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March 25: Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing US ambassador to Iraq, admits meeting with a number of representatives from major Iraqi insurgent groups last year, in an attempt to bring militant Sunni Arabs into the political process.
Iraq war and occupation
"There were discussions with the representatives of various groups in the aftermath of the elections, and during the formation of the government before the Samarra incident, and some discussions afterwards as well," says Khalilzad during a farewell interview at his home inside the fortified Green Zone. He is the first American official to publicly acknowledge holding such talks, though he says the former commander of US troops in the country, General George Casey, also took part in some of the talks. Democrats have been excoriated by Republicans and conservative media figures for suggesting such talks take place. He is slated to become the US ambassador to the United Nations.
Khalilzad began meeting with the insurgent leaders in early 2006, flying to Jordan for some of the talks. Some of the groups he met with included the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, two of the largest Sunni factions. Khalilzad refuses to give details of the meetings, but other officials say the meetings accomplished nothing, foundering after the bombings of Shi'ite mosques in Samarra. Khalilzad's meetings stand in complete contradiction to the Bush administration's stated refusals to negotiate with insurgents. But Khalilzad was given the leeway to meet with the insurgents in hopes that he could rein in the surging violence, and perhaps woo some of the groups away from the more extremist elements.
In his remarks, Khalilzad even says the US should consider giving some form of amnesty to the insurgents, a recommendation that has been treated as anathema by Bush officials. "This is something that we and Iraqis, the government, will do together, and there are various types of amnesties," he says. "But the fundamental point, the goal of bringing the war to an end, the most important tribute we could pay to our soldiers who have lost their lives here would be that the cause they fought for would be embraced and accepted by their former enemies, by those who fought them."
Khalilzad may have not met with the actual leaders of the insurgent groups, as it is difficult to know who exactly is in charge of those various groups; another fact making the talks more difficult is that many of the groups have competing ideologies. For example, the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades are believed to be led by Iraqis bitter at being ousted from the government and the military, but some of the most vicious groups are radical Islamists, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who have no interest in being brought into politics. "We were never able to find people who could reduce the violence," says one American official. "The insurgency itself does not have anything resembling a unified command. Even within different cities and different provinces, the insurgency is very fractured."
Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who is now a power broker in Baghdad and counts Khalilzad as a friend, says the talks fizzled out partly because the insurgents' representatives made untenable demands. They asked for a suspension of the Constitution, breakup of Parliament, a reinstatement of the old Iraqi Army and establishment of a new government, he says. However, Chalabi is not a reliable witness, and his statements cannot be taken as factual.
Khalilzad's outreach contrasts with the aloof and imperious demeanor of his predecessor, John Negroponte. He persuaded some Sunni Arab leaders to take part in elections for a full-term government even after he pushed through a Constitution that the Sunni Arabs abhor and that has reinforced sectarian tensions. "I think he did fine, actually, considering the circumstances," says Ayad al-Samarraie, a prominent Sunni Arab legislator. "He tried his best to be a moderator between different political leaders." Samarraie is from the Iraqi Consensus Front, the main Sunni Arab bloc that holds 44 of 275 parliamentary seats and 7 of 38 cabinet positions. Khalilzad had hoped the bloc's entry into politics would dampen the violence. Yet, a Pentagon assessment released to Congress on March 14 said the period of October to December 2006 was the most violent three-month stretch since the American invasion.
While some Sunnis appreciate Khalilzad's efforts, they have infuriated many in the ruling Shi'ite bloc, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi Shi'ites see the Americans as trying to dilute their power, which makes some Americans worry that they will turn increasingly to Iran, a nation ruled by Shi'ite Persians. Ironically, Khalilzad helped oust former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in favor of al-Maliki, who was seen as possibly more pliable. Instead, al-Maliki has aligned himself and his ruling bloc more closely with the radical Shi'ites of Moqtada al-Sadr. Some Shi'ite leaders accuse Khalilzad, a Sunni born in Afghanistan, of sectarian bias, calling him by the Sunni nickname of "Abu Omar." One Shi'ite legislator says, "He didn't transfer real power to the Iraqis. He wasn't cooperative enough with the Iraqi government in any field."
Khalilzad says the Shi'ites and Kurds will have to revise the constitution -- the one he helped write, and one that was roundly rejected by Sunni voters -- and roll back the purging of Sunni Arabs from the government. A parliamentary committee is only now starting to review the constitution, and there has been no decision on four competing proposals to overhaul de-Baathification. An oil law that could help ease sectarian tensions was approved by the cabinet last month but has yet to pass Parliament. All that leads critics of Khalilzad to say that he never brokered any lasting solutions to this country's sectarian squabbles. The aforementioned Shi'ite politician says, "Khalilzad's policy is based on compromise. He's like an Arab sheik -- he wants to make different groups sit down and compromise. That usually means putting off the hard decisions until the future." And until the constitution can be revised to give more benefits to the Sunnis, there seems little hope of any reconciliation. "The Constitution is the source of the problem," says a Sunni who sat in on the constitutional process. "It's a sectarian document." (New York Times)
March 25: The database of so-called "terrorism" intelligence information gathered in the McLean, Virginia offices of a government agency has quadrupled in the past four years, swelling from less than 100,000 files in 2003 to over 435,000 today.
Domestic spying
The database is maintained in the offices of TIDE, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. And the data -- field reports, documents, news from foreign allies, and idle gossip -- is threatening to overwhelm the analysts under the sheer volume and, in many cases, complete irrelevance of the information.
TIDE generates a huge database of information about individuals whom the intelligence community believes might pose a threat to the US. It is the source of watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border guards, and US consulates, and was created in an attempt to centralize and streamline the ability of federal agencies to correlate their knowledge of terrorist activities. But the veritable tsunami of information gathered by TIDE is proving too much for analysts to handle. "The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," says Russ Travers, the official in charge of TIDE. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?"
Many others worry that TIDE is generating a database riddled with errors and threatening the civil liberties of innocent Americans. The list combines foreigners and US citizens in a single database. It takes little to be put into the database, and is almost impossible to get removed once included. As a result, the number of privacy invasions, intrusions caused by name mixups and unconfirmed information, and other problems are rampant and growing. In 2004 and 2005, misidentifications caused tens of thousands of erroneous triggers on watch lists for US citizens innocent of any terrorist connections, with many of those misidentified denied access to passenger flights, subjected to searches and interrogations, and even incarcerations. Congressional committees charge that the process collects too much information about Americans, and others say it is ineffective at identifying and tracking real terrorists. Civil rights and privacy groups want more transparency. "How many are on the lists, how are they compiled, how is the information used, how do they verify it?" asks Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Such information is classified, and individuals barred from traveling are not told why.
The number of cases making the news are innumerable. Republican senator Ted Stevens complained last year that his wife, Catherine, was repeatedly delayed from boarding flights after being misidentified as the singer Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam, and no terrorist himself -- no one will say why Islam is barred from flying into the US). Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian imprisoned for a year in Syria at the behest of the US government after being wrongly accused of terrorist activities, remains on the watch list three years after his name was finally cleared. Democratic senator Ted Kennedy was never told why his name repeatedly popped up on watch lists. The Washington Post writes, "TIDE is a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data." But Travers says, "What's the alternative? I work under the assumption that we're never going to have perfect information -- fingerprints, DNA -- on 6 billion people across the planet.... If someone actually has a better idea, I'm all ears."
The TIDE analysts get "thousands of messages a day," says Travers, much of the data "fragmentary," "inconsistent," and "sometimes just flat-out wrong." The analysts often go back to the intelligence agencies for more details. "Sometimes you'll get sort of corroborating information," Travers says, "but many times you're not going to get much. What we use here, rightly or wrongly, is a reasonable-suspicion standard." The list is growing at a rate of 1,000 to 1,500 names a day. Currently over 30,000 people are barred from entering the US on an aircraft, and it is not known how many tens of thousands -- including many, many Americans -- are on the "watch lists" and subjected to more intense scrutiny.
The Transportation Security Agency (TSA) receives thousands of complaints each year from Americans wrongly put on the watch lists; TIDE only removed 355 names in 2005. Acting director Rick Kopel says that though the system has access to credit-card data and other highly personal information, that data is not entered into the system. Last year, the system was found by a CBS investigation to still list 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, five years after their deaths. Kopel retorts, "[W]e know for a fact that these people will use names that they believe we are not going to list because they're out of circulation -- either because they're dead or incarcerated.... It's not willy-nilly. Every name on the list, there's a reason that it's on there." (Washington Post)
March 25: Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes a scathing editorial for the Washington Post that accuses the Bush administration of using its "war on terror" to create an atmosphere of fear and, in essence, terrorize the American population.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Brzezinski writes that the damage the little phrase "war on terror" has done to America's collective psyche is incalculable, and far "greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants."
Brzezinski writes that the vagueness and generality of the phrase is a calculated one, that "stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear" that has been used by Bush officials -- he does not name Karl Rove, but the name springs to mind -- to make it easier for them to "mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue." The culture of fear gave the Bush administration the war it wanted in Iraq, and helped win Bush re-election in 2004. Bush and his campaign handlers such as Rove hammered into the electorate that it was a bad idea to change its commander-in-chief in a time of war. He writes, "The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being 'at war.'"
Brzezinski rails against the administration's attempt to create what he calls "a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier US struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan."
The result? "America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself. That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States."
Brzezinski rightly derides such talk as "fearmongering," enabled by the mass media, the entertainment industry (which gives us such shows as Fox's Islamophobic 24), and private security corporations giddily profiteering from the entire mess. Brzezinski lumps them under one ugly but accurate rubric: "terror entrepreneurs." "[T]heir task," he writes, "is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation. Americans have become ever more insensitive and inured to "security" procedures that their parents would have found intolerable. The government maintains a national database of "terror" suspects numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and a list of possible terrorist targets ranging from the Sears Tower to the Illinois Apple and Pork Festival. Electronic billboards exhort highway drivers to "Report Suspicious Activity." Guards require building visitors to fill out forms, show ID, and explain in writing the purpose of their visit. "[S]uch 'security' procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality," he writes. Activists for civil rights for minorities -- and not just Muslims -- are now routinely denouced as terrorist sympathizers.
Brzezinski concludes, "Where is the US leader ready to say, 'Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia'? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions. (Washington Post)
March 25: Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee gives additional weight to allegations that the Bush administration has improperly, and perhaps even criminally, politicized the Justice Department for its own political ends.
US Attorney firings
"The political decision-making process that led to the dismissal of eight United States attorneys was standard practice in the Civil Rights Division years before these revelations," says Joseph Rich, the recently retired head of the division's voting rights section. "This connection should not be minimized." (See earlier items about Bush's packing of the Civil Rights Division with right-wing ideologues. Current and former CRD officials testify about how their appointed superiors have deliberately and repeatedly bottled up cases that might harm the electoral position of Republicans, while encouraging the staff to pursue matters that might damage Democrats' prospects of election.
These critics are tying in their allegations to the recent firings of eight US attorneys, and remind the House members present at the hearings that at least two of the eight, David Iglesias and John McKay, say they were pressured by Republican Party leaders to pursue baseless voter fraud cases against Democrats. Rich, a 37-year department veteran, said a partisan litmus test in hiring and decision-making has undermined a tradition of nonpartisan professionalism in the division. "Unfortunately, since this administration took office, that professionalism and nonpartisan commitment to the historic mission of the division has been replaced by unprecedented political decision-making," he says. Rich's views are backed by other department veterans who had left the department in recent years. Many, like Rich, have joined civil rights organizations, such as the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where Rich now works. "The US attorneys' firing confirmed my view that at the highest levels of DOJ it was decided that politics would play a role in how decisions were made," says Mark Posner, a former civil rights division attorney who contributed to a book-length report released by a civil rights group in Washington last week called "The Erosion of Rights: Declining Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Bush Administration."
The most recent case cited in testimony concerns a 2005 Georgia law that required voters to provide photo identification. Staff attorneys raised concerns about the law after the Georgia secretary of state supplied data showing that tens of thousands of voters might not have driver's licenses or other prescribed forms of identification. They said the plan could effectively disenfranchise large numbers of black voters. The staff objections were ignored, department veterans said, and the Georgia ID rule was approved by the Justice Department 24 hours after the staff report was filed.
Rich and other former department staff have also charged that redistricting cases reviewed by the division have consistently benefited the GOP. These cases were particularly sensitive because redistricting has been a high priority for Karl Rove and earlier GOP strategists. Republican success in redrawing congressional districts has helped increase the number of so-called safe seats for GOP candidates in recent years, especially in the South. Delays by political appointees effectively allowed "the Republican Party in Mississippi to obtain implementation of a congressional redistricting plan that had been drawn at the party's behest," Rich says. Rich adds that unanimous staff objections to the Texas redistricting plan engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were ignored, and the plan was approved with encouragement from Republican officials in the department.
Though legal actions have generally declined in the division since Bush was elected, Rich and others say that shortly before the 2004 election, the division filed a series of "friend of the court briefs" in three cases challenging ballot provisions of the federal voting statute. "In each case, the brief supported the position of the Republican party," Rich says. (Los Angeles Times/LexisNexis)
March 25: As the leak of partial results into the death by friendly fire of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan cause a sensation in the media, Democrat Mike Honda, who represents Tillman's former San Jose district, says he will call for Congressional hearings into the matter.
War in Afghanistan
Honda is livid at the leaks, calling them unfair to Tillman's family, who have long accused the Pentagon of stonewalling their demands for information into Tillman's death. Tillman was accidentally shot to death by his fellow Army Rangers during a firefight. "I am dismayed that the family of Army Ranger Pat Tillman was not afforded the opportunity to review the results of the investigation into his death prior to their public release," Honda says. "The Tillmans have been subjected to great sorrow beginning with Pat's death and over the course of a deeply flawed and possibly dishonest series of prior investigations."
The final report on Tillman's death, by the Defense Department inspector general, is due to be released on March 26, but the Pentagon released partial results of the report on March 23. The probe will find nine officers, including as many as four generals, at fault for mishandling and falsifying information after Tillman's death. Though the evidence suggests otherwise, the report will conclude that there was no orchestrated coverup of the circumstances surrounding Tillman's death.
After Tillman's death, in a one-sided firefight where, apparently, all the fire came from his own unit, the Pentagon told the public and Tillman's family that he died at the hands of the Taliban, and tried to paint Tillman as a hero, spinning an almost comic-book story of Tillman's heroic death while gunning down the enemy, and awarding Tillman a posthumous Silver Star. "He ordered his team to dismount and then maneuvered the Rangers up a hill near the enemy's location," said a release from the US Army Special Command. "As they crested the hill, Tillman directed his team into firing positions and personally provided suppressive fire. ...Tillman's voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces." But within days, top military commanders knew that Tillman had died due to errant fire from his own fellows. Part of the reason for the orchestrated lies from the Pentagon is that at the time of Tillman's death, on April 22, 2004, was that at the time the country was outraged over the exposure of the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandals. In order to divert public attention from the prison stories, Pentagon and White House officials played up Tillman's death, painting him as a movie-star hero. Ironically, Tillman was by all accounts a brave and honorable soldier, who turned down a lucrative NFL contract to serve his country; though his death was the result of a horrific series of errors, his honor remains unstained. The honor of his superior officers, and that of the White House who tried to turn his death into a movie script for their own political ends, has been irrevocably besmirched. Says Tillman's father, "They blew up their poster boy."
On March 27, Tillman's mother, Mary, tells ESPN's Dan Patrick, "It became very obvious early on that they were lying to us. They were only telling one side of the story. They weren't telling the other side." Mrs. Tillman says the investigation into how her son's death was misreported was little more than a sideshow. Everyone involved in the shooting knew almost immediately that her son had been shot three times in the head by his own troops, she says, but at the memorial service for her son in May 2004, the military said Pat Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. "That was not a misstep, that was not an error," she tells Patrick. "This was an attempt to dupe the public and to promote this war and to get recruitments up, and that is immoral." "Pat was used," she adds. "Once he was killed, I think they saw this as an opportunity." She notes that April 2004 was the worst month up to that time in the year-old Iraq war, and the shooting occurred right after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. The report itself is worthless, she says: "The first investigative officer, in his statement to the third investigative officer, said in his opinion, there was evidence of criminal intent, and he also used the term 'criminal negligence.' Yet his report has been devalued because it doesn't go along with what they want out in the public eye."
"It is my sincere hope that the Department of Defense reveals, at long last, the complete truth in this matter, and explains its successive failures to do so in the years following Pat's fratricide," Honda says. "Should this not be the result of the latest investigations, I will immediately call for congressional hearings to bring justice to Pat's memory, closure for his family and to ensure service members' confidence in their commanding officers and civilian superiors."
On March 30, the AP reveals that General Stanley McChrystal warned his superior, General John Abizaid, that Tillman was likely killed by friendly fire a mere seven days after Tillman's death. The Pentagon waited over a month before making its first guarded admissions that Tillman may have died at the hands of his own fellows. McChrystal wrote in the memo to Abizaid that Bush needed to be notified immediately; the White House denies that Bush ever say the McChrystal memo. McChrystal was, and still is, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, head of "black ops" forces. He has since been promoted to lieutenant general. Abizaid was in charge of American forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. McChrystal said in the memo that he worreid that Bush and the Pentagon might try to misstate the circumstances behind Tillman's death. He added, "The potential that he might have been killed by friendly fire in no way detracts from his witnessed heroism or the recommended personal decoration for valor in the face of the enemy." (San Francisco Chronicle, Editor and Publisher, CNN, AP/Guardian)
March 25: Teams of undercover New York City police officers spied on possible protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention for at least a year before the convention, journeying around the country and even to Canada and Europe.
Antiwar protests
As a result of the spying, numerous protesters, including members of the peaceful War Resisters League, were arrested during a march in August 2004. NYPD officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists. They posed as friendly, sympathetic figures, sharing meals, posting messages, taking part in Internet chats, and swapping e-mails, all the while filing daily reports with the department's Intelligence Division.
While the NYPD successfully identified a number of groups and individuals who had at least some interest in causing havoc during the convention, potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped "NYPD Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law. These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.
The NYPD shared much of its information with other police departments, much of which were reports on lawful activities that are protected by free-speech and privacy laws. One police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on October 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos. "Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda," read the October 9, 2003 report. "Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event." The strong impression is that the NYPD, and other departments, regarded any antiwar or anti-Bush protests as inherently criminal.
NYPD officers traveled to, among other places, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, DC, and even to Europe.
The operation was mounted in 2003 after the NYPD, using 9/11 and the prospects of future terrorist attacks as justification, won greater authority from a sympathetic federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity. It is still unclear just how widespread the department's newfound powers are, and how seriously they contravene the Constitution. Some details are emerging from documents elicited by federal lawsuits, and from still-secret reports examined by the New York Times. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne readily admits the extent of the operation, and calls it an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention. "Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way," he says. Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York, like those in many other big cities, have operated under special limits as a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu. "All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu review," Browne says. Before monitoring political activity, the police must have "some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated," United States District Court Judge Charles Haight said in a ruling last month.
Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, says the NYPD stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program. "The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging NYPD program was wrong and illegal," Dunn says. "In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department's political surveillance operation." One series of depositions to be taken is from deputy police commissioner for intelligence David Cohen, whom the lawsuits call "central to the NYPD's efforts to collect intelligence information prior to the RNC." Cohen is a former senior CIA official.
The NYPD constructed its own intelligence department after the 9/11 attacks, at the behest of police commissioner Raymond Kelly. Cohen said in September 2002 that the NYPD's intelligence-gathering capabilities were essential to fighting terrorism. "Given the range of activities that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the NYPD must be available to conduct investigations into political activity and intelligence-related issues," he wrote in a court affidavit. In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.
Browne blames what he calls "a relatively small group of self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including vandalism" for the extraordinary precautions and privacy violations. "Our goal was to safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike." The department chose to use the intelligence resources intended for fighting terrorism to collect information on people participating in political protests.
A few intelligence reports by the police concerned people and groups with an idea towards trouble, but the vast majority of the reports covered the plans -- and views -- of people with no discernible intention of breaking the law. By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics. From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups' plans. Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests, marked "Secret," were circulated weekly under the heading "Key Findings."
Some of the perceived threats included:
- an antigentrification group in Montreal that claimed responsibility for fake bombs planted at construction sites of luxury condominiums, intended to draw attention to the homeless; the police drew connections between that group and a band of anarchist-Communists whose leader had recently visited New York;
- a planned campaign of "electronic civil disobedience" to jam fax machines and hack into Web sites;
- a few people's plans to get into delegates' hotels by making hair salon appointments or dinner reservations, perhaps with the intent of confronting the delegates and embarrassing them on camera;
- disabling charter buses and trying to confuse delegates by switching subway signs or by sealing off subway stations with crime-scene tape;
- one group's plans to block intersections; that report included mention of past demonstrations where various groups -- not the group under surveillance -- used nails and ball bearings as weapons, and threw balloons filled with urine.
The range of people targeted for surveillance ranged from Richard Picariello, a man who had been convicted in 1978 of politically motivated bombings in Massachusetts, to Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. For his master's thesis project, Kinberg devised a "wireless bicycle" equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or street. The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint. Kinberg's bicycle was "capable of transferring activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks," according to a report on July 22, 2004. "This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during the RNC," the report reads dramatically, "is capable of spraying anti-RNC-type messages on surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of escape." Kinberg was arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC's Hardball program during the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held for more than a year. Kinberg recalls that after his arrest, detectives with the terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. "I'm an artist," he told his interrogators. "I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs." Kinberg adds, "There's no reason I should have been placed on any kind of surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech, and the ability of thousands of people who were sending in messages for the bike, to exercise their free speech." Kinberg has yet to receive his bicycle back.
Most of the groups under surveillance gave no sign of any planned wrongdoing. One group, the "Man- and Woman-in-Black Bloc," planned to protest outside a party at Sotheby's for Tennessee's Republican delegates with Johnny Cash's career as its theme. Another, the satirical performance group Billionaires for Bush, was described as follows: "Billionaires for Bush is an activist group forged as a mockery of the current president and political policies. Preliminary intelligence indicates that this group is raising funds for expansion and support of anti-RNC activist organizations." BOB member Marco Ceglie says he thought the group was under surveillance by either police officers or federal agents during weekly meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004. "It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, 'First name, last name?' Ceglie recalls. "Some people didn't care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn't want to make a big stink because we didn't want to look paranoid. We applied to the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there's a file, but the answer came back that 'we cannot confirm or deny.'" Ceglie says the group is entirely peaceful and avoids provoking arrests.
Another group, the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization founded in 1923, were arrested two minutes after they began a silent march from the World Trade Center site, where they eventually planned to hold a "die-in" at Madison Square Garden. Charges against the group's members were later dropped, but the intent of preventing them from holding public demonstrations was clear.
Even a group planning a January 2004 ceremony honoring the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was targeted because the ceremony was in part a protest, according to the police, against "the RNC, the war in Iraq and the Bush administration." The report noted that three members of the City Council at the time, Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry Seabrook, "have endorsed this event." Others supporting it, the report said, were the New York City AIDS Housing Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the Liberation of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project.
Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the city Law Department said the preconvention intelligence justified detaining them all for fingerprinting. More importantly, it removed them from public protests which might have caused embarrassing media coverage. (New York Times)

March 26: Add at least 770 more to the official tally of America's war dead in Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
These are civilians working for private contractor and security firms whose personnel are serving for pay in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these dead are working in logistics -- truck drivers, cooks, laundry workers, and security guards. Adding their numbers to the official death toll of, at the moment, around 3,200, their numbers raise the death count of American war dead by about 25%.
Until now, few family members of these slain contract employees have spoken out, but now some are publicly complaining that their loved ones' sacrifices are being ignored by the government and the US public. They are also charging that their family members died because they were given inadequate protection. And some say that the families' financial and psychological hardships have been run over roughshod by the contracting companies that promised to help them. "I think these deaths are glossed over and swept under the carpet," says Hollie Hulett, whose husband, Stephen, was killed in an ambush in Iraq on April 9, 2004, while driving a truck for KBR, formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of oil services giant Halliburton. "I don't think anybody, including the Pentagon and the companies that hire these contractors, want it to be known that it is that dangerous over there and they are sending them out into a mess."
So far, the White House has refused to discuss how reliant the US military effort in Iraq is on private contractors. In Congressional testimony last year, Defense Department officials admitted that they don't bother to keep track of how many contractors are at work in Iraq and Afghanistan or how many casualties they have suffered. "We want to know how many contractors and subcontractors there are, the total cost of the contracts, the number of dead and wounded contractors," says Democratic representative Jan Schakowsky, who has introduced a bill to require the Bush administration to collect and publicize such information. "This is basic information.... When you don't even count [the contractor deaths], you mask the cost in life of this war." The most common estimate of the number of contractors currently working for U.S. firms in Iraq is 100,000, according to military analysts, but that figure includes unknown proportions of Americans, Iraqis and citizens of other countries.
The number of 770 dead in Iraq comes from the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Division of the US Labor Department, which computes the figures from workers' compensation claims filed under the federal Defense Base Act. But those figures, which also count 7,761 contract workers injured in Iraq, understate the actual number of casualties because they do not include killings of off-duty workers. Nor do they specify the nationalities of the dead and wounded. What is clear is that KBR, the Houston-based company that holds the largest Pentagon services contract, has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors at work in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait who are driving fuel and supply trucks, cooking meals, delivering mail and generally supporting the US military in the region. So far, according to the company, 99 KBR employees have been killed on the job, most of them in Iraq.
The war-zone jobs are lucrative and highly sought after, and KBR insists that it is committed to helping its workers and their families. Family members, some of whom are suing KBR and Halliburton over the deaths of their loved ones, say that KBR is lying. "It was like pulling teeth trying to find out from KBR what happened to Steve," says Hulett, whose husband was among six KBR employees killed when their convoy was ambushed along a route where fighting between Iraqi insurgents and US forces had been raging for several days. "Later on, I asked KBR to continue paying my health insurance -- I couldn't afford the COBRA for it, almost $800 per month. They refused. They wouldn't help." Richard Zbryski, whose brother Walter was a KBR truck driver before his death in Iraq, says company officials "were going to dump my brother at the airport, and that was the extent of them taking care of it" until Zbryski contacted several New York newspapers about the story. Only after that did KBR agreed to cover his brother's funeral costs.
Ray Stannard, who was wounded in the ambush that killed Hulett, says he believes he and many of his colleagues suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but that KBR refuses to help. "The first day I got back, I thought I was going to get help from KBR," Stannard says. "A lot of us who survived that thing, we are all having nightmares. But they never even called us to follow up. When I got ahold of one of the KBR secretaries higher up, she said they had a lot of people who have gone through that, you're not anything different than anyone else." The former KBR workers and their families say they receive criticism from skeptics who said the dead and injured workers ought to have known the dangers they were facing and deserved no special sympathy. That attitude offends Steven Schooner, a law professor at George Washington University and a former military officer who is an expert on Pentagon procurement and the use of private contractors to support US military operations. "People think of the contractors, alive or dead, as profiteers, adventurers, mercenaries or the like, whereas anyone in uniform who dies is a patriot and a hero," he says. "That's appalling. These are workers who are there to enable the US military to do its job. And when the going got tough, they didn't go home." (Chicago Tribune)
March 26: Seriously injured Army troops are being redeployed to Iraq, regardless of their medical conditions.
Iraq war and occupation
The examples, as collected by Salon reporter Mark Benjamin, are appalling. Army Specialist Edgar Hernandez injured an ankle during physical training. After surgery, he was slated to begin physical therapy on the ankle once the cast came off. Instead, two days after the cast came off, Hernandez was sent to a remote desert site in California for training rather than let him rehabilitate at Fort Benning, where his unit, the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infanty Division, was in training for deployment. Hernandez says he couldn't walk, much less resume training for wartime deployment. "Did they not realize that I'm hurt and I needed this physical therapy?" he recalls thinking. "I was told by my doctor and my physical therapist that this was crazy." Hernandez has already served two tours in Iraq.
Hernandez may have felt singled out by the Army. But when he arrived at the 1,000-square-mile mock battlefield at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, he was shocked to see who awaited him inside his tent barracks. There were dozens of other hurt soldiers. Some were on crutches, and others had arms in slings. Some had debilitating back injuries. And nearby was another tent, housing female soldiers with health issues ranging from injuries to pregnancy.
Hernandez is one of a dozen soldiers assigned to Fort Irwin, all with serious injuries, interviewed by Benjamin. All of the soldiers say they had no business being sent to Fort Irwin given their physical condition. In some cases, soldiers were sent there even though their injuries were so severe that doctors had previously recommended they should be considered for medical retirement from the Army. (See related items in the February 2007 page of this site.)
Military experts say they suspect that the deployment to Fort Irwin of injured soldiers was an effort to pump up manpower statistics used to show the readiness of Army units. With the military increasingly strained after four years of war, Army readiness has become a critical part of the debate over Iraq. Some congressional Democrats have considered plans to limit the White House's ability to deploy more troops unless the Pentagon can certify that units headed into the fray are fully equipped and fully manned.
This story relates to a previously reported story in Salon, excerpted in the February 2007 page of this site, that showed seriously injured or debilitated soldiers from Hernandez's 3rd Brigade were summarily downgraded by military doctors at Fort Benning in February, apparently so that the Army could send them to Iraq. Some of those soldiers, like Hernandez, were among the group sent to Fort Irwin to train in January.
Hernandez and some of the other injured soldiers did not begin training after arriving at Fort Irwin. "They had all of us living in a big tent," says Specialist Lincoln Smith, who spent the month there along with Hernandez and others. Smith is an Army truck driver, but because of his health issues, which include sleep apnea and narcolepsy, Smith is currently barred from driving military vehicles. "I couldn't go out and do the training." Smith's records list his problems as "permanent" and recommend that he be considered for retirement from the Army because of his health. Another soldier, a 20-year veteran with severe back problems and psychiatric issues, was sent to Fort Irwin to redeploy to Iraq, even though Army doctors wrote "unable to deploy overseas" on her medical records.
The Army refuses to admit how many injured soldiers were sent to Fort Irwin. None of the soldiers could say for sure, but they say the number was "dozens." Hernandez and others described a pitiful scene at Irwin. "You had people out there with crutches and canes," recalls an Army captain, who was being considered for medical retirement himself because of serious back injuries sustained in a Humvee accident during a previous combat tour in Iraq. "Soldiers that apparently had no business being there were there," says another soldier. "Pregnant females were sent to the National Training Center rotation" with the knowledge of Army leaders.
One infantry sergeant, an Iraq veteran, remembers being sent to Fort Irwin with a broken foot. "I didn't even get to put the cast on," he recalls. He says doctors put something like an "open-toed soft shoe" on his foot and put him on a plane to California. "I've got the cast on now. I never even got a chance to see the [medical] specialist." The sergeant says the deployment to the desert site was difficult for him. "I was on Percocet. I couldn't even concentrate. I hopped on a plane and hobbled around NTC on crutches." He adds, "I saw people who were worse off than I am. I saw people with hurt backs and so on. I started to think, 'Hey, I'm not so bad.'"
One of those soldiers is Master Sergeant Ronald Jenkins, who has a degenerative spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where doctors fused three of his vertebrae during surgery. He takes morphine for the pain in his neck and back. He is being considered for medical retirement. "I slept on a damn metal cot for 26 days with serious back problems," he recalls. "It was an unpleasant experience." His condition worsened while he was at Irwin. Hernandez reinjured his ankle at Irwin, and, when he returned to Benning, had to be put in another cast. "We could not train," Jenkins says. "Why were we even there?"
The explanation may lie in the brigade's readiness statistics, including "unit status reports" that carefully track personnel numbers and are sent up through the Army's chain of command. "There are a number of factors used to establish whether a unit is mission-capable," explains John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent organization that studies military and security issues. "One of them is the extent to which it is fully manned." Pike says he suspects the injured soldiers were camped out at Fort Irwin so that on paper, at least, "the unit would have a sufficient head count to be mission-capable." Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower during the Reagan administration now with the Center for American Progress, says that the 3rd Brigade can show statistically that more troops trained in California simply because they were there. "Basically, they could say 90 percent went through Fort Irwin," he says about the brigade.
Hernandez and others were lucky. Many of their injured colleagues were indeed sent to Iraq. On February 15, shortly after returning from Fort Irwin to Fort Benning, 75 injured soldiers from the 3rd Brigade lined up for screenings at the troop medical clinic. Some of the soldiers there that day described cursory meetings with a division surgeon -- meetings designed to downgrade their health problems, the soldiers said, so that they could be deployed to the war zone. Records for some of those soldiers show doctors had previously concluded that those soldiers could not wear body armor because of serious skeletal and other injuries. One military official familiar with the California training and the medical processing of the injured soldiers at Fort Benning says commanders were taking desperate actions to meet an accelerated deployment schedule dictated by Bush's escalation plan for securing Baghdad. "None of this would have happened if we had just slowed down a little bit," he says. "A lot of people were under a lot of pressure at that time."
The commander of the 3rd Brigade, Colonel Wayne Grigsby, says that the injured soldiers would be put into safe, noncombat jobs once in Iraq.
Not every one of the injured soldiers went quietly. Jenkins fought his redeployment, appealing his case to the Army surgeon general. He eventually won that battle. Smith also was ordered not to deploy. Jenkins says the disregard for soldiers' health motivated him to speak out, despite his fears that as an active-duty soldier he could suffer reprisal from superiors. "I am a guy who has been in the Army for 21 years," he says. "For me to speak about this -- and risk everything -- then there has got to be a problem. There has got to be an issue here."
The Army says it is investigating the injured soldiers' claims that their medical records were modified at Fort Benning in February in order for them to be sent to Iraq. House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton, a Democrat with a long record of supporting the military, has asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The Army inspector general has also launched a probe. It remains unclear if any of those probes will also look into injured soldiers' being sent to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in January.
Apparently the problems extend well past Fort Benning. When Skelton, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote to the GAO asking for an investigation into the deployment of injured troops to Iraq, he added in that letter that "the committee has received a number of phone calls and letters from concerned service members and their families, including similar allegations that injured and wounded service members are being deployed into combat despite their injuries." (Salon)
March 26: Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty went against the advice of senior administration lawyers and White House officials in testifying to Congress about the specific reasons eight US attorneys were fired.
US Attorney firings
McNulty told the committee last month (see earlier items) that politics was directly behind at least one of the firings. According to an unreleased internal White House e-mail, former White House counsel Harriet Miers said all administration officials should take a hard line in answering questions about the firings, and merely say that they will not comment on personnel issues.
McNulty's testimony was the first break from the stonewall put up by White House officials, which had officials refusing to say why specific attorneys were fired, and asserting that the White House has the blanket authority to fire any US attorney at any time for any reason. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales toed that line when he testified before the committee in January. But a senior Justice Department official says McNulty believed he had no choice but to more fully discuss the circumstances of the firings. McNulty believed the senators would demand additional information, and he was confident he could draw on a long relationship with Democratic senator Chuck Schumer in explaining in more detail. However, McNulty said far more than what he had been authorized to say when White House officials cleared his written testimony the week before.
McNulty's testimony clearly contradicts Gonzales's own testimony, though McNulty is said to believe he did not contradict his boss. However, senators have leapt on the inconsistencies. "That's what lit the fuse," says Republican senator Jon Kyl, a hardline Bush apologist. "They should've expected pushback -- not only from the US attorneys but from their supporters once they characterized the reason as negative performance, inadequate performance." McNulty's testimony also prompted several of the fired attorneys to more aggressively defend themselves and their work records, and senators now want to know just how politicized the process actually became. Gonzales, of course, has said and continues to say that politics played no part in the firings.
But McNulty said Bud Cummins, the US attorney in Arkansas, was fired merely to replace him with a RNC protege of Karl Rove, Tim Griffin. McNulty also asserted that the other seven attorneys were fired for "performance-related reasons," impugning the performance of the fired attorneys, which not only prompted quick and fiery responses, but contradicted assurances Gonzales and other DOJ officials had previously made about the fired attorneys to home-state senators, including Kyl. Gonzales had told Kyl privately that the administration was dismissing Paul Charlton, the US attorney in Arizona whom the senator had personally recommended, because of disagreements over policy. Charlton had crossed paths with the Justice Department over his reluctance to seek the death penalty in some cases, as well as his insistence that the FBI should record confessions. "The initial plan had simply been to deny the existence of improper motives," says a DOJ source. "People thought that should be enough. McNulty argued vigorously the other way. He said DOJ had to give these guys on the Hill an explanation."
In his prep session the day before he testified, McNulty said that he thought his long-standing friendship with Schumer would help keep the questioning under control. Several participants in the prep session, including senior DOJ lawyer David Margolis, said McNulty should continue stonewalling, and merely tell the senators that the administration had a "reasoned basis" for the decision but refuse to specify what it was. McNulty strongly disagreed, says the source. Other participants in the meeting included DOJ officials Kyle Sampson, Monica Goodling, Bill Mercer, Richard Hertling and Michael Elston. Sampson, Gonzales's chief of staff, has since resigned and has agreed to testify Thursday before the Judiciary Committee. Goodling said Monday she would assert her constitutional right against self-incrimination and refuse to testify. "[McNulty] thought he could explain it was performance-related and Schumer would accept that," says the source. "He touted his relationship with Schumer, and he said you have to be reasonable with these guys and give them the information. No one was willing to second guess McNulty."
At one point, one of the lawyers asked about Cummins's dismissal and how McNulty could explain that using the "performance-related" phrase. McNulty said he would "just explain the White House had a candidate for the job." Another source says, "That opened up the entire thing. The phrase 'performance-related' is where all this goes wrong."
McNulty was wrong about being treated with kid gloves by Schumer. The Democrat aggressively challenged McNulty throughout his testimony on his inconsistencies and the inconsistencies with Gonzales's earlier testimony, saying incredulously, "This is the first we've heard of this" when McNulty revealed the real reason behind Cummins's firing. Schumer continued to press McNulty about the reasons behind the firings, and used Gonzales's own testimony to highlight contradictions. Gonzales told the committee in January that "we would never, ever make a change in the US attorney position for political reasons." Schumer then said, "Then we have now, for the first time, we learn that Bud Cummins was asked to leave for no reason and we're putting in someone who has all kinds of political connections. Do you believe that firing a well-performing US attorney to make way for a political operative is not a political reason?" McNulty tried to stand firm, saying "I believe it is not a political reason." When McNulty began to list Griffin's qualifications, Schumer refused to let him get by with it, saying, "I find it hard to believe that Tim Griffin was the best person possible." McNulty wrongly left the testimony feeling that he had made the issue, in essence, go away, and even told his DOJ cronies that Schumer's office told him "the issue has basically run its course...." He was wrong.
To make things tougher on McNulty, Gonzales, junketing in South America, was furious when he read news stories of McNulty's testimony. "The attorney general is extremely upset with the stories on the US attys this morning," wrote Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, in an e-mail to Sampson and Tasia Scolinos, the chief spokeswoman for the department. "He also thought some of the DAG's statements were inaccurate." Scolinos responded to the e-mail that she, too, "didn't think the hearing had gone all that well." Roehrkasse suggested in his e-mail that the department offer a "clearly worded op-ed" and reach out "to [editorial] boards who will write in coming days" to help straighten out the situation. Gonzales then wrote an editorial that ran in USA Today in which he tried to reconcile McNulty's testimony with his own and to make clear that McNulty's "performance-related" phrase should not be interpreted to mean a negative or inadequate performance by the attorneys. "To be clear, it was for reasons related to policy, priorities and management -- what have been referred to broadly as 'performance-related' reasons -- that seven US attorneys were asked to resign last December," Gonzales wrote.
Gonzales's bobbing and weaving was too little, too late. Charlton, Iglesias, and other fired attorneys began publicly defending themselves against McNulty's character assassinations, and McNulty was forced to return to Congress to testify a second time, on February 14, to meet privately with the Judiciary Committee and provide more information on each firing. His carefully crafted responses, trying to give minimal information without disclosing much, left senators on both sides of the aisle either angry or frustrated, and according to those with knowledge of the meeting, only fanned the flames of the growing firestorm. (ABC News)
March 26: Democrat Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
US Attorney firings
orders the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign to preserve the e-mails of White House officials, and to meet with staff members to explain how the accounts are managed and what steps are being taken to prevent the e-mails from destruction and tampering. Waxman's committee is concerned that senior White House officials are using RNC and other political email accounts to avoid leaving a record of official communications. Despite the letter, many worry that thousands, and perhaps millions, of e-mail records have already been destroyed. (House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform)
March 26: Monica Goodling, a senior counsel at the Department of Justice, a liason to the White House, and a key player in the US attorney firings,
US Attorney firings
says she will exercise her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in her upcoming testimony to Congress. In a letter to Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Goodling's lawyers state that Goodling will take the Fifth instead of testify as to her knowledge of the events surrounding the firings in part because of the "hostile and questionable environment" of the hearings, and in part because the committee is already aware that Goodling and her DOJ colleagues have most likely broken the law in regards to the firings. "The potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling from even her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real," her lawyers write. "One need look no further than the recent circumstances and proceedings involving Lewis Libby."
It is disappointing that Ms. Goodling has decided to withhold her important testimony from the committee as it pursues its investigation into this matter, but everybody has the constitutional right not to incriminate themselves with regard to criminal conduct," says Leahy. "The American people are left to wonder what conduct is at the base of Ms. Goodling's concern that she may incriminate herself in connection with criminal charge."
Some legally knowledgeable commentators from Talking Points Memo question Goodling's right to invoke the Fifth under the circumstances. "A party can request a hearing (in federal or state court) to examine whether the party invoking the Fifth has done so properly," says one commentator. "Goodling's attorney's letter does not provide a valid basis for invoking the Fifth. You can't invoke the Fifth to avoid perjury charges (or obstructing justice with the selfsame testimony). ...You can't invoke the Fifth because you think the committee is on a witch hunt. They shouldn't let Goodling get away with this. She either is refusing to providing testimony because she may be testifying about some crime she has previously committed (which is a valid reason for taking the Fifth) or she isn't. If she is, and a judge so determines, then fine (and goodbye to her attorney's ridiculous GOP talking points), and if she isn't, she should be compelled to testify under subpoena. The funny thing is she may be obstructing justice (protecting others) by refusing to testify under a bogus claim of needing to take the Fifth." Another commentator says, "I read the letter from Ms. Goodling's attorney, and it seems rather odd to me. He says that Ms. Goodling will not testify because she fears that, even though telling the truth, she may face perjury charges due to the hostility of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The Fifth Amendment, however, has nothing to do with perjury or with feared partisanship. Rather, it states a privilege against self-incriminating testimony. If the Fifth were to be accepted every time a witness feared a perjury indictment, we would have very few witnesses, indeed."
Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall observes, "[I]f you look at the letter Goodling's attorney sent the committee, the essence of his argument is that the committee has relinquished its legitimacy as an investigative forum and that she has thus unilaterally decided that she will refuse to testify. (As part of the argument for not testifying, Goodling's lawyer notes that 'it is not uncommon for witnesses who give testimony before the Congress to face criminal investigations and even indictments for perjury, false statements, or obstruction of congressional proceedings.') It amounts to a sort of witness's nullification. Interestingly, or perhaps revealingly, at the end of the letter, John Dowd, Goodling's attorney asserts that 'we have advised Ms. Goodling (and she has decided) to invoke her Constitutional right not to answer any questions.' This is more than a semantic point. The Constitution says nothing about a right not to answer questions. The actual words are that no one 'shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself' -- or in the more modern parlance, your right against self-incrimination. This is why you lose your 'right not to answer questions' as soon as you're granted immunity."
Marshall continues, "So again, look at what the Goodling letter claims. The argument throughout almost all of it is that the committee is too hostile to her for her to answer its questions. ...I said 'almost' the whole argument. On page two of the letter, Goodling's lawyer asserts as the fourth reason for her refusal to testify that 'it has come to our attention that a senior Department of Justice official has privately told Senator Schumer that he [the official] was not entirely candid in his report to the Committee, and that the official allegedly claimed that others, including our client, did not inform him of certain pertinent facts.' His name isn't stated. But this appears to be a reference to Deputy Attorney General McNulty, the subject of this post from earlier this evening. Here we finally appear to have a bad act that Goodling believes or at least claims may expose her to criminal prosecution -- lying to Congress by proxy by intentionally misinforming an official about to testify before Congress. Just watching this from the outside, it looks as though that is the bad act she's afraid to testify about or -- and somehow I find this more believeable -- she's afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is. And yeah, I'd feel like I was in jeopardy then too." (Talking Points Memo [copy of Goodling's letter], USA Today, Talking Points Memo,)
March 26: More evidence is surfacing that the firing of eight US attorneys may be part of a larger scheme to manipulate the 2008 presidential elections.
Election fraud
On a recent edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Democratic senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, whose state's prosecutor, Bud Cummins, was replaced by former RNC aide and Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin, asked host Chris Matthews, "Some people have pointed to that, said isn't that strange, here [the Administration is] putting in a maybe highly-political US Attorney in Hillary Clinton's backyard.... Isn't that odd right before the Presidential race?" Pryor says he isn't sure that Griffin's insertion as US attorney in Clinton's home state is an actual attempt to place a political operative in a position to dig up possible dirt on Clinton, but Pryor isn't the first to make such an allegation.
In an item sourced above, McClatchy News recently reported that in April 2006, Karl Rove identified eleven key states necessary for a Republican victory in 2008; nine of those states have had their attorneys fired and replaced by partisan appointees. At the same speech, given to the National Lawyers Association, a partisan legal group, Rove acknowledged his friend, Thor Hearne, who had been both general counsel to the Bush-Cheney 2004 election campaign and the executive director of the GOP front group "American Center for Voting Rights" or ACVR, which has engaged in voter suppression efforts via phony propagandistic reports on America's non-existent "voter fraud" epidemic since 2004. The group's Web site has suddenly disappeared since the US attorney purge scandal has come to light. "I want to thank you for your work on clean elections," Rove added. "I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002 election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election."
Rove also, without apparent irony, compared elections in "some parts of the country" to those that take place in third-world dictatorships where the "guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses."
Three of the US attorneys Bush has nominated since the 2004 election were from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has been criticized for implementing policies which unfairly disadvantage poor, often minority voters whose political tendencies historically favor Democrats. (See above items.) Griffin's own involvement with voter suppression schemes is well documented, having helped come up with the 2004 scheme to disenfranchise Democratic voters by bogus attempts to confirm their home addresses (see above items). The scheme targeted homeless voters and soldiers serving overseas. Griffin's scheme targeted predominately African-American areas in swing states such as Florida. (MSNBC/BradBlog)
March 26: Lurita Doan, Bush's chief of the General Services Administration, used her position to help Republican candidates, according to witnesses testifying before Congress.
Partisan Bush appointees
Doan worked with Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs under Karl Rove, in a January 26, 2006 videoconference that discussed polling data surrounding the upcoming November elections. When Jennings concluded his presentation, Doan asked the 40 regional administrators on hand to think of ways they could "help 'our candidates' in the next elections," according to a March 6 letter to Doan from Democratic House member Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Waxman said in the letter that one method suggested was using "targeted public events, such as the opening of federal facilities around the country." Doan will soon testify before Waxman's committee as to her political actions as chief of the GSA, which is considered to be a nonpartisan, non-political agency. The committee is investigating whether remarks made during the videoconference violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that restricts executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes. Those found in violation of the act do not face criminal penalties but can be removed from their jobs.
Some of the slides include the "Top 20 House Targets" for the GOP, the "2008 House GOP Defense," and a slide showing all 50 states with 33 Senate races targeted for attention. The slides can be viewed at the Raw Story link immediately below.
The planned hearing is part of an expanding examination by Waxman's committee of Doan's tumultuous 10-month tenure as administrator of the GSA. The government's leading procurement agency annually handles about $56 billion worth of federal contracts. The committee is also expected to question Doan about her attempt to give a no-bid job to a friend and professional associate last summer. In addition, the committee plans to look at Waxman's charge that Doan "intervened" in a troubled technology contract with Sun Microsystems that could cost taxpayers millions more than necessary. Doan will also face questioning from members of the Senate, particularly Republican Charles Grassley. Also examining Doan are the GSA's Office of Inspector General and the independent federal Office of Special Counsel, which investigates allegations of Hatch Act violations.
Doan has insisted she did nothing wrong, and accuses the GSA's inspector general of mounting a vendetta against her in retaliation for her efforts to rein in spending and balance the GSA budget. Doan, a wealthy former government contractor who sold her company before taking over the GSA last May, has hired three law firms and two media relations companies at her own expense to handle inquiries from the federal investigators and the news media. "Ever since I made the decision to restore fiscal discipline to all divisions within GSA, I have had to face a series of personal attacks and charges," she said on March 7. "I am eager to have the chance to set the record straight and provide a full and complete record to Congressman Waxman and the committee and refute these allegations," she says.
The charges stem from a January 19 story in the Washington Post about a no-bid job Doan tried to give to firms run by Edie Fraser, a veteran Washington public relations executive who had served as a paid consultant to Doan (see the related items in earlier pages). Waxman's investigators concluded that the two women had "a long-standing business relationship" that was not "previously disclosed." Between 2003 and 2005, Fraser billed Doan as much as $20,000 a month in consulting fees to "generally promote attributes" of Doan and her former company, New Technology Management Inc. In all, Doan paid at least $417,500 to companies affiliated with Fraser before Doan took over the GSA. Last year, Fraser helped prepare Doan for her GSA confirmation and lined up political support for her. In return, Doan awarded Fraser's firms with no-bid contracts to produce a report about GSA's use of businesses owned by minorities or women. The GSA's general counsel at the time, Alan Swendiman, tells Waxman's investigators he was "alarmed" that the project was not competitively bid. A senior GSA official told Waxman's committee that the no-bid arrangement was merely a "procedural mistake."
Swendiman, now a special assistant to President Bush, testifies that he "immediately and repeatedly" advised Doan to terminate the arrangement. When he was unable to persuade her, Swendiman directed a GSA contracting officer to terminate the arrangement. The investigators found evidence indicating that Doan continued to try to find ways to award the project to her friend.
Jennings, who ran the videoconference about helping Republican candidates, is a key player in the US attorney firings currently being investigated. Jennings repeatedly discussed the firing of Arkansas prosecutor Bud Cummins and his replacement by another Rove colleague, former RNC operative Tim Griffin. For that exchange, Jennings, although working at the White House, used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as a political opposition researcher. Jennings is a longtime political operative from Kentucky. He served as political director for GOP senator Mitch McConnell in 2002 before joining the White House.
After Jennings and Doan spoke during the videoconference, one regional GSA administrator offered the suggestion that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could be excluded from the opening of an environmentally efficient federal courthouse in San Francisco, which Pelosi represents. GSA manages the nation's federal courthouses. Doan then discussed ideas about "the upcoming opening of a courthouse in Florida," based on statements from participants in the videoconference. Doan noted that former president Bill Clinton had suggested he might attend, and she "stated that an effort should be made to get Senator Mel Martinez, the General Chairman of the Republican National Committee, to attend," according to Waxman's letter. "It would be an obvious abuse if you suggested to agency officials that the activities of the agency be manipulated to provide political advantages to Republican candidates," Waxman told her in the letter. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Jennings did not ask GSA officials to help Republican candidates and described Jennings's presentation as "a factual assessment of the political landscape."
Waxman's committee also plans to question Doan about her alleged involvement last year in a technology contract with Sun Microsystems. The GSA, which collects a small percentage of the value of the contracts it handles, was at risk of losing substantial fees from the Sun contract if it was not renewed. Two GSA contracting officers had balked at renewing the deal, citing findings by the GSA's inspector general that Sun was allegedly overcharging taxpayers, not giving discounts to the government that were made available to private companies. Waxman's letter alleged that Doan "intervened" in the matter and that she suggested one of the contracting officers was too "stressed" and might be replaced. Days later, the agency brought in a new contracting officer, who approved the deal within two weeks. That officer was later granted a previously denied transfer to an agency field office in Denver. Grassley, the senator questioning Doan, says that Doan and her subordinates should have heeded warnings by the agency inspector general's office that problems with the Sun contract had been discussed with Justice Department officials. "The allegations alone should have been a showstopper, but they instead chose to turn a blind eye, failed to take corrective action, and allowed a bad contract to move forward that will cost taxpayers millions of dollars," he says. "It's unacceptable." Again, Doan denies any improper conduct in the Sun contract, and denies any personal involvement in the deal.
Doan's blanket denials of any wrongdoing defy belief. A longtime TPM Muckraker reader notes, "...on January 26, [Doan] sent an e-mail to [the GSA's] top-level political appointees inviting them to attend or videoconference into a presentation by Scott Jennings, deputy director of the White House political office. The subject of the presentation? Why, polling data from the 2006 elections. And then...the administrator solicited ideas for helping 'our' candidates in the next elections. Doan, of course, denies that such ideas were solicited. The White House explains that it was 'a factual assessment of the political landscape.' But just looking at what's already been admitted -- that the conference call took place, and that Jennings presented polling data on the elections -- offers prima facie evidence of a Hatch Act violation. Why on earth would regional administrators for the GSA need to be made aware of the political landscape? The White House isn't even claiming that there's a policy-driven reason for the presentation. The 'defense' here is that Jennings gave an unabashedly political presentation to a group of government officials. Unbelievable."
The TPM reader (ironically, much more astute than the average Washington-based reporter), continues, "It also brings into sharper focus an emerging pattern of misconduct. Note the timing, and the subject of the presentation. The GOP got spanked in the midterm elections. The president lost his congressional majorities. By late fall of 2006, it was clear that the GOP was in a tailspin. The only remaining levers of power in Republican hands were held by the administration, and it had just two years left to reverse the tide. Evidently, Karl Rove decided that he had been insufficiently aggressive in using federal agencies to bolster the chances of Republican candidates. So he dispatched Jennings to convince the minions at GSA to ensure that every new federal project would have a Republican cutting the ribbon. (It's worth noting that no one has bothered suggesting that Doan invited Jennings. That's not how this works. Jennings was there because the White House sent him, and Doan went along. She's likely to take the fall here, but this came straight from the White House.)
"One of the puzzling aspects of the US Attorney purge is that it wasn't completed until after the 2006 elections. So far, most allegations have focused on the notion that these US Attorneys failed to do enough to help Republican candidates win in 2006, by failing to investigate enough Democrats or to pursue scurrilous allegations of voter fraud. But it's looking more and more like what happened here has more to do with 2008 than with 2006. Only two USAs were asked to step down before the elections: Cummins, to make room for a specific Rove disciple, and Chiara, whose office was a mess. The plan to dismiss the rest had festered for well over a year, but it kicked into high gear immediately after the elections. Sampson sent out the formal plan on Nov. 15, marking its importance 'High'. 'An associate of Rove' told the Times that Rove learned of the plan in November. And...wait for it...remember that 18 day gap? It begins on November 15.
"What we're going to find, if Congress succesfully subpoenas officials or their e-mails, is that after the Republicans got routed in November of 2006 a panicked Karl Rove turned up the flame under lots of schemes that had simmered on the back burners for months or years. New orders went out -- learn the lessons of the exit polling, and make sure that 2008 brings success. The White House, in its panic, abandoned caution, and got sloppy. It left its fingerprints all over the sorts of things it had generally manipulated at arms-length. And the man who headed up the effort, by all indications, was Karl Rove's right hand, J. Scott Jennings." (Washington Post, TPM Muckraker, Raw Story)
March 26: Australian David Hicks, incarcerated in Guantanamo's Camp Delta since January 2002, pleads guilty to one count of material support for terrorism.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
Hicks is the first Guantanamo detainee to accept criminal responsibility for aiding terrorists since the detention camp opened more than five years ago. The guilty plea is part of a deal for allowing Hicks to return to Australia, where he will likely serve his sentence. He faces possible life in prison, but prosecutors say they will settle for a term of 20 years. Prosecutors say that Hicks trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden, but they have no evidence that Hicks attempted to kill anyone.
Congress wrote new rules for the commissions after the Supreme Court overruled the administration's earlier version of the trials, calling them unconstitutional. Attorneys for Guantanamo detainees have challenged the new law, and members of Congress have vowed to push legislation giving more rights to the detainees.
"I don't look at it as a victory," sats chief prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis. "We are satisfied where we stand at this moment." One of Hicks's lawyers, David McLeod, says the plea is the first step towards getting Hicks out of Guantanamo and back to Australia.
US military prosecutors allege that he has been involved in militant extremism since the late 1990s, when he joined liberation fighters in Kosovo. Hicks later traveled to Afghanistan and trained with al-Qaeda forces, met Osama bin Laden, and secured a tank at an airport in Kandahar, according to the US government. He later allegedly supported the Taliban. Australian officials have been pressuring Bush to try Hicks swiftly and have been negotiating to have Hicks returned to Australia to serve out any prison term.
In the court proceedings, the presiding officer of the military tribunal ruled that Hicks's two civilian attorneys were not qualified to represent him in court, in part because one refused to sign a form he felt would compromise his ethical responsibilities. The lawyers, Rebecca Snyder and Joshua Dratel, separately stormed out of the courtroom. "I'm shocked because I just lost another lawyer," Hicks said when Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, the military commission's presiding officer, asked if he wanted Dratel to remain at his defense table, even though he could not represent him. "What's the sense of him sitting here if he's not my lawyer and can't represent me?"
Civil rights lawyer Candace Gorman points out some of the problems in the Hicks case. The crime Hicks is pleading guilty to did not exist in law until September 2006, well over four years after his initial detention. All the charges previously pending against him were dropped for lack of evidence. Gorman writes, "Mr. Hicks was confined at Guantanamo until a new law could be passed that he could then be charged with. Never mind the fact that our constitution prohibits ex post facto (retroactive) laws, I mean that is why we are holding him at Guantanamo, right?" Secondly, there was no chance Hicks was ever going to have a hearing. When he stepped into his arraignment yesterday, two of his three attorneys were removed from representing him. His civilian attorney was removed because he refused to sign a statement agreeing to abide by military rules that had not yet been drafted and another attorney was removed because she supposedly did not have the correct credentials for the commission. That left Hicks with only one attorney, his military attorney, Dan Mori. Gorman writes, "Although Mori has been doing an exemplary job for Hicks, there was a little cloud hanging over Mori: the prosecuting attorney has suggested that Mori should be brought up on charges of misconduct for his zealous defense of Hicks. Mori was still trying to figure out how that threat by the prosecuting attorney would affect his representation of Hicks. Mori sought a short continuance to get legal counsel on this issue but that request was denied."
Hicks asked for additional counsel to assist Mori in defending him, and was denied. "The writing was clear on the glistening red, white and blue walls of the commission hearing room and David Hicks did the only thing that could possibly make sense in this abhorrent proceeding. He pled guilty to something that was not even against the law when he was arrested. Hicks's only hope is that he will be sent to Australia to serve his sentence and that perhaps, in time, a court in Australia will agree that pleading guilty to a crime that did not exist when he was arrested should be considered a nullity. Only problem is, Australia does not have a constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws.... I wonder if that is how the phrase 'kangaroo court' first came to be?" (Washington Post, Huffington Post)
March 26: David Stockman, the former top Reagan budget official who was the architect of the disastrous "trickle-down economics" plan that became known as "Reaganomics" during the Reagan presidency,
Reaganomics
is charged with securities fraud. Stockman and three others were charged in a securities fraud conspiracy that embroiled one of North America's largest auto parts companies before the supplier collapsed into bankruptcy. Stockman was the former chairman and CEO of Michigan-based Collins & Aikman Corp. He had previously served as budget director under Reagan in the 1980s and had been a former Republican congressman. An indictment unsealed in the US District Court in Manhattan charges Stockman and three others with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, making false statements in annual and quarterly reports, making false entries in books and records, lying to auditors as well as committing bank fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding. The others charged in the indictment were Michael Stepp, David Cosgrove and Paul Barnaba, all corporate officials with Collins & Aikman.
The indictment says the crimes occurred as Stockman served on the board of directors of Collins & Aikman from 2000 through May 2005. He was chairman of the board from August 2003 until May 2005. Stepp was vice chairman of the board of directors. Cosgrove and Barnaba also were employed by the firm, which filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2005. Its products included interiors, carpets, acoustics, fabrics and convertible tops. (AP/Houston Chronicle)
March 26: Conservative columnist Robert Novak, writing about the possibility of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigning,
George W. Bush
observes, "With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment. Republicans in Congress do not trust their president to protect them. That alone is sufficient reason to withhold statements of support for Gonzales, because such a gesture could be quickly followed by his resignation under pressure." Novak writes that Gonzales himself "is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than [Donald] Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is 'incompetent.' ...The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over US attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it draws attention away from debate over an unpopular war. But the overriding feeling in the Republican cloakroom is that the Justice Department and the White House could not have been more inept in dealing with the president's unquestioned right to appoint -- and replace -- federal prosecutors."
Novak continues, "The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the US attorneys firing fiasco. 'We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,' one House leader told me. 'How can we claim that anymore?'" (Washington Post)
March 26: Disgraced former congressman Tom DeLay, who has just written a book entitled No Retreat, No Surrender, revives a long-discredited smear against Bill Clinton that he obviously intends to extend to Clinton's wife Hillary, a leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2008.
Conservative smear campaigns
In his book, DeLay writes, "What sent me over the top about Clinton is that his brand of liberalism had an almost anti-American feel to it. Because it received scant treatment in the press many Americans don't know that when the Clintons first moved into the White House, they seriously considered banning all military uniforms from White House grounds. From the generals briefing the president to the Marines guarding the front door, no one would have been allowed to wear a military uniform. Fortunately, someone talked the Clintons out of this treachery, but take a moment to think about what even considering such a thing says about them. This was the president of the United States and his wife saying that something about military uniforms offended them. Apparently the noble symbols of martial honor and sacrifice so disturbed their unpatriotic, liberal sensibilities that they wanted to forbid them in the home of the nation's commander in chief. We should have kicked them out of office right then and there!"
DeLay is not only lying, he is repeating a lie that has been debunked for over fourteen years. While no one can be sure where the rumor started (three guesses), the Wall Street Journal reported in March 1993, "At the Pentagon, the stories about White House insensitivity are numerous, and, some Clinton defenders say, approach paranoia. Perhaps the most virulent is the story that Chelsea Clinton refused to enter a government car destined to drive her to school because she didn't want to ride with a uniformed officer. Knowledgeable sources say Chelsea has always ridden with Secret Service agents and the occasion has never arisen where a military escort was asked to fill in for her regular agents. Among other poisonous rumors is the tale that the Clintonites are preparing to order military personnel to wear civilian clothes, not their uniforms, whenever they enter the White House. Another rumor is that Clinton advisers have forbidden the military aide who carries 'the football' -- a suitcase containing nuclear launch codes -- to dress in uniform. The White House denies both allegations." The Washington Post debunked the rumors in April 1993.
But, like so many other lies about the Clintons, the stories have continued to circulate. In 2005, Newsweek reported, "There are still soldiers who swear by the myth that [Hillary Clinton] banned uniforms at the White House." Author Edward Klein reprinted the same lie in his 2005 "biography," The Truth About Hillary, which is chock full of lies and misstatements. (See Joe Conason's destruction of Klein's book on Al Franken's Air America broadcast.) Klein attributed the tale to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Patterson, who had served as the president's Air Force aide, and had related the story in 2003 in a Clinton-bashing book of his own, titled Dereliction of Duty. Patterson had Hillary proposing the ban in 1996, three years after the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post had already wrecked the rumor. Patterson worked in the White House only from 1996 to 1998, so it isn't possible that he merely got his dates confused. Slate's Timothy Noah writes, "To believe Klein and Patterson, then, we must believe that Hillary consciously made happen something that, three years earlier, had been identified by at least two prominent news sources as something that hadn't happened but, if it had, would have been a political disaster. That just isn't possible." Patterson is not the chief operating officer for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a "right-wing agitprop mill in Los Angeles" as Noah characterizes it, and a frequent source of misinformation and right-wing slogans for DeLay, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. Patterson says his story is accurate, but he refuses to give any support for his allegation. (Slate)

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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 2007, Week Four

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