bush was aware his claims about the aluminum tubes were false, and by smearing Wilson's credibility -- in the process leaking the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a covert CIA agent. Instead, then-CIA director George Tenet took the blame for the aluminum tubes claim, and no one in the White House admitted leaking Plame's identity.
Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons, well before Bush and other officials had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon. Full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration's conduct in the months leading up to war. "Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, says, "This was about getting past the election."
Senior White House aides did everything they could to conceal Bush's knowledge that the claims about the aluminum tubes were false, including keeping the portions of the NIE that documented that fact classified, while declassifying other portions that supported their claims about Iraq's WMDs. Bush's knowledge of the State and Energy departments' dissent over the tubes was disclosed in early March 2006, over three years after the intelligence assessment was provided to Bush, and 16 months after Bush won re-election.
The NIE summary was only one of several high-level warnings given to Bush and other senior administration officials that serious doubts existed about the intended use of the tubes, according to government records and interviews with former and current officials. In mid-September 2002, two weeks before Bush received the October 2002 summary, Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons. Bush was also told that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons. Again, as documented throughout this site, US inspectors combed Iraq after the fall of the Hussein regime, and determined that Iraq's nuclear program had been moribund for more than a decade and that the aluminum tubes had been used only for conventional weapons.
The new disclosures shed light on both the White House's success in concealing their knowledge of the falsity of their claims about Iraq's WMDs until well after the 2004 election, but on the White House's decision to out Plame as part of its smear campaign against Wilson. White House officials hoped that, by revealing Plame's status as a covert CIA agent and falsely alleging that she had arranged for Wilson's trip to Niger, those revelations might cast doubt on Wilson's motives for making the trip and on his credibility. The disclosure of Plame's name was a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Though no one has as yet been charged with that crime, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, has been charged with five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements about his role in leaking Plame's identity to the press. Libby claims that he didn't intentionally deceive FBI agents in their interviews with him, blaming his conveniently faulty memory. He also falsely asserts that he only learned of Plame's identity as a CIA agent from reporter Tim Russert. His attorneys also assert that Plame's identity was disclosed during "a period of increasing bureaucratic infighting, when certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability. The White House and the CIA were widely regarded to be at war." In actuality, the White House had engaged in another smear campaign against the CIA, falsely blaming the agency for "faulty intelligence" on Iraq, after it was revealed that Bush officials knowingly disregarded CIA and other agencies' intelligence casting doubt on the existence of Iraqi WMDs.
As documented elsewhere, part of the Wilson smear campaign and the CIA smear campaign involved Libby leaking Plame's identity, and leaking classified information from the October 2002 NIE, to selected reporters, including the New York Times's Judith Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper. Libby gave Miller selected information from the NIE that indicated Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger, but did not give her other portions from the NIE that showed those claims were based on fraudulent documents. According to Miller's account of that meeting in the Times, Libby told her that "the assessments of the classified estimate" that Iraq had attempted to get uranium from Africa and was attempting to develop a nuclear weapons program "were even stronger" than a declassified CIA white paper on Iraq that the administration had made public to make the case for war.
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick Fitzgerald, says that he considers the selective disclosure of elements of the NIE to be "inextricably intertwined" with the outing of Plame. Papers filed in federal court by Libby's attorneys on March 17 stated that Libby "believed his actions were authorized" by his boss, Dick Cheney, and that he had "testified before the grand jury that this disclosure was authorized," a reference to the NIE details he gave to Miller. It is later proven that both Bush and Cheney were involved in declassifying selected portions of the NIE. Simultaneously, Hadley and other officials were working to formally declassify selected portions of the NIE, but that process had not yet been completed. "Mr. Hadley was active in discussions about the need to declassify and disseminate the NIE and [also] had numerous conversations during [this] critical early-July period with Mr. Tenet about the 16 words [the Niger claim in the State of the Union address] and Mr. Tenet's public statements about that issue," Libby's lawyers assert.
During a July 11, 2003 visit to Africa, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed that neither she nor Bush were aware of any doubts surrounding the aluminum tubes claims, a flat lie. She implied that Powell, who had already said he harbored doubts about the claims, did not pass along his knowledge of the dissents about the claims to other White House officials: "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or me." Bush was indeed informed of those doubts in the October 2002 NIE summary; both Cheney and Rice received copies of that summary, along with a number of other intelligence reports about the State and Energy departments' doubts that the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program. Shortly after Rice lied to the press, Bush told reporters that his State of the Union claims were "cleared by the intelligence services," leading Tenet to take the entire blame for the intelligence debacle. But Bush had indeed known that those claims were questionable, as did his senior officials. The decision had been made days before Tenet's acceptance of responsibility to let Tenet fall on his sword in order to protect Bush.
At the same time, Rove and Libby escalated their smear campaign against Wilson. On July 11, they spoke privately about the campaign. Rove had already spoken to conservative columnist Robert Novak and revealed Plame's identity. The next day, the issue of smearing Wilson's credibility was still a high-priority topic of discussion. In his indictment of Libby, Fitzgerald wrote, "Libby flew with the vice president and others to and from Norfolk, Virginia on Air Force Two." On the return trip, "Libby discussed with other officials aboard the plane what Libby should say in response to certain pending media inquiries" regarding Wilson's allegations. Minutes after disembarking from Air Force Two, Libby contacted Cooper and outed Plame to him as well, though Cooper had already learned about Plame from Rove days beforehand. Libby also outed Plame to Miller that same day. Three days later, Novak published a column publicly outing Plame, destroying her career as well as endangering every CIA asset she and her colleagues had ever recruited. Four days after that, on July 18, the Bush administration released declassified portions of the NIE and revealed those small, selected portions to the press to "prove" that Bush had used the Niger information only because the intelligence community had vouched for it. But reporters noted that an "alternate view" box in the NIE stated that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) believed that claims of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Africa were "highly dubious" and that State and DOE also believed that the aluminum tubes were "most likely for the production of artillery shells." When reporters asked why Bush claimed not to know about the INR dissents since they were plainly included, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett suggested that both the president and Rice had been unaware of this information: "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document." Later, Bartlett added, "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."
But reporters remained unaware that the NIE summary received by Bush had told him plainly that both State's INR and the Energy Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related purpose. Hadley had decided not to declassify the summary because it would have shown that Bush should have known about the dissents. On June 22, Hadley denied that Bush could have known about the INR and Energy dissents, and claimed, falsely, that the administration still stood by the claims about the tubes.
The deception and concealing of evidence continued well into the next year, when the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an investigation of intelligence agencies to determine why they failed to accurately assess that Saddam had no viable programs to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the US invasion. Cheney, Libby, and Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, rejected advice given to them by other White House officials and decided to withhold from the committee crucial documents that might have shown that administration claims about Iraq's capabilities often went beyond information provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among those documents was the October 2002 NIE summary. Democratic senator Richard Durbin noted in his own "Additional Views" section of the committee report that the senators had not been given the NIE summary, which was "written exclusively for the president and senior policy makers and are therefore tailored for that audience. ...In determining what the president was told about the contents of the NIE dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- qualifiers and all -- there is nothing clearer than this single page." (National Journal)
March 31: Conservative radio show host Neal Boortz calls Democratic House member Cynthia McKinney a "ghetto slut"
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
and other racial slurs while gleefully attacking McKinney over her hairstyle: "She looks like a ghetto slut. ...It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory. ...She looks like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence. ...She looks like a shih tzu! ...I saw Cynthia McKinney's hairdo yesterday -- saw it on TV. I don't blame that cop for stopping her. It looked like a welfare drag queen was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building. That hairdo is ghetto trash. I don't blame them for stopping her." (MediaMatters)

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 2006

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