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
May 2003
Week One
Iranian offer to negotiate with the US harshly rebuffed
- May: Iran approaches the United States with an offer for serious negotiations.
War with Iran
The Iranians, who had only had one official communication with the US government since Iranian radicals seized the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, are coming to the Americans almost as supplicants, begging for talks. Dazed and frightened by the speed in which the American military had swept through Afghanistan and Iraq, and with relative moderates in power, Iran now want to open talks with the US about de-escalating tensions between the two countries. The Iranians approach the Americans through the auspices of Swiss ambassador Tim Guildemann, and offer sweeping concessions on their nuclear policy, on its policy towards Israel and Iran's support of the anti-Israeli organization Hezbollah, and to swap al-Qaeda prisoners -- including al-Qaeda's chief of operations, Saif al-Adel, and Osama bin Laden's own son, Saad bin Laden -- for homegrown Iranian terrorists of the Mujahedeen e Khalq (MEK) in American custody. MEK is an Iranian exile group that has operated, with Saddam Hussein's blessing, in Iraq since 1986. After the fall of Baghdad, the US had disarmed MEK's thousands of fighters and taken custody of the group's heavy military equipment, including 2000 tanks, artiller pieces, armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles provided by Hussein. MEK is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, and is known to have killed several Americans in Iraq, including CIA officers based there during the Shah's regime. In other words, one of the three nations Bush had designated a member of the "axis of evil" now wants to come in out of the cold, and help stabilize the region, reduce tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, and provide the US with key sources of information about al-Qaeda terrorism. It would have been a triumph for the US in the region, and, if the negotiations could have been completed, would have led to a major easing of tensions in the entire Middle East. For many US officials, including Bush, it sounds like a good deal. Bush gives his preliminary approval for the exchange. - Instead, the United States rebuffs the Iranian offer. "We told them no," recalls Larry Wilkerson, the chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Not only did we tell them no -- we wrote a letter of protest to the Swiss for interfering in our foreign policy." A golden opportunity was missed, and, partially in response to the US's intransigence, the Iranians elected radical hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as their new leader. Who was responsible for this insanely misguided decision to slap the Iranians across the face instead of sit down at the negotiating table? Says Wilkerson, "It was the vice president of the United States." Spearheaded by Cheney, in one of the most egregrious instances of his refusal to negotiate with anyone under any circumstances, a number of powerful administration figures oppose the deal, including Cheney's Pentagon cohorts Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have been toying with the idea of rearming MEK and using it in a future war with Iran, so they want to keep the group whole and ready for reactivation. Officials at the CIA and the State Department are shocked that the Pentagon would so openly flaunt their willingness to cut a deal with a terrorist organization, and are doubly stunned when they realize that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz will not be held accountable for blocking the deal, even in the face of Bush's approval. And national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, ostensibly the official who should have headed off Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in order to make the deal happen, does nothing. (It later becomes clear that Bush had little input into the entire process -- everything is coordinated through Cheney, who has no intention of negotiating with Iran under any circumstances.)
- Reporter James Risen believes that MEK has watched the success of Ahmad Chalabi's group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress after the invasion of Iraq, and hopes to cut a similar deal for itself when the US decides to invade Iran. MEK is already copying Chalabi's lead in providing information -- perhaps misinformation -- about Iran's nuclear weapons program and its willingness to violently confront the US, in hopes of perpetuating another misbegotten war in the Middle East that it can exploit, like Chalabi's INC, for its own purposes. (James Risen, (Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)
CIA review of falsified Iraqi intelligence
- May: The CIA begins a review of pre-war intelligence to determine if the
US intelligence
Pentagon falsified or exaggerated evidence of Iraq weapons of mass destruction for its own ends before the invasion. Various spokesmen, including Rumsfeld, have backtracked on previous claims, and asserted that Iraq may have destroyed all of their weapons of mass destruction before American forces arrived. (CCR) - May: A terrorist advisory issued by the Department of Homeland Security advises
Attack on civil liberties
local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who "expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the US government." The San Francisco Chronicle notes: "If police vigorously followed this advice, millions of Americans could be added to the official lists of suspected terrorists." The advisory is sent to law enforcement agencies and is not meant to be public knowledge, though many corporations are given the same information. (San Francisco Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Penn State CentreDaily) - May: Khidar Hamza, an Iraqi scientist who in 1992 worked with David Kay to
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
fabricate evidence of Iraqi WMDs, is named the head of Iraq's nuclear industry by the Pentagon. In 1995, Hamza's evidence of nuclear weapons programs in Iraq was thoroughly discredited by the IAEA and the UN, and he was found to have grossly inflated his own experience and background. In February 2003, Hamza and a disproportionate number of defense contractor SAIC employees are named to the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council. (Baltimore Independent Media Center) - May: Defense consultant Michael Maloof, a member of the secretive Office of
Bush's foreign policies
Special Plans in the Pentagon, is stripped of his security clearance after the FBI link him to a Lebanese-American businessman under investigation by the FBI for weapons trafficking. A handgun registered to Maloof had been found in the possession of his friend Imad al-Hage, who is suspected of dealing arms. Investigators begin to seek to learn whether Maloof's alleged contacts with Hage and a hard-line former Lebanese general, Michel Aoun, may have been part of a back-channel effort to destabilize Syria, which has occupied Lebanon for nearly two decades. (Boston Globe/Veterans for Peace/Daily Kos) - May: A report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union, entitled "Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/11 America," finds numerous instances of illegal searches, surveillance, and arrests made by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, along with other suppression of legal dissent against the Bush administration.
Attack on civil liberties
FBI agents are conducting illegal surveillance of students and faculty at the University of Massachusetts. New Mexico teachers and guidance counselors have been suspended for displaying student work taking a stand against the Iraq invasion. In Alberquerque, a guidance counselor was suspended for posting a speech by Senator Robert Byrd in his office. A teacher at the same school was suspended for refusing to take down students' posters the principal didn't think were "sufficiently pro-war." And there's more repression coming down the pike. - Texas is preparing to pass a law labeling two or more people involved in environmental or animal rights protests "terrorists." Similar bills are pending in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maine. Mike Van Winkle, a spokesman for California's anti-terrorism center, says, "You can almost argue that a protest against that [war on terrorism] is a terrorist act." Columnist Charles Levendosky writes, "The federal government has not been accused of torturing American citizens, but it has acquired many of the powers that were granted to inquisitors in order to search out heretics. As a consequence, we are no longer living in the America at one time we considered so lofty and free." (Casper Star-Tribune/First Amendment Cyber-Tribune)
- Early May: Oil cartel representative Richard Carroll, the former CEO of both Shell
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Oil and Fluor, takes the position of "shadow minister" of Iraq's oil ministry, largely to ensure that Paul Bremer and his fellow neoconservatives do not go through with their plan to privatize and sell off Iraq's oil industry piecemeal. Further information on Carroll's tenure in Iraq, and the foiled plans to break up and sell off Iraq's oil industry, can be found in the long writeup of March 19, 2003, following the entry about the invasion of Iraq. (Greg Palast) - Early May: Former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who more than a year ago
Iraq-Niger scandal
disproved the administration's allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons, and has tried repeatedly within channels to get the administration to admit that the allegations were wrong, mentions his mission and his findings during a talk about Iraq at a political conference in suburban Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof receives Wilson's permission to write about Wilson's Niger trip in a column. Months later, on July 6, Wilson himself will write a scathing op-ed about his trip, his conclusions, and the administration's refusal to accept the reality of the situation, in the Times. "I gave them months to correct the record," says Wilson of the White House, "but they kept on lying." (Seymour Hersh)
Bush gives "Mission Accomplished" speech
- May 1: Bush is flown aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in a Navy S-3B Viking fighter jet, and while dressed in a flight suit, gives a rousing speech about the "weakening of international terrorism" as a result of the US conquest of Iraq.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
(The jet, temporarily named "Navy 1" and with the phrase "George W. Bush Commander in Chief" stenciled below the cockpit, dramatically buzzes the carrier twice before making an exciting high-speed landing; camera angles are carefully planned so that live audiences can see the jet's new monikers as the pilot and Bush exit the plane. Bush later tells a sycophantic Fox News interviewer that he actually flew the jet that took him to the Lincoln: "Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course I liked it." Bush's statement is a lie; for one, he is accompanied in the very cramped four-seater plane by another pilot and a Secret Service agent, and it's reasonable to assume that the second pilot occupied the co-pilot's seat; for another, it would be completely illegal for the pilot to turn over control of the plane to Bush just as it would be to allow any other civilian, regardless of previous flight training, to pilot the craft. Reporter Bob Woodward later confirms that Bush rode in the co-pilot's seat and never actually controlled the plane.) Author Mark Crispin Miller calls the entire exercise "a moment of Neronian self-indulgence." Referencing Clinton's infamous airport haircut of 1993, Miller writes, "Clinton would have had to put a hot tub on Air Force One and frolicked in it for a week at LAX to outdo Bush's inconsiderate stunt." - The original plan envisioned Bush delivering his speech on board the USS Missouri, the battleship that had hosted the surrender agreement signing between the US and Japan at the end of World War II, but that ship is now a memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and unavailable. Bush's speech includes General Douglas MacArthur's memorable line, "The guns are silent."
- Standing behind a banner that reads "Mission Accomplished," Bush compares the war in Iraq to World War II, and declares the war officially over: "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." He also repeats the debunked assertion that the US "has removed an ally of al-Qaeda," and says, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001, and still goes on," obviously continuing to connect the Hussein regime with the 9/11 attacks and implying that Iraq was merely a "battle" in a much longer, much more far-reaching war. Besides conflating Iraq with the 9/11 attacks, Bush again makes an unfounded claim of a linkage between Hussein and al-Qaeda: "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more." No terrorist network had ever gotten weapons of mass destruction from Iraq in the past, and the prospect of such was dim at best. (Bush flacks later say that technically, the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" is not a declaration that the war is over, because the Geneva Conventions state that such an event would require the release of more than 6,000 POWs.)
- Woodward also later confirms, from Donald Rumsfeld, that the entire theme of "Mission Accomplished" was included by Bush's speechwriters and planners from the outset. Rumsfeld himself struck the line "Mission Accomplished" from Bush's speech. "I took 'Mission Accomplished' out," Rumsfeld later tells Woodward. "I was in Baghdad and I was given a draft of that thing and I just died. And I said, it's too inclusive. And I fixed it and sent it back. They fixed the speech but not the sign." The White House will later claim that the "Mission Accomplished" banner was the Navy's idea, not theirs, but Rumsfeld proves that claim is a lie.
- The carrier, which is only 30 miles offshore, is prevented from landing for a full day (forcing crewmen coming home from a long, grueling tour of duty to wait another day to be reunited with their families), at an additional cost to taxpayers of $3.3 million. Instead, it steams in circles off San Diego to allow media camera teams to film Bush's speech against the backdrop of open ocean to give the impression that Bush and the carrier were much farther out. Originally the White House claimed that it was necessary to fly Bush to the carrier on a jet because the carrier was too far out for a helicopter to make the trip; after this claim was debunked, the administration admitted that the entire speech was conceived as a "photo op" for the President. Bush personally collaborated on the idea, which was "choreographed by a White House advance team led by communications specialist Scott Sforza, who arrived on the carrier days earlier." (The event was so orchestrated that Sforza even made sure that crew members' shirts were properly color-coordinated. Bush will later claim that his team had nothing to do with the idea of the banner, but merely created it at the request of the crew, who wanted to celebrate their return home. That statement is also proven to be a lie.) "The carrier landing was just one scene in a deliberate pattern of images sought by the White House.... At a speech at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, cameramen were given a platform that offered up Bush's profile as if he were already carved into the mountain with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt." One aide says of the carrier appearance, "If you looked at the TV pictures, you saw there was flattering light on his left cheek and slight shadowing on his right. It looked great." Such an effect, scheduled for dusk and called by Hollywood lighting experts "the magic hour" for its golden glow, was obtained by laboriously diverting the Lincoln from its scheduled course. The banner itself was carefully placed by Sforza's crew in order to appear almost as a halo over Bush's head.
- The speech is scheduled for a Thursday night, the most-watched night of television during the week, and during prime time for the east coast. Even better, it takes place during a Nielsen ratings sweeps month.
- After the Lincoln speech, Bush returns to California and gives a speech to workers in a United Defense plant. United Defense is owned by the Carlyle Group.
- On May 29, Bush is asked by former classmates about the "codpiece" he appeared to wear during the photo op on the carrier (actually a parachute harness that Bush chose to keep on during his speech; the harnesses are typically removed immediately after disembarking). Bush initially reminds the questioner about "the importance of marketing," then claims, in an apparent aping of certain Central African tribal leaders, that everything that showed below his belt is all his. General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, will say in July, "The world expects something more of an American president than to prance around on a flight deck dressed up like [a] pilot. He's expected to be a leader. That's my fundamental issue with it. It doesn't reflect the gravitas of the office. Furthermore, it's a little phony." The focus on Bush's overemphasized crotch was a deliberate one, part of an entire arsenal of public mannerisms and presentations to overcome the perception of Bush being a "Daddy's boy." Says political observer Richard Goldstein, "Karl Rove's rangers must be aware of this possibility [public doubts about Bush's manhood and maturity] since they've crafted an image to counter Bush's macho problem. His public affect -- the narrowed eyes, the locked-and-loaded look -- is calculated to annul his liabilities, present and past." Journalist Ian Williams waggishly observes, "The exaggerated masculinity and the enforced strutting gait was doubtless a serendipitous but welcome side effect." Rock musician Neil Young, formerly a Bush supporter, was more blunt: "And this big deal about Bush landing on an aircraft carrier? Talk about a six-year-old kid with a Tonka toy -- we got it here." It is also noteworthy that Bush is the first of any president to appear in military uniform of any kind, whereas many presidents with actual military experience, including former generals George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, refused to do so out of respect for military tradition. It is a breach of military protocol for a civilian officeholder to publicly appear in a military uniform, and doubly so for a civilian with no real military service. It is left to the reader's imagination to decide what the American press would have had to say about Bill Clinton appearing before an audience in any sort of military garb. (Guardian, Consortium News, Buzzflash Commentary, MidEast Web, MSNBC, Village Voice, Buzzflash, Bush on Iraq, Ian Williams, David Corn, Bob Woodward, Frank Rich pp.88-91)
Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
- May 1: According to the official White House web site, "President Bush
Iraq war and occupation
Declares Combat Operations Have Ended in Iraq." On August 19, the Cursor will notice that the site has been altered. Now the headline reads, "President Bush Declares Major Combat Operations Have Ended in Iraq." This is part of the administration's attempt to back off on Bush's original declaration that the war is "over." (The Memory Hole) - May 1 - on: Many media pundits are ready to swoon over the careful portrayal of Bush as a macho guy in a flight suit, and gladly climb aboard the Bush public relations express.
Conservative media slant
The Washington Times's Susan Fields writes, "The president has to meet a testosterone standard that appeals to women but does not offend men. ...George W. Bush succeeds with both and that drives Democrats crazy. They've made fools of themselves with their churlish criticism of his landing on the deck of the USS Lincoln, but they can't let it go. George W. was a hottie in his flight suit. He was the victorious commander, and most of all he looked at home with himself. He glowed with the pride born of authenticity, declaring the war over and thanking all those appreciative sailors on the decks of the Lincoln." The Wall Street Journal's Lisa Schiffren writes, "I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking -- how to put it? -- really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly 'hot,' as in virile, sexy and powerful." Schiffren goes on to praise Bush for using "overwhelming military force to vanquish a truly evil foe," and for "facing down balking former 'allies,'" and finds it hard to believe that "he is not taken seriously as a foreign-policy president." CNN's Kyra Phillips and Miles O'Brien go virtually gaga over Bush's stunt, giving their audience the following exchange: "He looks like a fighter pilot!" "Yes. He's got the look, doesn't he? Yeah! That's --" "He sure does! Look at the stroll!" "I'm telling you, that's the fighter pilot strut if I ever saw it. He's got it going!" "Tom Cruise! [a reference to the movie Top Gun] Look at him!" - The Top Gun comparison is apt. Columnist and author Frank Rich writes, "If there was a single aesthetic that dominated this rousing scene, it was that of Jerry Bruckheimer, the hugely successful producer of Armageddon, Black Hawk Down, and Top Gun, the movie specifically reenacted by Bush in his flyboy landing on the Lincoln." Bruckheimer has had a profitable relationship with the Pentagon since the advent of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and worked with the Department of Defense to produce the short-lived ABC show Tales from the Front Lines, "which presented the American mission in Afghanistan as an MTV-paced joy ride."
- Fox commentator Morton Kondracke, who helped craft Bush's action-hero portrayal in the fictional Showtime film DC 9/11, calls Bush landing on the carrier "fantastic theater," and compares Bush to the action-hero president in the movie Independence Day, who in the film was a former fighter pilot called on to lead an assault against alien invaders. "[T]his president has learned to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command," says Washington Post columnist David Broder. NBC's Meet the Press contrasts Bush's swaggering strut across the flight deck with Michael Dukakis's disastrous attempt to look tough during the 1988 presidential campaign by poking his head out of a tank. Columnist Robert Novak asks, "Could Joe Lieberman get into a jet pilot's jump suit and look credible?" His answer is, of course, no.
- James Wolcott, sardonically discussing the event's impact on Chris Matthews and his Hardball guests, says that Matthews "gets as gaga as Andrew Sullivan and frequent guest Peggy Noonan over that hickory-smoked hunk of masculinity, George W. Bush." Wolcott continues, "One of the more cringe-inducing TV moments in recent memory was Matthews and G. Gordon Liddy [on Hardball] sprouting rhetorical woodies over the spectacle of Bush on the carrier deck in his flight suit, his parachute harness showcasing the presidential bulge -- or, to use Liddy's inimitable phrase, 'his manly characteristic.' One guy to another, Liddy put Matthews wise. 'You know, all those women who say size doesn't count, they're all liars. Check that out.' Matthews: 'And I've got to say why do the Democrats, as you say, want to keep advertising this guy's greatest moment?' Liddy: 'Look, he's coming across as a, well, as women would call in my show saying, what a stud....' To borrow a line from the late critic Marvin Mudrick, the two of them should take a cold shower, preferably not together."
- Rich observes that the sanitizing, showmanship, and historical revisionism of the entire production "did the job as effectively as Ronald Reagan's 1984 D-Day anniversary appearance in Normandy. Equipped with his own aircraft-carrier backdrop, Reagan forever cemented the national fantasy that his own wartime service had been on the front rather than in the safe film-industry haven of Culver City, California." The draft-dodging, AWOL Bush has been transformed, by marketing magic and media slavering, into a war hero. (Buzzflash, Mark Crispin Miller, Frank Rich pp.88-91)
"At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords, we're all generals. Only some of us never grow out of it." -- Peter Ustinov
- Democratic senator Robert Byrd scoffs at Bush's carrier photo-op, saying,
Iraq war and occupation
"As I watched the president's fighter jet swoop down onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, I could not help but contrast the simple dignity of President Lincoln at Gettysburg with the flamboyant showmanship of President Bush.... To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the president to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech. I do not begrudge his salute to America's warriors aboard the carrier Lincoln...but I do question the motives of a deskbound president who assumes the garb of a warrior for a speech." (Ian Williams) - In the aftermath of Bush's "enhanced" declaration of "Mission Accomplished," journalist Amy Goodman writes,
Iraq war and occupation
"Two wars took place in Iraq. ...In the real war, there were devastated communities, overcrowded and underequipped hospitals, dead and dying victims of US bomb attacks. Anguished families dealt with personal losses. It was gruesome and heart-wrenching. Pain and suffering starred in this war. Then there was the fake war -- the one Americans saw on TV. In this war, there were almost no victims. The United States overran a whole country, destroyed a foreign army, engaged in street-to-street combat and intense aerial bombing, rescued a brave young woman from enemy hands -- and barely saw a victim. The American flag starred in this war." She cites a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that examined 40.5 hours of war coverage and 108 reports from embedded reporters by the mainstream television media -- ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox -- and not one time was a wounded soldier or civilian shown. This despite the fact that about half of the embedded reporters were with combat units. Goodman notes that it took very little coverage of wounded soldiers and civilians in Vietnam to galvanize public outrage against the war; analysis of the coverage from Vietnam shows that only a little over 3% of the televised footage of that war showed actual violence. - Goodman continues, "If Americans had seen the war in Iraq that the rest of the world saw, it would surely have had an impact. ...Too bad it was a case of 'the more you watch, the less you know,' to quote media critic Danny Schecter. The US media was engaged in a massive deception. We could devastate Iraq, but the media wouldn't show the results. ...We can watch Arnold Schwarzenegger blow away and disembowel scores of villains in the movies, but when it comes to showing us the real face of war, the networks suddenly worry about images that are in 'poor taste.' ...Censorship goes by many names in the United States. Taste is one of the favorite euphemisms. Sensibility is another." Indeed, the US protested when Arab networks such as al-Jazeera showed footage of dead American soldiers and American POWs being interrogated. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld called the POW footage "a clear violation of the Geneva Convention," which protects prisoners of war against being publicly humiliated. The only network to decide to run anything other than stills or very brief footage of the POW interrogations was CBS, on its news show Face the Nation, and that was because Rumsfeld was on hand to give the footage the appropriate spin. Even so, when the Pentagon complained, CBS obligingly decided not to air the footage.
- A week later, several newspapers ran photos of Iraqi prisoners of war, some with bags over their heads; the Pentagon did not complain that their Geneva Convention rights were being violated. "American POWs mattered," writes Goodman; "Iraqi POWs did not." She continues, "The real issue for the Pentagon was not protecting the dignity of prisoners or the Geneva Convention -- international laws that Human Rights Watch suggests the United States has violated in its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan -- it was about controlling the media. The Pentagon understood that if the real, grisly images of dead American soldiers and POWs got out, domestic support for the invasion would weaken. That explains why the Pentagon issued orders that all returning caskets from Iraq be off-loaded behind curtains -- no press photos allowed -- in order to keep images of the grim toll out of the media." (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
- It is not long before the "bounce" that the Bush handlers had hoped for with the "Mission Accomplished" speech fades, to be supplanted with new questions about the continuing conduct of the war, which is anything but over.
Conservative media slant
Bush's team will now begin to distance themselves from the event, going so far as to blame the crew of the aircraft carrier for the idea behind the "Mission Accomplished" banner: Bush says, "They asked us to do the production of the banner and we did. They're the ones who put it up." General Wesley Clark quips in response to Bush's backpedal, "I guess the next thing we are going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear a flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier." (New York Times/The Boston Channel/Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
"[The Bush administration] believed we would find an oil-rich, functioning country, that we'd be met by cheering crowds, that all we had to do was sweep out the top Baathist layers, implant our favorite exiles and watch democracy take root as the bulk of the troops returned home by Christmas." -- Senator Joseph Biden, September 2003
- May 2: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld announces the end of combat in
Iraq war and occupation
Afghanistan. However, Rumsfeld's announcement is premature, as heavy military operations continue in that country through at least the spring of 2007. (Wikipedia)
- May 3: George W. Bush tells reporters, "We'll find them [Iraq's WMDs]. It'll be a matter of time to do so."
Iraq war and occupation
But then he begins preparing for a new shift, saying, "But what we're going -- the world will find is, the man had a program to develop weapons of mass destruction." The line is now programs for the development of WMDs, not WMDs themselves. (White House, Democratic Underground, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire US government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it." -- CBS reporter Joie Chen on May 4, quoted by Dave Zweifel
- May 4: The administration awards Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root a $24 million contract to distribute gasoline and other fuels to Iraq.
Halliburton
This is part of a $7 billion &umbrella& contract Halliburton has with the Department of Defense for affairs in Iraq, by far the single largest contract awarded to a corporate entity involved in the rebuilding program. (Online Journal) - May 4: Colin Powell, along with other administration officials, continues to backtrack on the issue of finding WMDs:
Iraq war and occupation
"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now." Contrast this to the dozens of statements before the war that flatly asserted the evidence was already in hand. Additionally, Rumsfeld says, "We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country." The New York Times reports that Bush's "senior aides, in interviews in recent days, had begun to back away from their prewar claims that Mr. Hussein had an arsenal that was loaded and ready to fire. They now contend that he developed what they call a 'just in time' production strategy for his weapons, hiding chemical precursors that could be quickly loaded into empty artillery shells or short-range missiles. But no evidence has been found that he did so, and Mr. Bush's comments [that it will take time to find the WMDs] reflected a growing concern in the administration that opponents of the war would claim that the United States exaggerated the evidence against Iraq in order to justify an attack that was intended to depose Mr. Hussein." Some Bush officials are saying privately that WMDs may never be found. After a relatively strong grilling by a reporter during a press conference on May 7, press secretary Ari Fleischer is forced to admit on the issue of WMDs, "Well, we don't have anything concrete to report on that." (State Department, Defense Department, David Corn) - May 4: One US official says that the US tolerance of a nuclear North Korea sends the same message to Iran that the invasion of Iraq sent to North Korea:
Bush foreign policy
"Get your nuclear weapons quickly, before the Americans do to you what they've done to Iraq, because North Korea shows once you get the weapons, you're immune." (New York Times Magazine/Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - May 4: Matt Schofield, a reporter for the Kansas City Star, writes one of the most poignant and revealing stories from the war, from a Baghdad cemetery:
Iraq war and occupation
"Ten-year old Saad Sammir offers a tour of his little cemetery on the grounds of the Al-Aksari hospital. 'Here is a small mound of dirt: this is for a baby I buried. He was very little. Here is the biggest mound of dirt, a momma and her baby died together. She was holding him very tight, and we could not pry them apart, so we put them in the same hole.' Saad is here because many schools are still closed in the wake of the war. He guesses that he has helped dig 100 graves. The cemetery is temporary. There are only 150 graves, only 64 of them are still occupied. The graves are no more than two feet deep, and some are simply at ground level, with dirt from a nearby hole piled on top. Hands stick out the sides of some, and feet out of others. Saad smiles. He is paid 1,000 dinars for each body that he buries or reburies. For the first few weeks, that means as much as 1,000 dinars a day, or about $2 at the old rate." (Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson) - May 4: The New York Times reveals the Department of the Interior's plan to rescind an order protecting 2.6 million acres of pristine wilderness in Utah.
Global warming and the environment
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton declares that her department has no interest in setting aside any wilderness lands in the future. (New York Times/Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- May 5: The "Conference for the Reconstruction of Iraq" is held at the National Press Club.
Military-industrial complex
It is organized by William Loiry, head of Equity International. Attendees include corporate leaders, aid officials, foreign diplomats, and representatives of 21 federal agencies including US Aid, the Department of Defense, and the State Department. Republican Representative Christopher Shays and Under-Secretary of State Lincoln Blommfield are among the speakers. Blommfield claims that this conference "couldn't have come at a better time." The most frequent question is how can private companies sign contracts with governmental agencies and with companies already in Iraq, including Halliburton, KBR, and Bechtel. (Truthout) - May 5: Journalist Seymour Hersh writes a powerful expose of the "Cabal," the small but powerful group of neoconservatives working to change America's foreign policy.
Bush's foreign policies
Led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the Cabal has succeeded in changing the direction of American intelligence gathering. American intelligence was critical in convincing American citizens of the necessity of invading Iraq, even though the "facts" presented to bolster this necessity have largely turned out to be false and in many cases manufactured. The Cabal works primarily out of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, headed up by Abram Shulsky, a scholar whose mentor is right-wing iconoclast Leo Strauss. Shulsky has thirty years of experience and connections with previous Republican administrations. The OSP itself is directed by retired naval captain William Luti, whose official post is Undersecretary of Defense. Luti has always been a powerful advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the DIA, says, "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running [Iraqi exile Ahmad] Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA." An aide to Luti says, "The intelligence community is still looking for a mission like they had in the Cold War, when they spoon-fed the policymakers." A Pentagon adviser who has worked with Special Plans dismisses any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic whining: "shulsky and Luti won the policy debate," the adviser says. "They beat 'em -- they cleaned up against State and the CIA. There's no mystery why they won -- because they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who won." - He adds, "I'd love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won." The Cabal and the OSP have been driven by their unshakable belief that Saddam Hussein's large stash of biological and chemical weapons, now proven to have been destroyed in the early 1990s, still exists and poses a serious threat to US security. Rumsfeld, who is closely aligned with the Cabal neocons, and his colleagues believed that the CIA was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. "The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism," says the Pentagon adviser. "That's what drove them. If you've ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at CIA that color the way it sees data." The goal of Special Plans, he says, was "to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can't see. Shulsky's carrying the heaviest part." The OSP has a powerful ally in Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, who has made the same argument from his post. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, "Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons.... How far he's gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don't think we really know. My guess is it's further than we think. It's always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we're able to prove and demonstrate.... And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we're able to report."
- Last October, Rumsfeld had ordered an intelligence operation to hunt for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists that had been overlooked by the CIA. When Rumsfeld was asked about the operation at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. "I'm told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now...were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things." He went on to say, "You don't know what you don't know. So in comes the daily briefer [from the CIA] and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. 'Gee, what about this?' or 'What about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members."
- Rumsfeld's information was provided by the OSP, who was mainly channeling disinformation and lies from Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress. Besides Chalabi's connections inside Iraq, which have now been shown to be largely specious, the close personal bond between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle helped cement Chalabi's position as an exile with excellent connections and information. After Wolfowitz and Perle brought Chalabi on board, the exile formed strong relationships with other Bush administration neocons, including Rumsfeld, Undersecretary for Defense Douglas Feith, and Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. For years, Chalabi has had the support of prominent members of the American Enterprise Institute and other conservatives. Chalabi had some Democratic supporters, too, including neoconservative James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA. Chalabi's group also had been secretly funded by the CIA to the tune of millions of dollars, payments that stopped in 1996 because the agency was suspicious of Chalabi's integrity and loyalties. "You had to treat them with suspicion," another former Middle East station chief says of Chalabi's people. "The INC has a track record of manipulating information because it has an agenda. It's a political unit -- not an intelligence agency."
- One of the linchpins of the case for Iraqi WMDs was the testimony of the former chief of the Iraqi weapons program, General Hussein Kamel, who, along with his brother Colonel Saddam Kamel, defected to Jordan with thousands of pages of documents. The Kamels were extensively interviewed by UN inspectors before they were convinced by Saddam Hussein to return to Iraq in 1996, where he had them murdered. In October 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati, President Bush cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam's regime "was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents.... This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions." A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself." What was omitted from the Kamel testimony was the fact that both brothers insisted that the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons had been destroyed circa 1991, mostly to keep them from being discovered by UN inspectors. Kamel himself ordered the destruction of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons stockpiles. "You have an important role in Iraq," Kamel told Rolf Ekeus, the executive chairman of the UN inspection teams, and Ekeus's two associates, Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro, in an interview on August 22, 1995. "You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq." Smidovich told Kamel that the UN teams had not found "any traces of destruction" of weapons caches, and Kamel replied, "Yes, it was done before you came in." He also told the inspectors that "we gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons. ...I don't remember resumption of chemical weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling.... All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear -- were destroyed."
- Kamel also disproved the assertions of another defector, Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who settled in the US in 1994 with the help of Chalabi's INC and has frequently spoken about Iraq's burgeoning nuclear weapons program. Kamel told the UN that Hamza was "a professional liar," and went on to say, "He worked with us, but he was useless and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything.... He was even interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go." After his defection, Hamza became a senior fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington disarmament group, whose president, David Albright, was a former UN weapons inspector. In 1998, according to Albright, he and Hamza sent publishers a proposal for a book tentatively entitled Fizzle: Iraq and the Atomic Bomb, which described how Iraq had failed in its quest for a nuclear device. There were no takers, Albright says, and Hamza eventually "started exaggerating his experiences in Iraq." The two men broke off contact. In 2000, Hamza published Saddam's Bombmaker, a vivid account claiming that by 1991, when the Gulf War began, Iraq was far closer than had been known to the production of a nuclear weapon. Jeff Stein, Hamzi's collaborator on the book, says that Hamza's account was "absolutely on the level, allowing for the fact that any memoir puts the author at the center of events, and therefore there is some exaggeration." James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, said of Hamza, "I think highly of him and I have no reason to disbelieve the claims that he's made." On April 26th, he returned to Iraq as a member of a group of exiles designated by the Pentagon to help rebuild the country's infrastructure. Hamza himself is to be responsible for atomic energy. His book has now been shown to be largely a tissue of lies and exaggerations. In 2004, Hamza's contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority will not be renewed.
- Chalabi's group, supported by the Pentagon, worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In many cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the CIA. Misstatements and inconsistencies in INC defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of UN weapons inspections, which ended a few days before the American assault. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, compiled and examined the information that had been made public and concluded that the UN inspections had failed to find evidence to support the defectors' claims. For example, many newspapers published extensive interviews with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who, with the INC's help, fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed that he had visited twenty hidden facilities that he believed were built for the production of biological and chemical weapons. One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad. Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell's claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, that the United States had "firsthand descriptions" of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The UN teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri's claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. "No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far," he said. Almost immediately after September 11th, the INC began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks.
- In an interview on October 14, 2001, conducted jointly by the Times and the PBS news show Frontline, Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the September 11th operation "was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam," and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. However, a former CIA station chief and a former military intelligence analyst say that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-80s, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain's MI6. The CIA offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. "We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison," says the former station chief. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane -- which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training -- when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former CIA official notes, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. "That's Hollywood rinky-dink stuff," the former agent says. "They train in basements. You don't need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing." Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th, 2003. Neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war. The camp was overrun by American troops on April 6, 2003; no evidence was found to substantiate any of the administration's, or the defectors', claims.
- A former Bush Administration intelligence official recalls a case in which Chalabi's group, working with the Pentagon, produced a defector from Iraq who was interviewed overseas by an agent from the DIA. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi's people. Last summer, the DIA report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, the London Times described how the defector had trained with al-Qaeda terrorists in the late 1990s at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received instructions in the use of chemical and biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity and relocated. A month later, however, a team of CIA agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. "He says, 'No, that's not what I said,'" says the former intelligence official. "said, 'I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn't al-Qaeda.' He never saw any chemical or biological training." Afterward, the former official said, "the CIA sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing." But the CIA rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. "I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn't." The former intelligence official continues, "One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with -- to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God. ...If it doesn't fit their theory, they don't want to accept it."
- It is worth noting that Shulsky, the coordinator of the OSP, is an expert in Soviet disinformation tactics. It is also noteworthy that Leo Strauss, Shulsky's mentor, built his entire schema of governmental foreign policy on the idea of deception -- not only on deceiving the public, but of one branch or element of a government deliberately deceiving another. Shulsky and Gary Schmitt co-authored a 1999 essay in which they wrote that Strauss's idea of hidden meanings "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception." Strauss believed that a leader, whether a king or elected president, needs a trusted "inner circle" of advisors: according to a critic of Strauss's, Robert Pippin, such reliance on a secretive inner circle means that "what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way." Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the CIA, worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He says, "Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group -- the Straussian view." The group's members, Cannistraro says, "reinforce each other because they're the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they've never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they're in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there." A former CIA task-force leader who is a consultant to the Bush administration says that many analysts in the CIA are convinced that the Chalabi group's defector reports on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda have produced little of value, but said that the agency "is not fighting it." He says that the DIA has studied the information as well. "Even the DIA can't find any value in it."
- In interviews, former CIA officers and analysts describe the agency as increasingly demoralized. "George knows he's being beaten up," one former officer says of CIA director George Tenet. "And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he's been forced to do things their way." Because the CIA's analysts are now on the defensive, "they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what's going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want." A former CIA official adds, "The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments. I've never seen a government like this." "They see themselves as outsiders," says a former CIA expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs of the Special Plans people. "There's a high degree of paranoia. They've convinced themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool." A former high-level intelligence official says that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. "They came up with nothing," the official said. "Never found a single Scud." Since then, there have been a number of false alarms and a tip that weapons may have been destroyed in the last days before the war, but no solid evidence.
- On April 22nd, Hans Blix, hours before he asked the UN Security Council to send his team back to Iraq, told the BBC, "I think it's been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been so shaky." There is little self-doubt or second-guessing in the Pentagon over the failure to immediately find the weapons. The Pentagon adviser to Special Plans says he believes that the delay "means nothing. We've got to wait to get all the answers from Iraqi scientists who will tell us where they are." Similarly, the Pentagon official who works for Luti said last week, "I think they're hidden in the mountains or transferred to some friendly countries. Saddam had enough time to move them." There were suggestions from the Pentagon that Saddam might be shipping weapons over the border to Syria. "It's bait and switch," the former high-level intelligence official says. "Bait them into Iraq with weapons of mass destruction. And, when they aren't found, there's this whole bullsh*t about the weapons being in Syria."
- In Congress, a senior legislative aide says, "some members are beginning to ask and to wonder, but cautiously." For now, he says, "the members don't have the confidence to say that the Administration is off base." He adds, "For many, it makes little difference. We vanquished a bad guy and liberated the Iraqi people. Some are astute enough to recognize that the alleged imminent WMD threat to the US was a pretext. I sometimes have to pinch myself when friends or family ask with incredulity about the lack of WMD, and remind myself that the average person has the idea that there are mountains of the stuff over there, ready to be tripped over. The more time elapses, the more people are going to wonder about this, but I don't think it will sway US public opinion much. Everyone loves to be on the winning side." Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a strong supporter of the President's decision to overthrow Saddam. "I do think building a democratic secular state in Iraq justifies everything we've done," Kerrey, who is now president of New School University, in New York, says, "But they've taken the intelligence on weapons and expanded it beyond what was justified." Speaking of the hawks, he says, "It appeared that they understood that to get the American people on their side they needed to come up with something more to say than 'We've liberated Iraq and got rid of a tyrant.' So they had to find some ties to weapons of mass destruction and were willing to allow a majority of Americans to incorrectly conclude that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with the World Trade Center. Overemphasizing the national-security threat made it more difficult to get the rest of the world on our side. It was the weakest and most misleading argument we could use." Kerrey adds, "It appears that they have the intelligence. The problem is, they didn't like the conclusions." (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh)
- May 6: The US and Britain break their promise to bring self-rule to Iraq quickly, announcing that plans to form a national assembly and interim government by the end of the month will be put off indefinitely.
Iraq war and occupation
Many Iraqis are resentful and angry at the decision. Bush also formally announces the selection of Paul Bremer as the "presidential envoy" to Iraq, essentially the US viceroy of the country until the US allows the country to determine its own government. Bremer later writes that Bush makes it clear to both Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell that Bremer is directly subordinate to Bush himself, not either of the secretaries, but three days later, Bush appoints Bremer as his envoy to Iraq "reporting through the Secretary of Defense." Bremer is in charge of everyone except Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks. - One of Bremer's first orders in Iraq is the "de-Ba'athification" of Iraq's governmental and ministerial infrastructure, a devastating loss to the country and a step bitterly fought by Jay Garner and many others. Bremer recalls that Rumsfeld's undersecretary of policy, Douglas Feith, is responsible for pushing the program; Feith later blames Bremer for both the de-Ba'athification policy and Bremer's order to disband the Iraqi army. (David Corn, Bob Woodward)
- May 6: Bush states, "I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons
Iraq war and occupation
program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program." (White House) - May 6: Colonel Paul Hughes, part of the fired Jay Garner's reconstruction staff, presents an agreement he has tentatively made to pay 137,000 former Iraqi army soldiers $20 apiece as an "emergency payment" in return for a group of former officers' turnover of computers and documents about the army.
Iraq war and occupation
Reporter Bob Woodward writes, "Hughes was very excited, believing he had stumbled on an opportunity to get the former Iraqi army on the coalition's side and help them retain some honor. It was what General Grant had done in the Civil War after Lee's surrender at Appomatox, he thought. For $20 a head -- less than $3 million for all 137,000 soldiers on the list -- they could offer parole to part of the Iraqi military, and get them invested in the post-Saddam society." Hughes never gets the money; instead, new administrator Paul Bremer will soon order the disbanding of the Iraqi army, a disastrous move. (Bob Woodward) - May 6: Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times writes a slashing op-ed about the Bush administration's lies and misinformation in the runup to war with Iraq, noting,
Iraq war and occupation
"There are indications that the US government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world." Kristof goes into some detail about the bogus charges surrounding Iraq's supposed attempts to buy uranium from Niger, writing in part, "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former US ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. ...The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted -- except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway." - One of Kristof's sources is the former ambassador, Joseph Wilson. Kristof met Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, at a conference of Democratic senators at a hotel in Maryland. (The other conference members have no idea Plame is a covert CIA agent; one friend of Wilson's, who meets his wife for the first time during the conference, recalls getting the impression that she is some sort of "energy executive.") Kristof hears Wilson freely discussing his trip to Niger and asks Wilson if he can write about it. Wilson agrees, as long as Kristol doesn't name him as a source. Kristof gets some of the details wrong -- Wilson's report was largely ignored within the administration and had less of an impact on the White House than Kristof implies, and Wilson himself did not prove the documents to be forgeries. Wilson himself had never seen the documents and never claimed to have debunked the documents. (Over a year later, Wilson's attackers will use Kristof's mistakes to assault Wilson's own veracity.) (New York Times/Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
