May 2004: Week Four: This Far and No Further

Back to May 2004

Entire Iraqi war and occupation proven an Iranian intelligence operation

May 22: The Defense Intelligence Agency reports that a senior aide to Ahmad Chalabi has duped the US for years with disinformation designed to affect US foreign policy and to collect highly sensitive information, and the treachery has been paid for by US taxpayers. The aide, Aras Karim Habib, is an agent of Iranian intelligence, and has apparently passed along the secrets he has collected to Iran for years. Iraqi and coalition police are currently seeking Habib, who is now the subject of a warrant for his arrest. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," says a DIA source. The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified US documents and other sensitive information. The program has received millions of dollars from the US government over several years. An administration official confirms that "highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel." The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 per month to Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Patrick Lang, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East branch, says he has been told by colleagues in intelligence that Chalabi's US-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he says. He describes it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history," and goes on to say, "I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work."
The DIA source says Karim is primarily responsible for the intelligence breach: Karim's "fingerprints are all over it," he says. "There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the US government, inadvertently," he says. The Iraqi National Congress has received about $40 million in U.S. money over the past four years, including $33 million from the State Department and $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency. In Baghdad after the war, Karim's operation was run out of a floor of a secure intelligence headquarters building while the agency was on the floor above, said an Iraqi source who knows Karim well. The links between the Iraqi National Congress and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992, when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and military operations. Indications that Iran, which fought a war against Iraq during the 1980s, was trying to lure the United States into action against Saddam appeared years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 that ousting Saddam was a US priority. In 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's nuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb program in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave United Nations nuclear inspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program. Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed with Chalabi after his escape. It turns out that the documents were sophisticated forgeries made by Iranian intelligence. Other Chalabi aides term the allegations that Habib is working for Iranian intelligence "ridiculous" attempts to undermine Chalabi. (Newsday/Duluth News Tribune, MSNBC)
May 22: A confidential December 24 letter to the International Red Cross disputes the protected status of many of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, and contends that the prisoners do not warrant protection under the Geneva Conventions. The letter, drafted by military lawyers and signed by Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, emphasized the "military necessity" of isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their "significant intelligence value," and said prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals. The military insisted that there were "clear procedures governing interrogation to ensure approaches do not amount to inhumane treatment." In recent public statements, Bush administration officials have said that the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" in Iraq. That has put American-run prisons in Iraq in a different category from those in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo Bay, where members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been declared unlawful combatants not eligible for protection. However, the December 24 letter undermines administration assertions of the conventions' broad application in Iraq. Until now, the only known element of the letter had been a provision described by a senior Army officer as having asserted that the Red Cross should not seek in the future to conduct no-notice inspections in the cellblock where the worst abuses took place. The International Committee of the Red Cross had reported in November that its staff, in a series of visits to Abu Ghraib in October, had "documented and witnessed" ill treatment that "included deliberate physical violence" as well as verbal abuse, forced nudity and prolonged handcuffing in uncomfortable positions.
In recent Congressional testimony, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, asserted that the December 24 response demonstrated that the military had fully addressed the Red Cross complaints. Much of the military's reply is devoted to presenting a legal justification for the treatment of a broad category of Iraqi prisoners, including hundreds identified by the United States as "security detainees" in a cellblock at Abu Ghraib and in another facility known as Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport, where the Red Cross had also found abuses. Prisoners of war are given comprehensive protections under the Third Geneva Convention, while civilian prisoners are granted considerable protection under the Fourth Convention. Under the argument advanced by the military, Iraqi prisoners who are deemed security risks can be denied the right to communicate with others, and perhaps other rights and privileges, at least until the overall security situation in Iraq improves. The military's rationale relied on a legal exemption within the Fourth Geneva Convention. "While the armed conflict continues, and where 'absolute military security so requires,' security detainees will not obtain full GC protection as recognized in GCIV/5, although such protection will be afforded as soon as the security situation in Iraq allows it," the letter says, using abbreviations to refer to Article 5 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That brief provision opens what is, in effect, a narrow, three-paragraph loophole in the 1949 convention.
The Red Cross's standing commentary on the provision calls it "an important and regrettable concession to State expediency." It was drafted, during intense debate and in inconsistent French and English versions, to address the treatment of spies and saboteurs. "What is most to be feared is that widespread application of the article may eventually lead to the existence of a category of civilian internees who do not receive the normal treatment laid down by the convention but are detained under conditions which are almost impossible to check," says the Red Cross commentary, which is posted on its Web site. "It must be emphasized most strongly, therefore, that Article 5 can only be applied in individual cases of an exceptional nature." An authority on the laws of war, Scott Silliman of Duke University, says that the assertions in the military's letter were highly questionable and that the military lawyers who drafted it may have misconstrued the law. The category in which prisoners may be excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions that the letter cites, Silliman says, are for people who can be shown to be a continuing threat to the occupying force, not people who might have valuable intelligence. "They may be high value assets but that does not necessarily make them security risks," he says. The provision cited in the letter provides that the protections could be suspended for people suspected of "activities hostile to the security" of a warring state or an occupying power. In testimony last week on Capitol Hill, Colonel Marc Warren, a top American military lawyer in Iraq, defended harsh techniques available to American interrogators there as not being in violation of the Geneva Conventions. He said the conventions should be read in light of "various legal treatises and interpretations of coercion as applied to security internees."
Exactly how the treatment of security prisoners would differ from others under the military's approach was not spelled out in detail, but clearly it would allow their segregation into a separate part of the prison for interrogation, where some of them could be held incommunicado. The military's letter promised to try to improve prisoners' treatment in some respects cited by the Red Cross, promising, for example, to provide shelters against mortar and rocket attacks "in due course" but noting that the shelters are in short supply for American and allied soldiers. It also said "improvement can be made" to provide adequate clothing and water, and promised speedier judgments and discharges of innocent prisoners. The letter is addressed to Eva Svoboda of the Red Cross committee, who is identified as the agency's "protection coordinator." It asserts that the prisoners at Camp Cropper "have been assessed to be of significant ongoing intelligence value to current and future military operations in Iraq. Their detention condition is in the context of ongoing strategic interrogation," it reads, and "under the circumstances, we consider their detention to be humane." The Red Cross report said that at the time of the October visits to Abu Ghraib, "a total of 601 detainees were held as security detainees. Many were unaware of any charges against them or what legal process might be ahead of them," the report reads. Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer who heads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke, says the response of authorities at Abu Ghraib to the Red Cross appears to be part of a larger pattern in which the administration and the military devote great energy to find ways to avoid the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. "If you look at this in connection with other things that are coming out, it doesn't seem like a snap decision but part of an across-the-board pattern of decision-making to create another category outside the conventions." He cites a memorandum written in January 2002 by Albert Gonzales, the White House counsel, recommending that President Bush decree that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners from the war in Afghanistan. In the memorandum, Gonzales said that getting out from under the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions would preserve the government's flexibility in fighting terrorism. (New York Times)
May 22: Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, head of coalition forces in Iraq, issued an order last October giving military intelligence control over almost every aspect of prison conditions at Abu Ghraib with the explicit aim of manipulating the detainees' "emotions and weaknesses," according to an October 12, 2003 memorandum published in the Washington Post. The memo proves that Sanchez, far from being "out of the loop," was provably involved in the abuse of prisoners at the Iraqi prison. The memorandum comes to light as more details emerged of the extent of detainee abuse. Formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator. The October memorandum also contradicts Sanchez's sworn testimony to the US Senate. At a hearing this week of the Senate armed services committee, he was questioned about an order he had given in November placing Abu Ghraib prison under the command of a military intelligence brigade. He insisted the order referred only to the defense of the jail. "All of the other responsibilities for continuing to run the prison for logistics, training, discipline and the conduct of prison operations remained with the 800th [military police] Brigade commander," Sanchez told senators. He specifically rejected the findings of the official report into the Abu Ghraib abuse by Major General Antonio Taguba, who concluded that military intelligence officers had told the guards "to set the conditions" for interrogations. However, according to the memorandum, Sanchez had explicitly given military intelligence interrogators control over the "lighting, heating...food, clothing and shelter" of the detainees being questioned. It also called for military intelligence officials to work more closely with the military police guards at the prison to "manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses." It has also become clear that the military intelligence brigade that took control of the interrogation center was deployed direct from Afghanistan and brought with it harsh procedures it had developed there. The US military deems US military prisons in Afghanistan to be outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva conventions because it defines al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters as "unlawful combatants." (Guardian)
May 22: Several high-ranking US military officials believe that the Pentagon has hired private contractors to interrogate Iraqi prisoners in an attempt to avoid congressional and military oversight. "They believed that there was a conscious effort to create an atmosphere of ambiguity, of having people involved who couldn't be held to account," says a civilian lawyer who has spoken to the officials. Two private companies were involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib. One, CACI International, supplied interrogation specialists, while the other, Titan International, supplied interpreters. Their participation has been highly controversial because of concerns that their confused legal status could preclude them from effective oversight. Private contractors are not subject to the same military legal code as uniformed soldiers. They have also been exempted from local laws in Iraq, under a decree passed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. A Pentagon spokesman denies that contractors were used for reasons of secrecy, and said they were held to the same standard as regular military intelligence: "The regulations -- both Geneva and otherwise -- apply the same exact way to the contractors as they do to uniform personnel," says the spokesman. Critics of such outsourcing arrangements note that while seven US soldiers are already facing court martials for their conduct at Abu Ghraib, no contractors have yet been punished despite being implicated in the abuses in a report filed by army Major General Antonio Taguba in late February. Civilian contractors in Afghanistan have also avoided sanctions even though at least one has come under investigation in connection with the death of a prisoner at an army detention facility there. (Financial Times/CommonDreams
May 22: It is now revealed that two Marines have been court-martialed for torturing an Iraqi prisoner with electricity at the Marine-run Al Mahmudiya prison in Iraq. Privates Andrew Sting and Jeremian Trefney, both 19 years old, pled guilty to charges stemming from their abuse of an inmate with wires attached to a 110-volt cell. Both have been discharged from the military and will serve jail terms. Two other Marines are facing unspecified charges over the incident. (San Diego Union-Tribune
May 22: A newly released AP video of the aftermath of a US attack on a wedding party in western Iraq shows a scene of horrific carnage, depicting the dead bodies of at least ten children, clumps of hair from a woman's head, bloodstains, shattered musical instruments, and more. The attack killed up to 45 civilians, mostly from the Bou Fahad tribe of the village of Mogr el-Deeb, near the Syrian border. US officials have denied that the gathering that was attacked was actually a wedding party, but instead a gathering of terrorists. The video gives those denials the lie. Most of the graves of the Iraqis killed in the attacks contain the bodies of mothers and their children. In Washington, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers has told Congress that "we feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters" who may have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on US troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaeda. "The intelligence right now and what we found at the site, which were weapons and the sort of things you might not expect at a wedding party, were not consistent with that. They were consistent with folks trying to come into the country, across the desert, in vehicles, staying for the night, trying to make it into Iraq." Several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site, according to US spokesman General Mark Kimmitt.
Bou Fahad tribesmen deny that any foreign fighters were among them. They consider the desolate border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. In the springtime they leave spacious homes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and roam the desert. Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life, although no one in the tribe acknowledges that. Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire, but survivors insisted no weapons were fired before the US bombings, despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack. The first bomb hit the huge goat-hair tent, where male guests were sleeping, at about 2:45 AM May 19. The barrage didn't stop until sunrise, witnesses say. Women and children were in an adjacent one-story house and the men went to their nearby homes. After the first missile, tribesman Hamdan Khalaf ran in panic and hid in a grassy area. "In the morning, we went back to the hill and saw people torn apart, attacked by the plane," Khalaf, who was not wounded, tells APTN. "We pulled them out of here," another man tells APTN, standing on a pile of stones as he picks up a stained green cloth that looks like part of a young man's shirt. A severed arm lays in the rubble. "We took them to hospital -- straight to the fridge," he adds. An angry voice in the background of the tape denounces President Bush. "This is his terrorism," the voice says. The body of what survivors say was the wedding's cameraman was pulled out of the debris on May 20. The footage also shows women in colorful clothes sifting through the wreckage and carrying away blankets and other goods. Pieces of rockets and bullet casings were strewn across the sandy plain, as were pots and pans and a satellite dish. Partly charred pickup trucks and a water tanker stood in the desert.
The attack left few survivors. About a dozen wounded were taken to the town of Qaem, about 140 miles northwest of Ramadi and 130 miles north of Mogr el-Deeb. Witnesses, interviewed on May 20 by the AP in Ramadi, said revelers at the wedding party began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. on May 18. Then came military vehicles, which stopped about two miles away from the village and switched off their headlights. The planes were still overhead at 11 p.m, so the hosts told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed. About four hours later, airstrikes began and continued until dawn when two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up. Some witnesses said the houses were attacked by helicopters; others said Americans detonated them with explosives. Kimmitt confirms that the operation was an air and ground assault. "Those people on the ground identified no children as part of that location that were killed," he says, adding that they reported only adult deaths. He also referred to the APTN video, shot May 20 in Mogr el-Deeb, as well as separate APTN footage from Wednesday in Ramadi that showed a headless body of a child and other bodies of children. "What we saw in those APTN videos were substantially inconsistent with the reports we received from the unit that conducted the operation," Kimmitt says. "We're now trying to figure out why there's an inconsistency. We're keeping an open mind as to exactly what happened on the ground. That's why we're continuing to try to gather all the facts; that's why we're not ruling out anything based on information coming forward." (AP/Guardian)

Testimony of rape of Iraqi boys by male interrogators

May 22: An Iraqi detainee has testified that he witnessed the rape of an Iraqi boy by a man in a US army uniform. The report of the detainee's testimony blacks out the name of the rapist, but he has been identified as a translator working for the US Army. "I saw [name blacked out] f*cking a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his d*ck in the little kid's *ss," Kasim Hilas told military investigators. "I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures." It is not clear from the testimony whether the rapist described by Hilas was working for a private contractor or was a US soldier. A private contractor was arrested after the Taguba investigation was completed, but was freed when it was discovered the army had no jurisdiction over him under military or Iraqi law. Another inmate, Thaar Dawod, describes more abuse of teenage Iraqis. "They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer [Corporal Charles Graner, one of the military policemen facing court martial] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners," he said. According to most inmate statements, Graner ran the night shift at Abu Ghraib's interrogation wing, and dealt out the worst of the abuse. Ameen al-Sheikh testified that: "The night guard came over, his name is Graner, open the cell door, came in with a number of soldiers. They forced me to eat pork and put liquor in my mouth. The second night Graner came and hung me on the cell door. I told him I have a broken shoulder. I am afraid it will break again...the doctor told me 'don't put your arms behind your back'. He said : 'I don't care.' Then he hung me to the door far more than eight hours." Al-Sheikh's testimony suggests military intelligence interrogators were also directly involved in the abuse. When he fails to identify a picture of a man suspected of giving him some pistols, he said the interrogators "point a weapon to my head and threaten they will kill me; sometime with dogs and they hang me to the door allowing the dogs to try to bite me." (Guardian)
May 22: Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi walks out of an Arab League summit meeting over his objections to what he says are insufficiently tough criticisms of Israel's handling of the Palestinian crisis. The 22 Arab leaders are united over their outrage at US abuses of Iraqi prisoners and their calls for Iraqi independence. The Arab summit will conclude with a resolution calling for the relaunching of a peace-for-land initiative to end the 56-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict that was endorsed by an Arab summit in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2002. The Bush administration plans to formally unveil its plan for Mideast reform that has been criticized by some as interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries. The plan, known as the Greater Middle East Initiative, will be launched at the G-8 summit of major industrial countries June 8-10 in the United States. (AP/Fox News)
May 22: Truck drivers for Halliburton subsidiary KBR confirm that the firm has sent convoys of empty flatbed trucks through Iraq over 100 times this year alone, putting their drivers and military escorts at severe risk and handing taxpayers the bill with added profit. The drivers were in peril of insurgent attack while taking empty rigs on the 300-mile resupply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad, say 12 current and former drivers for the company. KBR billed the government for hauling what the drivers derisively call "sailboat fuel." KBR, the US Army, and the truckers give different reasons for why empty trucks were driven through areas that the drivers nicknamed Rockville and Slaughterhouse for the danger they presented. KBR describes the practice of including empty trucks in convoys as normal, given the large number of trucks it has delivering goods throughout Iraq. The Army's contract doesn't dictate how many trucks must be in a convoy or whether they must be full, says Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for the US Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Illinois. "There was one time we ran 28 trucks; one trailer had one pallet, and the rest of them were empty," says David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs. Four other drivers who were with Wilson confirm his account. "It was supposed to be critical supplies that the troops had to have to operate," says Wilson, who has been fired by KBR. "It was one thing to risk your life to haul things the military needed. It's another to haul empty trailers." KBR denies there was any problem with the truck runs. "It is difficult and dangerous work and requires a lot from our employees," says Cathy Gist, a KBR spokeswoman. KBR truckers say they can earn about $80,000 a year, which is tax free if they remain in Iraq for a year. Trucking experts estimate that each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars. Of 12 current or former KBR drivers iinterviewed, 7 asked not to be identified. Six of the truckers said they were fired by KBR for allegedly running Iraqi drivers off the road when they attempted to break into the convoy; the dismissed drivers dispute that accusation. The 12 drivers, interviewed separately over the course of more than a month, tell similar stories about their trips through hostile territory. (Detroit Free Press)
May 22: After careful review, a number of medical experts have concluded that the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg was staged. "I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic," Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, says from New Zealand. Echoing Dr Simpson's criticism, forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, says, when asked whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been "staged:" "Yes, I think that's the best explanation of it." Both Simpson and Nordby believe it is highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation. A factor in this was an apparent lack of the "massive" arterial bleeding such an act initiates. "I would have thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered in blood, in a matter of seconds...if it was genuine," says Simpson. Notably, the act's perpetrators appeared far from so. Nordby observes: "I think that by the time they're...on his head, he's already dead." During the period when Berg's captors filmed the decapitation sequence, circumstances indicate that he had already been dead "a quite uncertain length of time, but more than...however long the beheading took," Simpson says.
Both Simpson and Nordby also note the difficulty in providing analysis based on the video. But both also felt that Berg had seemed drugged. A particularly significant point in the video sequence occurred as Berg's captors attacked him, bringing the supposedly fatal knife to bear. "The way that they pulled him over, they could have used a dummy at that point," says Simpson. Nordby adds that Berg does not "appear to register any sort of surprise or any change in his facial expression when he's grabbed and twisted over, and they start to bring this weapon into use." Subsequently, Nordby says it was likely that the filming sequence was manipulated at the point immediately preceding this, allowing Berg's corpse to be used for the decapitation sequence. Nordby also emphasized that the video "raises more questions than it answers," with the most fundamental questions of "who are you, and how did you die," being impossible to answer from it. But broad speculation exists regarding a number of factors surrounding both Berg's death and the video, and its timing in regard to revelations of US prison atrocities. Because Iraq's radical Islamists speak in a particular manner, and live by a closely proscribed code, apparent contradictions between these ways and the way Berg's captors appeared has generated speculation. Some observers have speculated on the possibility that the individuals weren't native Arabic speakers. Conversely, it is reported that in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law allows for beheadings in cases of severe crimes, the condemned is heavily drugged with tranquilizers prior to the execution, reportedly leaving them in a state similar to that which Berg appeared in during parts of the video. Nordby emphasizes that the video "raises more questions than it answers." (Asia Times
May 22: A coalition of political scientists, computer experts, voter groups, and state officials are demanding that electronic voting machines to be used in the November elections have a verifiable paper trail, something that manufacturers such as Diebold and ES&S say are both unnecessary and difficult to provide. The voting machines, which will be used in almost a third of polling places around the country, have proven so unreliable, open to manipulation, and vulnerable to hacking, that watchdog groups say that the 2004 election will be even easier to manipulate and fraudulently influence than even the 2000 Florida results. There are no national standards to help resolve the disputes. The federal commission that Congress created after 2000 to guide states is behind schedule, and the research body that was supposed to set standards for November 2004 has not even been appointed. So states, prompted by voter organizations, are taking matters into their own hands. Nevada, which is using touch screens in all its voting precincts this November, has become the first state to require the manufacturer to attach printers in time for Election Day. California is requiring voter-verified paper trails for any electronic machines that counties in the state buy after November; for this November, it has banned touch-screen machines unless counties meet certain security standards. Three counties are suing the state to overturn the ban and a fourth has said it plans to use the touch screens anyway. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley says he is requiring counties to allow voters to vote on paper if they wanted to, even if there were no apparent problems with the touch screens. "It's a voter-confidence issue," he says. "It should be a no-brainer."
More than a dozen other states are considering legislation to require paper backups, and Congress, which had left the matter on the back burner, is considering several similar proposals. "People are demanding this," says Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has introduced a bill to require that by November, all voters be able to cast ballots that they can verify. This would entail either retrofitting touch screens with printers or requiring a county to go back to a paper-based system like optical-scan equipment or even punch cards. Ohio, one of the states considered to be most "in play" during the November elections, has passed a law requiring paper verifications for ballots cast -- by 2006. "Ohio is the big struggle state right now," says Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org, a group advocating for paper trails. Doug Chapin of Electionline.org, a clearinghouse for election information set up by the Pew Charitable Trust, says that Ohio is "rolling the dice" to see whether paper trails were necessary. "You can either build a fence around a cliff or put an ambulance in the valley," he says. "The paper trail is the ambulance in the valley. Certifying the machines and testing them in the first place to make sure they are secure is the fence around the cliff." Right now only a few smaller manufacturers are producing machines with paper verifications, while the larger vendors claim that they can if they want to, but see no need for paper verification. Sequoia Voting System's vice president for sales, Howard Cramer, says that the demand for paper trails is a "fad" that will disappear once voters gain confidence in the electronic machines. (New York Times)

Fahrenheit 9/11 wins acclaim at Cannes

May 22: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 wins the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the top prize offered by the festival's organizers and the first documentary to win the prize since Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World in 1956. Some critics say that, as good as the film is, it doesn't measure up to the quality of his 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, and that the award was given to this film partly for political reasons. Moore's earlier film won a special award at Cannes in 2002. (AP/CommonDreams)

A third of Taguba report "missing" after its release to the Senate

May 23: Around 2,000 pages are missing from the copies of the Army's report on prison abuses in Iraq delivered to the US Senate. The original report, compiled by Major General Antonio Taguba, comprises over 6,000 pages. Pentagon spokesman Larry DeRita says that he knows nothing about the missing pages, but says that if pages are missing, it is an "oversight" due to a technical "glitch." One committee member, Senator Pat Roberts, said Sunday he would talk to the chairman, Senator John Warner, to get the facts. "I don't know" whether pages are missing, Roberts said, "but we'll sure as hell find out." Roberts, a Republican, heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, which also has been handed the report. Democratic Senator Jack Reed, another Armed Service Committee member, said he became aware Friday of the possibility of the missing pages. Reed indicated he would not be surprised if it were true because of the way that he said Defense Department normally treats Congress. "There's a lack of cooperation. There's a lack of candor. And that has hurt not only their perception but also gives rise to feelings or inferences that something is amiss deliberately," said Reed on CBS's Face the Nation. "I hope that's not the case." (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
May 23: The investigation of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is spreading to include allegations of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay facility. Following the stories from British detainees who claim that they were abused and videotaped, Navy Vice Admiral Albert Church is calling for an investigation into conditions at Camp Delta, where hundreds of terrorist suspects are being held, many without charges. (AP/KATV)

General Ricardo Sanchez directly linked to Iraqi prisoner abuse

May 23: In statements made during hearings involving Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick's involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, it is revealed that General Ricardo Sanchez, the highest US military officer in Iraq, visited the prison a number of times, and was present for several interrogations and allegations of prisoner abuse. Captain Donald Reese, company commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, is expected to testify to Sanchez's presence at the prison. Reese, who will testify that he was shocked by some of the techniques used by military intelligence officials during interrogations, is expected to testify that none of the abuses were a secret. "All of that was being questioned by the chain of command and denied, general officer level on down," says lawyer Captain Robert Shuck. "Present during some of these happenings, it has come to my knowledge that Lieutenant General Sanchez was even present at the prison during some of these interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse by those duty [non-commissioned officers]." A number of officers, including Reese, may be offered immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony about the knowledge and possible complicity of senior officers regarding the abuses. Sanchez visited the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade's operation, which encompassed Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib, at least three times in October, according to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of US detention facilities in Iraq as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade. That month, the serious abuses documented in published photographs -- naked detainees shackled together, a guard posing with a prisoner on a dog leash -- began. Karpinski says the number of visits by a commanding general struck her as "unusual," especially because Sanchez had not visited several of the 15 other US detention facilities in Iraq. Karpinski has said that she is being used as a scapegoat for the command failures at Abu Ghraib. The general, a reservist from South Carolina, says she was not present during Sanchez's visits because her brigade had surrendered authority over that part of the prison to intelligence officers. She said she was alerted as a courtesy while the three-star general was planning to travel to the prison. Karpinski added that Sanchez might have visited without her knowledge after the intelligence officers were given formal authority over the entire prison on November 19. "He has divisions all over Iraq, and he has time to visit Abu Ghraib three times in a month?" Karpinski asks. "Why was he going out there so often? Did he know that something was going on?"
Sergeant Samuel Provance, a military intelligence soldier who worked at Abu Ghraib, has said that enormous resources began to pour into the interrogation operation in October and November. Provance said new personnel, including some from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came in suddenly to beef up interrogations. Karpinski says the resources arrived after Major General Geoffrey Miller, then commander of the US military prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, visited Abu Ghraib between August 31 and September 9. She says Miller told her he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib's operation because the intelligence gathering there was not producing the desired results. Miller has said he never used that phrase. "I think General Miller's visit gave them ideas, inspired them, gave them plans, told them what they were succeeding with in Gitmo," Karpinski says. She added that intelligence officers were "under great pressure to get more actionable intelligence from those interrogations." Karpinski says she believes that intelligence officers were central to the abuses because the MPs arrived in mid-October at the prison, just weeks before serious abuses began. The general also says she believes officers in the military intelligence chain of command knew what was going on, and that Sanchez later tried to shift the blame to her unit, in January, after an MP reported the abuse and provided photos to military investigators. "I didn't know then what [Sanchez] probably knew, which was that this was something clearly in the MI, maybe that he endorsed, and he was already starting a campaign to stay out of the fray and blame the 800th," Karpinski says. "I think the MI people were in this all the way. I think they were up to their ears in it.... I don't believe that the MPs, two weeks onto the job, would have been such willing participants, even with instructions, unless someone had told them it was all okay."
On May 19, Pentagon officials testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a female Army officer identified only as "Captain Woods" drafted a set of interrogation "rules of engagement" used in Iraq. Those rules had been posted at Abu Ghraib by October, and became public during hearings into the abuses at the prison. The list shows two sets of procedures -- those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Sanchez. Among the items requiring approval from Sanchez were techniques such as "sensory deprivation," "stress positions," "dietary manipulation," forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and the use of dogs. Senator Richard Durbin said at a May 12 hearing that some of those techniques went "far beyond the Geneva Conventions." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld countered that they all had been approved by Pentagon lawyers. Wood was the head of the military intelligence unit that controlled the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib. On May 21, the New York Times reported that Wood's unit developed aggressive rules and procedures while it was stationed in Afghanistan and imported them to Iraq. During the hearing on May 19. Sanchez noted that the military has initiated seven courts-martial against those involved, and more charges may be brought. "The Army Criminal Investigation Division investigation is not final, and the investigation of military intelligence procedures by Major General [George] Fay is also ongoing," Sanchez testified. Sanchez said he issued policies in September that required soldiers to conduct all interrogations in a "lawful and humane manner with command oversight." In October, he said he distributed a memo titled "Proper Treatment of Iraqi People During Combat Operations." He said he reissued the memo on January 16 after learning about the abuse allegations, and later issued policies emphasizing the need to treat all Iraqis with dignity. (Washington Post)
May 23: Britain's Guardian prints an investigative report illuminating the secretive world of Bush's elite campaign donors: the Pioneers, Rangers, and Super Rangers. Pioneers donate a minimum of $100,000; Rangers, $200,000; and Super Rangers, a quarter of a million or more. Bush has raised nearly $300 million in political donations since 1998, and about half of that total comes from a mere 630 people. (In order to bypass campaign contribution laws that restrict individual donations, the elite donors "bundle" contributions from family, friends, and coworkers.) The Pioneers and Rangers were formed in 1998, while Bush was governor of Texas and first contemplating a presidential run, by four well-heeled Bush family friends. Now it has grown to be the most exclusive, and most powerful, financial political network in America. And they are reaping the rewards. Of the 630 elite donors between 2000 and 2004, nearly a quarter of them received lucrative appointments from the Bush administration, including 24 ambassadorships and two cabinet positions. Over $3.5 billion of federal contracts were doled out to 101 companies that, between them, boast 123 Pioneers or Rangers. And these are only the ones that monitoring groups have been able to trace.
Corporate scandals and criminal activity, too, abounds among the elite. 146 of the 630 donors have either been directly involved in corporate malfeasance or helped run companies that have; the poster child for this particular issue is Enron's Kenneth Lay, but there are many, many others. 78 of the donors are linked to ongoing campaign finance scandals, and others are linked to financial wrongdoing on Wall Street, pollution violations, and even health issues. Four Bush family members are Pioneers, including his sister Dorothy Bush Koch and his uncle H.T. "Bucky" Bush (who will later prove to have profited handsomely from the Iraq occupation). Massachusetts millionaire Richard Egan and his sons Chris and Michael are among the elite. Joining them are three members of the Fox family, who own the Harbour Group finance firm with major investments in China, and the Reynolds family of land developers. Almost 20% of the group are financiers, while 18% are lawyers and lobbyists. The example of West Virginia coal baron and Pioneer James Harless is instructive. After donating at least $200,000 to the Bush campaign in 2000, Harless saw his grandson appointed to the secretive Cheney energy task force delegated to drawing up the US's new energy policies. Afterwards, Bush reversed a campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that plague the coal industry and eased environmental restrictions on opencast mining. "Here is where ordinary Americans are sold down the river," says Andrew Wheat, head of Texans for Public Justice. "When donations affect policy, it is ordinary people who end up biting the bullet."
Critics say the impact of the elite donors is most obvious in legislation governing energy and air pollution. Bush has eased laws governing old, polluting power plants. In many cases lawsuits against the worst offenders were finally dropped. Last week, the Bush campaign contribution cash machine was in full swing. Bush and political guru Karl Rove flew to Atlanta for a four-hour visit to a gated community in the city's poshest neighborhood, hosting a garden reception at the home of Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli. Afterwards, he was guest of honor at an exclusive dinner, where the diners ponied up $25,000 to eat steak with the president. Bush left for the airport with another $3.2 million in his warchest. (Guardian)
May 23: Georgia's Secretary of State Cathy Cox is outed as a crony of Diebold Electronics, the manufacturers of "paperless" voting machines with proven GOP ties. The Diebold website features a glowing quotation from Cox about the wonders of Diebold's machines, even going so far as to include, with Cox's permission, the Great Seal of Georgia on the site to give it an official imprimateur. In line with her support for Diebold, Cox has been instrumental in opposing resolutions in the Georgia State House demanding paper-verified ballots for the 2004 elections. After Governor Sonny Perdue promised to look into allegations of Diebold's machines' unreliability and ease of hacking and manipulations, Georgia scheduled a series of public forums to address the issues. Two such fora were held, with Cox's office refusing to participate; the remainder of the fora were cancelled. In 2002, a folder titled "rob-Georgia" was found on the Diebold FTP site, casting serious doubts on the validity of the 2002 election results. Cox's office has consistently refused to comment on the folder or the possibility of election fraud. except to deny that any of its contents were ever used; when it was proven that the "rob-Georgia" software patches were indeed used in the 2002 elections, Cox's office blocked all investigation of the software, even going so far as to defy the law by refusing to issue a certification of the software. The questions arising from the flawed and possibly fraudulent 2002 elections remain as the 2004 presidential elections loom. (American Politics Journal)
May 23: Former president Bill Clinton breaks a self-imposed silence to criticize the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation, saying that the UN, not the US, should be helping Iraq achieve democracy, and that Bush erred in sending in US troops before the UN weapons inspectors had finished their job. "There are so many people who suspect our motives," he says during an address in Brazil. "I don't think Iraq was about oil and imperialism but it was about unilateralism over co-operation as a way to shape the world in the 21st century." Any military intervention, he says, should have involved a multinational force rather than the present "coalition of the willing." He believes the US should support "the World Criminal Court, the comprehensive test ban treaty, the Kyoto [Protocol] and other international efforts." The US should also promote "health, education and democracy as part of an anti-terrorism strategy," and adds that those international organizations need to be strengthened. "Democracy cannot be imposed -- the Iraqis have to want it," he adds. While he supports the Bush decision to go to war in Afghanistan to "root out" al-Qaeda, he says that "we have to make more partners and fewer terrorists." Cooperation and ensuring democracy benefited the world's poor would help combat terrorism, he says. (Independent/Iraq Occupation Watch
May 23: Army and National Guard recruiters are contacting thousands of inactive reservists throughout the country attempting to persuade them to re-enlist in the active reserves or join their local Guard units. If they don't, many recruiters warn, they could soon be headed to Iraq. The warnings come by telephone, and they have been concentrated in four areas: Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Louisiana. "It then spread through the country, with the exception of New England," says Army Reserve spokesman Steven Stromvall. Stromvall says some National Guard recruiters heard about this and then began using similar tactics. The calls have generated a slew of complaints from veterans and their families. Stromvall acknowledges that there has been a widespread problem with misleading, inaccurate and intimidating retention efforts throughout the nation in the past few weeks but adds that the Army Reserve is moving quickly to fix it. "They went a bridge too far," he said. Stromvall says the problem stemmed from misunderstandings on the part of the reserve's 700 retention sergeants about a new drive to get service personnel in the Individual Ready Reserve, whose members do not have to belong to units or attend drills and meetings, to switch voluntarily to an active reserve branch known as the Selective Reserve. There are now 169,000 reservists and National Guard members of all kinds on active duty, an increase of about 3,000 from last week but down from the more than 200,000 on active duty last year.
The stress of the Iraq occupation and insurgency clearly is causing a crunch. "There is no question the Army is stressed," General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told a congressional committee earlier this year. Adding to the problem is that the Pentagon can't find about 50,000 reservists who moved without notifying the government. The reserve call-ups for tours of active duty in Iraq have largely been by unit. Individual Ready Reserve members have been called up during the war, but in relatively small numbers. Only about 6,500 such individual recalls have been authorized by the Pentagon. Stromvall says the misleading methods included telling Ready Reservists they likely would be called up individually for service in Iraq if they did not join a Selective Reserve unit by a certain date. He says there was one case at Fort Bragg, in which a soldier who was leaving active duty with the regular Army was told by a retention sergeant in the processing line that he would be sent to Iraq automatically if he did not join the Selective Reserve.
One Illinois National Guard veteran who asked not to be identified said the tactics disturbed him. "They did call my wife and threatened that I'd be taken away from her," the Guard veteran says. "Ethics are important to me. This bothers me a great deal. If it's an all-volunteer Army, it's just that," he says. "It's not something you should be tricked into." MariAnn Curta, whose son recently completed a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, recently received a call warning that her son, Bill, now on the Army's inactive reserve list, could be headed back to Iraq quickly unless he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard. "It's devious, it's deceptive, it's dishonest, it's valueless," Curta says. "I can't believe they'd pull this kind of fast trick on kids who have already served." Those who enlist in the armed forces have a minimum commitment of eight years of service, of which only a portion need be on active duty. The remainder can be spent either in the Selective Reserve, which includes both the active reserve and the National Guard and requires assignment to a unit, or the Individual Ready Reserve, in which the serviceman or woman merely remains on call. Curta says she was contacted last weekend by a recruiter from the Illinois National Guard who said it was "urgent" that her son get in touch with him. "They put the fear in me that he was going back in 48 hours," she says. Kelly Akemann of Elgin, Illinois, says she has received repeated phone calls in recent days from a Chicago-area Guard recruiter warning that her husband, a Guard veteran, could be sent to Iraq if he did not re-enlist quickly. "I told him I thought these were scare tactics and he told me they weren't scare tactics, these are the realities of life," she says. "I told him you don't need to raise the blood pressure of a three-month pregnant woman.... Then I hung up."
Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stone, an Army Reserve spokesman, says the Defense Department has asked Congress for authority to use the Internal Revenue Service to help track down members of the Individual Ready Reserve whose whereabouts are no longer known. "This has been a concern for some time," Stone says. "Two years ago the Defense Department began working with the Treasury on this, and legislation has now been proposed in the Congress." He says the military is not attempting to use the nation's chief tax collector for any Orwellian "Big Brother" purpose. "The only information they would be seeking is an address," he says. Stone says he knows of no mass mobilization of reserves under way or planned and said reserve call-ups thus far have been a simple matter of meeting the needs of commanders in the field. Curta's father, Bill Curta, says his son does not intend to re-enlist. "This is unethical, it's immoral, especially with kids who have already served," Curta says. "It's an ugly story." Stone acknowledges that retention rates for both the National Guard and the reserves have been slipping. But he said the services have been able to maintain their authorized strength, largely by relaxing their "up or out" rules and allowing personnel to stay in the military even though they have not been promoted to their next grade within a prescribed period. He says the Army Reserve has ordered a stop to intimidating retention methods and informed personnel of the proper procedures to follow in dealing with reservists. "It was a mistake," he says. (Chicago Tribune/Duckdaotsu)
May 23: Two reporters, NBC's Tim Russert and Time's Matthew Cooper, have been subpoenaed to testify about information they may have received concerning the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent. Both Time and NBC intend to fight the subpoenas. The subpoenas for Russert and Cooper come from a special grand jury investigating whether the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of Plame after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa. Wilson has charged that officials made the disclosure in an effort to discredit him. Plame was first identified as a CIA specialist on weapons of mass destruction by syndicated columnist and TV commentator Robert Novak last July. Novak said his information came from administration sources, but has declined to name them. Novak's office has repeatedly declined to say whether he has been subpoenaed or cooperated with investigators. NBC News president Neal Shapiro says the Russert subpoena was misdirected because he was "not the recipient of the leak." The subpoena, he said, would have a "potential chilling effect" on the network's ability to report the news. "The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news," says Shapiro. "sources will simply stop speaking to the press if they fear those conversations will become public." Time spokeswoman Robin Bierstedt says, "It is Time Inc.'s policy to protect its confidential sources. While we would like all of our reporting to be on the record, a promise of confidentiality is sometimes necessary to get information that would otherwise be unavailable." Justice Department guidelines for criminal prosecutions state that all avenues should be explored before reporters are subpoenaed or approached in an investigation. The issuing of new subpoenas for reporters may indicate that the investigation is nearing an end.
The Washington Post and the New York newspaper Newsday said last week that their reporters were asked to sit for questions in connection with the investigation but that they had not been formally subpoenaed. Disclosing the identity of an undercover US agent is a felony. The grand jury, which was convened after MSNBC.com and NBC News reported in September 2003 that the CIA had requested a criminal investigation of the leak, has also issued subpoenas for records of telephone calls from Air Force One during the week before Novak published Plame's name. Wilson identified Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "scooter" Libby, and Elliott Abrams, a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, as the possible leakers in a book he published earlier this year. He has also accused Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, of having known about and encouraging the campaign to discredit him. White House press secretary Scott McClellan has said that his conversations with Rove, Libby and Abrams ruled out their involvement. (MSNBC)
May 23: Lucrative and important positions in the US-run CPA in Iraq have gone to young, inexperienced ideologues chosen not for their job experience, but for their political correctness. Six of the 11 profiled in the Washington Post article have been promoted to positions that include managing Iraq's billion-dollar budget, positions that they are completely unprepared for. One, Simone Ledeen, the daughter of ultra-hawk Michael Ledeen, focused on her experience in running a cooking school before she landed her job in the CPA. Another, Todd Baldwin, boasts of his experience as a legislative aide to Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican. Two are English teachers, one a Web site designer, and another is a recent college graduate with no real job experience. All were hired through the Heritage Foundation, where they had posted their resumes. None of the 11 had any experience in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and none had any experience managing money. Yet many of them have risen to key positions managing critical CPA operations and monies. Their qualifications? They are all conservative ideologues. Almost all of them now pull down six-figure salaries, though their inexperience and sometime incompetence have turned the CPA budget office into a "bottleneck," and many of them have finally been replaced by more qualified personnel. (Washington Post)
May 23: The New York Times's Adam Hochschild deconstructs the Bush administration's refusal to accept the word "torture" in its discussions of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisoner abuses. He writes, in part: "As Orwell pointed out most effectively, governments control language as well as people. Since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, our government, from the highest officials in Washington to Army prison guards in Baghdad, have used every euphemism they can think of to avoid the word that clearly characterizes what some of our soldiers and civilian contractors have been doing: torture. 'What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,' said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. 'I'm not going to address the "torture" word.' And nobody else seems to want to address it either. Rather, we are told, military police officers at Abu Ghraib were encouraged to treat the prisoners so as to create 'favorable conditions' for interrogations. What does this mean? Give the prisoners English lessons? New clothes? Come on. In any bureaucracy, orders or clearance to do something beyond the law always comes in code. For those in senior positions, deniability is vital. ...Obviously, no coded orders, suggestions or hints given to the Abu Ghraib prison guards will appear in [Pentagon officials' documentation of the abuses]. ...[N]o, these were not orders for deaths -- but they were for actions similarly beyond the law. What the paper trail will have, however, are the euphemisms for what was actually done:
- 'Sleep management.' This apparently benign term -- doctors use it in discussing insomnia -- disguises a form of torture that has long been popular because it requires no special equipment and leaves no marks on the body. Widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches by inquisitors, it was called the tormentum insomniae. Hundreds of years later, in the interrogation rooms of Stalin's secret police, it was known as the 'conveyor belt,' because relays of interrogators would question a prisoner, day and night, until he or she signed the desired statement and named enough co-conspirators. After being kept awake for a hundred hours or so, almost anybody will confess to almost anything, from flying through the night sky on a broomstick to being a capitalist spy. Soviet prisoners of the 1930's had to sign each page of their interrogation record. In the files that have been released from archives in recent years, you can sometimes see how a prisoner's signature, clear and firm on the first day, gradually turns into an indecipherable scrawl as the sleepless nights roll by.
- 'Water-boarding.' This, as we now know, does not involve water skis, but holding prisoners under water for long enough that they think they are drowning. Again, interrogators favor it because after the prisoner has coughed the water out of his lungs, it leaves no identifiable marks. Reports by human rights groups on countries including Brazil, Ethiopia and El Salvador have noted the prevalence of 'simulated drowning' or 'near drowning.'
- 'Stress positions.' What is a stress position? Mike Xego, a former political prisoner in South Africa, once demonstrated one for me. He bent down and clasped his hands in front of him as if they were handcuffed, and then, using a rolled-up newspaper, showed me how apartheid-era police officers would pin his elbows behind his knees with a stick, forcing him into a permanent crouch. 'You'd be passed from one hand to another. Kicked. Tipped over,' he explained. 'The blood stops moving. You scream and scream and scream until there is no voice.' This begs an obvious question: when the Abu Ghraib detainees were in 'stress positions,' were they then kicked, tipped over, rolled around like soccer balls? We do not yet know, but chances are that if the guards were told to create 'favorable conditions' for interrogation, the prisoners were not lectured politely about the benefits of human rights and the rule of law that the United States is supposedly bringing to Iraq.
Granted, the torture of prisoners under Saddam Hussein was incomparably more widespread and often ended in death. The same is true in dozens of other regimes around the world. But torture is torture. It permanently scars the victim even when there are no visible marks on the body, and it leaves other scars on the lives of those who perform it and on the life of the nation that allowed and encouraged it. Those scars will be with us for a long time." (New York Times/Peace Redding)
May 23: Columnist Maureen Dowd is disgusted with the Bush administration's spin on the Ahmad Chalabi situation. She writes, in part: "[S]o let me get this straight: We ransacked the house of the con man whom we paid millions to feed us fake intelligence on WMD that would make the case for ransacking the country that the con man assured us would be a cinch to take over because he wanted to run it. And now we're shocked, shocked and awed to discover that a crook is a crook and we have nobody to turn over Iraq to, and the Jordanian embezzler-turned-American puppet-turned-accused Iranian spy is trying to foment even more anger against us and the UN officials we've crawled back to for help, anger that may lead to civil war. The party line that Paul Bremer was notified about the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's house after the fact is absurd. The Iraqi police, who can't seem to do anything without us, were just proxies. We were going after the very guy who persuaded us to go after Saddam, the con man the naïve neo-cons cast as de Gaulle; the swindler who sold himself to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Spartacus. ...Chalabi's wealthy family was swept out of Iraq in a coup in 1958 and he spent much of his life plotting a coup to take back his homeland, a far-fetched scheme that took on life when he hooked up with [Paul] Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, who had their own dream of staging a coup of American foreign policy to do an extreme Middle East makeover. The hawks dismissed warnings from their own people -- such as the Bush Middle East envoy General Anthony Zinni -- that the Iraqi National Congress was full of 'silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London.' As General Zinni told the Times in 2000: 'They are pie in the sky. 'They're going to lead us to a Bay of Goats, or something like that.' The CIA and State Department, too, grew disgusted with Mr. Chalabi, even though State paid his organization $33 million from 2000 to 2003.
"Cheney & Company swooned over Mr. Chalabi because he was telling them what they wanted to hear, that it would be simple to go back and rewrite the Persian Gulf war ending so that it was not bellum interruptus. The president and his hawks insisted that only a 'relatively small number' of 'thugs,' as Mr. Perle told George Stephanopoulos last month, were keeping the country from peace. Mr. Perle said the solution was 'to repose a little bit of confidence in people who share our values and our objectives...people like Ahmad Chalabi.' The neo-cons still think he can be Churchill. On Thursday, an Iraqi judge, Hussain Muathin, also lamented the actions of 'a small number of thugs.' But he was announcing warrants for the arrest of thugs around Mr. Perle's own George Washington, Chalabi henchmen suspected of kidnapping, torture and theft. Didn't we sack Saddam to stop that stuff? Now we're using Saddam's old generals to restore order -- reversing the de-Baathification approach that Mr. Chalabi championed -- while Mr. Chalabi snakes around like a bus-and-truck Tony Soprano, garnering less trust than Saddam in polls of Iraqis. A half-dozen dunderheads who thought they knew everything assumed they could control Mr. Chalabi and use him as the instrument of their utopian fantasies. But one week after getting cut off from the $335,000-a-month Pentagon allowance arranged by his neo-con buddies, he glibly accepts the street cred that goes with bashing America. And he still won't give us all of Saddam's secret files, which he confiscated and is using to discredit his enemies. Going from Spartacus to Moses, he proclaims to America, 'Let my people go' -- even as he plays footsie with the country that once denounced the US as the Great Satan.
"On Friday at Louisiana State University, President Bush told graduates: 'On the job and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you -- and that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In my job, I got to pick just about everybody I work with. I've been happy with my choices -- although I wish someone had warned me about all of Dick Cheney's wild partying.' Mr. Bush thought he was kidding, but too bad he didn't get that warning before Dick Cheney took the world on such a wild ride." (New York Times)
May 23: Frank Rich reviews Michael Moore's new documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. He begins with a telling moment: "In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush...minutes before he makes [a] prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut. 'In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake,' said Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. 'But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave.'"
Rich continues, "Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources -- foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video -- he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read 'My Pet Goat' to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an expose of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere -- most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, House of Bush, House of Saud -- that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now. Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on Nightline? In Fahrenheit 9/11, we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails.
"...We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. 'I was a Republican for quite a few years,' one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, 'and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way.' Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of 'news,' has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samarra, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before 60 Minutes II? Don Van Natta Jr. of the New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at CIA interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on January 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that 'US soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners.' And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story. Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. 'We've had this footage in our possession for two months,' he says. 'I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic.'
"We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that 'humanitarian do-gooders' looking for human rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan in Iraq. Last weekend the Los Angeles Times reported that for the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that they are classified 'unfit to fight.' In contrast to Washington's neglect, much of Fahrenheit 9/11 turns out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable conditions since President Bush's declaration of war. In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described 'conservative Democrat' from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, whose son, Sergeant. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account 'always hated' antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending 'the bible and books and candy,' but not before writing of the president: 'He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama.' ...[Moore] can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: 'They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?' Fahrenheit 9/11 doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president are seen being made up for TV appearances. ...No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell." (New York Times/CommonDreams)

Rumsfeld and Ashcroft at top of Iraqi abuse orders

May 24: A Newsweek investigation proves that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to the torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, and other US-operated detention facilities. The system deliberately sidestepped, or ignored, the historical safeguards provided by the Geneva Conventions. The system was adopted over the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers. While the word "torture" was never specifically authorized, the techniques that were authorized entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation; methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture." A new legal framework was concocted by Bush administration lawyers to justify the system of interrogation. Originally the system, and its legal framework, was designed to be used on a specific few prisoners, all suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members, by a small number of trained CIA professionals. Instead, it evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in Iraqi prisons and Cuban detention camps. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, authorized a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners' resistance to interrogation. "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that al-Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.
Towards the end of 2001, a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and are verified by copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos. The Bush administration's emerging approach was that America's enemies in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights. One Justice Department memo, written for the CIA late in the fall of 2001, put an extremely narrow interpretation on the international anti-torture convention, allowing the agency to use a whole range of techniques, including sleep deprivation, the use of phobias and the deployment of "stress factors," in interrogating al-Qaeda suspects. The only clear prohibition was "causing severe physical or mental pain" -- a subjective judgment that allowed for "a whole range of things in between," says one former administration official familiar with the opinion. On December 28, 2001, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel weighed in with another opinion, arguing that US courts had no jurisdiction to review the treatment of foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The appeal of Gitmo from the start was that, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone, or "the legal equivalent of outer space," as one former administration lawyer described it. And on January 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in Afghanistan.
Cut out of the process, as usual, was Colin Powell's State Department. So were military lawyers for the uniformed services. When State Department lawyers first saw the Yoo memo, "we were horrified," says one. As State saw it, the Justice position would place the United States outside the orbit of international treaties it had championed for years. Two days after the Yoo memo circulated, the State Department's chief legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV, fired a memo to Yoo calling his analysis "seriously flawed." State's most immediate concern was the unilateral conclusion that all captured Taliban were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions," Taft wrote. "I have no doubt we can do so here, where a relative handful of persons is involved." The White House was undeterred. By January 25, 2002, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. In a memo written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of US soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That US officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 US law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions.
As to arguments that US soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers." When Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State source. Desperately seeking to change Bush's mind, Powell fired off his own blistering response the next day, January 26, and sought an immediate meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of US policy and practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international reaction." Powell won a partial victory: on February 7, 2002, the White House announced that the United States would indeed apply the Geneva Conventions to the Afghan war -- but that Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees would still not be afforded prisoner-of-war status. The White House's halfway retreat was, in the eyes of State Department lawyers, a "hollow" victory for Powell that did not fundamentally change the administration's position. It also set the stage for the new interrogation procedures ungoverned by international law. What Bush seemed to have in mind was applying his broad doctrine of pre-emption to interrogations: to get information that could help stop terrorist acts before they could be carried out. This was justified by what is known in counterterror circles as the "ticking time bomb" theory: the idea that when faced with an imminent threat by a terrorist, almost any method is justified, even torture. With the legal groundwork laid, Bush began to act. First, he signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable sources, the president's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness. Washington then negotiated novel "status of forces agreements" with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not merely to US government personnel but also to private contractors.
The administration also began "rendering" -- or delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation. Why? At a classified briefing for senators not long after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was asked whether Washington was going to get governments known for their brutality to turn over al-Qaeda suspects to the United States. Congressional sources say that Tenet suggested it might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive interrogation methods. By 2004, the United States was running a covert charter airline moving CIA prisoners from one secret facility to another, sources say. The reason? It was judged impolitic (and too traceable) to use the US Air Force. At first, in the autumn of 2001, the Pentagon was less inclined than the CIA to jump into the business of handling terror suspects. Rumsfeld himself was initially opposed to having detainees sent into DOD custody at Guantanamo, according to a DOD source intimately involved in the Gitmo issue. "I don't want to be jailer to the g*ddammed world," said Rumsfeld. But he was finally persuaded. Those sent to Gitmo would be hard-core al-Qaeda or other terrorists who might be liable for war-crimes prosecutions, and who would likely, if freed, "go back and hit us again," as the source put it. In mid-January 2002 the first plane-load of prisoners landed at Gitmo's Camp X-Ray.
Still, not everyone was getting the message that this was a new kind of war. The first commander of the MPs at Gitmo was a one-star from the Rhode Island National Guard, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, who, a Defense source recalled, mainly "wanted to keep the prisoners happy." Baccus began giving copies of the Qur'an to detainees, and he organized a special meal schedule for Ramadan. "He was even handing out printed 'rights cards'," the Defense source recalled. The upshot, according to the Defense source, was that the prisoners were soon telling the interrogators, "Go f*ck yourself, I know my rights." Baccus was relieved in October 2002, and Rumsfeld gave military intelligence control of all aspects of the Gitmo camp, including the MPs. Pentagon officials now insist that they flatly ruled out using some of the harsher interrogation techniques authorized for the CIA. While the CIA could do pretty much what it liked in its own secret centers, the Pentagon was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military officers were routinely trained to observe the Geneva Conventions. According to one source, both military and civilian officials at the Pentagon ultimately determined that such CIA techniques were "not something we believed the military should be involved in."
But in practical terms those distinctions began to matter less. The Pentagon's resistance to rougher techniques eroded month by month. In part this was because CIA interrogators were increasingly in the same room as their military-intelligence counterparts. But there was also a deliberate effort by top Pentagon officials to loosen the rules binding the military. Toward the end of 2002, orders came down the political chain at DOD that the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods of interrogation. "There was almost a revolt" by the service judge advocates general, or JAGs, the top military lawyers who had originally allied with Powell against the new rules, says a knowledgeable source. The JAGs, including the lawyers in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, fought their civilian bosses for months but finally lost. In April 2003, new and tougher interrogation techniques were approved. Covertly, though, the JAGs made a final effort. They went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international human-rights law and a major player in the New York City Bar Association's human-rights work. The JAGs told Horton they could only talk obliquely about practices that were classified. But they said the U.S. military's 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how the conventions should be interpreted and applied, they told Horton. And the prime movers in this effort, they told him, were DOD Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was, they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for US interests. The approach at Gitmo soon reflected these changes. Under the leadership of an aggressive, self-assured major general named Geoffrey Miller, a new set of interrogation rules became doctrine.
Ultimately what was developed at Gitmo was a "72-point matrix for stress and duress," which laid out types of coercion and the escalating levels at which they could be applied. These included the use of harsh heat or cold; withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells for more than 30 days, and threatening (but not biting) by dogs. It also permitted limited use of "stress positions" designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain. While the interrogators at Gitmo were refining their techniques, by the summer of 2003 the "postwar" insurgency in Iraq was raging. And Rumsfeld was getting impatient about the poor quality of the intelligence coming out of there. He wanted to know: Where was Saddam? Where were the WMD? Most immediately: Why weren't U.S. troops catching or forestalling the gangs planting improvised explosive devices by the roads? Rumsfeld pointed out that Gitmo was producing good intel. So he directed Steve Cambone, his under secretary for intelligence, to send Gitmo commandant Miller to Iraq to improve what they were doing out there. Cambone in turn dispatched his deputy, Lieutenant General William Boykin, who was later to gain notoriety for his harsh comments about Islam, down to Gitmo to talk with Miller and organize the trip. In Baghdad in September 2003, Miller delivered a blunt message to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was then in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade running Iraqi detentions. According to Karpinski, Miller told her that the prison would thenceforth be dedicated to gathering intel. (Miller says he simply recommended that detention and intelligence commands be integrated.) On November 19, Abu Ghraib was formally handed over to tactical control of military-intelligence units. By the time Gitmo's techniques were exported to Abu Ghraib, the CIA was already fully involved. On a daily basis at Abu Ghraib, says Paul Wayne Bergrin, a lawyer for MP defendant Sgt. Javal Davis, the CIA and other intel officials "would interrogate, interview prisoners exhaustively, use the approved measures of food and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement with no light coming into cell 24 hours a day. Consequently, they set a poor example for young soldiers but it went even further than that."
Evidence is growing that the Pentagon has lied about exactly when it was first warned of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib. US officials continued to say they didn't know until mid-January. But Red Cross officials had alerted the US military command in Baghdad at the start of November. The Red Cross warned explicitly of MPs' conducting "acts of humiliation such as [detainees'] being made to stand naked... with women's underwear over the head, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position." The Coalition commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and his Iraq command didn't begin an investigation until two months later, when it was clear the pictures were about to leak. Now more charges are coming. Intelligence officials have confirmed that the CIA inspector general is conducting an investigation into the death of at least one person at Abu Ghraib who had been subject to questioning by CIA interrogators. The Justice Department is likely to open full-scale criminal investigations into this CIA-related death and two other CIA interrogation-related fatalities. (MSNBC)
May 24: Many military contractors currently under investigation for their part in crimes perpetrated on Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib and other prisons may escape prosecution because, technically, they do not work for the Department of Defense -- instead, their contracts are through the Department of the Interior. The unexpected role of the Department of the Interior, usually associated not with wartime intelligence-gathering but with national parks, grew out of a government plan to cut costs. But in practice, it may have increased costs and reduced scrutiny, says Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution. "You're placing a military interrogation task under Smokey the Bear," Singer says. "You can't have good oversight." What's more, legal experts say, contractors for nonmilitary agencies such as the Department of the Interior may be able to escape prosecution for crimes they commit overseas because of an apparent loophole in the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The law, passed in 2000, applies only to contractors with the Department of Defense -- a flaw some members of Congress want to remedy. The Iraq war and its aftermath have focused attention on the extraordinary expansion of the work performed by federal contractors, often in sensitive security and intelligence roles. US security contractors in Iraq, who do everything from guarding US administrator Paul Bremer to advising Iraqi police, number more than 20,000, making them the second-largest security force after the US military.
Many military officers and outside experts say that using contractors as interrogators is a bad idea no matter what agency hires them, because they are not subject to military discipline and control. "I would never have tolerated civilian contractors working as interrogators," says Army Colonel Charles Brule, a Rhode Island reservist who worked at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. "Who do they answer to? What's the chain of command?" Congress has also expressed concern about contract interrogators. A defense spending bill passed Thursday by the House would require the Pentagon to disclose in greater detail the work of contractors in Iraq, and Senate Democrats have said they might propose legislation banning contractors from interrogating prisoners. "Daniel Akaka, a Senate Democrat, pressed top Army officials on the issue at a hearing last week. "The contractors seem to be outside of the line of command," he said. "And as a result, some things they do are not known by us." Major General Geoffrey Miller replied that "no civilian contractors had a supervisory position. It's the military...who sets the priorities and ensures that we meet our standards."
But in the case of the contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib, the chain of command is especially blurry, because it ends with an obscure Department of the Interior office 70 miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona. The interrogators work for CACI International, a global government contractor based in Arlington, Virginia, with more than $1 billion a year in revenue. And CACI's contract is with the Interior Department's National Business Center, which for the past four years has run the contracting office at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Interior Department spokesman Frank Quimby says the arrangement was a result of federal efforts in the 1990s to "streamline and reduce duplication," by having agencies with particular skill at administrative functions such as payroll or contracting handle those jobs for other agencies. Thus, with efficiency in mind, the Fort Huachuca Contract Administration Office was gradually transferred from the Army to the Department of the Interior between 1998 and 2001. "Now the Army comes to that office when it needs services," Quimby says. In 2001, the Interior Department contracting office awarded a "blanket purchase agreement" to a company called Premier Technology Group for services to be provided to the Army. Last year, CACI International acquired Premier Technology. The blanket purchase agreement allows the Department of the Interior to purchase services from CACI International without going through a new round of competitive bidding for each new job.
Since 2001, the department has approved 81 "delivery orders" under the Premier Technology-CACI contract, including 11 for services in Iraq. Most of the services relate to information technology, but at least two involve the provision of interrogators, one for $19.9 million covering "interrogation support" and another for $21.8 million labeled "human intelligence support." Under those contracts, Army officials have said that CACI has provided 27 interrogators to work in detention centers in Iraq. Several work at Abu Ghraib, and one -- a 34-year-old Navy veteran named Steven Stefanowicz -- is sharply criticized in an Army investigative report on the prisoner abuse. Stefanowicz instructed military police officers to "facilitate interrogations" in such a way that "he clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," says the report by Major General Antonio Taguba. It also declares that Stefanowicz "made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses." Taguba's report recommends that Stefanowicz be fired, reprimanded and stripped of his security clearance. The report does not suggest criminal charges. Technically, Stefanowicz and other CACI workers are not Defense Department contractors, and thus do not appear to be covered by the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. Two congressmen submitted legislation last week designed to plug such loopholes in the law. "Pentagon contractors working in Iraq are operating in a legal fog, where they are not accountable to Iraqi laws, US laws or military laws governing our troops," Democrat David Price said in a statement about the amendment he proposed along with Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican. Their bill would extend the law to contractors with any federal agency, as long as they are "supporting the mission of the Department of Defense."
But even if it passes, the amendment would not apply to crimes committed before it takes effect. Singer says the Interior Department's role began with an attempt to be frugal. But by involving two Cabinet departments and having a contractor provide services for years without new bidding, the government has almost certainly increased costs, he says. "There is no competition and no oversight," Singer says. "The free market can be a wonderful mechanism. But not if you do everything possible to ensure that it won't work." (Baltimore Sun)
May 24: A speech touted by President Bush to address the problems with the Iraq invasion does nothing of the sort; instead, the speech merely repackages the administration's current policies in a "new" five-step plan. Bush fails to address the murder of the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, the torture allegations from Abu Ghraib and other US-run detention facilities, nor does he mention any concerns with the upcoming Iraqi elections or with the mushrooming costs of the US occupation of Iraq. "In effect," writes the Washington Post, "the president said his current plan is good enough to win, and he set out to rally Americans to his cause with rousing language that placed the conflict in Iraq in the context of the larger, more popular battle against terrorism." Bush's endless reiteration of the same points -- it's all about terrorism, Iraq is a rousing success, and so forth -- rankles Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who has been critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. "The more explicit and precise, the better. A lot of rhetoric without altering the substance will not do," he says. "What's involved is basically American credibility." Bush continues to advocate a democratic revolution for the entire Middle East, a goal that most observers believe wildly unrealistic and extremely dangerous. "I'm extremely disappointed, says Senator Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "He didn't answer any of the important questions. I don't think he leveled with the American people. This may be the last time we have to get it right." (Washington Post)
May 24: A Portland, Oregon judge has thrown out all charges against US lawyer Brandon Mayfield for his supposed involvement in the recent Madrid terrorist bombings. The judge says that the FBI misidentified a fingerprint found at the scene and arrested Mayfield. Mayfield was wrongly accused of being involved in the March 11 terrorist bombings of a Madrid train. The case hinged on fingerprints lifted near the scene of the bombing. The FBI incorrectly identified the prints as Mayfields, and jailed the lawyer for two weeks, in the meantime telling federal prosecutors preparing the case against Mayfield that Spanish officials were "satisfied" with their conclusion. Spanish officials have vehemently denied that they ever made any such claims to the FBI, and say that from the outset they insisted that the fingerprints did not match Mayfield. Spanish officials say that the FBI relentlessly pursued the case against Mayfield anyway, ignoring proof of Mayfield's innocence. "They had a justification for everything," says Pedro Luis Melida Lledo, head of the fingerprint unit for the Spanish National Police, whose team analyzed the prints in question and met with the Americans on April 21. "But I just couldn't see it." The fingerprint actually belongs to an Algerian national, Ouhnane Daoud, who was arrested by Spanish authorities.
Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police's science division, says he was struck by the FBI's intense focus on Mayfield. "It seemed as though they had something against him," Corrales says, "and they wanted to involve us." The FBI has finally admitted that they were mistaken in asserting that the fingerprints belonged to Mayfield, though as late as last week they were refusing to admit any such thing, accusing the Spaniards of being responsible for the misidentification. Former assistant FBI director William Baker compares the misidentification to the wrongful arrest of Richard Jewell for the 1996 Olympic bombings. Mayfield, a Muslim convert, was arrested on May 6 on a material witness warrant, a technique that civil liberties advocates maintain is being abused by the Bush administration in its efforts to counter terrorism. Mayfield was never charged with a crime, but was told that he was being investigated for crimes that warranted the death penalty and jailed for 14 days. On May 24, Spanish officials inform the FBI that the print matched that of an Algerian national, and a judge throws the case against Mayfied out. The FBI issues an official apology, and the entire ordeal becomes, in the words of the New York Times, "a stunning embarrassment to the United States government."
Spanish law enforcement officials insist that the entire incident could have been avoided. For one, the FBI sent a fingerprint examiner who spoke no Spanish to confer with Spanish officials on the case. The analysis of Mayfield's fingerprints was "hasty and erroneous," says an FBI official, but the FBI refused to back down, and accused the Spanish of incompetence and obstructing their investigation. The FBI had no other credible evidence against Mayfield. In the May 6 search of Mayfield's home, FBI investigators took what they initially called "miscellaneous Spanish documents" that they asserted may prove a connection between Mayfield and the Spanish terrorists; the "documents" turn out to be Mayfield's children's Spanish homework. A Senate aide who attended a Congressional briefing on the incident says there is great concern about the impact the Mayfield mistake would have. "This is going to kill prosecutors for years every time they introduce a fingerprint ID by the FBI," the aide says. "The defense will be saying, 'is this a 100 percent match like the Mayfield case?'" Mayfield's family was not informed by authorities of the reason for his detention, even after his abrupt release. Some legal experts have said that American officials had been misusing their material-witness authority since September 11 in their zeal to catch terrorists. Mayfield's mother, AvNell Mayfield, says that the government owed her son an apology. "That's what we've been saying all along -- it's not his fingerprint," she says. "He was falsely accused, and they still weren't letting him go." (New York Times , New York Times/Portland Indymedia)

May 25: US intelligence sources fear that Iranian intelligence duped American neoconservatives into attacking Iraq. They believe that Iran schemed to set the US on a course towards invasion by funnelling false intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and into the ears of willing US neoconservatives such as William Luti and Douglas Feith, Chalabi's primary "handlers" in the Bush administration. The purpose appears to be to get the US to get rid of the hostile Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and help replace it with a Shi'a-led, more Iran-friendly government. "It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," says an intelligence source in Washington. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi." Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, says: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy." Chalabi has vehemently rejected the allegations as "a lie, a fib and silly," and accuses CIA director George Tenet of a smear campaign against himself and his top aide Aras Karim Habib. However, the CIA is quite sure of its information, and is sticking to its allegations. "The suggestion that Chalabi is a victim of a smear campaign is outrageous," says a US intelligence official. "It's utter nonsense. He passed very sensitive and classified information to the Iranians. We have rock solid information that he did that." He adds, "As for Aras Karim [Habib] being a paid agent for Iranian intelligence, we have very good reason to believe that is the case." He says it was unclear how long this INC-Iranian collaboration had been going on, but points out that Chalabi has had overt links with Tehran "for a long period of time." Habib, a Shi'a Kurd who is being sought by Iraqi police since a raid on INC headquarters last week, has been Chalabi's righthand man for more than a decade. He ran a Pentagon-funded intelligence collection program in the run-up to the invasion and put US officials in touch with Iraqi defectors who made claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Those claims helped make the case for war but have since proved groundless, and US intelligence agencies are now scrambling to determine whether false information was passed to the US with Iranian connivance. (Guardian

Sanchez replaced as top military commander in Iraq

May 25: Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, is being replaced as of July 1. Pentagon and Bush administration officials insist that Sanchez's replacement is not due to his implication of complicity in the Abu Ghraib prison scandals. In a brief press conference, Bush praises Sanchez's service in Iraq and refuses to answer questions. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, says commanders are usually kept in the war zone for about a year, and that Sanchez has been there more than a year. Other commanders will also be rotated out in the coming months, including himself, Kimmitt adds. Kimmitt says military officials in Iraq have always expected Sanchez to depart sometime after the June 30 transfer of power. One Pentagon source says General George Casey, Army vice chief of staff, has emerged as the top candidate to replace Sanchez and assume the new position of unified commander of military forces in Iraq. "There has been no final decision on a replacement, but General Casey is a top candidate," says the official. "This has absolutely nothing to do with Abu Ghraib," adds another official. "The secretary [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] is very mindful that the perception [of punishment] might arise. But it simply is not the case."
But defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, who has close connections to the Pentagon, says, "You'd have to be pretty naive to think that the problems with abuse of detainees had no impact at all on this decision." Sanchez testified before a Senate committee last week on the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which US forces physically and sexually abused Iraqi detainees. Sanchez took responsibility for the abuse because it happened during his time as commander. But he said he was not aware of the abuse while it was happening and moved quickly to investigate the matter after learning about it. Sanchez was ensnared in the prison abuse scandal after a military lawyer stated at an open hearing April 2 that Captain Donald Reese told him that Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of the abuse at the prison and that Sanchez was present at some of the interrogations. Sanchez is being considered for an appointment to head the US Southern Command in Miami, a job that carries the fourth star of a full general, officials say.
Casey is a full general, and Rumsfeld has for months been considering making a four-star general the overall commander in Iraq, responsible for the broad direction of military operations while a three-star general handles day-to-day military operations. Lieutenant General Thomas Metz serves in that capacity. Sanchez was considered for the new position, but Bush would first have had to nominate him for a fourth star, which is subject to confirmation by the Senate. Pentagon officials say military officials concluded that it would be too complicated to go through that process in the middle of the war in Iraq. Thompson doubted the move was intended to make Sanchez the scapegoat in the Abu Ghraib scandal, but said Pentagon leaders were "recognizing the fact that some atrocious behavior occurred while he was in command, and that has probably shaken their confidence in his suitability for the higher job." Thompson says numerous problems have been associated with Sanchez's tenure as the top commander in Iraq since June 2003, but noted that Sanchez has faced the difficult task of defeating an insurgency. "The fact of the matter is that the United States hasn't decisively won a single major counter-insurgency campaign in modern times," Thompson says. "Look at all the problems Sanchez has faced: a flawed strategy, dreadfully inaccurate intelligence, inadequate forces on the ground, flagging domestic support, and a political leadership that seems to have multiple agendas above and beyond simply defeating the insurgents," Thompson says. "This is not a prescription for success." (MSNBC)
May 25: The Bush administration is refusing to comment on, or release photos and videotapes proving, that many Iraqi female prisoners were raped by their American captors. Such sexual assaults are anathema in Iraqi society, and often result in the shunning or even the murder of the female victims. One photo explicitly shows a US soldier raping an Iraqi woman; a videotape shows US soldiers harnessing a 70-year old woman and riding her around, calling her a donkey. One Iraqi woman has told British reporters that she was raped by several US soldiers, was injured during the assaults, and concludes by begging the reporters, "We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this." Numerous photos of Iraqi prisoners being forced to bare their breasts for the cameras have not been released by the administration. (Village Voice)
May 25: The US Army has kept whistle-blower Lieutenant Julliam Goodrum, a 16-year veteran of the Gulf War and the Iraq occupation, in a locked psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in order to keep him quiet; when they finally released him, they charged him almost $6,000 for the stay. "They are definitely retaliating against me," Goodrum says. Goodrum has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or combat stress, from Iraq. Last summer Goodrum asked for an investigation into the death in Iraq of a 22-year-old soldier in his 212th Transportation Company. He was also quoted in a United Press International article about poor medical care at Fort Knox, Kentucky, that helped spark investigations in Congress. Last fall Goodrum sought mental health care at Fort Knox but was turned away -- just days after complaining in the press about poor medical treatment at Fort Knox. "I said I was having problems. I told them I felt like I was having a breakdown right there," Goodrum says. "They did not care. They said leave." A form from Fort Knox from the day Goodrum says he sought help states that Fort Knox officials in charge of medical care "do not want him" in the medical-hold unit at the base. Goodrum then went to see a private doctor who hospitalized him. That doctor alerted Fort Knox that Goodrum had been hospitalized, according to Goodrum's medical records and documents from that doctor. But Fort Knox cut off his pay, terminated his Army medical insurance and threatened to charge him as absent without leave. Goodrum showed up at Walter Reed in Washington on February 9, where doctors admitted him to Ward 54, the locked psychiatric unit. Though his doctors planned to move him into outpatient therapy on February 19, on the 18th, Reed officials were contacted by officials from Fort Knox who ordered them to keep Goodrum locked away. His records show that Goodrum was held in the locked psychiatric ward for the next 13 days. His health appears to have deteriorated some because of that confinement. "They hurt me, in terms of my recovery. I was doing fine, then 'bam,'" Goodrum says.
On February 21 his record states: "Per chief of psychiatry patient will need to be (in the locked ward) because he has charges pending.... Pt voiced concerns regarding his reduction in status, pt stated that he will continue to be cooperative with staff and follow the current treatment plan but does not understand why he was reduced in status." Some medical staff at Walter Reed expressed concern that Goodrum was being held for non-medical reasons. Walter Reed released Goodrum from the locked ward on March 2, one day after UPI published a story on allegations that Fort Knox refused to treat him. On March 2, an addition to Goodrum's medical records states that Goodrum was "a voluntary patient for the duration of his admission." Goodrum says, "That's not true." Fort Knox officials have not charged Goodrum with any offense, and he says the Army still owes him thousands in back pay -- he did not get a paycheck from early November through April. "I've got a mortgage to pay," he says. UPI published a series of stories last fall about poor medical care for soldiers on "medical hold" at US bases, including many who served in Iraq like Goodrum. In response, the Pentagon announced a series of new polices and has pledged $77 million towards fixing the problem. Goodrum was named the 176th Maintenance Battalion's "soldier of the Year" in 2001. He has received a host of awards, including the combat action ribbon, and positive reviews from superior officers. "Lt. Goodrum is a truly outstanding junior officer," reads one performance evaluation from 2002. "In addition to his technical competence, he demonstrates great leadership potential. ...Promote to captain and select for advance military schooling." (UPI)
May 25: Senator Trent Lott defends the use of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib, saying that the prisoners should be treated "really rough[ly]" and defending the use of dogs to intimidate and attack prisoners. Lott does say he is disturbed by some of the allegations of sexual abuse, but when reminded that at least one prisoner has died due to abuse, he retorts, "This is not Sunday school. This is interrogation. This is rough stuff." He also calls for the resignation of CIA chief George Tenet over the "bad intelligence" provided before 9/11. (The Jackson Channel)
May 25: For the first time, Stephen Cambone, Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man in the Pentagon and officially Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, has become the subject of media scrutiny. Cambone, almost universally hated and feared in the Pentagon as "Rumsfeld's henchman," is bearing much of the brunt of Congressional inquiry over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Cambone, a prominent neoconservative and staunch promoter of the "star Wars" missile defense system, worked under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration. Cambone was a key player in securing billions of defense dollars for the development of the program and other space-based defense systems. After Rumsfeld was named defense secretary, he made Cambone his special assistant in January 2001. Then, in March 2003, Cambone was appointed the first-ever under secretary for intelligence -- a position that, according to one defense analyst, "will allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA head George Tenet's role." Well known and much despised by both military and civilian officials in the Pentagon prior to joining the second Bush administration, Cambone, serving as Rumsfeld's henchman and intelligence chief, soon began creating a new enemies list in the CIA and State Department. While Cambone was directing the two Rumsfeld commissions, he also participated in two national-security strategy and military-transformation commissions sponsored by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP). The NIPP's 2001 report, "Rationale and Requirements for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," and the PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" were blueprints for Rumsfeld's promised "revolution in military affairs."
Several other PNAC associates, in addition to Rumsfeld himself, also served on the Rumsfeld commissions, including Paul Wolfowitz, Malcolm Wallop, William Schneider, and James Woolsey. Both the NIPP and PNAC studies seem to have served as blueprints for the defense policies initiated by the current administration of George W. Bush with respect to nuclear policy, national security strategy and military transformation. Tom Donnelly, PNAC military analyst and lead author of "Rebuilding America's Defenses," wrote in the Weekly Standard that "fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed -- but more important, feared -- by the services." The Washington Monthly reported in late 2001: "It would be hard to exaggerate how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top aide Stephen Cambone were hated within the Pentagon prior to September 11. Among other mistakes, Rumsfeld and Cambone foolishly excluded top civilian and military leaders when planning an overhaul of the military to meet new threats, thereby ensuring even greater bureaucratic resistance. According to the Washington Post, an army general joked to a [Capitol] Hill staffer that 'if he had one round left in his revolver, he would take out Steve Cambone'. Cambone's reputation in the building hasn't improved much since September 11, but Rumsfeld's has been transformed." Cambone's work on missile-defense issues extends well beyond his participation on the influential Rumsfeld missile-threat commission. According to the Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project, "As director of strategic defense policy, [Cambone] was a major contributor to president [George H W ] Bush's decision to refocus the SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] program in 1991 and developed the concept for a global protection system. He was a member of the high-level group appointed by the president to discuss the global protection system with Russia, US allies and other states. In addition, he was responsible for addressing and resolving policy issues that arose in the compliance review group (DOD [Department of Defense] organization to oversee compliance with the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty) and the strategic systems committee of the Defense Acquisition Board, which is responsible for approving DOD weapon-system acquisition."
Before joining the first Bush administration, Cambone worked for SRS Technologies, a defense contractor. SRS recently received a $6 million contract to provide administrative and management support for the Missile Defense Agency. SRS has also received a lot of attention recently for its work on the controversial military effort to mine the passenger records of JetBlue. Torch Concepts, the SRS subcontractor that worked on the project, "worked directly with the army and had a specific mandate to ferret information out of [the] data stream [to find the] abnormal behavior of secretive people," says SRS's Bart Edsall. Privacy advocates immediately cried foul when the story broke. Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: "We should put the brakes on all these data-mining programs and have a serious national conversation, because travel data is just one example of the many kinds of data every data-mining operation wants to suck in from private business." (Asia Times)
May 25: A drug case in Florida may shed light on the failure of the FBI to predict the 9/11 attacks. Mehrzad Arbane, an Iranian convicted of drug smuggling and suspected of money laundering and smuggling people from the Middle East into the US, told an associate who had become a government informant in October 2001 that he "may have smuggled two of the hijackers who flew planes into the towers in New York on September 11, 2001." Arbane was convicted May 13 in a Florida federal court of importing cocaine. He is expected to stand trial in New York for harboring illegal aliens, including two from Iran. Jairo Velez, "well-known" for smuggling cocaine from Mexico and Colombia into the US, met Arbane in 1999, and the two went into business smuggling cocaine, according to court documents. But two years later, Velez, spooked because Arbane had told him of having possibly transported the hijackers, became a government informant, providing the information used by prosecutors in their case against Arbane. Velez may be the Arab informant who, according to former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, told FBI officials in April 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack against American cities through the use of hijacked jetliners. Edmonds says that it was common knowledge among the Farsi translators at the FBI that such information had been provided to the FBI, but the reports filed on Velez's allegations were never acted upon. Edmonds cannot be more specific because of an unusual gag order placed on her by Attorney General John Ashcroft. (Village Voice)
May 25: In yet another misrepresentation of the Kerry policies by the Bush campaign, the Bush campaign has released an advertisement falsely claiming that Kerry, if elected, will repeal wiretaps, subpoena powers and surveillance on terror suspects as allowed under the USA Patriot Act. The ad goes on to accuse Kerry of "playing politics with national security" and alleges that Kerry changed his position on the Patriot Act after being pressured by liberals. In reality, Kerry has always supported the wiretaps, subpoena powers, and surveillance of terrorists as provided for in the legislation; Kerry is co-sponsoring a bill to modify the Patriot Act to re-establish some of the most egregrious of the civil liberties' suspensions in the Act, a bill co-sponsored by five Republicans. The ad shamelessly lies about Kerry's positions and continues to portray Kerry as a flip-flopper, a theme that is largely unsupported by the facts but one that seems to resound with voters. (Fact Check)

May 26: Attorney General John Ashcroft tells a global television audience that al-Qaeda is planning an attack within our borders in the next few months, with a "specific intention to hit the United States hard." Ashcroft gives the word "hard" a dramatic pause. Ashcroft has no evidence pointing to any such plans; many observers feel that his announcement is timed to coincide with the presidential election coming up "in the next few months." The Department of Homeland Security sees no need to raise the terrorist threat advisory from its current level, Bush is not planning to make any changes to his schedule because of security concerns, and the DHS admits on May 25 that they have no new intelligence indicating any sort of attack in the works. When asked about the timing of his announcement, Ashcroft replies, "We believe the public, like all of us, needs a reminder." Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, tells reporters that he finds the timing of the announcement to be "politically convenient at best" because it comes after "we see the president's approval ratings plummet." (The Bush campaign retorts that it is the Kerry campaign who has been "playing politics" with the security of the nation.) Columnist Charles Cutter reminds us, "The fact that [the administration's] cries of 'Wolf!' seem politically timed does not necessarily mean there is no wolf at the door; what it does mean is that public safety is at risk when people have to question the motivation behind each warning." Cutter goes on: "With just over five months to go before election day, it must be asked: How far would they go? With blood on their hands and God on their side, what actions would Bush & Co. consider too extreme -- when the goal is to extend their control over the financial and military power of the American presidency? The anti-Bush forces are thick with speculation, from planted WMDs, to rigged paperless balloting, to an elevated threat level 'justifying' a declaration of martial law (either before the election itself, or before the January 2005 transfer of power). Some even suggest Mr. Bush might 'look the other way' while al-Qaeda launches another attack on American soil, counting on a 'rally-round-the-flag' response (and the return to a ninety-percent approval rating). Let's hope there is a moral line, somewhere, that Mr. Bush and his people will not cross. Otherwise, today's conspiracy theory may turn into November's nightmare." (Magic City Morning Star, New York Times)

Terry Nichols convicted in OK City bombing

May 26: Terry Nichols, the American terrorist who conspired with Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, is convicted of 161 counts of murder by a state court. Nichols, already convicted on federal charges, faces the death penalty. (AP/Rick Ross)

Perle admits Iraq occupation "a grave error"

May 26: In a stunning admission largely ignored by the American media, Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraqi invasion, now calls the US policy in Iraq a "grave error" and admits that the Iraqi occupation has largely been a failure. "I would be the first to acknowledge we allowed the liberation [of Iraq] to subside into an occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a continuing error," says Perle, former chair of the influential Defence Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon. With violent resistance to the US-led occupation showing no signs of ending, Perle says the biggest mistake in post-war policy "was the failure to turn Iraq back to the Iraqis more or less immediately. We didn't have to find ourselves in the role of occupier. We could have made the transition that is going to be made at the end of June more or less immediately," he says, referring to the US and British plan to transfer political authority in Iraq to an interim government on June 30. (Toronto Star)
May 26: The Bush administration has known for over two years that it was authoring and promoting policies in Iraq that qualify as war crimes under the Geneva Convention. In January 2002, White House counsel and future Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote a now-infamous memorandum urging the abandonment of the Geneva Convention's prescriptions against torture as "quaint" and "obsolete," a memo that has been documented elsewhere in this site. Gonzales and Bush are also aware that the methods they have advocated fall under the 1996 War Crimes Act and the Torture Conventions. Gonzales's recommendation that the Bush administration use a technicality -- claiming that detainees be classified as "enemy combatants" and not "prisoners of war" -- is chillingly similar to the "Commando Order" issued in World War II by Adolf Hitler, which classified Allied units caught inside of German territory as "terrorists" and not POWs. Such units were summarily executed. And much like the defendants at the Nuremburg trials after World War II, Gonzales and his cohorts Paul Wolfowitz and General Peter Pace have denied any knowledge or understanding of the basic rules of engagement as laid down by the US military for Iraq, and have routinely lied and misrepresented the Conventions and the US War Crimes Act. According to a strict interpretation of the Third Geneva Convention, Bush, his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and General Ricardo Sanchez should all be charged with war crimes and brought before a special prosecutor. (Intervention Magazine)

Former vice president Gore gives a fiery speech calling for the resignations of Rumsfeld, Rice, and Tenet

May 26: Former vice president Al Gore gives what may be the most passionate and angry speech of his career, in remarks made at New York University and sponsored by the political organization MoveOn.org. He calls the Bush administration "incompetent," its Iraq policy "disastrous," and calls for the immediate resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, security advisor Rice, and CIA head Tenet. Here are some of his remarks:
- "George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world. He promised to 'restore honor and integrity to the White House.' Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon. Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as 'a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.' He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins. How did we get from September 12th, 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words 'We Are All Americans Now' and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib? To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of 'preemption.' And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral US right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President. More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word 'dominance' to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does. Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens -- sooner or later -- to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul."
- "One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know -- and not just from De Sade and Freud -- the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people's pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America. Those pictures of torture and sexual abuse came to us embedded in a wave of news about escalating casualties and growing chaos enveloping our entire policy in Iraq. But in order to understand the failure of our overall policy, it is important to focus specifically on what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison, and ask whether or not those actions were representative of who we are as Americans? Obviously the quick answer is no, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that. There is good and evil in every person. And what makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our natural distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have lead us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations more than the people any other nation. Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only 'better angels' in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation -- especially the temptation to abuse power over others. Our founders understood full well that a system of checks and balances is needed in our constitution because every human being lives with an internal system of checks and balances that cannot be relied upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow citizens. Listen then to the balance of internal impulses described by specialist Charles Graner when confronted by one of his colleagues, Specialist Joseph M. Darby, who later became a courageous whistleblower. When Darby asked him to explain his actions documented in the photos, Graner replied: 'The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the Corrections Officer says, "I love to make a groan man piss on himself."' What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by 'a few bad apples,' it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances. The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of the truth that characterized the Administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th."
- "There was then, there is now and there would have been regardless of what Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation -- because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him. He has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every U.S. town and city to a greater danger of attack by terrorists because of his arrogance, willfulness, and bungling at stirring up hornet's nests that pose no threat whatsoever to us. And by then insulting the religion and culture and tradition of people in other countries. And by pursuing policies that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children, all of it done in our name. President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is 'the central front in the war on terror.' It's not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists. [Dick Cheney said, 'This war may last the rest of our lives.'] The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict 'has arguably focused the energies and resources of al-Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition.' The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq al-Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks."
- "The war plan was incompetent in its rejection of the advice from military professionals and the analysis of the intelligence was incompetent in its conclusion that our soldiers would be welcomed with garlands of flowers and cheering crowds. Thus we would not need to respect the so-called Powell doctrine of overwhelming force. There was also in Rumsfeld's planning a failure to provide security for nuclear materials, and to prevent widespread lawlessness and looting. Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers even though they were denied the tools and the numbers they needed for their mission. What a disgrace that their families have to hold bake sales to buy discarded Kevlar vests to stuff into the floorboards of the Humvees! Bake sales for body armor. And the worst still lies ahead. General Joseph Hoar, the former head of the Marine Corps, said 'I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss.' When a senior, respected military leader like Joe Hoar uses the word 'abyss,' then the rest of us damn well better listen. Here is what he means: more American soldiers dying, Iraq slipping into worse chaos and violence, no end in sight, with our influence and moral authority seriously damaged. Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who headed Central Command before becoming President Bush's personal emissary to the Middle East, said recently that our nation's current course is 'headed over Niagara Falls.' The Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Army Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., asked by the Washington Post whether he believes the United States is losing the war in Iraq, replied, 'I think strategically, we are.' Army Colonel Paul Hughes, who directed strategic planning for the US occupation authority in Baghdad, compared what he sees in Iraq to the Vietnam War, in which he lost his brother: 'I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that...from happening again.' Noting that Vietnam featured a pattern of winning battles while losing the war, Hughes added 'unless we ensure that we have coherence in our policy, we will lose strategically.'
- "The White House spokesman, Dan Bartlett was asked on live television about these scathing condemnations by Generals involved in the highest levels of Pentagon planning and he replied, 'Well they're retired, and we take our advice from active duty officers.' But amazingly, even active duty military officers are speaking out against President Bush. For example, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior General at the Pentagon as saying, 'the current OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) refused to listen or adhere to military advice.' Rarely if ever in American history have uniformed commanders felt compelled to challenge their commander in chief in public. The Post also quoted an unnamed general as saying, 'Like a lot of senior Army guys I'm quite angry' with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration. He listed two reasons. 'I think they are going to break the Army,' he said, adding that what really incites him is 'I don't think they care.' In his upcoming book, Zinni blames the current catastrophe on the Bush team's incompetence early on. 'In the lead-up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct,' he writes, 'I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption.' Zinni's book will join a growing library of volumes by former advisors to Bush -- including his principal advisor on terrorism, Richard Clarke; his principal economic policy advisor, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was honored by Bush's father for his service in Iraq, and his former Domestic Adviser on faith-based organizations, John Dilulio, who said, 'There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.' Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require 'several hundred thousand troops.' But because Rumsfeld and Bush did not want to hear disagreement with their view that Iraq could be invaded at a much lower cost, Shinseki was hushed and then forced out. And as a direct result of this incompetent plan and inadequate troop strength, young soldiers were put in an untenable position.
- "For example, young reservists assigned to the Iraqi prisons were called up without training or adequate supervision, and were instructed by their superiors to 'break down' prisoners in order to prepare them for interrogation. To make matters worse, they were placed in a confusing situation where the chain of command was criss-crossed between intelligence gathering and prison administration, and further confused by an unprecedented mixing of military and civilian contractor authority. The soldiers who are accused of committing these atrocities are, of course, responsible for their own actions and if found guilty, must be severely and appropriately punished. But they are not the ones primarily responsible for the disgrace that has been brought upon the United States of America. Private Lynndie England did not make the decision that the United States would not observe the Geneva Convention. Specialist Charles Graner was not the one who approved a policy of establishing an American Gulag of dark rooms with naked prisoners to be 'stressed' and even -- we must use the word -- tortured -- to force them to say things that legal procedures might not induce them to say. These policies were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White House. Indeed, the President's own legal counsel advised him specifically on the subject. His secretary of defense and his assistants pushed these cruel departures from historic American standards over the objections of the uniformed military, just as the Judge Advocates General within the Defense Department were so upset and opposed that they took the unprecedented step of seeking help from a private lawyer in this city who specializes in human rights and said to him, 'There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity' where the mistreatment of prisoners is concerned. Indeed, the secrecy of the program indicates an understanding that the regular military culture and mores would not support these activities and neither would the American public or the world community. Another implicit acknowledgement of violations of accepted standards of behavior is the process of farming out prisoners to countries less averse to torture and giving assignments to private contractors. President Bush set the tone for our attitude for suspects in his State of the Union address. He noted that more than 3,000 'suspected terrorists' had been arrested in many countries and then he added, 'and many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our allies.'
- "George Bush promised to change the tone in Washington. And indeed he did. As many as 37 prisoners may have been murdered while in captivity, though the numbers are difficult to rely upon because in many cases involving violent death, there were no autopsies. How dare they blame their misdeeds on enlisted personnel from a Reserve unit in upstate New York. President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush. How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison. ...What a terrible irony that our country, which was founded by refugees seeking religious freedom -- coming to America to escape domineering leaders who tried to get them to renounce their religion -- would now be responsible for this kind of abuse. ...Ameen Saeed al-Sheikh told the Washington Post that he was tortured and ordered to denounce Islam and after his leg was broken one of his torturers started hitting it while ordering him to curse Islam and then, 'they ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive.' Others reported that they were forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. In my religious tradition, I have been taught that 'ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit... Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.'"
- "The President convinced a majority of the country that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11th. But in truth he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The President convinced the country with a mixture of forged documents and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, and that he was 'indistinguishable' from Osama bin Laden. He asked the nation, in his State of the Union address, to 'imagine' how terrified we should be that Saddam was about to give nuclear weapons to terrorists and stated repeatedly that Iraq posed a grave and gathering threat to our nation. He planted the seeds of war, and harvested a whirlwind. And now, the 'corrupt tree' of a war waged on false premises has brought us the 'evil fruit' of Americans torturing and humiliating prisoners.
- "It is therefore essential that even as we focus on the fateful choice, the voters must make this November that we simultaneously search for ways to sharply reduce the extraordinary danger that we face with the current leadership team in place. It is for that reason that I am calling today for Republicans as well as Democrats to join me in asking for the immediate resignations of those immediately below George Bush and Dick Cheney who are most responsible for creating the catastrophe that we are facing in Iraq. We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point. We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense. Condoleezza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately. George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately.
- "As a nation, our greatest export has always been hope: hope that through the rule of law people can be free to pursue their dreams, that democracy can supplant repression and that justice, not power, will be the guiding force in society. Our moral authority in the world derived from the hope anchored in the rule of law. With this blatant failure of the rule of law from the very agents of our government, we face a great challenge in restoring our moral authority in the world and demonstrating our commitment to bringing a better life to our global neighbors. During Ronald Reagan's Presidency, Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan was accused of corruption, but eventually, after a lot of publicity, the indictment was thrown out by the Judge. Donovan asked the question, 'Where do I go to get my reputation back?' President Bush has now placed the United States of America in the same situation. Where do we go to get our good name back? The answer is, we go where we always go when a dramatic change is needed. We go to the ballot box, and we make it clear to the rest of the world that what's been happening in America for the last four years, and what America has been doing in Iraq for the last two years, really is not who we are. We, as a people, at least the overwhelming majority of us, do not endorse the decision to dishonor the Geneva Convention and the Bill of Rights....
- "Make no mistake, the damage done at Abu Ghraib is not only to America's reputation and America's strategic interests, but also to America's spirit. It is also crucial for our nation to recognize -- and to recognize quickly -- that the damage our nation has suffered in the world is far, far more serious than President Bush's belated and tepid response would lead people to believe. Remember how shocked each of us, individually, was when we first saw those hideous images. The natural tendency was to first recoil from the images, and then to assume that they represented a strange and rare aberration that resulted from a few twisted minds or, as the Pentagon assured us, 'a few bad apples.' But as today's shocking news reaffirms yet again, this was not rare. It was not an aberration. Today's New York Times reports that an Army survey of prisoner deaths and mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanisatan 'show a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known.' Nor did these abuses spring from a few twisted minds at the lowest ranks of our military enlisted personnel. No, it came from twisted values and atrocious policies at the highest levels of our government. This was done in our name, by our leaders. These horrors were the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration's contempt for the rule of law. And the dominance they have been seeking is truly not simply unworthy of America -- it is also an illusory goal in its own right. Our world is unconquerable because the human spirit is unconquerable, and any national strategy based on pursuing the goal of domination is doomed to fail because it generates its own opposition, and in the process, creates enemies for the would-be dominator. A policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the United States and creates recruits for al-Qaeda, it also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating the efforts of terrorists who wish harm and intimidate Americans. Unilateralism, as we have painfully seen in Iraq, is its own reward. Going it alone may satisfy a political instinct but it is dangerous to our military, even without their Commander in Chief taunting terrorists to 'bring it on.' Our troops are stretched thin and exhausted not only because Secretary Rumsfeld contemptuously dismissed the advice of military leaders on the size of the needed force -- but also because President Bush's contempt for traditional allies and international opinion left us without a real coalition to share the military and financial burden of the war and the occupation.
- "Our future is dependent upon increasing cooperation and interdependence in a world tied ever more closely together by technologies of communications and travel. The emergence of a truly global civilization has been accompanied by the recognition of truly global challenges that require global responses that, as often as not, can only be led by the United States -- and only if the United States restores and maintains its moral authority to lead. Make no mistake, it is precisely our moral authority that is our greatest source of strength, and it is precisely our moral authority that has been recklessly put at risk by the cheap calculations and mean compromises of conscience wagered with history by this willful president. It is now clear that their obscene abuses of the truth and their unforgivable abuse of the trust placed in them after 9/11 by the American people led directly to the abuses of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and, we are now learning, in many other similar facilities constructed as part of Bush's Gulag, in which, according to the Red Cross, 70 to 90 percent of the victims are totally innocent of any wrongdoing. The same dark spirit of domination has led them to - for the first time in American history -- imprison American citizens with no charges, no right to see a lawyer, no right to notify their family, no right to know of what they are accused, and no right to gain access to any court to present an appeal of any sort. The Bush Admistration has even acquired the power to compel librarians to tell them what any American is reading, and to compel them to keep silent about the request -- or else the librarians themselves can also be imprisoned. They have launched an unprecedented assault on civil liberties, on the right of the courts to review their actions, on the right of the Congress to have information to how they are spending the public's money and the right of the news media to have information about the policies they are pursuing. The same pattern characterizes virtually all of their policies. They resent any constraint as an insult to their will to dominate and exercise power. Their appetite for power is astonishing. It has led them to introduce a new level of viciousness in partisan politics. It is that viciousness that led them to attack as unpatriotic, Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat during the Vietnam War.
- "The president episodically poses as a healer and 'uniter.' If he president really has any desire to play that role, then I call upon him to condemn Rush Limbaugh -- perhaps his strongest political supporter -- who said that the torture in Abu Ghraib was a "brilliant maneuver" and that the photos were 'good old American pornography,' and that the actions portrayed were simply those of 'people having a good time and needing to blow off steam.' This new political viciousness by the President and his supporters is found not only on the campaign trail, but in the daily operations of our democracy. They have insisted that the leaders of their party in the Congress deny Democrats any meaningful role whatsoever in shaping legislation, debating the choices before us as a people, or even to attend the all-important conference committees that reconcile the differences between actions by the Senate and House of Representatives. The same meanness of spirit shows up in domestic policies as well. Under the Patriot Act, Muslims, innocent of any crime, were picked up, often physically abused, and held incommunicado indefinitely. What happened in Abu Ghraib was difference not of kind, but of degree.
- "...[W]hat we do now, in reaction to Abu Ghraib will determine a great deal about who we are at the beginning of the 21st century. It is important to note that just as the abuses of the prisoners flowed directly from the policies of the Bush White House, those policies flowed not only from the instincts of the president and his advisors, but found support in shifting attitudes on the part of some in our country in response to the outrage and fear generated by the attack of September 11th. The president exploited and fanned those fears, but some otherwise sensible and levelheaded Americans fed them as well. I remember reading genteel-sounding essays asking publicly whether or not the prohibitions against torture were any longer relevant or desirable. The same grotesque misunderstanding of what is really involved was responsible for the tone in the memo from the president's legal advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote on January 25, 2002, that 9/11 'renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.' We have seen the pictures. We have learned the news. We cannot unlearn it; it is part of us. The important question now is, what will we do now about torture. Stop it? Yes, of course. But that means demanding all of the facts, not covering them up, as some now charge the administration is now doing. One of the whistleblowers at Abu Ghraib, Sergeant Samuel Provance, told ABC News a few days ago that he was being intimidated and punished for telling the truth. 'There is definitely a coverup,' Provance said. 'I feel like I am being punished for being honest.'
- The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration. To me, as glaring as the evidence of this in the pictures themselves was the revelation that it was established practice for prisoners to be moved around during ICRC visits so that they would not be available for visits. That, no one can claim, was the act of individuals. That was policy set from above with the direct intention to violate US values it was to be upholding. It was the kind of policy we see -- and criticize in places like China and Cuba. Moreover, the administration has also set up the men and women of our own armed forces for payback the next time they are held as prisoners. And for that, this administration should pay a very high price. One of the most tragic consequences of these official crimes is that it will be very hard for any of us as Americans -- at least for a very long time - to effectively stand up for human rights elsewhere and criticize other governments, when our policies have resulted in our soldiers behaving so monstrously. This administration has shamed America and deeply damaged the cause of freedom and human rights everywhere, thus undermining the core message of America to the world."
- "President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world -- but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the US Army for cavalierly sending them into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America. He is willing only to apologize for the alleged erratic behavior of a few low-ranking enlisted people, who he is scapegoating for his policy fiasco."
- "In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the US Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president. I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability... So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands. I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable -- and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, 'We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility."
(MoveOn, C-SPAN [archived video of Gore's speech])

May 27: Iraqi scientist Hussein Shahristani, a Shi'a Muslim jailed under Saddam Hussein and chosen by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and US presidential envoy Robert Blackwill to serve as Iraq's interim prime minister, is refusing the position. Shahristani, who had previously indicated he would accept the post, now says he will not serve in the Iraqi government in any position. Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni who was foreign minister in the 1960s, is expected to be appointed the next president, according to a US official; also under consideration are potential candidates for the position of vice president in the new government. Leading names include Ibrahim Jaafari, a doctor from the Shi'a Dawa Party, and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani. (BBC)
May 27: UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is reportedly furious over the Bush administration's leak that Iraqi scientist Hussain Shahristani is the leading candidate for Iraq's interim prime minister, a position that Shahristani has refused. Brahimi's spokesman Ahmad Fawzi says that the leak could endanger Shahristani's life. UN and British officials dismiss suggestions that the Americans had a sinister motive in putting out Shahristani's name, and say that the information was simply out of date. Asked whether the Americans might have been trying to "bounce" Shahristani into the post, a senior British official replies that "it was just a leak." Shahristani, who has the support of the British Government as he had worked as a visiting professor in Britain, was apparently in the lead for the position of prime minister. But his candidacy ran into difficulties when Brahimi held further consultations with a range of Iraqis, including the influential Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini Sistani. The formation of the Iraqi government is a crucial step towards the adoption of a UN resolution which is to officially end the occupation of Iraq, transfer political sovereignty to the Iraqis and map out the future towards an elected government. Among other contenders for the top posts is Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni who served as foreign minister in the 1960s and who is being touted as a possible president. Ibrahim Jaaferi, a potential vice-president, and Pachachi are two of the only members of the current US-appointed Governing Council to command the respect of ordinary Iraqis. Jaaferi is one of the leaders of the Dawa party, a Shi'a faction that was opposed to Baathist rule and banned under the Hussein regime. Unusually, the Shi'a Jaaferi is respected by Sunnis. Some Sunnis even said yesterday that if there were an election, they would vote for him. By contrast, the name suggested to fill the other of the two vice-presidencies, Jalal Talabani, is one that will not please Iraq's Arabs, both Sunni and Shi'a. Talabani's past, leading a Kurdish rebellion against Arab rule, and the fact that he was seen as close to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, would make him a particularly unpopular choice. He is one of the two Kurdish leaders who control the Kurdish north of Iraq. (Independent/Independent Media)
May 27: The Bush administration issues yet another warning of a possible al-Qaeda strike, warning that a terrorist strike this summer is "imminent." Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller also release photos of 7 suspected terrorists, and ask the public for help in identifying and locating them. Administration officials say a stream of new intelligence chatter suggests an attack could occur in the next few months, and say that they are also relying on al-Qaeda's warning in January that its preparations for an attack in the United States were 70 percent complete and a more recent boast after the March 11 rail bombing in Madrid that preparations for an attack were 90 percent finished. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge says that in spite of the warnings, there is no reason to raise the terror alert level from yellow to orange. (San Francisco Chronicle)
May 27: FBI investigators are quietly visiting prominent Washington neoconservatives, asking about who might have passed Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi classified information about US plans to invade Iraq. Washington neocons have either been made fools of by Chalabi, who has been outed as a spy for Iran who has passed secret US intelligence to Iran for decades, or some of them have been working with Chalabi themselves. The FBI wants to know what information was passed, who was passing it, and whether those involved with Chalabi were dupes or willing participants. Though no one will say it, either in Beltway circles or among the mainstream media, the word "treason" is being seriously considered. A prime target for investigation is the supposedly disbanded Office of Special Plans, operated by, among others, aides to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. The fallout from the Chalabi investigation is one reason why the New York Times recently admitted that it had been misled for years by informants connected both to Chalabi and the OSP. Sidney Blumenthal concludes: "Things fall apart: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, General Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; the intelligence agencies abused and angry, their retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous truths; the press, hesitating and wobbly, investigating its own falsehoods; the neocons, publicly redoubling defence of their hero and deceiver Chalabi, privately squabbling, anxiously awaiting the footsteps of FBI agents; Colin Powell, once the most acclaimed man in America, embarked on an endless quest to restore his reputation, damaged above all by his failure of nerve; everyone in the line of fire motioning toward the chain of command, spiralling upwards and sideways, until the finger pointing in a phalanx is directed at the hollow crown." (Guardian)
May 27: New questions are arising about the touch-screen voting machines being tested in Miami and Dade County, Florida. For the second time in two weeks, the ES&S iVotronic machines have produced a raft of auditing errors and miscounts; it is also revealed that Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan knew about the problems with the machines two months earlier than she had previously disclosed. Kaplan and her staff call the results an "anomaly" and say they won't affect voting tabulation. Critics note that the auditing errors make it impossible to verify the votes cast, as there is no other way to show how many votes were cast for which candidates, and say that such auditing problems may be used to conceal voting fraud. At an April 19 meeting of the County Commissioners' elections subcommittee, Kaplan lied by telling the commissioners that she was unaware of any problems with the machines. Kaplan, a Republican, claims she "misspoke" at the meeting. (Daily Business Review/Law.com)
May 27: The New York Times belatedly admits that its coverage of the Iraqi WMD controversy was flawed, with an obvious bent towards supporting the administration's lies about Iraq's supposed WMDs and away from printing the truth. In "a number of instances," the editorial reads, the coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been." Much of the editors' criticism surrounds the unquestioning acceptance of Judith Miller's administration-orchestrated coverage of Iraq, though Miller's name is never mentioned in the article. The article also points out that in some cases, the administration was misled by Miller, and accepted her stories, often fed to her by Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, as fact: "it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. ...And until now we have not reported that to our readers." The Times editors observe that administration officials now acknowledge "they sometimes fell for misinformation" from exile sources, mentioning Chalabi as one. So, they note, did many news organizations, adding, "in particular, this one." The article continues, "Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all." Yet nowhere does the Times suggest that it is penalizing any editors or reporters in any way. It is probably most telling that, like its follow-up articles that purported to correct misinformation printed under large front-page headlines, this confession of malfeasance is buried in the back pages.
Miller has acknowledged, more or less, that Chalabi is her main source for her information (or what can now be safely termed "disinformation"). Along with Chalabi, Miller interviewed a number of Chalabi's expatriate and defector associates, all apparently hand-picked by Chalabi to further his own goals of disseminating self-serving disinformation in America's flagship newspaper. The damage that Miller caused may be best exemplified by her May 2002 story, written along with Michael Gordon, titled "Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." The story, filled with lies and half-truths from Chalabi, was quoted at length by Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell on their turns through that Sunday's talk shows. All cited the "liberal New York Times" as an unimpeachable source for the story that an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes, to be used as centrifuges, was evidence Hussein was building a uranium gas separator to develop nuclear material. The story quoted national security advisor Condoleezza Rice invoking the image of "mushroom clouds over America." Author and journalist James Moore writes, "No single story did more to advance the political cause of the neoconservatives driving the Bush administration to invade Iraq." Of course, the tubes could not have been used for any nuclear development, but were obtained strictly for conventional missile construction. It wasn't long before American intelligence units confirmed that fact. The probable source for Miller's story, in addition to US intelligence operatives, was Adnan Ihsan Saeed, an Iraqi defector Miller was introduced to by Chalabi. Miller had quoted him in a December 2001 report when Saeed had told her he had worked on nuclear operations in Iraq and that there were at least 20 banned-weapons facilities undergoing repairs. Of course, no such facilities have been found -- meaning Saeed was either lying or horribly uninformed. "I had no reason to believe what I reported at the time was inaccurate," Miller said later. "I believed the intelligence information I had at the time. I sure didn't believe they were making it up. This was a learning process. You constantly have to ask the question, 'What do you know at the time you are writing it?' We tried really hard to get more information and we vetted information very, very carefully."
Despite Miller's protestations of innocence and inexperience (a "learning curve?"), other journalists know just how flawed her approach was, and how eager Miller was to cooperate with Chalabi even at the cost of accuracy and journalistic integrity. "The White House had a perfect deal with Miller," says a former CIA analyst. "Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi. Too bad Judy didn't spend a little more time talking to those of us in the intelligence community who had information that contradicted almost everything Chalabi said." (It will be months after the above story is published that Miller admits her reporting about the aluminum tubes is wrong, but she refuses to admit that she erred.)
But that was not the worst of Miller's transgressions. She wrote another story, titled "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert," based on a source she never met or even interviewed. For that story, Miller watched a man in a baseball cap from a distance, who pointed at the desert floor, and used that as a basis for filing a piece that confirmed the US had discovered "precursors to weapons of mass destruction." According to her sources in the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha of the US Army, this unnamed scientist from Hussein's WMD program had told them the "building blocks" of WMD were buried in that spot. Miller explained months later that she had seen a letter from the man, written in Arabic and translated for her, that gave his claims credence. "I have a photograph of him," she explained. "I know who he is. There's no way I would have gone forward with such a story without knowing who my source was, even if I got it from guys in my unit. You know, maybe it turns out that he was lying or ill-informed or cannot be independently verified." Miller, as is her wont, didn't bother with independent verification. Instead, she made the rounds of the TV talk shows the next day, proclaiming that she had discovered "more than a smoking gun...[a] silver bullet in the form of an Iraqi scientist" that proved Iraq's possession of WMDs. Before long she began talking about multiple scientists and implying that she had multiple sources for her story, and credited the Bush administration for creating a "political atmosphere where these scientists can come forward."
The story was trumpeted by conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and, once it was transmitted off to regional newspapers via the Times wire service, it acquired even more dramatic purchase. "Illegal Material Spotted," the Rocky Mountain News blared with a subhead that distorted even more: "Iraqi Scientist Leads US Team to Illicit Weapons Location." "Outlawed Material Destroyed by the Iraqis Before the War" was the headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Unfortunately, it was all false. The Times was forced to admit that Miller's informant was dead wrong, and that he had "also claimed that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to Syria and had been cooperating with al-Qaeda -- two claims that were then, and remain, highly controversial. But the tone of the article suggested that this Iraqi 'scientist' -- who in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence -- had provided the justification the Americans had been seeking for the invasion. The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims." Miller still claims to have been correct: "You know what," she retorted, "I was proved f*cking right. That's what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved f*cking right."
In the editorial, the Times also belatedly distances itself from Miller's sensational reporting of the allegations of Chalabi's defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed that Iraq was riddled with secret WMD facilities. Al-Haideri's entire statement was proven to be false, and Chalabi's INC was proven to have extensively coached and orchestrated his story and its media presentation. This is the story to which the Times admits that "we, along with the administration, were taken in."
Instead of firing her, or even holding her up to public ridicule, the Times has staunchly defended Miller, even after it has repeatedly been forced to admit that much of her reporting has been absolutely wrong. Even in its attacks on Chalabi's credibility, the paper has refused to admit that its own stories have so often been based on misinformation provided by Chalabi and his cohorts. Moore writes, "[T]he paper failed to point out that much of its reporting was dependent on Chalabi and Iraqi defectors provided through the exiled Iraqi National Congress, the same operation that was getting the Bush White House to gobble up its lies and distortions. Why weren't Times editors as intellectually disciplined on the subject of Chalabi when Miller and other reporters were trotting in with stories based on spurious allegations from the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi's merry band of defectors? The fact that Chalabi was able to feed disinformation to America's most widely recognized publication and have it go relatively unchallenged as the electorate was whipped into a get-Saddam frenzy ought to be keeping Times editors awake all night. Nobody wanted a war against Iraq more than Ahmed Chalabi -- and the biggest paper in the US gave it to him almost as willingly as the White House did."
Moore concludes, "The failures of Miller and the Times' reporting on Iraq are far greater sins than those of the paper's disgraced Jayson Blair. While the newspaper's management cast Blair into outer darkness after his deceptions, Miller and other reporters who contributed to sending America into a war have been shielded from full scrutiny. The Times plays an unequaled role in the national discourse, and when it publishes a front-page piece about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, that story very quickly runs away from home to live on its own. The day after Miller's tubes narrative showed up, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News went on national TV to proclaim, 'They were the kind of tubes that could only be used in a centrifuge to make nuclear fuel.' Norah O'Donnell had already told the network's viewers the day before of the 'alarming disclosure,' and the New York Times wire service distributed Miller's report to dozens of papers across the landscape. Invariably, they gave it prominence. Sadly, the sons and daughters of America were sent marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told and widely disseminated lie. Of course, Judy Miller and the Times are not the only journalists to be taken by Ahmed Chalabi. Jim Hoagland, a columnist at the Washington Post, has also written of his long association with the exile. But no one was so fooled as Miller and her paper. Russ Baker, who has written critically of Miller for the Nation, places profound blame at the feet of the reporter and her paper. 'I am convinced there would not have been a war without Judy Miller,' he said. The introspection and analysis of America's rush to war with Iraq have turned into a race among the ruins. Few people doubt any longer that the agencies of the US government did not properly perform. No institution, however, either public or private, has violated the trust of its vast constituency as profoundly as the New York Times."
Shortly after the editorial appears, executive editor Bill Keller, who is most likely the author of the piece, receives a nighttime phone call from an agitated Miller. She says she is standing in the living room of al-Haideri's house in northern Virginia, claims she is about to be "deported," and demands room on the front page to denounce this terrible injustice. Keller is furious. He had instructed Miller months before to stop reporting on Iraq and WMDs. Not only has she apparently not listened to him, she is still defending and protecting one of Chalabi's defectors who had misled the Times and the entire nation. Keller tells her he has no interest in another al-Haideri story. (New York Times, Editor and Publisher, Salon, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
May 27: Other newspapers are scrambling to add their own voices to the New York Times' correction of its "flawed" and often misleading articles concerning Iraqi WMDs. Many of these papers subscribe to the Times' news service, and ran the same articles that originally appeared in the Times. Many of the newspapers ran the Times' correction much more prominently than did the Times itself. (Editor and Publisher)
May 27: Ward Reilly, a member of Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, writes of his experience with the Bush campaign's "free speech zone" during a May 21 Bush rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Outside of Bush's appearance at Louisiana State University, anti-war protesters such as Reilly were forced to stand in a roped-off area 100 feet from the street that Bush's motorcade was scheduled to drive through, and were threatened with arrest if they left the area (some did leave, and were not arrested). Reilly's group had all of the requisite permits. Other, pro-Bush supporters were allowed to stand on the sidewalk and cheer their candidate. Reilly asked a police officer, "Why can those people stand along the curb but we can't?" and was told, "Because they are pro-Bush, and they don`t have signs." Reilly writes, "so let me get this straight -- and also let me present this to you, and you decide what is wrong with this picture. If you are 'pro-Bush,' you need no permit to stand along the edge of the road, and no security is necessary if you decide that you want to get as close to the President as you can. The police checked none of them, asked them for no permits, and allowed those people to line the street within only inches of where the President would be riding. So if I were a terrorist or an assassin trying to 'hit' our President, all I would have needed to do in order to get only inches away from him, would have been to say nothing, get no permit, and carry no sign. I just don`t get it. Do you get it?" (Baltimore Chronicle)

May 28: The Pentagon confirms that trainers from the Guantanamo Bay detention center were sent to Iraq last year to train American military intelligence teams in interrogation tactics at Abu Ghraib. Reports have already surfaced concerning abuse and torture at Guantanamo; it seems evident that the Guantanamo trainers taught some of these tactics to their colleagues in Iraq, where, unlike Guantanamo, the Geneva Conventions are supposedly followed by American soldiers and interrogators. The teams were sent for 90-day tours by Major General Geoffrey Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantanamo. Miller was sent to Iraq last summer to recommend improvements in the intelligence gathering and detention operations there. The involvement of the Guantánamo teams has not previously been disclosed, and military officials said it would be addressed in a major report on suspected abuses by military intelligence specialists that is being completed by Major General George Fay. The Fay report will be the next major chapter in the documentation of abuse of Iraqis by their American captors, following on the heels of the Taguba report released earlier in the year. Fay will brief Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, sometime next week. The involvement of the Guantanamo teams in Iraq marks the second major instance in which interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib appear to have been modeled on those in place earlier in Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, at facilities where the United States had declared that the Geneva Conventions do not apply. In Iraq, Bush administration officials have insisted that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" to all prisoners, whether they were prisoners of war or civilians waging an insurgency against the United States. But since the abuses at Abu Ghraib have become public, some American officers have acknowledged that certain abusive tactics -- hooding, chaining, isolation, sleep deprivation, and more -- may have been employed with the approval of senior American officials in Baghdad and perhaps Washington. (New York Times/Independent Media)
May 28: Officers from the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force surround the offices of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) in Falls Church, Virginia, confiscating little more than soccer balls and documents about youth sports leagues. Though the FBI and US intelligence agencies have known since 1993 that officials from WAMY have been using the group as a cover for funding and coordinating terrorist activities in the US -- the convicted bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993 had literature in their homes advocating "revenge on the Jews and the oppressors," and telling stories of "heroic" missions like the 1989 suicide hijacking of an Israeli bus that killed 14 and wounded 27 -- counter-terrorist officials were not allowed to investigate WAMY until September 13, 2001. Not only was WAMY allowed to function unhindered in the US until now, pass out inflammatory literature in prisons that would fuel tensions between Sunni and Shi'a inmates, and distribute videotapes praising Osama bin Laden, the organization even achieved US tax-exempt status.
Besides working with Muslim youth on the soccer field, WAMY's documented goal is to instruct young potential jihadists in the ways of Islamic terrosism, recruit them for organizations such as al-Qaeda, and even transport them to areas of the world where they can become active terrorists. WAMY operates in 55 countries, operates with multiple millions of dollars, and, most tellingly, is organized and funded directly from high-level Saudi Arabian officials. WAMY's US chapter was founded by Abdullah bin Laden, the nephew of Osama. By September 15, when the restrictions on FBI agents were removed and they began hunting for the bin Laden family members in the US who were working with WAMY, they were long gone -- allowed to leave the country by the special dispensation of the Bush administration. Interestingly, several of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Falls Church, blocks from WAMY headquarters. The May 28 raid on the WAMY offices takes place just days after terrorists blow up an oil workers' compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That attack finally resulted in permission from the Saudis for American agents to raid the WAMY headquarters. "Messing with the oil sheikhs gets the Bush administration's attention," writes investigative journalist Greg Palast. "Falling towers in New York, however, are only good for Republican politician photo ops."
While Bill Clinton was also too careful of the Saudi's feelings to conduct a serious investigation of WAMY, in 2000 he sent two secret delegations, one headed by his national security advisor Sandy Berger, to recommend to the Saudi royal family that they crack down on the "charitable donations" from their kingdom to the terrorists who attacked the WTC in 1993, and our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But an advisor to the Bush transition team in 2001, Reagan's former "counterterrorism advisor" Robert Oakley, said, "The only major criticism I have [of Clinton] is the obsession with Osama...." Oakley was one of many who ensured that the Bush administration wouldn't "obsess" over Osama bin Laden until after 9/11. When Palast broadcast his report on WAMY over the BBC network in November 2001, the FBI responded darkly to his questions about WAMY: "There are lots of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know." (Greg Palast)
May 28: Confusion over the administration's latest terror alert, and Homeland Security's failure to raise the alert level, indicates infighting between White House officials and Homeland Security officials. Although Attorney General Ashcroft told American citizens on May 27 that a terror attack was "imminent," Homeland Security head Tom Ridge was not at the announcement, and Ridge later told the press that he saw no reason to raise the terror alert. According to federal law, only Homeland Security can issue official terror warnings. The Cato Institute's Charles Pena says, "When you have the guys at the top seemingly unable to communicate, that indicates that we've got a bigger problem on our hands." (KSL-TV News)
May 28: On CNN's Crossfire, Republican representative Dana Rohrbacher claims that the Clinton administration, and Al Gore in particular, are responsible for the 9/11 attacks: "It's the Democratic Party and of course it's Al Gore, who knows a lot about incompetence, I might add, that got us into this mess; 9/11 was on the way; 9/11 was on the way by the time President Bush was inaugurated." He offers no proof of his allegation. (CNN)
May 28: Presidential candidate John Kerry gives an in-depth interview to Salon's Tim Grieve. Kerry says that the Bush administration's "arrogance" has "cost Americans billions of dollars and too many lives." Its deceptions about the war may have taken an even greater toll. Kerry says the White House lacks "any credibility" at home or abroad; indeed, the Bush administration has misled the nation so often now that Kerry says he has no way to know whether the new terror threats John Ashcroft revealed this week represent legitimate national security concerns or simply a political ploy aimed at propping up a foundering president. "I think people are beginning to wake up and feel the broken promises of this administration," he says. "On Iraq, on security, on schools, on healthcare, on jobs -- they haven't paid attention. They haven't been there for the working people. ...I don't think this administration has any credibility left."
About his October 20, 2001 vote to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq, Kerry insists that his vote was appropriate: "My vote was the right vote. If I had been president, I would have wanted that authority to leverage the behavior that we needed. But I would have used it so differently than the way George Bush did. ... I would never have rushed the process in a way that undoes the meaning of going to war 'as a last resort.' ...You know, we got a set of promises: We're going to build an international coalition, we're going to exhaust the remedies of the U.N., respect that process and go to war as a last resort. Well, we didn't. And not only [did we] not go to war as a last resort, they didn't even make the plans for winning the peace. They disregarded them. They disregarded [U.S. Army General Eric] Shinseki's advice, disregarded Colin Powell's advice, disregarded the State Department's plan. The arrogance of this administration has cost Americans billions of dollars and too many lives."
Kerry is visibly angry about the relentlessly negative attacks mounted on him, his military record, and his family by the Bush campaign and its surrogates: "I find it about as craven, petty, childish and destructive in terms of America's hopes in politics as anything I've ever seen." About the attacks on his military record, he says, "...I knew what they do. I knew they'd try to do anything. I saw what they did to John McCain and I saw what they did to Max Cleland. So, you know, we were ready, and I think we beat them back. And the more they want to bring it up, the happier I am. I'm happy to go anywhere in the nation with Dick Cheney and George Bush and have a debate about what they did and what I did during that period of time. Let's have that debate."
When asked about charges that he is a "flop-flopper," Kerry says, "It's not only intellectually dishonest, it's shallow beyond belief. It's exactly what they said about Bill Clinton, it's exactly what they said about Al Gore, it's exactly what they said about John McCain. It is the standard operating approach of Republicans who have nothing to say for themselves, so all they do is try to brand somebody else. ...What's really so craven about it is that they pick something that they implement badly and screw up, like Iraq or No Child Left Behind or the Patriot Act. And when you point out that they screwed it up, they say that you're 'flip-flopping.' But they, on the other hand, break a promise to have no deficit, break a promise not to invade Social Security, break a promise to fund No Child Left Behind, break a promise to introduce the four-pollutant bill and move forward on the environment, break a promise to deal with the real health issues and prescription drugs, break a promise of humility in American foreign policy. I mean, you start running down the list -- I've never seen a grander array of flip-flops. This is the biggest 'say one thing, do another' administration in modern history. ...This is the biggest 'my way or the highway' crowd we've ever had in Washington. They have no interest in legitimate governance. They have all the interest in power, favor, privilege, perks and reelection." (Salon)
May 28: Economist Paul Krugman notes that many people are asking how such a "straight-shooting" president as George W. Bush could suddenly become such a liar about Iraq, particularly in his comments and statements to the press. Krugman writes, "The answer, of course, is that the straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character that the press, for various reasons, presented as reality. The truth is that the character flaws that currently have even conservative pundits fuming have been visible all along. Mr. Bush's problems with the truth have long been apparent to anyone willing to check his budget arithmetic. His inability to admit mistakes has also been obvious for a long time." Krugman lists a number of reasons why the press has "bent over backwards" to give the president a veneer of spurious credibility: "misplaced patriotism" after the 9/11 attacks, "the tyranny of evenhandedness," which forces reporters to cast obvious falsehoods in a "he said, she said" manner that avoids questioning the president's credibility, and the plain fact of White House intimidation of journalists and press outlets. (New York Times/Paul Krugman Archive)

May 29: Several US guards say they witnessed military intelligence operatives encouraging the abuse of Iraqi prison inmates at four prisons other than Abu Ghraib, according to investigative documents such as court transcripts and US Army investigator interviews. The witnessed abuses include forcing inmates to stand in hoods in sweltering heat and beating inmates. The abuses took place at a US Marine detention camp and three Army prison sites in Iraq. Testimony about tactics used at a US Marine POW camp near Nasiriyah also raises the question whether coercive techniques were standard procedure for military intelligence units in different service branches and throughout Iraq. At the Marines' Camp Whitehorse, guards kept enemy POWs, called EPWs, standing in place for 50 minutes an hour, for up to 10 hours, then were interrogated by "human exploitation teams," or HETs, comprising intelligence specialists. "The 50/10 technique was used to break down the EPWs and make it easier for the HET member to get information from them," testified Marine Corporal Otis Antoine, a guard at Camp Whitehorse, at a military court hearing in February. As always, military spokespeople insist that guards and interrogators always follow Geneva Convention rules. The Marine judge presiding over the Whitehorse case writes that he believes the "50-10" technique is likely a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The judge, Colonel William Gallo, writes that such actions "could easily form the basis of a law of war violation if committed by an enemy combatant." Two Marines face charges in the June 2003 death of detainee Nagem Sadoon Hatab at Camp Whitehorse, although no one is charged with killing him. Military records say Hatab was asphyxiated when a Marine guard grabbed his throat in an attempt to move him, accidentally breaking a bone that cut off his air supply. Another Marine is charged with kicking Hatab in the chest in the hours before his death. Army Major General George Fay is finishing an investigation into military intelligence management and practices at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq. Pentagon spokesman Keith Alexander has told a Senate investigative panel, "If we have a problem, if it is an intel oversight problem, if it is an MP (military police) problem, or if it's a leadership problem, we have to get to the bottom of this." Most of the seven enlisted soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib abuses say they were encouraged to "soften up" prisoners for interrogators through humiliation and beatings. Several witnesses also report seeing military intelligence operatives hit Abu Ghraib prisoners, strip them naked and order them to be kept awake for long periods. Other accusations against military intelligence troops include:
- Stuffing an Iraqi general into a sleeping bag, sitting on his chest and covering his mouth during an interrogation at a prison camp at Qaim, near the border with Syria. The general died during that interrogation, although he also had been questioned by CIA operatives in the days before his death.
- Choking, beating and pulling the hair of detainees at an U.S. army prison camp near Samarra, north of Baghdad.
- Hitting prisoners and putting them in painful positions for hours at Camp Cropper, a prison at Baghdad International Airport for prominent former Iraqi officials.
Military officials say they're investigating all of those incidents. One focus of the incident at Qaim is Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshover, an interrogator with the Army's 66th Military Intelligence Group. Welshover was part of a two-person interrogation team that questioned former Iraqi Air Force Maj.-Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush. Military autopsy records say Mowhoush was asphyxiated by chest compression and smothering. Army officials say members of a California Army National Guard military intelligence unit are accused of abusing prisoners at a camp near Samarra, north of Baghdad. The Red Cross complained to the military in July that Camp Cropper inmates had been kept in painful "stress positions" for up to four hours and had been struck by military intelligence soldiers. One of the military intelligence soldiers interviewed in the Abu Ghraib probe claimed some prisoners were beaten before they arrived at Camp Cropper. Corporal Robert Bruttomesso of the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion told Army investigators he reported that abuse to his chain of command. The report of his interview does not include details on what action, if any, Bruttomesso's commanders took. (AP/CNews)
May 29: New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent says the newspaper was duped by "the cunning campaign" of those that wanted the world to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Some stories, writes Okrent, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets on the shoulders of editors." The half-page critique of the newspaper's coverage during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq follows a separate admission signed by "the editors" last week saying the newspaper had not been as "rigorous as it should have been" in questioning Iraqi exiles. Okrent says that in the run-up to the invasion, "cloaked government sources... insinuated themselves and their agendas into prewar coverage." The newspaper's failure, he said, was institutional: "To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of WMD seemed unmistakable." Okrent says much of the inaccurate WMD coverage was "inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines." Other stories that had challenged the assertions or tried to put the claims into perspective "were played as quietly as a lullaby." In one instance, a story headlined "CIA aides feel pressure in preparing Iraqi reports" was completed several days before the invasion and "unaccountably" held for a week. The report finally appeared three days after the war broke out and was buried on page 10 of the newspaper's second section, apparently buried deliberately in the run-up to war. Many "scoops" based on unsubstantiated revelations have still to be revisited, Okrent says. He adds he hopes the failings would produce not further contrition, but rather "a series of aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe Hussein had WMD. ...The aggressive journalism that I long for...would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the WMD stories, but how the Times was used to further their cunning campaign." (Guardian)
May 29: A number of neoconservative allies of Ahmad Chalabi have visited the White House to demand that the "smear campaign" against Chalabi be halted. The visitors include Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, and ex-CIA head James Woolsey. Members of the group speak with security director Condoleezza Rice, and say they are incensed at what they view as the vilification of Chalabi, a favorite of conservatives who is now central to an FBI investigation into who in the American government might have given him highly classified information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran. Chalabi and his aides deny he is an Iranian spy. "There is a smear campaign under way, and it is being perpetrated by the CIA and the DIA and a gaggle of former intelligence officers who have succeeded in planting these stories, which are accepted with hardly any scrutiny," says Perle in an interview after the meeting with Rice. Perle, referring to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, says the campaign against Chalabi was "an outrageous abuse of power" by government officials in Washington and Baghdad. "I'm talking about Jerry Bremer, for one," Perle says, referring to Paul Bremer, the top American administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in charge of the occupation of Iraq. "I don't know who gave these orders, but there is no question that the CPA was involved."
In Baghdad, CPA officials deny Perle's assertion: "Jerry Bremer didn't initiate the investigation," CPA spokesman Dan Senor retorts. And CIA spokesman calls Perle's accusation that the agency was smearing Chalabi "absurd." A Defense Department official who asked not to be named says that Perle's accusations against the DIA had no foundation. Intelligence officials argue that some of the intelligence provided by Chalabi was fabricated, and that Chalabi's motives were to push the United States into toppling Saddam Hussein and pave the way for his installation as Iraq's new leader. Participants in the meeting with Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, are told by Rice that she appreciates that they had made their views known, but Rice gives no hint of her own opinion and makes no concessions to their point of view. Danielle Pletka, a vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a research institution in Washington, attends a larger meeting with Hadley later. Pletka says that Chalabi has been "shoddily" treated and that CIA and State Department people had been fighting "a rear guard" action against him. "They've been out to get him for a long time," says Pletka. "And to be fair, he has done things and the people around him have done things that have made it easier for them. He is a prickly, difficult person and he drives them crazy. He never takes no for an answer, even when he should. ...There are questionable people around him -- I don't know how close -- who have been involved in questionable activities in Iraq. He is close to the Iranian government. And so all of these things have lent credence to the accusations against him."
Perle says the actions against Chalabi will burnish his anti-American credentials in Iraq and possibly help him to be elected to political office. "In that regard, this clumsy and outrageous assault on him will only improve his prospects," he says. Perle adds that while he has had no business dealings with Chalabi, he believes the CIA and DIA have spread false information that he did. He also says that Chalabi was not alone in supplying intelligence to the United States government that turned out to be false. "I know of no inaccurate information that was supplied uniquely by anyone brought to us by the Iraqi National Congress," he says. (New York Times
May 29: Interim Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi has been confirmed as the source of the false information that Saddam Hussein could launch WMDs against targets in 45 minutes, a claim used by both British and American governments to bolster their push for the invasion of Iraq. Allawi, a member of the Iraq National Accord party of exiles, has had close ties to both British and US intelligence for years. (Independent/CommonDreams)
May 29: The New York Times asks tough questions about who in reality tests the new electronic voting machines, and how voters can have confidence that their votes won't be manipulated or corrupted. Voting officials reassure us that the machines are rigorously tested by independent outside consultants; unfortunately, an examination of those tests and those consultants shows collusion, cronyism, and a shocking lack of transparency. Testing companies refuse to provide the most basic information to election officials or the public, basically requiring voters to blindly trust their results -- even when they are provably in bed with corporations and politicians who have their own agendas for the upcoming elections. Furthermore, the testing companies, who refuse to spend the time and money required to thoroughly test the millions of line of computer code, are using computer standards from 2002 that are woefully inadequate. Last fall, 17 California counties used uncertified and unreliable voting machines to choose their new Republican governor. In 2002, after machines all over Georgia failed weeks before the midterm elections, uncertified and unexamined software was used on every machine in the state -- and Republican Saxby Chambliss defied every exit poll in existence to post a victory over Democrat Max Cleland. The Election Assistance Commission, charged with rectifying these problems, is woefully underfunded and understaffed. Truly independent laboratories, paid by the government and not by the voting machine manufacturers, do not exist. Rigorous standards do not exist for the most part; when they do, they are not enforced. Voters are either lied to about the machines' reliability or given jolly, unfounded assurances. Penalties for voting machine problems do not exist. Mandatory backups for failed software and vote tallies do not exist. Paper trails do not exist. It is inconceivable how these machines can be relied upon to correctly count our votes that choose our elected officials. (New York Times/CommonDreams)

May 30: Former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, forcibly ousted from power by a US-backed coup, heads into exile in South Africa. He promises that his exile will be temporary. He says he is still Haiti's elected and rightful leader, and calls on his supporters not to use violence against the new regime. (AP/CNews)
May 30: When California Secretary of State asked Wyle Laboratories, contracted to test Diebold testing machines used in the state, if it had certified Diebold's machines as accurate -- a mandate of state law before the machines can be used in elections -- Wyle refused to tell him. That was proprietory information that Wyle could only disclose to Diebold, he was told. Shelley was stunned. State officials are forced to rely on what amounts to a privately operated testing system -- a small group of for-profit companies overseen by a private elections group to ensure the integrity of elections increasingly dependent on electronic voting machines. "I was shocked," Shelley recalls. "Everyone seemed to be in bed with everyone else. You had these so-called independent testing authorities floating out there in an undefined pseudo-public, pseudo-private status whose source of income is the vendors themselves."
Recent testing by states and university scientists has shown that these labs, called independent testing authorities, or ITAs, are signing off on some software with serious flaws. Last year, a team led by a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist found "significant and wide-reaching security vulnerabilities" in a Diebold system that could have allowed vote tampering. Subsequent investigations by the states of Ohio and Maryland raised similar security concerns about equipment sold by Diebold and other voting-machine makers. "We can't trust the ITA process," says David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a technical adviser to the California secretary of state. "The record shows that these systems have gotten through the ITA testing with embarrassing security vulnerabilities in them." 42 states rely on three testing laboratories to certify their voting machines. All three of those labs are funded by election machine manufacturers such as Diebold, and are not required by law to report their findings to anyone but those manufacturers. "The only thing they are independent from is state and federal regulators," Shelley told the US Election Assistance Commission this month. Dan Reeder, a spokesman for Wyle, which functioned as the nation's sole testing lab from 1994 to 1997, says the company's policy is to provide information to the manufacturers who are its customers. "We would not even acknowledge who we have done business with because of the proprietary nature of the relationship," Reeder says. "It's much like a lawyer-client relationship." Shelley has since banned some of Diebold's machines from use in four counties because it lied about their testing status.
Only two independent labs test voting software: CIBER of Greenwood Village, Colo., and SysTest Labs of Denver. And only one, Wyle, tests the physical machinery. SysTest Labs President Brian Phillips says the security risks identified by the outside scientists were not covered by standards published by the Federal Election Commission. "so long as a system does not violate the requirements of the standards, it is OK," Phillips says. The FEC standards that SysTest has been using date back to the late 1980s, Phillips says, when $300,000 was allocated to study the security and reliability of the first generation of electronic voting machines. But after the voting system standards went into effect in 1990, the federal government failed to provide money for their implementation. The standards were not updated again until last year. The private testing system of independent labs was created in 1994 by a group of election officials who were brought together by the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). But the association lacked the resources to accredit testing laboratories and track equipment approvals.
The Election Center, a private training organization for election officials, offered to take on those tasks for free. In 2002, the Houston-based Election Center operated on a $462,000 budget. Executive Director Doug Lewis said Election Center's budget comes mostly from membership dues and training fees. He acknowledges accepting up to $10,000 a year in donations from voting-equipment manufacturers like Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software. That doesn't sit well with Shelley. "Where I come from, any firm regulatory or approval scheme should be conducted by entities that are entirely independent from any reliance -- financial or otherwise -- from the people that they have to oversee," he says. Lewis defends the donations. "I don't have a problem with it because neither the Election Center or NASED ever had the right to approve or disapprove a voting system," he says. Though the Election Center couldn't force manufacturers to send their equipment to testing labs, many states require the labs' approval before the machines can be used in an election.
Today, only a handful of states conduct their own examination of a voting system's hardware and software. Despite its central role in guaranteeing the integrity of elections, the private testing system of independent labs is only loosely monitored. Neither the National Association of State Election Directors nor the Election Center has the resources to conduct follow-up inspection visits after a lab is accredited, Lewis says. The election directors' association also does not review contracts between the testers and manufacturers. According to FEC records, CIBER donated $48,000 to Republicans during the past four years, including $25,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2000, when CIBER was the only company testing voting software in the country. The company made no donations to Democrats. Democrat Shelley says, "I think it compromises the integrity of the process if you have the testing entities give contributions to one party or another. It's not appropriate." The Election Center ended its involvement with the independent labs last year. An attempt to transfer the responsibility to a new federal election agency was thwarted after the agency's creation was delayed and Congress did not provide enough funding for an oversight program. Currently, no one appears to be closely watching the labs. While the testing system remains in limbo, Shelley has requested that voting-equipment makers turn over a copy of their computer code. For the first time, California will be conducting its own line-by-line code review and security analysis. "Even if the testing labs approve something, if we don't approve it, we won't run with it," Shelley says. (San Jose Mercury News)
May 30: A news analysis by Britain's Independent newspaper highlights 10 major problems with the turnover of power in Iraq to a US-appointed interim government. The analysis begins with the selection of Iyad Allawi as Iraq's interim Prime Minister. Allawi, a Shi'a with close ties to US and British intelligence agencies, appears to be the result of a "hijacking" of power by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council away from UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. Whatever the reasoning, the US actions in Iraq have all been pointed at one goal -- assisting the re-election of George W. Bush in November. Originally power in Iraq was to have been turned over to Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of Washington's neoconservatives, but since the outing of Chalabi as an Iranian spy, he has fallen from grace, and the Bush administration has scrambled to find another prominent Iraqi who will represent their interests as "reliably" as Chalabi would have. The US wanted to hand over sovereignty to an expanded version of the IGC, mostly made up of former Iraqi opposition leaders who returned from exile with American forces. "But the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shia majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded elections before any handover," the Independent writes. "The Americans called for the UN's Mr. Brahimi, who was involved in setting up the transitional government in Afghanistan, to decide whether early elections were possible -- in other words, to convince Ayatollah Sistani they were not. Mr. Brahimi duly obliged, and was asked to stay on and find a new interim government acceptable to the ayatollah and Iraqis in general. He let it be known he would pass over the IGC's members and choose a government of technocrats, but the council has now announced the appointment one of its own members as Prime Minister. And not just any member, but one who looks distinctly like Ahmad Chalabi Mark II."
Allawi, an asset of British and American intelligence, is probably the source for the false claim that Iraq could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes of Saddam Hussein giving the order. But Allawi is only the latest in a line of fumbles, mistakes, and deliberately damaging decisions made by the Bush administration. The news analysis goes all the way back to the replacement of retired General Jay Garner by corporate executive Paul Bremer as the head of Iraq's reconstruction efforts; the replacement of Garner underscored the gross underestimation by the US over the difficulties of such a project. Originally the Bush administration estimated the costs of rebuilding Iraq at $50 billion, and the architect of the Iraq invasion, neocon Paul Wolfowitz, confidently predicted that it would be mere weeks before the reconstruction would soon be financing itself due to expanded Iraqi oil output. However, a year later, oil output lags behind even those levels reached under Hussein. Bush has asked Congress for $187 billion in Iraq funding so far, and is believed to be ready to ask for more after the elections. The occupation alone costs the US $4 billion a month.
The White House warned last week that, if Bush is re-elected, federal spending will have to be virtually gutted to continue funding the Iraqi occupation. Troop levels are another massive blunder. Originally, US forces were scheduled to have been cut back to well below 100,000 by now. Instead, the troops are at their current strength of 138,000, and those levels are obviously not enough. Several senior commanders, including Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, warned that an occupation force of 250,000 to 300,000 would be needed to facilitate the occupation, and was fired as a result. Now Shinseki's words have come back to haunt the US. In November 2003, as plans for a new constitution foundering and US forces fighting against a growing insurgency, Bremer "rushed back to Washington for consultations. Instead of waiting for a new constitution to be drawn up -- a process that could take years -- the US junked its existing seven-stage, multi-year plan and decided to transfer power to the transitional government that assumes power in 32 days' time. That government would preside over elections for an assembly. This body is meant to produce a constitution, on the basis of which Iraq would hold its first election for a permanent government, all by the end of 2005. But Mr Bush still dares not set a firm date for the withdrawal of US troops. Critics accordingly accuse him of still lacking an exit strategy. The President says 'full' sovereignty will be transferred on 30 June. But what does 'full' mean?"
One of the most examined mistakes made by the US occupational authority was its forced disbanding of Iraq's army after the invasion. The CPA has twice reversed itself on this problem. It abandoned "de-Baathification" when the US gave responsibility for policing the flashpoint Sunni city of Fallujah to a force under a senior Saddam-era Iraqi commander. The same could happen in the Shia south, where the US struck a deal with the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf under which local militias are taking over some security tasks. The about-turn is further admission that the US doesn't have the troops, or the respect of the local citizenry, to do the job. Another tactic tacitly abandonded is Donald Rumsfeld's plan to use heavy weaponry to eradicate what he called "foreign fighters and dead-enders." A more effective way to alienate the Iraqi citizenry can hardly be imagined. The US's relationship with the UN has been rocky, to say the least. Now the US's sudden dependence on Brahimi, an Algerian Sunni whose views on Iraq conflict harshly with many in the Bush administration. Brahimi has been routinely outmaneuvered and backstabbed by his US "colleagues," ruining an already-fragile relationship. The issue of American bases in Iraq is another flashpoint. "For the hawks in the Pentagon one of the key geo-strategic goals of the invasion of Iraq was to secure a new desert 'aircraft-carrier' in the Gulf, once US forces were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia," writes the Independent. "There was talk of American forces pulling out of the populated areas of Iraq within months, and establishing up to five permanent bases in desert areas granted to them by a grateful Iraqi administration. So unpopular is the US in Iraq that all public mention of such plans has ceased."
The bases, however, do exist. Even the talk of a new democracy in Iraq, once the linchpin of Bush's speeches about the occupation, have been all but forgotten. Now the goal is merely a "stable and secure" Iraq. Next week's G8 summit, which will be dominated by Iraq, was originally to launch a "Greater Middle East Initiative" bringing reform to the Muslim world. That won't happen, particularly in light of the ongoing Abu Ghraib scandals. A draft document for the summit reads, "Change should not and cannot be imposed from the outside." This phrase is likely to strike Middle Eastern states as particularly ironic. A regional conference to promote democracy has also been scaled back. (Independent/Global Security)

May 31: A March 5, 2003 e-mail reveals that Vice President Dick Cheney helped his former company Halliburton land a huge government contract for Iraq in March 2003. Cheney has repeatedly denied any involvement with his former company since he took office in January 2001. The e-mail, from an Army Corps of Engineering official, shows that Cheney delegated the job of giving the contract to Halliburton through Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Feith approved the multibillion-dollar deal "contingent on informing WH [the White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP's [vice-president's] office," said the email. Halliburton won the contract three days later, although no other bids had been submitted. In September 2003, Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press: "As vice-president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government." (The Age)
May 31: Contradicting earlier reports from the Pentagon, it is now confirmed that at least eight American contractors were involved in the May 20 raid on Ahmad Chalabi's home and office; earlier reports have US officials insisting that the raid was entirely an Iraqi affair, carried out without American input. The contractors not only accompanied Iraqi police on the raid, they directed the Iraqis, ordering them to rip out computers and smash furniture. At one point in the raid, some of the contractors helped themselves to food from Chalabi's kitchen and sat out in Chalabi's yard, enjoying their snacks while the Iraqis ran rampant through Chalabi's home. The contractors work for DynCorp, a subsidiary of Computer Science Company and the company contracted to train Iraqi police for the State Department. (Baltimore Sun/The Age)
May 31: Newsweek runs an illuminating profile of the "rise and fall" of Ahmad Chalabi's influence within the Bush administration. The recent raid on Chalabi's home and the accusations that Chalabi and/or his senior aides are agents of Iranian intelligence have brought to a head the conflict over Chalabi that has marked the relations between Bush administration neocons, for whom Chalabi has always been a prized resource, and the CIA and the State Department, whose officials have largely distrusted Chalabi and warned that the US should avoid him and his advice. Newsweek's Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball write, "Everyone and no one was responsible for the prisoner-abuse scandal; the deadline for turning over the country to a new government is five weeks away, and the outcome is highly uncertain. Chalabi, who was supposed to be Our Man in Baghdad, is now whipping up anti-American sentiment. It wasn't long ago that Chalabi was touted as a great democrat, a friend of Israel, an Arab who 'thought like us.' He was going to help Americans reshape the troubled Middle East in our own image. But just as Chalabi once seemed to personify the utopian dreams of the true believers -- remember those bouquets that would greet the troops? -- his fall from grace suggests a more depressing turn in the Iraq reality show." The article traces Chalabi's influence in the US back to his short-lived career as a CIA agent in the 1990s, where his ham-handed attempts to foment insurrection in Iraq and his penchant for stealing agency funds warned his CIA handlers that he was, at best, unreliable. Clinton's State Department wanted nothing to do with him. However, the neoconservatives waiting in the wings felt quite differently. Chalabi was, they felt, their man in Iraq, the man who, if they ever gained power in Washington, could help pave the way for the execution of their plans for restructuring the Middle East, starting with Iraq. Douglas Feith, then an obscure lawyer, recalls that he found Chalabi's 1997 predictions that Saddam Hussein could be overthrown "on the cheap" if Chalabi was allowed to lead the insurrection very compelling, and found Chalabi's rosy picture of a grateful post-Hussein Iraq "quite moving."
Once Feith and his fellow neocons were in power, Chalabi had a captive audience. After 9/11, Chalabi brought an array of Iraqi defectors and sources into Washington's halls of power to tell the neocons in the Defense Department and the White House what they wanted to hear -- that Hussein was building masses of WMDs that he was planning to unleash on America, that Hussein was in bed with al-Qaeda, and that Hussein was vulnerable to an overthrow if the US moved quickly enough. Though the CIA found Chalabi's stories groundless, the Bush administration parroted Chalabi's information to the world as justification for what it wanted anyway -- the removal of Saddam Hussein and an American military occupation of Iraq. (Colin Powell blames Chalabi for much of the bogus information that he presented to the UN in his memorable February 2003 speech.) When Chalabi's stories fell on deaf ears in the American intelligence apparatus, he went to foreign intelligence ministries and to neoconservative media outlets such as the Weekly Standard, and was all too often given reverent attention and media play. Though former Defense Policy board member Richard Perle denies that the Bush administration ever planned to "install" Chalabi as the new leader of Iraq, Chalabi seems to have been planning for just that -- and, even after his fall from grace, is still working towards that goal. He was among the first into Baghdad after Hussein's escape, and quickly installed himself in the old Foreign Ministry building, where he, with US approval, began magnanimously doling out lucrative business contracts and promises of positions in the Iraqi government-to-be (along with obtaining huge amounts of information on former Ba'ath party members and using that information to punish old enemies and blackmail others). Chalabi promised something that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to hear: that Iraq would quickly right itself under his leadership, making it possible for US troops to get out of the country almost as quickly as they came in. Though Chalabi has lost much of the popularity he once enjoyed in the US, he is still quite powerful in Iraq, and continues to be a force to be reckoned with.
Thomas and Hosenball write, "Today his extensive network of cousins and nephews runs almost every major bank. The minister of Finance, Kamel Gailani, is regarded as a weak Chalabi crony. 'He was put in that position as a button for Chalabi,' says a Coalition Provisional Authority official who works in the financial sector. Judging from the allegations made last week in Baghdad, Chalabi has run the INC the way Tony Soprano runs the Bada Bing. Chalabi's INC associates have been accused of using their connections at the Ministry of Finance and the major banks to commit fraud and embezzlement, according to charges that led to the raid on Chalabi's headquarters. Chalabi's men have also been accused of extortion and kidnapping by the Iraqi Central Criminal Court, which was set up by the U.S.-run CPA." Predictably, Chalabi says that the US now wants to smear him. He has lost the support of CPA head Paul Bremer, and the ear of UN envoy Lakshmi Brahimi. Yet his network of power and influence may yet bring him to the presidency of Iraq, or some similarly powerful post. The current game he is playing, as the man who duped the Americans in the name of the Iraqi people, may be enough to give him what he wants. (Newsweek)
May 31: Scholars and political analysts agree that the Bush campaign is running what is probably the most vicious and negative presidential campaign in modern history. Some recent examples include Vice President Cheney telling an audience that opponent John Kerry "has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all" and said that Kerry "promised to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts within his first 100 days in office." Neither allegation is true. A recent ad campaign alleges that Kerry will scrap wiretaps that are needed to hunt terrorists, another false allegation. The the same day, the Bush campaign released a memo falsely charging that Kerry wants to raise taxes on gasoline by 50 cents a gallon. And a recent ad charges that Kerry now opposes education changes that he supported in 2001, another falsehood. The Bush campaign has pushed the envelope on both negativity and on false, often outright lying, allegations against Kerry. Although Bush and his campaign officials have promised to remain on "the high road" politically, 75% of the ads they have released have been negative attacks on Kerry. (In contrast, 27% of Kerry's ads have been negative attacks on Bush.)
The Washington Post article writes, "The assault on Kerry is multi-tiered: It involves television ads, news releases, Web sites and e-mail, and statements by Bush spokesmen and surrogates -- all coordinated to drive home the message that Kerry has equivocated and 'flip-flopped' on Iraq, support for the military, taxes, education and other matters." Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communication, says, "There is more attack now on the Bush side against Kerry than you've historically had in the general-election period against either candidate. This is a very high level of attack, particularly for an incumbent." Brown University professor Darrell West, author of a book on political advertising, said Bush's level of negative advertising is already higher than the levels reached in the 2000, 1996 and 1992 campaigns. And because campaigns typically become more negative as the election nears, "I'm anticipating it's going to be the most negative campaign ever," eclipsing 1988, West says. "If you compare the early stage of campaigns, virtually none of the early ads were negative, even in '88."
The analysts involved in the report acknowledge that Kerry has made his own misleading statements about Bush and his policies, but, as the Post reports, "...Bush has outdone Kerry in the number of untruths, in part because Bush has leveled so many specific charges (and Kerry has such a lengthy voting record), but also because Kerry has learned from the troubles caused by Al Gore's misstatements in 2000." Jamieson says the Kerry team has been far more careful in its allegations than Bush. The Post observes, "[T]he Bush campaign relentlessly portrays Kerry as elitist, untrustworthy, liberal and a flip-flopper on major issues. This campaign is persistent and methodical, and it often revs up on Monday mornings with the strategically timed release of ads or damaging attacks on Kerry, including questioning medical and service records in Vietnam and his involvement in the peace movement afterward. Often, they knock Kerry off message and force him to deflect personal questions." A favorite Bush campaign theme is that Kerry is "playing politics" with Iraq, terror, and national security; several campaign officials have repeated the lie that Kerry said that all US soldiers are "universally responsible" for the Abu Ghraib scandal, a statement that Kerry never made, and campaign manager Ken Mehlman is fond of saying, "For John Kerry, the war in Iraq and the overall war on terror are a political game of Twister."
Another favorite theme is that Kerry wants to "gut the intelligence services" by slashing $1.5 billion from its budget; this allegation is based on a 1995 proposal by Kerry that would eliminate only around 1% of the total budget, was targeted specifically at waste, and was far smaller than the $3.8 billion cut the Republican-led Congress approved for the same program Kerry was targeting. Bush ads allege that Kerry wants to "raise taxes by $900 billion," a flagrant misstating of Kerry's tax proposals. Some Bush claims are misleading, but have a basis in fact: for example, Cheney's claim in almost every speech that Kerry "has voted some 350 times for higher taxes" includes any vote in which Kerry voted to leave taxes unchanged or supported a smaller tax cut than some favored. Former Dole campaign advisor Scott Reed says, "The Bush campaign is faced with the hard, true fact that they have to keep their boot on his neck and define him on their terms." That might risk alienating some moderate voters or depressing turnout, "but they don't have a choice." A new feature on the Bush Web site allows visitors to "Track Kerry's Shifting Positions on Iraq." That feature joins a Web log that points out negative coverage of Kerry, a feature called "John Kerry: The Raw Deal," "The Kerry Line," "Kerry Flip Flop of the Day," and "Journeys with John," a Kerry itinerary allowing people to see why "John Kerry is wrong for your state." On Wednesday, a Bush memo charged that Kerry "led the fight against creating the Department of Homeland Security." While Kerry did vote against the Bush version multiple times, it is not true that he led the fight, but rather was one of several Democrats who held out for different labor agreements as part of its creation. Left unsaid is that, in the final vote, Kerry supported the department -- which Bush initially opposed. (Washington Post )
May 31: New York magazine runs an article slamming the New York Times' Judith Miller for her slanted, pro-government coverage of Iraq. Writer Franklin Foer identifies former Executive Editor Howell Raines as the key enabler for some of her shoddiest work. Foer refers to Miller's "seemingly bottomless ambition," and her "pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders," but many of the most critical comments come from Miller's colleagues at the paper. Some reporters at the Times claim they have told their editors they will never share a byline with her. "she considers us to be her minions," says one. Executive Editor Bill Keller admits to Foer that Miller "has sharp elbows," is "possessive of her sources" and "a little obsessive" but adds that many people would say the same of legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
Foer's article, which had been in the works for weeks and is based on dozens of on- and off-the-record interviews, contains plenty of "dish" on Miller, some from former colleagues speaking on the record. Jeffrey Goldberg refers to her "unpleasant hyper-aggressiveness." Adam Clymer recalls her days as deputy editor of the Washington bureau when she would call reporters and editors in the middle of the night to complain about stories. But most of the withering criticism comes from unnamed sources. Foer asks, how did her faulty, and extremely influential WMD reporting (partly based on tips from Ahmad Chalabi and other dubious sources), get into the paper in the first place? Miller was a star reporter and a role model in Howell Raines' drive to raise what he called "the competitive metabolism" of the paper. Then, in the summer of 2002, Raines was widely criticized for running a prominent story by Patrick Tyler that wrongly attributed antiwar views to Henry Kissinger. In the aftermath, according to an ex-Times editor, Raines wanted to prove that he could be "fair-minded about the Bush administration" and so "bent over backwards to back them often." Another former editor said that in the following months, during the run up to the war, Raines often objected to stories that questioned the administration's claims on Iraq while "never" raising doubts about Miller's pieces.
According to Foer, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen "went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller's over reliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions. ...But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed managements' faith in her by putting her stories on page 1." Complicating matters was that some believed that Steven Engelberg was the only editor who could "harness" her -- and he had left the paper. Raines last week declared that he had never rushed a Miller story into print before it was ready. And Keller told Foer: "It's a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone or earned the right to carry Judy's laptop." (Editor and Publisher)
May 31: John Kerry delivers a Memorial Day speech honoring the US military, and tells his Virginia audience that George W. Bush "didn't learn the lessons of our generation in Vietnam."I think this administration has overextended our military," he later says. "It has turned the Guard and Reserve into almost active duty. ...Even while they are creating more veterans, they are not taking care of the veterans we have the way they ought to be." Kerry's campaign accuses Bush of planning budget cuts that would devastate programs for veterans, women, children and homeland security, and yet do little to reduce the nation's deficit. The Bush campaign retorts, "John Kerry never misses an opportunity to deliver a political attack. Sadly, that even seems to include Memorial Day, a day of remembrance that should be above politics." Bush himself makes a number of Memorial Day campaign appearances, and roundly attacks Kerry in all of them. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
Late May: Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, has a second "disheartening" meeting with Condoleezza Rice and NSC lawyer John Bellinger. Rice makes it clear that although the administration does not condone torture per se, the "implementation of policy" sometimes leads to "confusion in the military." She tells Roth, "There's a need to clarify whether there's a need for better training, and there must be accountability" within the military. "The military leadership needs to learn where the breakdown was" that led to the tortures and abuses at Abu Ghraib. However, the administration cannot "overthrow the whole detention and interrogation facility." Roth says, "To this day, they cling to the fiction that there is a realm of coercion that does not violate the international prohibition against torture. Until the administration formally abandons all forms of coercive interrogation, it is inviting the abuse that has become standard fare since September 11th." (Seymour Hersh)
Late May: The White House mounts another PR counteroffensive, this time to counter the effectiveness of the 9/11 families calling for further investigations into the pre-attack lapses in intelligence and preparedness. As is so often the case, the strategy involves attacking the messengers -- even the families of the 9/11 victims. The White House begins the strategy by proxy attacks, with talk show host Rush Limbaugh leading the charge. Limbaugh falsely characterizes one of the so-called "Jersey Girls," the four housewives who lost husbands in the attacks on the World Trade Center, as a Democratic operative. The target of his opprobrium is Kristen Breitweiser, a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000 and does not work with any partisan organization. Limbaugh accuses Breitweiser and her fellow widows of not being "grieving family members," but rather being "obsessed with rage and hatred."
Not to be outdone, Fox's Bill O'Reilly warns his viewers that "some 9/11 families have aligned themselves with the far left." Unfortunately for the strategy, it not only goes nowhere, but backfires, instead engendering even more criticism for such harsh and unwarranted attacks on bereaved families. The strategy was designed to help deflect criticism of Condoleezza Rice, who fought for months to avoid having to testify before the 9/11 Commission; when Rice finally does testify, she is forced to acknowledge the damning fact that Bush had received a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001 entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States."
For far more information on this topic, see the 9/11 page of this site. (Frank Rich pp.121-2)

Back to May 2004

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 2004:

Week Four

Entire Iraqi war and occupation proven an Iranian intelligence operation

Testimony of rape of Iraqi boys by male interrogators

Fahrenheit 9/11 wins acclaim at Cannes

A third of Taguba report "missing" after its release to the Senate

General Ricardo Sanchez directly linked to Iraqi prisoner abuse

Rumsfeld and Ashcroft at top of Iraqi abuse orders

Sanchez replaced as top military commander in Iraq

Terry Nichols convicted in OK City bombing

Perle admits Iraq occupation "a grave error"

Former vice president Gore gives a fiery speech calling for the resignations of Rumsfeld, Rice, and Tenet

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