November 2003: Week Four: This Far and No Further

Back to November 2003

November 22: Mosul, a northern city in Iraq once thought to be a showplace of Iraqi tranquility and cooperation with US occupation forces, has become increasingly restive and dangerous. It is also the site of the deadly Black Hawk helicopter crashes of a week or so ago. The city is fraught with what reporters call "simmering resentment" over the US occupation. Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, is well outside the bloody "sunni Triangle." Residents expressed happiness over the Black Hawk crashes. "I was happy because they [the Americans] are our enemies. They persecute us," says one neighborhood man. "The day after the crash, I tried to go out to pray and a soldier pushed me inside. Should I hate him or not?" A neighbor says guerrillas shot down the copters: "It's their right," he says. "This is our country, not theirs. Why are they [the Americans] here?" A Mosul city council member says the Americans' efforts to be viewed "as an army of liberation and not an army of occupation," in the words of US General David Petraeus, aren't working. "When they want to search homes, they break the doors, draw their guns and barge in on women and children at three [in the morning] without asking for permission. This will generate hatred and spite." Recently a US soldier inspecting identity cards asked one resident, "Why don't you like us?" The Iraqi responded, "We like you when you come to us as friends, not when you're pointing your weapons at us." (AP/The State)
November 22: The Army plans to keep at least 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq through early 2006. MAny Army officials believe it will take at least that long to stabilize the country. Any deployments in excess of that number would likely strain the Army past its capability, according to one senior official who wishes to remain anonymous. As the situation develops, the Army's plans could change, warns the official. (New York Times/Yahoo! News [cached Google copy])
November 22: The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has provided terrorist group al-Qaeda with what writer Mark Matthews terms "a powerful propaganda tool in its holy war against the West, injecting new energy into the worldwide network even though many of its key operatives are in jail or dead, its top leadership is on the run and its sources of money are shrinking, according to international security analysts." Recent bombings in Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the latest efforts by the group to energize its followers, add new members, undermine those countries' pro-US governments, and demonstrate that it is still a force to be reckoned with. "Iraq is a rallying cause for al-Qaeda -- it's allowed them to attract new recruits," says Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism specialist at the Congressional Research Service, the think tank for the House and Senate. "This was an organization that was under enormous pressure. Iraq has put new wind in its sails, definitely." Zeyno Baran of the Nixon Center says, "It's so much easier to recruit people because of what's happening in Iraq. People ask, 'How can I fight the British and American occupiers?' and they find each other." "We think we can decapitate them by going after leaders," says Zachary Abuza, a specialist on militant Islamic groups in Southeast Asia. Instead, the groups "are going to morph and be able to reorganize with the same principles but with different organizations and leaders." "There is a strong sense among experts who look at this that [the war in Iraq] has breathed new life into the jihadist movement," says Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "More and more groups are trying to take up the al-Qaeda cause. There is a general movement toward more radical thinking in the Muslim world." This is particularly true in Southeast Asia, where "anti-Americanism has never been higher," says Abuza. It is found in community groups, political parties, student study groups and online communities, and is spread in mosques, journals and magazines, he says. The top-selling magazine in Indonesia promotes the anti-Western Wahhabi brand of Islam promoted by al-Qaeda. Bush administration officials downplay such observations, saying that the US has the group on the run. (Baltimore Sun/CommonDreams)
November 22: The US will release approximately 24 prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center within weeks. Several dozen others will be transferred into the custody of their home nations. Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S ambassador-at-large for war crimes, says the freed prisoners "no longer pose a threat to the international community." As for the detainnes to be transferred but not freed, Prosper said they pose "a medium-level threat" and will be prosecuted in their own countries. (AP/Billings Gazette)
November 22: The Bush administration has moved to what is privately known as "Plan C" for Iraqi governance: establish security by June or sooner and transfer authority to a provisional Iraqi government by July. Two elements are critical to the success of the new plan: the competence of quickly trained Iraqi security guards who will soon start replacing weary US troops, and how eager Iraq's majority Shi'ites are to take control of the political process and in what direction they move. "We are finding an administration that is looking for ways out of this mess," says foreign policy expert Ivo Daalder. "They recognize there is a mess." In the rush to place Iraqi security forces, many members of these units are getting as little as three weeks of training, raising concerns about their readiness. "It was a way of getting more people on the street doing things," says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in response to questions about the pace of security force training. Unfortunately, judging from recent events, the Iraqi security forces do little more than retreat when attacked. When US troops had to adjust their position in the central Iraq town of Samara, guerrilla fighters overran the position, forcing Iraqi civil defense troops to bolt and American troops to return. A similar failure in Ramadi would force Pentagon planners to review their plan to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq from roughly 130,000 now to 100,000 by June. Without at least improved security, the political process will stall, as will the occupation. The Shi'ites are bolstered by one of their most powerful leaders, the Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who almost single-handedly crushed the Bremer plan for waiting at least 18 months before allowing Iraqis to begin running their own affairs. Sistani insists that elections be held as soon as possible, even before the completion of an Iraqi constitution. Under the current program, the US-led civilian authority in Iraq is scheduled to dissolve July 1, as soon as a new provisional Iraqi government is elected through a quasi-democratic process. The potential problem with transferring authority Sistani's way is that it all but eliminates the US from the constitutional process, leaving what promises to be a Shi'ite-dominated government in firm control of creating the document that will chart Iraq's political future. The fear is that the Shi'ites could write a constitution based heavily on Islamic, rather than democratic, principles, and marginalize rival ethnic groups, most notably the Sunnis, who staffed Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. That could lead to civil war. "The question is not whether the Shia will run the government. It's which Shia, the clerics or the secular Shia," says expert Marina Ottaway. "We really don't know what is happening behind the scenes. We really don't have an assessment of what the Shia really want. They play their cards very close to the vest." The Iraqis are supposed to complete their constitution by March 2005. (Gannett/Tucson Citizen)
November 22: The FBI is in the process of collecting an enormous amount of information on anti-war groups, according to a memo sent to local law enforcement agencies around the country. The memo details how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. (One op-ed column suggests that the term "training camps" may be used deliberately to evoke comparisons with terrorist camps such as those sponsored by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.) It also analyzes lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site. Reports of the FBI's monitoring have drawn comparisons with the program known as Cointelpro, created during the Cold War and in effect until the 1970's, when the FBI routinely sent agents to infiltrate organizations protesting the Vietnam War. FBI officials say that the intelligence-gathering effort is aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters. The memo, dated October 15, notes that the bureau "possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests" and that "most protests are peaceful events."
While some law enforcement officials welcome the FBI's efforts, many civil rights advocates and legal scholars feel that the FBI risks making the same encroachments on civil liberties that were performed under J. Edgar Hoover. "The FBI is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," says the ACLU's Anthony Romero. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover." Constitutional law professor and FBI expert Herman Schwartz says collecting intelligence at demonstrations is probably legal, but adds, "As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, `We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in FBI files." The abuses of the Hoover era led to strict constraints on FBI activity until Attorney General John Ashcroft removed most of those restrictions last year. While no systematic evidence of abuse has yet surfaced, a plethora of anecdotal evidence shows that the FBI is once again curtailing and abusing essential Constitutional liberties in the name of "fighting terrorism" and curbing violence at antiwar protests. The memo notes that the FBI can effectively intimidate protestors by overtly recording their activities for FBI files. A column in the Berkshire Eagle notes, "The threat of terrorism is real. Any threat from dissent is imagined. With the administration claiming to promote democratic openness abroad, it had better mind how it observes -- or fails to observe -- these cherished principles at home." (New York Times/Free Republic, Daily Misleader, Berkshire Eagle)

GOP orchestrates Medicare bill passage by breaking House rules

November 22: One of the most partisan and controversial bills in administration history narrowly passes the House, a Medicare bill that is criticized for giving HMOs virtual carte blanche to handle seniors' health benefits, and for laying the groundwork for the eventual complete dismantling of Medicare itself. Extraordinary measures are taken by the GOP leadership to ensure passage of the bill. Speaker Dennis Hastert illegally excludes Democrats from participating in the final debate, and Hastert extends the deadline for voting on the bill by an unprecedented 3 hours (the norm is 15 minutes) while administrative operatives and other GOP members pressure recalcitrant Republican members for their votes. In an astonishing act, Republican Congressman Nick Smith is told that if he votes yes, his son, who is running for Smith's seat, will be given $100,000 in donations from unnamed "business interests," and if he votes no, his son will be targeted for defeat. Smith confirms both the bribe attempt, made by either Hastert or Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, and the threat, in a press release, but then attempts to back off of his story after it hits the media. (Smith voted no.) Smith writes, "The House passed a deeply flawed Medicare prescription drug bill by a vote of 220-215 at 6:00am, November 22. Votes in the House usually last 15 minutes plus a traditional two minute cushion. But because the leadership did not have the votes to prevail, this vote was held open for a record two-hours-and-51-minutes as bribes and special deals were offered to convince members to vote yes. I was targeted by lobbyists and the congressional leadership to change my vote, being a fiscal conservative and being on record as a no vote. ...Tommy Thompson and ...Dennis Hastert talked to me for a long time about the bill and about why I should vote yes. Other members and groups made offers of extensive financial campaign support and endorsements for my son Brad who is running for my seat. They also made threats of working against Brad if I voted no. Brad heard about what was going on and called me to say he didn't want to get to Congress that way and that I should do the right thing. That added to my resolve." Smith later says, "I told them, not very politely, to get away from me. Threatening your kids is beyond the pale. It caught me by surprise. It made me mad."
Robert Novak writes, "After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, [Rep.] Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat." Smith is the eyewitness to a federal crime committed on the floor of the Congress; Smith later refuses to name the person who issued the bribe, and Hastert denies the charges. Washington lawyer and ethics advisor Marc Miller says what Novak described not only looks like "a slam-dunk violation of the bribery law" but probably also includes "a smorgasbord of other criminal violations." Former Republican congressman Newt Gingrich calls Smith "a disgruntled retiring member" who was the victim of nothing more than the usual treatment in a close vote. Miller says that Smith "should really be sharing the specifics with the Justice Department." As of late December, the Justice Department had not yet decided to pursue an investigation, though four other congressmen have confirmed that Smith was, indeed, offered a bribe and was the subject of a threat towards his son's campaign, and two groups, the nonpartisam Campaign Legal Center and the Democratically aligned Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, have filed complaints. It is later revealed that other Republicans were pressured: one was told that if he didn't vote properly, he would be challenged by another Republican in the next election, and another was threatened with the loss of his subcommittee chairmanship. (Slate, Nick Smith, AP/Our Future, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Washington Post, Slate, Washington Times)
It is noteworthy that, in presenting the Medicare bill to the public, Bush asserts that senior citizens on Medicare will have the same kinds of choice in their health care options that government employees have: "If it's good enough for the employees and members of Congress to have choice, it's good enough for our seniors to have choice." Yet the House Medicare bill that Bush is touting gives very little choice to seniors on Medicare. Worse, the federal employee coverage provides 80% of prescription drug benefits; the House bill provides 55%. (David Corn)

November 23: A DHL cargo plane is struck by a ground-fired missile while flying into Baghdad; it lands with one wing afire. No injuries are reported. The plane was the first civilian airliner hit by insurgents, who have shot down several military helicopters with shoulder-fired rockets. DHL and Royal Jordanian, the only commercial passenger airline flying into Baghdad, immediately suspended flights on orders of the coalition authority. (Toronto Star)
November 23: Iraqi teenagers drag two injured American soldiers from a wrecked vehicle in the previously calm city of Mosul, pummel them with concrete blocks, and slit their throats. Another soldier is killed by a bomb and a US-allied police chief is assassinated along with his bodyguard and driver. It is unclear whether or not the two US soldiers are dead before the mob attacks them. In Baghdad, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt confirmes the Mosul deaths but refuses to provide details. "We're not going to get ghoulish about it," he says. The six deaths point up the fact that Mosul, once considered much more stable than the beleagured "sunni Triangle" area around Baghdad, is becoming more and more dangerous for the US occupying forces. (Toronto Star)
November 23: Al-Qaeda leaders are "franchising" their organization's style of synchronized, destructive terror attacks to smaller groups around the world; the US and other countries opposed to terror are having a difficult time dealing with the situation. Recent attacks in Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Chechnya and Iraq prove that smaller groups, most of whose leaders trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, have spread over the globe. They are bringing their radical Islamic ideology and a sense of broadening horizons to these groups, many who originally focused on regional issues. Al-Qaeda has lost much of its senior leadership, and is now largely operated by midlevel operatives; it relies heavily on these groups to carry out its jihad against the US and its allies. A senior US official says al Qaeda's children are "growing up and moving out into the world, loyal to their parents but no longer reliant on them." The evolution challenges attempts to combat terror groups, because rather than facing a few defined, recognized targets, counterterror forces must confront dozens of small groups that are much more difficult to trace and attack. And knocking out one small group does not have the same crippling effect as taking down a major leader of a large organization. "The threat has moved beyond al Qaeda," says terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna. "While al Qaeda was the instigator of recent attacks, very few have actually been carried out by al Qaeda." One of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's major contributions in the spread of terrorism, says CIA analyst Paul Pillar, "was putting the anti-American perspective at the forefront. It has been so successful that it has thoroughly affected even these groups that are more regionally focused. ...Anti-Americanism sells, particularly in the Middle East."
"Al-Qaeda is as much an ideology as a structure," says Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence in Scotland. "Iraq is now the center of gravity, but I think they are seeking out soft targets and hitting from every flank imaginable by any means. This is an ongoing, raging war with all the gloves off." Pentagon terrorism consultant Michael Pillsbury believes that the evolution of the terrorist groups is analogous to a process of corporate merger and acquisition. At a terrorism conference earlier this year, Pillsbury said regionally-focused terrorism groups with their own particular agendas join with al Qaeda to learn their operational techniques or benefit from their contacts, but are not subordinate to al Qaeda. For example, he said, Jemaah Islamiah seeks to create a pan-Islamic state in Asia, an agenda that has little to do with driving US forces out of Saudi Arabia or other goals of bin Laden's: "They like to get advice and equipment from al Qaeda but still have their own political agenda." Terrorism expert Margret Johannsen says, "If [al-Qaeda] can make an instrument of local groups, it will make up for the losses al Qaeda has suffered. ...They won't need international financing, they won't need a base as in Afghanistan. [Al Qaeda becomes] an idea, a banner, and that is very dangerous." (MSNBC)
November 23: It is the consensus of a panel of more than 200 senior business and government executives, many of whom are specialists in security and terrorism related issues, that there will be another major terrorist attack on the US before the 2004 election, and that attack will work to the advantage of George Bush in the presidential elections. The panel noted the extraordinary effect the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis had on that year's elections, swinging the decision away from Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and towards Republican Ronald Reagan. It also noted the effect of massive suicide bombings on the 1996 Israeli elections, swinging the elections towards hardline Likud candidate Binyamin Netanyahu and away from more conciliatory incumbent Shimon Peres. In 2002, hardline Israeli candidate Ariel Sharon won when a major attack occurred just before that country's elections. In Russia, Vladimir Putin's tough stance against Chechen terrorists was widely credited with his presidential win in 2000. In Turkey, in 1999, Bulent Ecevit cited violence and the threat of unrest in his country from Islamic-led political opponents; he jailed them and won. In Sri Lanka, when President Chandrika Kumaratunga, known for her tough stance against Tamil Tiger terrorists, was wounded in a pre-election attack, her flagging political fortunes were revived and she, too, won.
"From the perspective of the terrorist, attacking in an election year makes perfect sense," writes co-chair David Rothkopf. "The objective of terrorism is not so much to strike a blow against a particular physical target as it is to strike a psychological blow against a target audience. That is why terrorists will often hit symbolic targets such as the World Trade Center or conduct 'message' strikes on buses or sidewalk cafes to suggest that no one is safe. Elections heighten the stakes because a blow during an election is a blow against a society's political foundations. Elections also enable terrorists to lash out more directly at individual political figures and to do so in a highly visible way." Rothkopf notes that in every instance, hard-line conservative candidates were the beneficiaries of terrorist attacks on their countries. He asks, " So why would they want to help them win? Perhaps because terrorists see the attacks as a win-win. They can lash out against their perceived enemies and empower the hard-liners, who in turn empower them as terrorists. How? Hard-liners strike back more broadly, making it easier for terrorists as they attempt to justify their causes and their methods. This in turn suggests that while terrorists must be combated, a measured public response is more effective than an impulsive or ill-conceived military response (however emotionally satisfying) that is likely to produce unnecessary collateral damage, political or otherwise. We should remember that what attackers seek most is to damage our national prestige and that to the extent that we do the same, we are doing the terrorist's bidding." (Washington Post)
November 23: The US military and intelligence communities are encroaching further and further into everyday American life under the guise of protecting the citizenry from terrorism; long-standing rules and laws prohibiting the surveillance of American citizens by US intelligence agencies and military organizations are being invalidated, ignored, or legislated out of existence in the name of national security. "We must start thinking differently," says Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, the new commander of Northern Command, the military's homeland security arm. Before 9/11, he says, the military and intelligence systems were focused on "the away game" and not properly focused on "the home game." The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the direct use of federal troops "to execute the laws" of the United States; the courts have long interpreted the act to prohibit the military from any active role in direct civilian law enforcement, such as search, seizure or arrest of civilians. Eberhart says his Northern Command stays within the bounds of the law. In March, he said to the House Armed Services Committee, "We believe the [Posse Comitatus] Act, as amended, provides the authority we need to do our job, and no modification is needed at this time." The amendments of which he speaks have already expanded the military's domestic powers so that the federal government can act unilaterally in dispatching the military without waiting for a state's request for help. Long before 9/11, Congress authorized the military to assist local law enforcement officials in domestic "drug interdiction" and during terrorist incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the president, after proclaiming a state of emergency, can authorize additional actions. In fact, since September 11, the military has operated under just such an emergency declaration.
Eberhart's command has defined three levels of operations, each of which triggers a larger set of authorized activities. The levels are "extraordinary," "emergency" and "temporary." The "temporary" category covers short-term situations such as the increased security surrounding the Super Bowl or Olympic Games, when the military provides logistical, transportation, and other assistance to local and state law enforcement. "Emergency" operations extends that kind of assistance in response to situations such as the 9/11 attacks. "Extraordinary" conditions are, essentially, martial law. Military air patrols are authorized to shoot down hijacked planes, defuse bombs, collect intelligence, deploy "special operatives," and field combat troops in American communities, among other powers. "We are not going to be out there spying on people," Eberhart told PBS in September, but "we get information from people who do." Some of that information increasingly comes not from the FBI or those charged with civilian law enforcement but from a Pentagon organization established last year, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). CIFA, originally established to protect the Defense Department and its personnel from attacks or infiltration by terrorists, has been given the authority by DoD Secretary Rumsfeld to establish and maintain "a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense," in Rumsfeld's words; observers compare it to the Operation TIPS database envisioned by John Poindexter.
A professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College, Mackubin Owens, says, "There are abundant reasons for rejecting the further expansion of the military's domestic role." Owens wrote in August 2002 that "the use of soldiers as a posse [places] them in the uncomfortable position of taking orders from local authorities who had an interest in the disputes that provoked the unrest in the first place." Moreover, Owens said, becoming more involved in domestic policing can be "subtle and subversive, like a lymphoma or termite infestation." Though we are far from having "tanks rumbling through the streets," he wrote, the potential long-term effect of an increasing military role in police and law enforcement activities is "a military contemptuous of American society and unresponsive to civilian authorities." Military affairs analyst William Arkin writes, "[I]t doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that those charged with assembling 'actionable intelligence' will slowly start combining databases of known terrorists with seemingly innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the 'data mine.'" "What is the chilling effect that will be felt by Americans all across the country if they think they will come under FBI scrutiny just by going to a protest?" asks the ACLU's Anthony Romero. "There is a very clear difference between legitimate forms of civil disobedience and terrorism, and we have to keep that in mind." Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy calls the FBI's new surveillance tactic "outrageous," and says the Bush administration is going to "extraordinary lengths" to attack anyone who disagrees with the Iraq war. "That, I think, is fundamental flaw of this administration. It is absolutely outrageous in terms of what this country is about," says Kennedy. "How could we be fighting abroad to defend our freedoms and diminishing those freedoms here at home?" (Los Angeles Times/Yorkshire CND, AP/Boulder Daily Camera)
November 23: Shortly after 9/11, the US Congress allocated $324 million for a variety of programs and projects aimed at shoring up the Washington, DC area's vulnerable security infrastructure. To date, very little of the money has actually been spent on making Washington more secure; some of it remains unspent, while much of it has been spent on various "pet projects" that have little or nothing to do with keep Washington safe from terror attacks. The Washington Post observes, "In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, lawmakers doled out the money quickly, with few restrictions and vague guidelines. Left to interpret needs on their own -- and with little regional coordination -- cash-strapped local and state officials plugged budget holes, spent millions on pet projects and steered contracts to political allies." The city itself spent the money on a jobs program, gave police leather jackets, and assessed environmental problems on property marked for redevelopment. Maryland spent part of the money on an office security system for Prince George County prosecutors. A Virginia volunteer fire department spent $350,000 on a custom-made fire boat and loaded it with $44,000 of equipment bought from two of its members. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments used some of the money for janitorial services. Since the original allotment, Congress has appropriated $180 million more for the district. Much of the money has been spent legitimately -- for example, $63 million has been allocated for compatible radio systems, long considered critical so rescuers from different jurisdictions can communicate with each other in an emergency. Disaster training for first responders has been provided. Equipment such as ambulances, fire trucks, and earth movers have been purchased in case of emergencies. Yet critical needs remain unmet. Area hospitals will be strained past their limits in case of an attack, yet little money has been spent to provide extra beds, material, or personnel.
"In the District, hospital officials estimate that just 400 beds could be freed in a disaster. Some police officers are still waiting for basic protective gear," the Post writes. "Public health labs swamped by the anthrax attacks of 2001 have no additional capacity today. Most local governments have no efficient way to give instructions to residents shut off from radio and television, such as a 'reverse 911' system that automatically telephones people at home. There is no comprehensive plan to unite families separated in a disaster." Similar problems have arisen in the allocation of monies provided for other areas considered most likely to be stricken by another terrorist attack: Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and Maryland. (These areas were also chosen because their Congressional representatives sat on the committee that provided the funding.) Congress has also forced the Homeland Security Department to dole out other funds for improving security based on a formula that gives relatively isolated areas such as North Dakota more money than received by Washington, DC.
Representative Christopher Cox, a Republican who is pushing legislation that would direct money based only on threat and risk assessments, says, "If we were talking about equipment and training for our armed forces, we wouldn't make the argument that it had to be done on a pork-barrel basis. The danger is that you solve a political problem but fail to achieve the homeland security mission because you are sending money to the wrong places for the wrong things." Corporal Anthony Walker, president of the Fraternal Order of Police lodge that represents county officers, was interviewed shortly before his death this month, when he complained about his men failing to receive critical and long-promised gas masks: "If there was an attack, police officers and civilians would die because of our lack of preparedness," he said.
Other departments have played the game of "dual use," best summed up by Leslie Hotaling, director of DC's Department of Public Works, who said: "If we can tie it to 9/11 and build capacity in our core functions, let's do it!" Examples include sanitation engineers receiving Dale Carnegie coursework and justifying it by saying the training would improve their performance in an emergency. Her agency used an additional $300,000 to help pay for a computerized car towing system that the mayor had promised for three years to help combat fraud by private towing companies; she rationalized it by saying the city could use the system to clear streets after an attack, and assist recovery efforts by locating towed cars in the aftermath. Another District agency directed $100,000 to the mayor's politically popular summer jobs program. Forty low-income young adults were trained in first aid and other emergency skills, then paid to rap and dance about emergency preparedness as part of outreach efforts. The program was nationally recognized and a "brilliant" use of money, said Deputy Mayor Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, who oversaw spending. The Washington mayor's office says "The District has done a remarkably good job. ...We used these federal funds to achieve remarkable progress in preparing the District government's capacity to respond to potential terrorism incidents or similar emergencies." (Washington Post)
November 23: Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy have sued the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. "The Patriot Act allows the Feds to search every financial institution in the country for the records of anybody they have suspicions about," writes journalist Michael Isikoff. "The very definition, critics say, of a fishing expedition." (Falls Church News Press)
November 23: NBC cameraman/correspondant Craig White discusses the kind of restrictions he and his colleagues were under during their filming of the Iraqi invasion. White was embedded with an Army unit that survived a horrific fight for one of the key Baghdad road intersections on April 7. White says, "I was not allowed to show what happens to an American soldier when they get killed that way [RPG fire]. Part of our ground rules on being embedded were not to show that either Iraqis or Americans in a way that would identify the human being that had been killed or badly injured. But I can say war is a horrible thing. And with large caliber weapons, people don't just get red spots and collapse, they come apart, pieces go all over the place. That's what war is like in modern day." Of the battles for the three major intersections, which were some of the bloodiest of the invasion, White says, "When I called New York I found out what they'd seen for the last two days and it was nothing but the glorious taking of Baghdad, statues starting to fall, palaces being taken, that's the live television they saw. So they assumed that's what was happening. At [the three intersections], people fought for days and it wasn't seen. ...So often we don't show those things on television. They are deemed inappropriate for the dinner table, for the evening broadcast, or for the breakfast table for the morning broadcast. But I remember saying, if it wasn't appropriate for the broadcast at that time of day, then we shouldn't be fighting wars at that time of day. If it's there, we should show it. Not to show it is a lie." White says that it is very easy for embedded journalists to become overly sympathetic with the soldiers they accompany: "It's a bit of a Stockholm syndrome, I think, when you're spending time with soldiers, they are protecting your life. They are giving sustenance, food and water. It's very easy to fall into that 'I am one of them' soldier attitudes." (CBC)
November 23: David Chater, a correspondant for Sky News, confirms that the US attack on the al-Jazeera television building in Baghdad during the invasion was a deliberate act, not an "accident" as claimed by the US military. Chater says he observed "a hell of a fight" for the area of Baghdad around the al-Jazeera building, which he says was, like its neighbor, the offices of Abu Dhabi Television, "...had massive, huge sorts of signs sort of draped on sheets, hanging outside. There's no mistaking al-Jazeera Television and Abu Dhabi Television." Chater witnessed two missiles fired from an F-16, one of which struck just in front of the al-Jazeera building and one which obliterated a journalist about to broadcast from the roof. "I mean, that is extraordinary that an air strike was called in," says Chater. "To call in an air strike you've got to go through a certain procedure. They must have known that the target they were giving out the coordinates for was the al-Jazeera television station. So, what are they saying, what's their defense, were they receiving RPG rounds from there, like they claimed they were receiving from the Palestine Hotel? No, none of that's true, they knew exactly what the coordinates were, they brought in an air strike against this television station just as this al-Jazeera journalist was about to go live. The Pentagon has a lot of explaining to do there. ...The conspiracy theory that is growing is that the Americans wanted al-Jazeera out of the way because they don't like what they were reporting, they didn't like their television station, so they took it out. I think the Pentagon's got to answer that." (CBC)
November 23: Freelance reporter Patrick Graham says of the Iraqi people: "Talk about post-traumatic stress, what those people have gone through is just extraordinary, and that mixture of welcoming and anger [towards US and British occupation forces] is much more accurate about what's happening there [than what is being broadcast over the rigidly controlled American media]. And I think this relentless propaganda coming from the White House and everybody else that we're there to save them, you know Iraqis don't consider themselves saved, they don't really consider themselves liberated." (CBC)
November 23: Freelance reporter Patrick Graham comments on embedded reporters, several of whom he knew quite well: "...[I]t turned out to be pretty interesting, but at the same time it didn't sound like journalism. It sounded like tourism with an army. Well, it sounded like World War II journalism. You know, you were basically producing what propaganda needed to be produced. ...There were some [embedded journalists] who were just stoked to be with the Marines, I mean this was a childhood fantasy, and they were really enthusiastic about the officers they had met and were going to drive around with them and they loved watching the Americans kick some Iraqi ass and were completely into this sort of hooah Marine mindset. And others were sort of indifferent. There was a bit of territorial defensiveness, I think, to some extent." (CBC)
November 23: Army Times photographer Rob Curtis discusses the reasons why he pushed for publication of his photographs of Larry Brown, one of the first US soldiers to die in combat. "Pictures of dead soldiers are terrible for morale. But then I sat and thought about it for a while and I decided that I had to move this picture to my publishers, to my editor, because this is the reality, this is what's happening out here. And I remember back to the Gulf War -- it was such a sanitized war and there were hundreds and hundreds of images taken that would turn your stomach but none of them were published for whatever reason. I think mostly because there were military censors. ...I just thought to myself, if people at home can't look at this photograph and think of Larry Brown every time they think of what it took to take Saddam Hussein out of power, then we shouldn't be here, and that's the political process." The military was highly critical of Curtis and the magazine for publishing the picture. (CBC)
November 23: Conservatives such as Janine Hansen of the Nevada Eagle Forum, an anti-feminist group, have come out against the USA Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism legislation. Hansen is a featured speaker at a three-city announcement launching a campaign against the statutes. The Chicago Tribune writes, "Most criticism of the controversial anti-terrorism law is associated with the ACLU and other liberal groups. But more often than not in the West, it is conservative libertarians like Hansen who take the lead. Months before the campaign, Hansen said, she persuaded the Nevada Legislature to add language protecting civil liberties to its new anti-terrorism laws. 'I really led the battle on this,' she said. 'The ACLU supported me, but I was the first one there.' For a growing number of conservative libertarians, the Patriot Act and the Bush administration's 'big government' war on terrorism are becoming wedge issues that threaten to separate them from the Republican Party and President Bush. Those worried about this include Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, David Keane of the American Conservative Union and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum. 'We all want to continue to fight and win the war against terrorism, but there is absolutely no need to sacrifice civil liberties,' said Bob Barr, a former congressman who works with the ACU and ACLU. (Chicago Tribune)
November 23: Reportedly, Queen Elizabeth is "furious" at the devastation wrought on her treasured gardens surrounding Buckingham Palace by George Bush's security teams. It is not yet clear who will pick up the repair bill, said to be "massive." Palace staff says they have never seen the Queen so angry after she saw how her lawns had been churned into mud after being turned into helipads for the Bush visit. The rotors of Bush's Marine Force One helicopter and two support Black Hawks damaged trees and shrubs that had survived since Queen Victoria's reign. Security men trampled an array of precious and exotic plants. And the Queens own flamingoes, which security staff insisted should be moved in case they flew into the helicopter rotors, are described as so traumatized after being taken to a "place of safety" that they might never return home. The structure of the Palace itself was damaged as high-tech links were fitted for the US leader and his entourage during his three-day stay with the Queen. The Palace's head gardener, Mark Lane, was reported to be in tears when he saw the scale of the damage. "The Queen has every right to feel insulted at the way she has been treated by Bush," says a Palace insider. "The repairs will cost tens of thousands of pounds but the damage to historic and rare plants will be immense. They are still taking an inventory. The lawns are used for royal garden parties and are beautifully kept. But 30,000 visitors did not do as much damage as the Americans did in three days. Their security people and support staff tramped all over the place and left an absolute mess. It is particularly sad because the Queen Mother loved to wander in the garden just as the Queen and Prince Charles do now. Some of the roses, flowers and shrubs damaged are thought to be rare varieties named after members of the Royal Family and planted by the Queen Mother and Queen. Other Royals had their own favorite parts of the garden as children and some of those areas have been damaged." (Sunday Mirror)
November 23: Presidential candidate General Wesley Clark calls on Bush to begin personally honoring the dead American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the Pentagon directive mandating that all war dead will not be given public ceremonies, Clark says, "This is absolutely unacceptable. The brave men and women who've lost their lives in Iraq deserve proper public ceremonies to honor their service. And the American people should know the consequences of the Bush Administration's reckless war. ...Many of the men I served with in Vietnam came home in coffins. The government started bringing them back in the middle of the night to hide the casualties from the American people. I never thought anything like that would happen again. Apparently, I was wrong." He adds, "Part of being a leader is facing the consequences of your actions, no matter how hard or painful that is. ...President Bush owes more to the families of our soldiers. They should not be mourning alone." (Clark for President)

November 24: US officials have retracted earlier reports that two American soldiers had their throats slashed in the northern city of Mosul. Now the officials are saying that the soldiers died of gunshot wounds, and their bodies were pulled from their vehicle, an unarmored SUV, and robbed, but no mutilations nor celebrations of their deaths took place. Neither were they dragged through the streets, as officials had earlier reported. The comparison between the soldiers in Mosul and the US Rangers slain and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 is hard to avoid. The pictures of that incident turned US public opinion sharply against continued actions in that country, and prompted then-President Clinton to order a withdrawal. It is unclear which story told by US officials is true, and which one was told to manipulate public opinion. The father of a soldier in Iraq writes of the Mosul attacks, "This is simply the more recent and most graphic of many tragic events. We have had over 70 of our sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives and friends killed this month alone. So what has this Administration been doing about this? Non-stop million dollar event fund-raising. Running campaign ads claiming that those who oppose [Bush] are 'now attacking the President for attacking the terrorists.' Complaining about all the 'good news' that doesn't get reported. Hiding the return of the caskets carrying the remains of our soldiers as they touch US soil at Dover. Stonewalling the investigation of 9-11. Holding useless 30-hour debates over four extremist judicial nominees. Firing 28,000 teachers in Iraq for affiliation with the former regime. Cutting troops' combat pay. Delaying medical treatment of our wounded soldiers and charging them for hospital meals. ...He doesn't have to stay awake at night, tossing and turning, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, worrying about our children coming home alive, let alone healthy or even intact. We parents worry about that so [Bush] doesn't have to. Heaven help us all." (New York Times, Buzzflash)
November 24: President Bush makes the specious claim that the US "put the Taliban out of business forever." The reality is much different. The day before, Taliban forces launched a rocket attack on Kabul's most prominent hotel; that same day, Taliban leader Mullah Omar urged Afghans to unite against American forces in Afghanistan. Also on that day, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister issued a desperate plea for more international help in beating back Taliban forces intent on retaking the country. The AP calls the Taliban "an increasingly virulent insurgency" while the LA Times reports "nearly two years after the US drove the Taliban from power, remnants of the Islamic extremist group are regrouping and attacking U.S. troops." The Daily Misleader writes, "The President's declarations that the challenges in Afghanistan are over is not only misleading to the American public, but a direct affront to the 10,000 US soldiers at risk there. Just this weekend, five U.S. soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash north of Kabul. A day earlier, two US soldiers were injured in a Taliban rocket attack, and a soldier lost his leg in a land mine explosion, and just last month two CIA officers were killed. The Taliban problem has gotten so bad that the UN is pulling staff out of parts of the country, and Germany's ambassador recently said it threatens the country's efforts to form a democratic government. Downplaying the war in Afghanistan also has effects on the ground. In a story headlined 'The Forgotten War,' the Green Bay Press-Gazette profiles local reservists who are serving in Afghanistan. As 27-year-old Lieutenant Michelle Orley said, 'Sometimes we feel like we're the forgotten war. Just seeing the things that go on here, we're not out of danger, we're not out of the threat ... and there are soldiers risking their lives here every day.'" (Daily Misleader)
November 24: Iraq's Governing Council submits a timeline for self-rule, and requests that the UN pass a resolution ending the US occupation by June 2004. The timetable, worked out with US and British officials, beats the December 15 deadline by three weeks. It was requested in an October 16 Security Council resolution, which created a multinational force in Iraq. The council has promised to select a "provisional legislative body" no later than May 31, 2004. By June 2004, the assembly will elect a provisional government, at which time "the Coalition Provisional Authority will be dissolved and the occupation ... will end." A new constitution is due by March 15, 2005, and will be ratified by a referendum; afterwards elections will be held for a new, permanent government before year's end. The United States and Britain are considering a new resolution that would welcome or endorse the accelerated timetable, which Washington had opposed in October. But faced with a mounting death toll, the Bush administration switched positions this month and decided to speed up a transfer of power. The letter does not mention continued deployment of US and other foreign troops. But it is assumed that a new provisional government in June will request that they stay. France, Russia and Germany, who opposed the war, told the council on Friday they would like to see any new resolution give the United Nations a major role in the political transition and urge a broader participation of Iraqi political groups, an apparent reference to nationalists and members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist party. They also proposed a conference to bring Iraq's neighbors into the political process. (Reuters/New York Times)
November 24: The US Army is failing to retain reservists, who are bailing out of the Army in record numbers rather than sign up for further duty. Many of those leaving service are career reservists, doubly valuable because they train junior officers and operate complex weapons systems. "The Army has invested an enormous amount of money in training these people, and they're very hard to replace," says Global Security's John Pike. The Pentagon fears that a broader downturn in retention and recruitment is looming on the horizon. The Army is offering $5,000 re-enlistment bonuses; the Army National Guard is staging thank-you ceremonies for returning soldiers. The Massachusetts National Guard is offering a range of prizes to members who sign up new recruits. Military recruitment advertising is up all across the board. The Army is also implementing a wartime policy called "stop loss"' that allows the Pentagon to indefinitely keep soldiers from leaving the service once their time has expired. Staff Sergeant Scott Durst is one example of the exodus, a 15-year veteran of the Army Reserve who extended his enlistment after a tour in Bosnia but will not sign on for another tour after Iraq, though it will means he loses the opportunity for retirement benefits. "'Not even a chance, no," says wife Nancy. "He didn't sign up to be a Reserve to be doing active-duty orders every year." Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who sits on the personnel subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, observes, "here's an old saying in the Army that they enlist the soldier but reenlist the family, and the new one-year 'boots on the ground' policy for service in Iraq has really upset a lot of the families with whom I've talked." (Boston Globe/Dayton Daily News)
November 24: Al-Arabiya, one of the biggest Arab television news networks, agrees to halt reports from Iraq after the US-appointed government raids its offices, bans its broadcasts and threatened to imprison journalists. Media groups said the action called into question the future of a free press in Iraq. The Iraqi Governing Council accuses Al-Arabiya of "inciting murder" for broadcasting an audiotape a week ago of a voice it said belonged to Saddam Hussein. "We have issued a warning to Al-Arabiya and we will sue," says council president Jalal Talabani. "Al-Arabiya incites murder because it's calling for killings through the voice of Saddam Hussein." He says Al-Arabiya would be banned from working in Iraq for "a certain time," which he didn't specify. Shortly after Talabani finishes his news conference, Iraqi police officers raid Al-Arabiya's Baghdad, making lists of equipment to be seized if it continued to broadcast from Baghdad. Al-Arabiya correspondents accuse the government of trying to stifle a free media. "Opposing opinions should be respected," says correspondent Hadeer al-Rubei. "What was practiced during Saddam's rule is being practiced now," Correspondent Jawad Hattab says that in broadcasting the Saddam tape, the station was merely carrying out "its fundamental journalistic duty, which is to broadcast excellent news that people expect." The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the government action: "This is the latest in a string of heavy-handed actions by the Iraqi Governing Council and U.S. and coalition authorities toward the media that make us apprehensive about the future of press freedoms in Iraq," says the group's Middle East program coordinator, Joel Campagna. In the past, US forces have detained journalists and shut at least one newspaper. The Paris-based media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders calls the closure a violation of freedom of the press and said it represents "methods...that are contrary to the promises of setting up a democracy in Iraq." (CBS)
November 24: Families in the city of Fallujah, as in other Iraqi cities and towns, claim that many of the attacks against US forces aren't by resistance fighters, but are attacks by bereaved and vengeful family members who have lost loved ones to American attacks. One young Iraqi man, who lost five family members including a 10-year old nephew to US gunfire from a mobile checkpoint unit, says of the attack, "No one shouted to us to slow down. And when they started to fire, we screamed: 'Stop! Stop! We're civilians!' No one answered us." He was in a truck laden with chickens, which he said should have given the soldiers the idea they were civilians and not terrorists. Human Rights Watch, who maintains a civilian researcher base in Baghdad, says that it has found "credible" reports of 94 civilian deaths by American firepower in the capital alone, between May 1 and Oct. 1. The report said five of those deaths have been investigated above division level -- the level that can order courts-martial or grant substantial compensation. In four of those cases, soldiers were deemed justified in killing the civilians. The fifth is still under investigation. Exacerbating the problem, says Human Rights Watch, is a sense among soldiers that they will not be punished for using excessive force. "Right now, soldiers feel they can pull the trigger without coming under review," says HRW's acting director for the Middle East, Joe Stork. (San Francisco Chronicle)
November 24: Former Iraqi general Abed Hamed Mowhoush is suffocated to death, apparently by members of the Iraqi commando squad known as the Scorpions. Mowhoush had turned himself in to American authorities. While being questioned at a detention facility, the Iraqis, apparently under American supervision and with the participation of a US Army interrogator, stuff Mowhoush into a sleeping bag, where he suffocates. Two days before, a number of Scorpions beat him nearly senseless with fists and a rubber hose. An Army memo later says that the savage beating "complicated" the "circumstances surrounding the death." The Baghdad CIA station chief, John Maguire, who had trained the Scorpions, insists that the Iraqi commandos merely questioned Mowhoush and "there was nothing to substantiate" the allegation that the Scorpions had beaten and suffocated him. The Army interrogator is later convicted of negligent homicide, but no CIA officer or Scorpion is ever charged with any crime. (Washington Post/Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
November 24: President Bush meets with family members of fallen US soldiers at Fort Carson, Colorado. Though invited, Johnna Loia chooses not to attend. Loia's fiancee, SPC Brian Peniston, was killed in the crash of a Chinook helicopter that took 15 other American lives. Loia says she didn't go because she is angry with the president and "didn't want to go and be disrespectful." Penisten, 28, was on his way back to Colorado to marry Loia. "I have a lot of harsh feelings for the president right now," she says. "I contemplated going, but right now I think I'd find it hard to be respectful." Had she met with Bush, Loia might have asked him why he declared war: "I would want to know why he decided to go to Iraq and why he felt that the war was justified. In my eyes, I don't feel it was justified at all." (AP/San Jose Mercury News)

November 25: US military officials say that attacks on American troops in Iraq have declined over the last two weeks, matched by an increasing number of attacks on Iraqis who work for or are believed to sympathize with the US occupation forces. General John Abizaid says, "In the past two weeks, these attacks have gone down, attacks against coalition forces, but unfortunately we find that attacks against Iraqis have increased." He also notes that the attacks had increased not only in number but in severity. (AP/Rocky Mount Telegram)
November 25: Former president Jimmy Carter calls the invasion of Iraq one of the US's worst foreign policy blunders ever made by the US, and predicts it may take a dozen years to bring stability and democracy to the region. "I was strongly against going in unilaterally," says Carter. "I thought it was a serious mistake, maybe the worst mistake in foreign policy that our country's made in many years. But now we are there, we have to support our troops there and pray that we can cut down on our casualties. ...I've got one grandson who is 4½ years old. I hope that before he's out of high school, we'll be out of Iraq. Bottom line is, we should turn over as rapidly as we can both the economic and political affairs to the Iraqis -— as much as they can handle —- and bring in other nations to help us." (The State)
November 25: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say they have evidence that Arab television news organizations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya are cooperating with Iraqi insurgents to witness and videotape attacks on American troops. Rumsfeld says the effort fit a pattern of psychological warfare used by remnants of the Baathist government, who want to create the impression that no amount of US firepower can end the insurgency. Rumsfeld tells a Pentagon news conference, "They've [Iraqi insurgents] called Al-Jazeera to come and watch them do it [attack American troops], and Al-Arabiya, 'Come and see us, watch us; here is what we're going to do.'" Rumsfeld and Myers claim they have seen more than just circumstantial evidence that one or both of the Arab news organizations might have cooperated with the attackers. "Yes, I've seen scraps of information over a sustained period of time," Rumsfeld says. "I'm not in a position to make a final judgment on it," but it needs to be examined in an "orderly way." Neither Myers nor Rumsfeld offered any proof of their claims. (ABC News)
November 25: The Australian aid organization Care Australia is pulling its six staffers out of Iraq and telling its 70 Iraqi employees to go home, following a rocket attack on its Baghdad headquarters. Care Australia had also received a specific threat from a terror group that called itself the Iraqi Resistance: "We are going to kill you and attack your places without any further notice," said the warning. "We are issuing this communique after we attacked the Care office and we are letting you know that the deadline for all such places, hotels, houses, oil companies, will be the third and the last day of [Ramadan]. Otherwise these buildings will be totally destroyed." (AP/Rocky Mount Telegram)
November 25: Army chaplain James Joseph Yee, also known as Yousef Yee, writes a letter to President Bush demanding that he be released from a brig in South Carolina and returned to normal duties. Yee, who has been charged with mishandling classified material at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba says he has been held in harsh conditions, barred from practicing his Islamic faith, and deprived of his legal right to a speedy trial. Military spokesman Captain Tom Crosson says the case was proceeding normally. "I can't speak to what the brig does in South Carolina," Crosson says. He said that Yee was taken into custody Sept. 10 and that under military law a court-martial should be held by Jan. 10, or within 120 days of his arrest. In addition, he said, there was a 45-day delay in the case once Yee was arrested. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
November 25: Former vice president Al Gore says to a college crowd in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, that the Bush administration is using fear as a political tool. He says that this is unworthy of the presidency. Gore continues that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt did not inspire fear but called for courage in urging support of World War II. His remarks were carried via satellite at about 30 colleges. (AP/WATE-TV)
November 25: Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin is cynical about the "gag rules" imposed on local journalists covering a recent Bush photo-op with troops at Fort Carson. "No talking to the troops before the rally. No talking to the troops during the rally. No talking to the troops after the rally. In other words, if I've done the math right, that means no conversation at all -- at least, while on base -- with any soldiers. After all, who knows where that kind of thing could lead? Just as an example: It could lead to a discussion about why the president has time to get to so many fund-raisers and no time to attend a single funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. There could have been debate, and we all know the risks in debate, as to whether it's really the families' privacy that is being guarded by the rule against photos of coffins as they arrive from Iraq. Or whether it's the president's standing -- the latest Gallup Poll showed 54 percent disapproved of his handling of Iraq -- that is being guarded from what one general once called 'the Dover test.' Or somebody might have wanted to reminisce about Corporal Gary B. Coleman, 24, of Pikeville, Ky., giving flesh-and-blood detail to the chilling statistic that Coleman was the latest casualty from Fort Carson, a post that has now given up 31 lives to the war in Iraq. Coleman, who was on patrol when his car crashed into a canal, trapping him inside, left behind a wife he had married only weeks before shipping out. ...But even here, or maybe especially here, a soldier or two might have, in conversation, questioned the need for the war in Iraq. This is not exactly a welcome notion in the White House.
"The Bush campaign has put up an ad in Iowa saying that certain of his opponents are 'attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,' as if opposing the war in Iraq is the same as opposing the war on terror. The cameras went instead to Bush, who gave his speech standing in front of a huge American flag (think George C. Scott in the opening scene of Patton) while dressed in an olive-green Army jacket bearing a Fort Carson 7th Infantry Division insignia. There were no 'mission accomplished' signs anywhere. There were, though, maybe 6,000 troops, mainly dressed in camouflage, some of them standing atop battle vehicles. It was the ideal setting for his speech. The president praised the soldiers' sacrifice and thanked them for their help in bringing democracy to Iraq -- if not necessarily to Fort Carson. He got the biggest cheer when he said democracy will come to Iraq 'because the United States of America will not be intimidated by a bunch of thugs.' But there is something that apparently makes the president nervous. Although the lack of access to the troops was explained as a logistics problem -- too many media members needing escorts -- it couldn't have been quite the problem, say, of embedding media in Iraq. Immediately after the speech, the president went upstairs for what was an emotional meeting with around 100 family members of the fallen soldiers. The meeting was, of course, closed to the press, as it should have been. And, I guess, it could have been a logistics problem that prevented the media from meeting with the families after they talked to the president. It could have been a privacy concern. Or it could have been an Elaine Johnson issue. In his speech, Bush didn't mention Elaine Johnson, whose son Darius Jennings was one of four Fort Carson soldiers on the Chinook helicopter that was shot down November 2. When Johnson was at the Fort Carson chapel a week ago for her son's memorial service, she wondered aloud why the president had visited South Carolina in the week of her son's funeral but had not bothered to attend or to send any message to her or her family. 'Evidently my son wasn't important enough to him dead for him to visit the family or call the family,' she said then. 'As long as my son was alive he was important, because he sent him over there to fight a war.' There was no such headline this time. All anyone saw this time was Bush's speech in a visit that was as organized as any presidential campaign stop. In fact, the last thing anyone heard as the president left the room was some in the audience chanting, 'Four more years.' And no one got to ask their names."
Fellow area journalist Jim Spencer of the Denver Post writes, "Monday's Ground Rule 6 -- 'no roaming' -- amounted to a heavy-handed smack at the First Amendment. But it was an insult to the intelligence of military men and women and their families as much as it was an indictment of the media. Bush and his lieutenants believe newspapers, television and radio focus on the negative events of Iraq. The president, vice president and the secretary of defense have all accused the media of filtering out good news. Well, Monday was a chance to get some good press for people who deserve it. Instead, White House and Army officials went to great lengths to make sure it wouldn't happen." (Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post)
November 25: BBC Director General Greg Dyke attacks US TV coverage of the war in Iraq, saying that American news channels need to challenge governments. "News organizations should be in the business of balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other," he says. He goes on to say that coverage of the war showed the difference between the US and the UK, and that the need for balance was "something which seemed to get lost in American reporting during the war." Dyke quotes research that shows of 840 commentators aired on US TV, only four were opposed to the war. "I have to tell you if that was true in Britain the BBC would have failed in its duty. ...Telling people what they want to hear is not doing them any favors. It may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion, but it's what we are here to do," Dyke says. (BBC)
November 25: Controversial British reporter Yvonne Ridley is fired from her new post as al-Jazeera's English correspondent, possibly due to pressure from the US government. Ridley, a recent convert to Islam, was imprisoned by the Taliban in 2001 for trying to get inside one of their camps. She does not know why she was fired, but others involved say it may be because the US government did not approve of the material she was airing. Al-Jazeera has already removed several items from its Web site after criticism from the US, including an editorial cartoon showing two oil derricks rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center, and pictures Ridley took of a 7-year old Iraqi girl being kept in plastic hand restraints while US soldiers searched her home. Ridley has written the story of her imprisonment by the Taliban, along with a novel about the 9/11 attacks. (Independent/Muslim News)

November 26: Grand Ayatollan Ali Sistani, Iraq's most powerful cleric and a senior member of the Iraqi Governing Council, is strongly opposed to the new US plan for indirect elections of an Iraqi government. Most observers believe that without Sistani's support, the plan is doomed to failure, possibly derailing the overall plan to turn power over more quickly to Iraqis. Sistani, a Shi'ite, insists that next June's election must be a direct, popular ballot, not the indirect caucus election called for in the American plan. He also wants any new Iraqi government to have a more overtly Islamic character. "The people should have a basic role in issues concerning the destiny of their country," says Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric and Iraqi politician, who earlier discussed the American initiative with Sistani. Hakim says that Sistani "expressed concern about real gaps that must be dealt with, or the plan will lack the ability to meet the hopes of the Iraqi people." Sistani's objections are a further blow to a plan that is already unraveling. Earlier this week, leaders of the Governing Council said they wanted to back away from their agreement to dissolve the council as soon as the elections are held in June and instead maintain it as a second legislative body of government. Some council members still support the plan, partially because they fear a Shi'ite domination of an elected Iraqi government. The Shia make up roughly 60 percent of Iraq's nearly 25 million people. Sistani's earlier objections forced the council to abandon the original plan, pushed by Washington, to write a constitution and then hold elections. Sistani issued a fatwa, or religious edict, in June saying that a constitution must be drafted by an assembly directly elected by the Iraqi people. 13 of the council's 25 members are Shi'ite, and many of them refused to go along with a plan Sistani did not endorse. That same edict, it appears, is behind the current objections. American officials have insisted that a direct election cannot be held now because there are no voter rolls. A census must be taken first, and that cannot be completed until late next year at the earliest. Both American and Iraqi officials believe the real motivation for insisting on direct elections is that the clerics hope the nation's Shi'ite majority will empower religious leaders to form an Islamic government, an idea the United States opposes.
Hakim has said one of Sistani's objections was that "there is no emphasis on the role of Islam and the identity of the Muslim people. ...There should have been a stipulation which prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq." In their public statement announcing the agreement on Nov. 15, the council proclaimed that the new Iraqi state would respect "freedom of religion and religious practices." It added that the government would also "respect the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people." The view that the American elections play a major role in shaping Iraq's political future is widely held among council members. Ahmed Chalabi, another council member, earlier said: "The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on." American officials have denied that electoral concerns played into their plans. (New York Times)
November 26: General Jay Garner, the former administrator of Iraq who was removed from the post after a bare few weeks, says that the US has made some egregrious mistakes in Iraq, including disbanding the Iraqi army, putting too few troops on the ground, and failing to explain the goals of the war to the world. Of the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, Garner says, "I think it was a mistake. We planned...on bringing the Iraqi army back and using them in reconstruction." Current Iraq administrator Paul Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army effectively threw hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and provided potential recruits for insurgency, Garner observes. The original plan had been to pay the army to take part in reconstruction work. "You're talking about around a million or more people...that are suffering because the head of the household's out of work," says Garner. He also says that not enough effort was put into winning over ordinary Iraqis by getting America's message across to them after the war. "We did a bad job of executing that. There's no excuse for that. The consequence of that is all they got to listen to was Arab-language TV station al-Jazeera." Garner also points out that interagency rivalries, particularly between the State and Defense Departments, have made the situation in Iraq that much more untenable. (MSNBC)
November 26: The US military has paid out $1.5 million to Iraqi civilians who have filed over 10,000 negligence and wrongful death claims against US soldiers. Families have come forward with accounts of how American soldiers shot dead or seriously wounded unarmed Iraqi civilians with no apparent cause. In many cases their stories are confirmed by Iraqi police investigations. "The US pays claims for personal injury, wrongful death and property damage," says a statement from a US military spokesperson. "Payments will only be made for non-combat related activities and instances where soldiers have acted negligently or wrongfully." Usually commanders make payments from their discretionary funds and rarely admit liability. Payouts usually average just a few hundred dollars. In many cases, Iraqi families have been asked to sign forms waiving their right to press for further compensation. Beyond the initial payments there is little recourse for the families of the dead. No American soldier has been prosecuted for illegally killing an Iraqi civilian and commanders refuse even to count the number of civilians killed or injured by their soldiers. Iraqi courts, because of an order issued by the US-led authority in Baghdad in June, are forbidden from hearing cases against American soldiers or any other foreign troops or foreign officials in Iraq. Human Rights Watch has stated that, according to their research, many US troops are operating "with impunity. The individual cases of civilian deaths...reveal a pattern by US forces of over-aggressive tactics, indiscriminate shooting in residential areas and a quick reliance on lethal force. The lack of timely and thorough investigations into many questionable incidents has created an atmosphere of impunity, in which many soldiers feel they can pull the trigger without coming under review." Many families feel that the killings and the lack of legal recourse has provoked a groundswell of opposition to the US military occupation. Some relatives are joining the growing guerrilla resistance movement to avenge the deaths of their relatives. "I know the American soldiers are not inhumane because I saw them when they first came and they behaved well. But now they have changed and I don't know why," says Faiz Alwasity, who works for Civic, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, one of the few groups that has helped secure payments for civilian victims of the US military operations in Afghanistan and now Iraq. "They are becoming more aggressive, maybe because they are frightened. I am afraid this is creating more resistance against them." (Guardian)
November 26: After a week of disparaging Democratic Senator Richard Durbin for accusing that private Democratic memos were stolen from secure Senate Judiciary Committee computers, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch is forced to suspend one of his own aides for committing the theft. It is unclear whether Hatch suspends the aide for stealing the memos, or for getting caught at the theft. The staffer, whom Hatch did not identify, was placed on administrative leave with pay. He also said a former committee majority aide also had knowledge of the security breach, but was not disciplined. "It is with deep regret that I must report today that the interviews conducted to date have revealed at least one current member of Judiciary Committee majority staff had improperly accessed some of the [Democratic] documents," Hatch says. He continues that he is "mortified" at the results of the investigation, which he ordered. "There's no excuse that can justify these actions," he said. Hatch had previously announced that no evidence of any theft could be unearthed, and used the opportunity to mock and denigrate Durbin and the Senate Democrats. The investigation will continue; meanwhile, Democratic and Republican documents will no longer share the same servers, but be housed on separate machines, as requested by Durbin. (The Hill)
November 26: Ellen Mariani, who lost her husband Louis in the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11, files a RICO lawsuit against President Bush and several of his administration's highest officials alleging that Bush and his administration "had knowledge/warnings of 911 and failed to warn or take steps to prevent [the attacks]; ...have been covering up the truth of 911; and ...have therefore violated the laws of the United States...." Mariani is filing a RICO lawsuit as opposed to another type of suit because she alleges that Bush and his officials failed to prevent the attacks for personal and political gain: "Defendant GWB failed to act and prevent '911' knowing the attacks would lead to our nation having to engage in an 'International War on Terror (IWOT)' which would benefit Defendants both financially and for political reasons." (Scoop)
November 26: "The White House is obsessed with not associating President George W. Bush with slain American troops so close to the 2004 presidential elections. Bush worries that it will harm the already poor image of his occupation of Iraq as a supposedly bloodless 'piece of cake' for the United States," writes author and medical doctor Frederick Sweet. He quotes Seth Pollack, board president of the veterans group Veterans for Common Sense, as saying, "From the cuts in the VA budget, reductions in various pays for soldiers deployed...to the most recent things like those we've seen at Fort Stewart, where soldiers who are wounded are not being treated well, the Administration has shown a blatant disregard for the needs of the soldiers." Pollack, a veteran who served in the Gulf War and in Kosovo, continues, "I was really shocked that the president wouldn't attend a funeral for a soldier he sent to die, but at the same time I'm not surprised in the least. This administration has consistently shown a great deal of hypocrisy between their talk about supporting the troops and what they've actually done." "Bush's inaction is a national disgrace," says an anonymous Gulf War vet. "I'm distressed at the lack of coverage -- amounting to government censorship -- of the funerals of returning U.S. service members. ...Bush loves to go to military bases near fundraisers. The taxpayers pay for his trip, then he rakes in the cash. Soldiers are ordered to behave and be quiet at Bush events. What a way to get a friendly crowd! The bottom line is that if Bush attended a funeral now, it would highlight a few things: 1) There's a war going on, stupid; 2) There are bodies flying home in coffins censored by the Pentagon; and 3) Bush is insensitive to families and veterans."
Gulf War vet Charles Sheehan-Miles says, "I'm appalled" by the lack of attention paid by Bush to the dead and wounded. "The impact of the president not talking about [casualties] is huge –- it goes back to the whole question of morale of the troops back in Iraq; they're fighting a war that the president says is not a war anymore but still is...they haven't restored democracy, nor did they find any weapons -– and they [the troops] are being shot at every day." Paul Vogel, whose son is posted in Iraq, recently said, "With any military family, most of them feel very isolated and afraid to speak out. ...It's a very frustrating thing for a military family to realize they're paying the price for a war that, at least for military families, is really hard to get all patriotic about. It seems to be unwinnable and unending, and those are the worst words anyone in a military family could hear." Sweet concludes, "Obviously, de-emphasizing the homecoming of dead soldiers is part of Bush's larger strategy of putting the best spin on the situation in Iraq. Yet even the fiercest critics of Bush Administration policies acknowledge the sacrifices these men and women have made for their country. But Bush's de-emphasis dishonors the soldiers and the American people." (Intervention Magazine)
November 26: One of Great Britain's most senior judges launches an unprecedented attack on US treatment of the 660 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, saying they will become martyrs in the Muslim world. Breaking with the convention that law lords do not speak out on politically sensitive issues, Lord Steyn describes their imprisonment as a "monstrous failure of justice" and the military tribunals that will try them as kangaroo courts. Steyn says that judges "have the duty, in times of crisis, to guard against an unprincipled and exorbitant executive response. As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this a monstrous failure of justice. The military will act as interrogators, prosecutors and defense counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. The trials will be held in private. None of the guarantees of a fair trial need be observed." Steyn also notes that the kind of justice meted out at Guantanamo "is likely to make martyrs of the prisoners in the moderate Muslim world with whom the West must work to ensure world peace and stability." With his remarks, Steyn has probably eliminated himself from being able to hear any appeal from the nine British prisoners held at the US naval base in Cuba if President Bush agrees to send them for trial in Britain. Stephen Solley QC, a former chairman of the Bar's human rights committee, says Steyn's comments would send a strong signal to the US Supreme Court, which is about to rule on American jurisdiction in Guantanamo Bay: "It might help to persuade some of the waverers to rule in favor of the detainees."
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty, says, "Lord Steyn is a man of principle and courage and one of our most respected law lords. Surely the Prime Minister will take heed of his comments and intensify the pressure on President Bush and allow these men to return to the United Kingdom for a fair trial?" Peter Williamson, president of the Law Society, responds, "I agreed with everything he said and I hope it will cause the Government to make further representations to the United States. The detainees should either be tried in the civil courts of America or sent for trial in this country." Steyn describes the military commissions set up to try the Guantanamo detainees as kangaroo courts. "It derives from the jumps of the kangaroo, and conveys the idea of a pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice." The trials would be "a stain on United States justice." He also criticizes the British policy of negotiating a separate agreement with the Pentagon so that British prisoners would not receive the death penalty. "This gives a new dimension to the concept of 'most-favored nation' treatment in international law. How could it be morally defensible to discriminate in this way?" (Independent/Rad-Green)

Domestic terror case ignored by media

November 26: A case of US terrorism goes virtually ignored by the press and the administration alike. Three people were arrested in May 2003 as a part of an investigation into a Tyler, Texas stockpile of sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud that was begun in April 2003. Investigators have seized at least 100 other bombs, bomb components, machine guns, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and chemical agents; however, documents found indicate that unknown co-conspirators may still be free to carry out what appears to be a well-advanced, well-organized plot. Authorities believe that other cyanide bombs are still in circulation. One of the suspects, Texan William Krar, who has paid no federal income taxes since 1988, made his living as a traveling arms salesman who pedaled illicit bomb components and other weapons to violent underground anti-government groups across the country. Krar and his cohorts, his wife Judith Bruey and friend Edward Feltus, have deep ties to white supremacist militias across the country. Krar and his collaborators were running a bomb-making facility out of a storage facility in the small east Texas town of Noonday. Groups that call East Texas home include the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity. Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen says of the Justice Department, "I think the reason for that...is that cases like this, of domestic terrorism, especially when they involve white supremacist and conservative Christian groups, don't have any political value for an administration, especially this particular administration. Therefore, why -- if one were going to be crass and cynical, why would they highlight this? On the other hand, foreign terrorism and things connected to Arab, South Asian and Muslim groups, well those have value because they can be used to whip up support for military interventions, which this administration is very keen on. ...I think what we have to acknowledge here is that probably since the Nixon administration, we have never seen a Justice Department so completely and thoroughly politicized as this one."
WSWS explains why, in its view, the Bush administration has remained virtually silent about the investigation: "Publicizing a conspiracy by the extreme right, however, cuts across the administration's aims on two counts. First, it diverts from the principal tactic pursued by the Bush White House ever since September 11: exploiting alleged terrorist threats to justify US military aggression first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq. Second, the fascistic politics of the defendants present a major problem because of the political ties of the Bush administration and the Republican Party to extreme right-wing elements, including militia fanatics and white supremacists." The author goes on to compare the investigation with the anthrax mailings of October 2001, which initially made huge media impressions but were almost completely ignored after the targets were shown to primarily be Democratic members of Congress and were not the work of Islamic terrorists. "[T]the blackout of this case suggests that if such an attack were to take place, both the government and the media could well attempt to blame it on foreign terrorists in order to further the administration's foreign policy agenda and provide the pretext for even more sweeping attacks on democratic rights. Given the affinity between the politics of these terrorists and those of extreme right-wing layers within the Republican Party, the question arises: could such an attack be in preparation as part of a provocation aimed at keeping the Bush administration in power?" (KTVT-TV, WorldNetDaily, The Memory Hole, Democracy Now, World Socialist Web Site)
November 26: US Army Captain Yousef Yee, a chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay detention base, has now been accused by the Army of adultery and of storing pornographic images on his computer. He has been cleared of previous charges of taking classified materials from the base. Yee has been released from custody and will be allowed to return to duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. Two other men, Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi and civilian interpreter Ahmad Mehalba, have been charged with espionage, aiding the enemy, and possessing classified materials in relation to their service at Guantanamo; both have pleaded innocent. (Fox News)
November 26: The FBI publicly denies spying on anti-war and environmentalist protesters. John Pistole, assistant FBI director for counterterrorism, says that recent allegations by civil liberties groups and some members of Congress about such an intelligence effort are "flat-out wrong." Pistole continues, "We have to have some type of predicate, some foundation, some basis for saying, 'This person poses some type of threat.,' The endgame is not to collect intelligence for political purposes. The endgame is to prevent terrorism or criminal activity." Some members of Congress are calling for hearings into an FBI bulletin sent to more than 17,000 state and local police agencies on October 15 that warned about anti-war protests being planned for later that month in Washington and San Francisco and urged authorities to report suspicious behavior to the FBI. "This report suggests that federal law enforcement may now be targeting individuals based on activities that are peaceful, lawful and protected under our Constitution," says Senator John Edwards, a Democratic presidential nominee, in a letter sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups say the bulletin raises concerns that the FBI might return to the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, when agents gathered intelligence intended to neutralize anti-Vietnam War protesters, civil rights demonstrators and other dissenters. "Clearly the FBI is on the defensive," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero says. "The bulletin raises serious questions about whether previous statements from the FBI and Justice Department are to be believed." The October 15 bulletin urged police to "report any potentially illegal acts" to one of the 66 joint terrorism task forces overseen by the FBI. Critics have seized on this line as an indication that the government is equating legitimate protest with support for terrorism in an attempt to squelch dissent against the Iraq war or opposition to overly broad government powers. "Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq so people there can be free of tyranny, yet our own FBI is investigating our fellow Americans for exercising their freedoms," Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel wrote in a recent letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft. (AP/San Diego Independent Media)
November 26: Project Censored releases its list of the 25 most ignored news stories of 2003 by the US media. Topping the list are: the neoconservative plot for global dominance; the threat to liberty posed by Homeland Security; the war against labor unions; and worsening poverty, unrest and repression of women in "liberated" Afghanistan. PC president Peter Phillips says, "We search the whole country to see if [a particular story] was covered. ...The neocon story, for example, was on page A29 of The New York Times one time. We don't think that's enough when you're talking world domination by the US military....The central theme is what people in powerful positions are doing, whether it's government or business. It's about undemocratic decisions." Phillips believes that the corporate media bypass stories about union-busting and colonialism not so much out of hostility toward reform but out of laziness, parsimony and disdain for the audience. It's quicker and cheaper to let public relations flacks for the Pentagon and the pharmaceutical companies supply information, and it's assumed that "news" customers prefer Kobe Bryant and "survivor" updates to expose´s of the Carlyle Group's ties to the Bushes and bin Ladens. "We don't have world coverage. We do the Winona Ryder trial because it's easy," says Phillips. "As [social critic] Neil Postman said, 'We're the best entertained and least informed society in history.'" Other stories include Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's plan to provoke terrorists into launching further strikes against US targets; the numerous treaties broken by the Bush administration; the administration's role in the failed coup in Venezuela; the administration's systematic attack on environmental regulations; the privatization of the military; and the threat to the US dollar by the Euro being one of the precipitating factors behind the Iraqi invasion. (Project Censored, Indianapolis Star)
November 26: The Federal Marriage Amendment is introduced into both the House and Senate. The Constitutional amendment would in essence mandate federal discrimination against gays and same-sex marriages, the first time in American history that an amendment would require discrimination against any group for any reason. "The Constitution is the guardian of our civil rights," says Ralph Neas, president of People For the American Way. "Writing discrimination into the Constitution would be a betrayal of our ideals and of the hard-fought progress we have made toward equality for all Americans. ...Targeting some Americans for second-class citizenship in the Constitution is not a precedent we should even consider setting." While the country is deeply split on the issue of same-sex marriages, only a small percentage of Americans favor the amendment. (People for the American Way)
November 26: Neil Bush, George W. Bush's brother, has been closely questioned about a $2 million deal between him and Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, by lawyers processing his divorce from his wife Sharon. Bush verifies that he has absolutely no experience in the semiconductor field, which makes such a lucrative arrangement hard to understand. Bush says the payments are for his extensive knowledge of Asian business. "It's hard to say" what Bush could do to help Grace Semiconducting, says George Burns of Strategic Marketing Research, a firm that covers the semiconductor industry. "Certainly he could act as a lobbyist." Fred Zieber, an industry analyst with Pathfinder Research, says, "I don't have a clue. You can speculate, but nothing rises to the top." Columnist Rick Casey has a simpler theory: "In some parts of the world it is assumed that members of the Royal Family have influence. And in those regions, anyone who has had both a father and a brother as presidents of the United States is a member of a Royal Family." As part of the divorce proceedings, Bush has admitted to having numerous sexual encounters with women during business trips to Thailand and Hong Kong; Bush claims that the women simply entered his hotel room and had sex with him. He denies that they were prostitutes, and denies paying them. His wife's lawyer asked him at one point, "Mr Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her." Bush replied, "It was very unusual." Sharon Bush has been sued by Robert Andrews, the former husband of Neil Bush's girlfriend, Maria Andrews, for allegedly charging that the Andrews' 2-year-old son, was fathered by Bush, not Andrews. Bush has given a DNA sample at the request of his ex-wife, but it has not yet been tested.
As with so many other cases involving Bush family members, the American media has all but ignored the story. The Washington Post buried a single, brief item deep in its pages. The New York Times ran a Reuters news service story, but stripped it of all references to sex. Only the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Post, and the Boston Herald, among US major newspapers, informed its readers of Neil Bush's sexual escapades. Bush's exploits have made huge headlines overseas. Sharon Bush's story of the divorce is telling. Apparently her husband told her by e-mail in 2002 that he wanted a divorce; only later did she find out that he had been having an affair with Maria Andrews, a much younger volunteer helping Neil's mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, with her correspondence. Andrews is the ex-wife of a Houston oil executive and the mother of three children. Bush only offered his wife $1,000 a month in alimony, and reportedly told her if she wanted more, she should get remarried. After threatening to write a tell-all book, Bush upped his offer to $30,000 a year in alimony, plus $750 a month for her two minor children. There is an ongoing dispute over whether Maria Andrew's youngest child is Bush's or her former husband's; as of this writing, Neil and Maria are splitting their time between Houston and Paris. (Sydney Morning Herald, Houston Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post)
November 26: Buzzflash reader Ruth Lopez writes about the failure of the Bush administration to honor US dead from Iraq: "Does President Bush care about our fallen military men and women? He says he does, when he's posing in front of them. He says he does, when his poll numbers drop and he needs a quick boost. He says he does, when he meets with the families of British soldiers who have paid the ultimate price for this policy of lies and war making. But the bodies of our soldiers, fallen in Iraq, are ushered back home under the cover of silence and censorship. Our wounded brothers and sisters are flown back home in the middle of the night, where no camera can see the crutches, the stretchers, the soldiers coming back with fewer limbs and a life irrevocably changed, to be greeted by darkness and silence. Contrast this with Italy, where the loss of 19 of their countrymen was greeted as a national tragedy. Their memorial service was held in St. Peter's, with 10,000 attending inside and the streets outside filled with over 250,000 mourners. The service was broadcast nationally, the country came to a halt. All to recognize and honor the loss of 19 of their countrymen. Do we care for our fallen soldiers? We have now lost over 400 of our own. President Bush says he cannot single out some to honor without honoring all, and so we honor none. And the toll of our losses continues to climb, each new death just another notch in the national psyche, until we are numb to the scale of tragedy inherent in each death. ...I suspect that President Bush has been told by his cynical political advisors that we must not be allowed to see the steady drip, drip, drip of American lives cut short. Inevitably, they tell him, we will lose our taste for the glories of war if we are continually faced with the reality of death. So there will be no TV shots of bodies being unloaded, no national memorial services for who has died today, or this week. Not when we might have to do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and next week, next month, next year. ...The president will not change his tactics and neither will the media will as long as we watch and play along. If a change is going to come, it is going to have to be from us. Because it is our children dying. Nobody in this administration has a child in Iraq and I'm willing to bet that the corporate owners of the media, who set the agenda for what is considered 'news' don't have children serving in Iraq either. Our soldiers come from the families of the working class and the poor, not the president and the corporate bigwigs. So, if we are going to change the way we honor our fallen, it will have to come from us, the families and friends of those who are risking their lives. Or we can continue to do nothing. Let the caskets trickle home in the darkness. In a few decades we can build another black wall with names inscribed upon it and then we can gather together to do what we are not willing to do now." (Buzzflash)

Secretive Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad by Bush

November 27: President Bush makes a secret Thanksgiving visit to the troops in Baghdad to praise them for their efforts. White House officials went to extraordinary lengths to keep the trip a secret, fearing its disclosure would prompt terrorist attempts to kill him. Journalist Richard Kell, who accompanies Bush on the flight, announces while en route, "The president of the United States is AWOL, and we're with him. The ultimate road trip!" What Kell fails to acknowledge is that the trip had been meticulously planned for five weeks, scheduled to take place during a slow news day, and staffed for maximum media exposure; in other words, as carefully crafted as any other Bush PR stunt. Bush has Thanksgiving dinner with 600 troops at the Baghdad airport, standing in a chow line for food and posing for pictures. Word of Bush's visit is not released to the press until his plane is well on its way back to the US; his director of communications, Dan Bartlett, tells reporters on the plane, "If this breaks while we're in the air we're turning around," while en route to Baghdad. Bush later tells reporters that Americans know that if the trip had been announced, "it would have put me in harm's way. It would have put others in harm's way, including yourselves." The entire visit lasted about two and a half hours; "If you were sitting outside the ranch waiting for the president you would not have known the president had just left," says Bartlett.
Troops were reportedly shocked and delighted to see him. Other observers were less impressed. "The message to the Iraqis is Bush doesn't think their country is secure," says former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal. "It underscores the insecurity, and it conveys insularity." Others were more sanguine. All of the Democratic presidential candidates expressed their support for Bush's visit. "It's absolutely appropriate to be honoring our soldiers overseas in battle on a day like Thanksgiving," says a spokesman for Wesley Clark. "It's more important to honor them every day, which includes allowing us to appropriately honor the heroes who come back in caskets and giving our troops a strategy so they're not there next Thanksgiving." "This is a president who has been unwilling to provide his presence to the families who have suffered, but thinks nothing of flying to Baghdad to use the troops there as a prop," says Joe Lockhart, former spokesman for President Clinton. "The trip highlights how insecure Iraq is and shows how we need to get our allies in to get the American face off the occupation," says a spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark. "The president did the right thing by visiting the troops yesterday, but this visit won't change the fact that those brave men and women should never have been fighting in Iraq in the first place," says a spokesman for fellow candidate Howard Dean. Candidate John Kerry says, "The president's trip to Baghdad was the right thing to do for our country. ...But, when Thanksgiving is over, I hope the president will take the time to correct his failed policy in Iraq that has placed our soldiers in a shooting gallery." Candidate John Edwards says the trip "was a nice thing to do, but unless this visit is followed by a change in policy that brings in our allies and truly internationalizes the effort, our mission is not going to be successful." Predictably, the most conservative of the Democratic presidential candidates, Joseph Lieberman, says, "I don't have anything political or partisan to say about it. There are days when you have to say, we're not Republicans, we're not Democrats. We are Americans."
The international press is less forgiving. The left-wing Paris daily Liberation headlines its story "Electoral Raid on Baghdad." The British Independent puts the story on A15 with the headline: "The Turkey Has Landed." "George Bush becomes the first US president to visit Iraq in order to provide the television pictures required by his re-election campaign," the article says, charging that Mr. Bush went to Baghdad to upstage "his undeclared Democratic opponent [Hillary Clinton]." The Spanish daily Vanguardia says, "George W. Bush does not attend the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, but has dinner in Baghdad with those who dream of coming home alive." And the Roman daily La Reppublica writes that Bush's trip is "obviously an electoral blitz, a Hollywood-style stunt of the kind we will see again and again throughout the campaign." Bush's security advisor Condoleezza Rice claims that the trip was for the sole purporse of allowing Bush to have Thanksgiving dinner with the troops. The London Times calls the visit "one of the most audacious publicity coups in White House history." Spain's El Mundo says the visit was "a publicity stunt which will not solve the problem of Iraq." The Spanish right-wing newspaper La Razon refers to the president as "Caesar Bush" and says Bush is exploiting the Hollywood machinery of his PR staff to its fullest. And, most interestingly, the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot said the trip will have little lasting effect on Bush's popularity, but something else will: "[O]nly one thing can ensure victory for Bush at the November 2004 polls: Saddam Hussein dead or chained up." Hussein will indeed be captured 16 days later.
As for the troops themselves, the stunt element of the photo-op is not lost on them. Usually, around 5,000 troops eat their meals in the cafeteria used by Bush; during the visit, half of it is closed down for over four hours. Many soldiers have to wait over 3 hours for their dinners, which are not lavish Thanksgiving spreads as put on for Bush (featuring Bush in a flight jacket, and a fake turkey prepared by Halliburton PR flacks as the centerpiece of the "meal"), but the equivalent of TV dinners. Many soldiers return to their barracks and eat MREs as a kind of protest against the president.
Columnist Michael Paul Williams notes, "I don't understand how a commander-in-chief who was so impatient to put our troops at risk in Iraq could be so skittish about putting himself 'in harm's way.' I can't grasp why the president had to wait until Thanksgiving -- and one day before Clinton's visit -- to boost the morale of our beleaguered soldiers. I don't understand his sudden concern for news media that his administration couldn't wait to 'embed' in Iraq during the invasion. I can't fathom why the same president who flew halfway around the world to spend 2½ hours in Iraq hasn't found the time to attend one single funeral here for the troops who gave their lives there. I don't get why Bush has been loath to even mention the ever-mounting casualties in the six months since he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. I don't understand why the president did not bother to speak with some of the ordinary Iraqis he sought to liberate. And if the media can shoot footage of the president serving turkey to U.S. troops in Iraq, why has the Bush administration barred coverage of the coffins being sent home from Iraq? Finally, I don't understand why the news media continue to play along with this dog-and-pony show. And why the public continues to just roll over."
The Berkshire Eagle writes, "To President Bush, America's soldiers are nothing more than props for his never-ending campaign. They were props on May 1 and they were props on Thanksgiving Day. An appearance at the funeral of one of the soldiers who has died in a war that has increased the terrorist threat against America, not diminished it, would be far more meaningful. So would an appearance to greet the coffins coming back from Iraq, ending an unprecedented policy forbidding the media from filming the arrival of America's war dead. Of course, footage like that would not make for jolly White House political propaganda. It is worth remembering that while the president enjoys being photographed with soldiers he passed on an opportunity to become a soldier himself, ducking out to the National Guard -- and then going AWOL from the guard. If he is now truly concerned about the welfare of America's soldiers he will devote his time to persuading foreign nations to join the cause in Iraq while Iraqis labors to set up their own government. That would be of more help than a brief campaign appearance. The May 1 campaign appearance produced the Flight-jacket George doll, and perhaps the Thanksgiving photo op will give us Army-jacketed George delivering a plate of turkey. The turkey can symbolize his Iraq policy." (Salon, Washington Post, Berkshire Eagle, Washington Times, Agence France-Presse/CommonDreams, Newsday, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Larry Syverson/Mark Crispin Miller)
November 27: Senator Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady, visits a number of areas in Afghanistan. She is on a trip with fellow Democratic Senator Jack Reed, touring both Afghanistan and Iraq. Clinton says more troops are needed in Afghanistan to combat the resurgent Taliban: "[I]t is hard to see how in a country this large with the challenges it faces we can expect to deliver the necessary security with the troop strength we have." Reed, a former Army paratrooper who is on his second trip to Afghanistan, says that Afghanistan has become the site of America's forgotten war. "We let our attention wander from Afghanistan, and we lost the initiative," he says. "We have to take more aggressive offensive operations." Both senators had Thanksgiving dinner with US soldiers at Bagram Air Force Base, the center of operations for most US military operations within the country. Later in the day, the two travel to another US base in Kandahar. (CBS News)
November 27: Several thousand more Marines will be sent to Iraq as part of the rotation of fresh combat troops and support forces next year, resulting in a much larger overall force than the 105,000 originally announced in early November. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved the mobilization of 9,900 Army, 1,290 Navy and 3,208 Air Force reserve personnel for the rotation. He also put on alert 4,228 Army, 1,290 Navy and 2,381 Air Force reservists, to let them know they may be mobilized for duty in Iraq. The specific units alerted and mobilized Wednesday were not disclosed. The Pentagon says they can expect to be on active duty for up to 18 months. The rotation is due to be completed in May, and the fresh forces are expected to stay there for one year. By May, close to 110,000 troops will be on duty in Iraq, counting the additional Marines. The Pentagon did not explain why it was activating three additional battalions of Marines beyond the 20,000 designated on November 6. Much of the reason for additional US troop callups and systematic extensions of duty tours is because of the failure of the Bush administration to persuade other countries to contribute troops to Iraq. Turkey offered to send up to 10,000 troops but balked in the face of Iraqi political opposition. South Korea has offered 3,000 troops, but it is unlikely any of those would be combat troops. Japan is balking on if and when it will contribute troops. Rumsfeld has also approved the mobilization of 2,995 Army, 100 Marine Corps and five Air Force reservists for a rotation of US forces in Afghanistan next spring. That brings to 6,906 the number of National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized for that rotation. (AP/Centre Daily)
November 27: A Cleveland couple has raised $1,500 to buy their son, who is deployed in Iraq with the US Army, a new flak jacket, since the Army can't or won't provide him and the others in his unit with the jackets. David Zvosechz's unit, stationed in a high-risk area near Baghdad Airport, has only been provided with obsolete flak jackets that won't stop modern high-velocity rifle bullets. A full one-quarter of Army troops in Iraq, approximately 44,000, are still waiting for the new jackets to be provided to them. Another family in Connecticut used its own money to buy their son a proper flak jacket; the incidents spur Representative John Larson, a Democrat, to introduce a bill to establish a program to reimburse members of the Armed Forces for the cost of protective body armor they purchased for themselves, or was purchased for them on their behalf. The bill would cover those troops deployed in connection with operations in Afghanistan and Iraq if the service member was not issued the adequate protective body armor before their deployment. "The men and women of our military are putting their lives on the line everyday overseas and deserve the best, most up-to-date protective gear," says Larson. "It is outrageous for our troops to go without adequate body armor and unconscionable that hardworking people like Pene Palifka need to spend $1,100 of their own money to buy protective equipment for their family members." (Cleveland Plain Dealer, East Hartford Gazette)
November 27: Neil Bush, brother of George W., has a $60,000/year job with a top adviser to a Washington-based consulting firm set up this year to help companies secure contracts in Iraq. He also has a $400,000/year contract to provide business advice to a Chinese computer chip manufacturer, Grace Semiconductor, worth a total of $2 million. Bush has promised to help Grace obtain US contracts at the same time his brother has promised to crack down on Chinese trade abuses. Bush was forced to disclose the positions in papers he filed in conjunction with his divorce from his wife Sharon. The divorce was finalized in April 2003. Neil Bush is co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation, a company based in Houston, Texas, that invests in energy and other ventures. For this he receives $15,000 every three months for working an average of three or four hours a week. The other co-chairman and principal of Crest is Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-American who is an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies, a company set up this year by a group of businessmen with close links to the Bush family or administrations. Its chairman is Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign director in the 2000 presidential elections. Neil Bush says he provided Crest "miscellaneous consulting services," including "answering phone calls when Jamail [sic] Daniel, the other co-chairman, called and asked for advice."
The relationship between Bush and Daniel goes further. Joseph Peacock, Crest's company secretary, is one of the original investors in Ignite, Neil Bush's educational software company based in Austin, Texas, as is Winston Wong, co-founder of Grace Semiconductor. Of Bush's relationship with Grace, business consultant Charles McMillan says, "There's certainly the appearance of influence being sought. ...If nothing else, it doesn't look good." The Bush family has had a long and profitable relationship with Chinese business interests. In the 1980s, George H.W. Bush's brother, Prescott Bush Jr., began pursuing business opportunities on the mainland. In 1988, he teamed up with Japanese businessmen to build China's first golf course in Shanghai. He struck up a long friendship with former President Jiang, whose son is now a business partner of Neil Bush. Prescott Bush Jr.'s Chinese ties generated their own share of controversy. He was criticized for meeting with Chinese business and government leaders just three months after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The Shanghai golf venture became an embarrassment when allegations surfaced that his Japanese partners were trying to get business contracts by bribing Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. Prescott Bush Jr.'s ties to an American firm, Asset Management, were scrutinized in 1989 because it was the only US firm able to skirt sanctions and import communications satellites into China. When Asset Management later went bankrupt, Prescott Bush Jr. arranged a bailout through a Japanese investment firm later accused of having ties to organized crime. There was no evidence he was aware of the alleged mob connection. (Financial Times, Los Angeles Times)
November 27: Former vice president Al Gore's attempt to buy the all-news Newsworld International channel is challenged by WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah. NWI, owned by Vivendi and managed by CBC, is seen as a more balanced TV news source than most American media outlets, and therefore is more popular with progressives and liberals than, say, Fox News. "CBC reporters and analysts were much more skeptical of US motives and decision-making than their American counterparts [in their coverage of the Iraqi war]," writes media critic Aaron Barnhart, and adds that the network is "substantive" and "crammed with long-form news reporting and expert analysis." One of the few Vivendi properties not snapped up by General Electric's NBC, NWI is the centerpiece of Gore's attempt to challenge the hammerlock the right wing has on American television news. Gore calls the Fox News Network, which led the charge against his presidency, part of a "fifth column" which injects "daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective." Recently he attacked TV news, calling it the "big kahuna" of US media: "What does it do to us that has relevance to democracy?" he asked. "Does it encourage passivity? Is it connected to this obesity epidemic? Does it relate to Robert Putman's data about the decline of community? If people are just staring at a little box for four hours a day, it has a big impact on democracy." Farah is attempting to raise money through his WorldNetDaily Web site to counter Gore's attempt to buy NWI, and is using his usual tactics to achieve his fundraising goal: While Gore "was Clinton's was Clinton's right-hand man, he found it extremely difficult to distinguish between truth and fibs -- which he told a lot of. Now he wants to run a news operation?" But there is more to Farah's long-shot bid to raise $70 million to buy NWI: it seems that Gore's campaign is suing Farah and WND for $165 million in defamation damages after a series of stories tying Gore to criminal investigations. Farah's fundraising campaign is just a scheme to raise money to survive that lawsuit. "Even if we don't raise $70 mil to purchase Al Gore's 'weapon of news destruction' -- and we won't, of course -- we will be able to stay in the race and beat these guys later," says Farah. Gore has to worry more about Vivendi stakeholder and media mogul Barry Diller, who may allow bigger media fish to have a shot at NWI. (Toronto Star)

November 28: The total number of US soldiers killed, wounded, injured, or taken with illness severe enough to warrant rotation home is nearing 10,000. This number is far below estimates released by the US military and the Bush administration, in part because the number of non-combatant injuries and illnesses have not been accurately compiled. The number may be even larger. "I don't think even that is the whole story," says Nancy Lessin, the mother of an Iraq war veteran and co-founder of Military Families Speak Out, a group opposed to the war in Iraq. "We really think there's an effort to hide the true cost in life, limb and the mental health of our soldiers," Lessin continues. "There's a larger picture here of really trying to hide and obfuscate what's going on, and the wounded and injured are part of it." Virginia Stephanakis, a spokeswoman for the US Army surgeon general, says there has been no effort to manipulate the casualty statistics. "I can reassure you that these are the best figures we have," Stephanakis says. "We're certainly not playing with the numbers or trying to downplay them." Others disagree. "I think it's a general reluctance to be forthcoming," says Wilson Powell, a Korean War veteran and executive director of Veterans for Peace. "There are ways of shaping numbers. You can do a lot just by omitting a few things now and then." (Orlando Sentinel/Centre Daily)
November 28: "For a president fond of a tough-guy image, George W. Bush was uneasy when an aide casually asked him, 'You want to go to Baghdad?'" So opens an article by Reuters outlining the persuasion it took to convince President Bush to risk going to Baghdad for Thanksgiving. The article continues, "Despite unprecedented precautions, the president slipped into Baghdad under cover of darkness on Thursday to minimize the risk of being targeted by surface-to-air missiles and was confined to the heavily guarded airport throughout his 2-1/2-hour stay. ...It was White House chief of staff Andrew Card who first proposed the surprise trip -- not the president." According to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Card said to Bush, almost in passing, "Thanksgiving's coming up. Where do you want to go? You want to go to Baghdad?" From then, the planning got underway, though Bush initially objected, fearing for his safety. "I was the biggest skeptic of all," he later acknowledged. Bush says that he thought "all along" it might be too risky and that he "had a lot of questions" about security. Meanwhile, Senator Hillary Clinton wound up an open, multiple-day tour of both Afghanistan and Iraq a day after Bush departed the Baghdad airport under the cover of night. "Is this a moment that the RNC [Republican National Committee] will try to use as a fund-raising moment? Yes. ...[But] it's a one-day winner. This is not a solution to anything," says Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. Dan Feldman, a National Security Council director under former President Bill Clinton, calls the trip a "great PR stunt...yet another in a long line of photo ops that don't say anything concrete about improving security and what our long-term plans are." Rice denies the trip was politically motivated. "This was generated out of the president and the policy side," she claims, but refuses to say if political adviser Karl Rove or Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman were among the handful of aides who knew about the trip. (Reuters)
November 28: New evidence has surfaced in the case of the anthrax poisonings which plagued the US in 2001. An article published in Science Magazine says that the anthrax spores mailed to two US senators contained sophisticated additives to make the powder float more freely in the air. If confirmed, such a technical innovation might be an important clue in the seemingly stalled FBI investigation, narrowing the field of potential suspects to people with access to such additives and expertise in using them. It makes the possibility of the anthrax being sent by a less technically adept person far less likely, the theory behind the FBI's 18-month investigation of former Army biowarfare expert Steven Hatfill. The FBI has backed off of its intensive investigation and surveillance of Hatfill, who in August filed a lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior DoJ and FBI officials, accusing them of destroying his career with a campaign of leaks suggesting that he was the anthrax killer. The lawsuit claims that Hatfill had been targeted to cover up the FBI's failure to make significant progress toward solving the case. Ashcroft, the DoJ, and the FBI have done their best to keep Hatfill's suit from being heard in court. (Baltimore Sun)
November 28: A Washington Post article exposes the lies behind the leaked Pentagon memos that were construed by the Weekly Standard to "prove" links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. David Ignatius writes, "Analysts working for Feith gathered those old intelligence reports [from the CIA investigating such presumed links] and some new ones and argued that they showed significant links between the Iraqis and al Qaeda -- rejecting the CIA's skepticism on one of the most sensitive issues in the Iraq debate. The Senate Intelligence Committee then asked Feith to explain why his staff had reached this conclusion and he responded with 50 specific intelligence items, his spokesman explained. The Standard summarized the memo this way in the lead of its article: 'Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003.' There's a reason why the CIA and British intelligence remained dubious about any serious Iraq-al Qaeda operational link, even though they knew about covert contacts between the two. That's because they had an unusually well-placed source in Iraq who told them before the war that in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had indeed considered such an operational relationship with bin Laden -- and then decided against it. 'The Iraqis did consider the possibility of links with al Qaeda to explore the possibility of cooperation, but they decided not to pursue that course of action,' explained a senior intelligence official. 'The Iraqis decided it wasn't in their best interest to be linked to an Islamic terrorist group.' The information was based on 'high-level human source reporting,' the official added, and it was the most important reason why 'prior to the war, the CIA and Britain agreed that despite contact between Saddam and al Qaeda over the years, there had been no substantive, institutional cooperation. Nothing we have learned in recent months would cause us to change that view.'"
Now the interesting part: Confirmation of this version of events can be found in, of all places, the Weekly Standard article. And it's one of the few elements in the story that's genuinely new, for it's based on a recent interview with a captured Iraqi spy. Here's how the Weekly Standard quotes from the new intelligence: 'One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, "said that the last contact between the IIS [Iraqi intelligence service] and al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam's office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from al Qaeda."' The Standard story dismisses the importance of this information, arguing that 'the bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim.' But the contradictory 'bulk' turns out to be pretty flimsy. For example, the Feith memo cites an intelligence report that al Qaeda 'in late 1999' set up a training camp in northern Iraq. If the camp was in the north, then it was probably in an area under effective Kurdish or Iranian control. Don't get me wrong. I respect the Weekly Standard's reporter, Stephen Hayes, and I think he had a good scoop (although I think he may have buried the lead). No, my complaint is with Feith, who produced an intelligence memo that to me had a clear political agenda, despite his claims to the contrary. The case that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were working together against America is not 'closed,' as the Weekly Standard would have it. The CIA, which collected most of the raw intelligence Feith cites, remains unconvinced, and for good reason. The case is thin, and contradicted by high-level Iraqi sources. Advocates for US policy in Iraq should understand that it weakens their credibility, rather than strengthening it, when they seem to be cooking intelligence to serve President Bush's political interests." (Washington Post)
November 28: An Army reserve officer is being charged with insubordination after questioning the legality of a waiver his battalion was asked to sign allowing their third deployment to a war zone since January 2002. Captain Steve McAlpin, of the 401st Civil Affairs Battalion, has been removed from his unit's battle roster and will not join his unit during its redeployment on December 3. He may face court martial and being stripped of rank, among other punishments. His unit commander, Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Carey, has charged McAlpin with having a "negative attitude" toward the 401st and with being "insubordinate towards the leadership" of the unit. McAlpin says he asked his parent unit's commander, Colonel Guy Sands, if the battalion may be violating federal law by not allowing combat troops a required 12-month "stabilization period" at home. A spokesman for the 401st says that McAlpin's questioning of the waiver was one reason why he was being disciplined. Individual members of the 401st are allowed to refuse to sign the waiver, but he said McAlpin was "butting in" for other soldiers. He said the military was also taking action because of "an accumulation of things," including difficulties in one of his previous missions to Afghanistan. McAlpin, a 25-year military veteran, has refused to sign the reprimand document, and instead written a note of protest, stating his performance evaluations have been excellent and that his record shows "no pattern of incompetence." He also plans to meet with a military attorney. (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune)
November 28: Many Iraqis are perplexed at the hush-hush visit by President Bush to US troops in Baghdad Airport over Thanksgiving. They say they knew it was meant for US troops, but hope he gained some insight into the country during his brief stay. "It meant little to the Iraqi people. Some are welcoming it, but most are dismissing its importance," says an Iraqi cashier in Baghdad. Bush's brief visit upstaged Friday's arrival in Baghdad of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is visiting US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan along with Senator Jack Reed. The two Democrats have been critical of the Bush administration's handling of postwar operations in both countries. (Salon)
November 28: The Senate sergeant-at-arms opens an investigation of how Republicans purloined and publicized internal memos from the secure computers used by two Democratic senators. GOP Senator Orrin Hatch has acknowledged that one of his aides "had improperly accessed some of the documents" and a second former staff member "may also have been involved." Hatch says that his staffers deny releasing the memos to the press. The 15 memos, written from 2001 to 2003, outline strategies for opposing judicial nominees of the Bush administration, and occasionally report the views of outside organizations that have made suggestions on how to respond. Since the first disclosure, House and Senate Republicans, along with conservative groups, have continued to publicize the memos, using them to criticize the Democrats for their tactics. On Nov. 17, the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative advocacy group, issued a press release in which it said the memos show the "immense power they [special interest groups] exert over Democratic legislators." The press release goes on to identify Manuel Miranda, a senior aide to GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, as circulating the memos. "Manuel Miranda, counsel in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office, recently sent around an e-mail composed of strategy memos that had been obtained from the 2001-2002 period when Democrats ran the Judiciary Committee," the Women's Forum release said. "The 'real bosses' of Democratic legislators, Miranda concluded, are the liberal interest groups that more or less tell the senators when to sit, speak and roll over -- and which Bush judges to confirm or not." Miranda, who worked for the Judiciary panel's Republican staff until joining Frist in February, recently said that he had sent the Women's Forum and other groups an e-mail copy of the Wall Street Journal article but nothing more. Asked about the Democratic strategy memos, he said they "have never touched my office. ...I have never distributed any memos to anyone."
Rieva Holycross, the Women's Forum official who said she was responsible for the Nov. 17 press release, described it as "a terrible mistake." The group never received the memos, she said, and only had the Wall Street Journal article that Miranda had sent. Holycross said the quote attributed to Miranda in the press release was a rewrite of a sentence in the Journal article, something that Miranda had also suggested. Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said the office was cooperating with the investigation but would have no further comment. Five committee Republicans have objected to Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle allowing anyone to read their backup tapes without their consent. They also want the inquiry to be limited to examining the "memoranda in question and no other files." Three days after the Wall Street Journal article appeared, Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee along with Kennedy and Durbin, requested that Pickle hire security experts to determine who retrieved the documents. They also asked for an audit of logs to determine who may have been trying to access the files or directories from which the memos had been copied. Two days later, the senators complained to Hatch that he had not yet given consent for the committee hard drives to be turned over to Pickle. On Wednesday, Leahy issued a statement saying he believed Pickle's investigation "is being handled in good faith" and "with the intent of identifying and solving this problem." That same day, GOP Senator John Cornyn, a Judiciary Committee member who asked Pickle to get his permission before accessing his computer files, took the Senate floor to discuss the memos. After saying he awaited the outcome of the investigation to see how the memos were obtained, he said that now they have "entered into the public domain, and I think it is important that we address these memos and what, in fact, they confirm about the obstruction and destructive politics that have taken hold of the judicial confirmation process and which have left me concerned that there is no foreseeable end to the current gridlock." (Washington Post)
November 28: Mansour Al-Nogaidan, a columnist for the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh, writes about his conviction in a Saudi religious court to 75 lashes for articles he wrote calling for freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia and criticizing Wahhabism, his country's official religious doctrine. Al-Nogaidan says that he and others like him routinely receive death threats from al-Qaeda sympathizers and others intolerant of his views; on the flip side, he and those who feel as he does are persecuted by the Saudi government. "The most recent government crackdown on terrorism suspects, in response to this month's car-bombing of a compound housing foreigners and Arabs in Riyadh, is missing the real target," he writes. "The real problem is that Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism in most schools and mosques, which have become breeding grounds for terrorists. We cannot solve the terrorism problem as long as it is endemic to our educational and religious institutions. Yet the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs have now established a committee to hunt down teachers who are suspected of being liberal-minded. This committee, which has the right to expel and punish any teacher who does not espouse hard-core Wahhabism, last week interrogated a teacher, found him 'guilty' of an interest in philosophy and put on probation." About the Wahhabist religious leaders in the country, he writes: "During the holy fasting month of Ramadan, imams around the country stepped up their hate speech against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews -- and many encouraged their congregations to do the same. I heard no sermons criticizing the people responsible for the attacks in Riyadh, in which innocent civilians and children were killed. The reason, I believe, is that these religious leaders sympathize with the criminals rather than the victims." Al-Nogaidan speaks from experience; for eleven years he was a radical Wahhabist, and participated in the burning of stores and even a women's clinic. While in jail for his crimes, he began reading "liberal Muslim philosophers. It was with wrenching disbelief that I came to realize that Islam was not only Wahhabism, and that other forms preached love and tolerance. To rid myself of the pain of that discovery I started writing against Wahhabism, achieving some peace and atonement for my past ignorance and violence." He believes that to survive and flourish, Saudi Arabia needs to renounce Wahhabism and its tacit, clandestine support of Islamic terrorism, and embrace more tolerant Islamic philosophies. "Those in charge [of Saudi Arabia] must realize that to avert disaster we will have to pay the expensive price of reforms, to be ready to live with the sacrifices that starting over entails. Only then will I be hopeful of the future of my country." (New York Times)
November 28: Save the Children UK, one of Britain's largest charities, has been forced to keep silent about its criticism of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq. The pressure comes from its powerful US wing, and is brought in order to avoid jeopardizing financial support from Washington and corporate donors. The UK branch of the charity came under enormous pressure from the US branch after it accused coalition forces of breaching the Geneva convention by blocking humanitarian aid. The London charity issued a statement in April which said that the coalition forces had backed off on an agreement to allow a relief plane, packed with emergency food and medical supplies for 40,000 people, to land in northern Iraq. Rob MacGillivray, the UK wing's emergency program manager, released a statement which stated that the "lack of cooperation from the coalition forces is a breach of the Geneva conventions and its protocols, but more importantly the time now being wasted is costing children their lives." Senior figures at Save the Children US demanded the withdrawal of the criticism and an effective veto on any future statements blaming the invasion for the plight of Iraqi civilians suffering malnourishment and shortages of medical supplies. Dianne Sherman, associate vice-president for public affairs and communications in the US, sent a blistering e-mail to the UK operation. Sherman said the Americans were "really astonished at today's release, which went out without our prior knowledge, that attacks the US military. ...This is undermining all the great work we've done, much of it in collaboration with you. We'll have to see the consequences of how this plays out -- including affecting our future funding from the government." Sherman then proposed a number of less controversial "joint messages" from the two organizations together. The British branch has complied with the US requests. Save the Children UK boasts the Queen as patron and Princess Anne as president, plus a large number of politicians, celebrities, and the like donating their titles and time. (Guardian)

November 29: Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed make a less dramatic, but more open, visit to Baghdad. Both call for a new involvement by the UN in Iraqi reconstruction. "'I'm a big believer that we ought to internationalize this, but it will take a big change in our administration's thinking," says Clinton. "I don't see that it's forthcoming." Both warn that the Bush administration's new plans to speed up the transfer of power to an Iraqi government are risky, given the country's political and social upheaval. Reed says a "critical factor" for coalition authorities is securing the blessing of Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslim community, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, who has criticized the plan. "We're caught in a dilemma, possibly of our own making," says Reed. "A quick, hasty election might bring to power a person who doesn't share the values we're trying to encourage. But the more we wait, the more it looks like an occupation." Clinton says her main purpose for making the trip was to show support for US troops. "I wanted to come to Iraq to let the troops know about the great job they're doing," she says.
Reed says his decision to vote against authorizing the war has been supported by his visit, as well as by a trip he made in July. He says the Bush administration was too hasty in dismissing the UN search for weapons that probably would have shown that Iraq represented no imminent threat to the United States. Clinton voted for the resolution granting Bush congressional authority to wage war in Iraq. Michelangelo Signorile asks of the Bush and Clinton trips: "[W]hy did the president of the United States fly into Iraq under cover of night in a Thanksgiving Day cloak-and-dagger escapade that had George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice actually wearing disguises at one point (baseball caps that, according to Bush, made them look like 'a normal couple')? And why is Baghdad safe enough for a former first lady, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, to announce her trip there two months prior and then, accompanied by Secret Service, spend more than 10 hours meeting with Iraqi leaders and mingling with citizens, but not safe enough for the president to make a quick tour of the city? Iraq is either a) so totally in chaos that the president couldn't make his trip public the way that, say, Lyndon Johnson announced his trip to Vietnam during the height of the bloody and dangerous war there or; b) though Baghdad is very unstable, with a literal army of security accompanying him it would it's safe enough for Bush to have announced the trip or at least venture out in the city more, but the Bushies are using the "security" issue as a way to once again orchestrate a photo-op and control media coverage. ...[T]hose who've claimed this was a brave action are completely deluding themselves. If anyone was brave it was Hillary Clinton -– who voted for the war resolution, let's not forget -–and Sen. Jack Reed, allowing their itineraries to be known and traveling the streets of Baghdad. Lying to the vast majority of the media and the public about your whereabouts, not telling your own parents (yes, George Sr. and Barbara were apparently in the dark) and then flying in, with the lights out, for a two-hour airport stopover just doesn't strike me as gutsy." (Boston Globe, New York Press/Truthout)
November 29: Seven Spanish intelligence officers and two Japanese diplomats are slain in separate ambushes in Iraq, the latest in a series of attacks against US allies that seem intended to drive a wedge between them. Word of the attacks comes hard on the heels of a declaration by General Ricardo Sanchez that attacks against US targets are dropping significantly. After the seven Spaniards were slain in their car, the local civilians celebrated the success of the attack. "There was a crowd of people around, and they were happy," says one eyewitness. "They were dancing in the streets." Television images showed young Iraqis kicking the bodies and saluting the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. (Washington Post, New York Times/Lakeland Ledger)
November 29: Evidence points to the involvement of some Iraqi police in coordinating and executing attacks on US soldiers in Iraq. US military officials worry that some attacks on Americans have been coordinated by some of the numerous Iraqi civilians hired by the US military, who may glean intelligence on troop movements and travels of high-ranking officers, according to Lieutentant General Ricardo Sanchez. "Clearly those are concerns we have. We try to do the vetting [of Iraqi employees] as close as we can," Sanchez says. "There have been instances when police were coordinating attacks against the coalition and against the people." Not only are the Iraqi police the most recent targets of insurgent attacks ever since the US began a policy of pursuing resistance fighters before they can strike, they are underpaid, poorly armed, and have little equipment needed to protect themselves from attack. They are often called collaborators by Iraqi civilians. Many police resent the Americans and some even express sympathy for the guerrillas. Police lieutenant Miqdad Thamer says, "Take a look at the American bases. They are hiding behind barricades while we are here in the streets with not even guns to protect ourselves. We are getting attacked because they think we cooperate with the Americans. This is not true. We are trying to bring security to the city." A traffic policeman says attacks will continue against both Americans and Iraqis as long as US forces remain. "If they want the attacks to stop, they must leave the cities and hand over security responsibilities to us." Thamer says he and many Iraqi police resent the rough and high-handed methods US forces use against Iraqis, including home invasions, trashing and sometimes destroying the contents of the homes, and bullying all and sundry. Thamer recalls one innocent Iraqi man forced to leave his home wearing little more than his underwear. "Why make him walk into the street dressed like that and humiliate him?" he asks. He continues, "I feel anger. Because I cannot make the Americans understand that this is the sanctity of the home, and I cannot justify the Americans' action to the people. I am in a very difficult situation and suffer tremendously because of that." Many policemen say they were better off under Hussein. (AP/New York Times/Information Clearinghouse, Guardian)
November 29: Exiled Iraqi leaders now say that they tried to warn the Bush administration that if it intended to overthrow the Hussein regime, it would need a strong plan to handle the resulting power vacuum, or widespread looting and insurrections would result. But, the administration ignored their warnings. "On many occasions, I told the Americans that from the very moment the regime fell, if an alternative government was not ready there would be a power vacuum and there would be chaos and looting," said Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and a longtime ally of the United States. "Given our history, it is very obvious this would occur." Similar warnings came from international relief experts and from within the United States government. In 1999 the same military command that was preparing to attack Iraq conducted a detailed war game that found that toppling Hussein risked creating a major security void, said Gen. Anthony Zinni, who headed the command. But as Pentagon officials hurriedly prepared for war last winter, they envisioned Iraq after the fall of Hussein's government as far more manageable. They were wrong. "I told them, 'Let there not be a political vacuum,'" says Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi author and college professor who said he had consulted with several senior administration officials and met twice with President Bush. In many ways the war plan drove the postwar plan, senior military officials say. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded that the invasion force be kept as small as possible, prompting his commanders to build an attack plan based on speed and surprise. Any recommendations for sending more troops to maintain order afterward would probably have collided with the war plan. The plan for handling post-Hussein Iraq assumed that Iraqi troops and police officers would stay on the job, an assumption that proved wrong. "The political leadership bought its own spin," says one senior Defense Department official involved in the planning, in part because it "made selling the war easier."
Senior administration officials acknowledged that they had considered these warnings before the war, but defended their judgments. "The United States government did extensive, detailed contingency planning for post-Saddam Iraq," counters Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council. The facts contradict McCormack. The shortcomings in the planning became immediately apparent to some exile leaders after Baghdad fell. Rend Rahim Francke, who was appointed Iraq's ambassador to Washington in late November, says: "When people started looting and the Americans just watched, what it did was legitimize lawlessness. 'It's OK. No problem.' And we are still suffering from it now." Iyad Alawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord exile group, says, "I am not sure there was any strategy." Even the Army's Third Infantry Division said in an after-action report that when it arrived in Baghdad it had no instructions, no mission statement. "Despite the virtual certainty that the military would accomplish the regime change, there was no plan for oversight and reconstruction, even after the division arrived in Baghdad," the report stated. The exile leaders were not alone in their warnings. Leaders of aid groups said they also warned about a lack of security in Iraq after the fall of the government. Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International and a former Pentagon spokesman, says, "It should have been expected."
In fact, it was. The 1999 war-game exercise, which envisioned an American-led military overthrow of Hussein, "surfaced a lot of problems," noted Zinni, the former chief of the United States Central Command. But none perhaps as serious, he said, as the security void that would follow the collapse of Hussein's rule in Baghdad. Some of the exiles say they told American officials that the void would be partly filled by the Iraqi police officers and elements of the Iraqi Army, which they said would remain in place, but only if an Iraqi-led provisional government was appointed. "The people would see that another government had been established, and they would have had confidence to stay in their jobs," says council member Barzani. The American-led occupation authority appointed the Iraqi Governing Council instead, but United States officials have said that one reason it has not been more effective is discord among representatives of various factions of Iraqi society. To Iraqis, one reason for the troubled occupation is discord within the United States government. "This country fell victim to the intense struggle within the U.S. government over Iraq policy," says Makiya. Administration officials appear to have formed their views by picking and choosing from the advice offered. Makiya cautioned about the political vacuum, but also told Bush that American troops entering Baghdad would be greeted with "sweets and flowers." In a speech just days before the war began, Vice President Dick Cheney said American troops would "be greeted as libeators." The dangers of the political vacuum were real, Makiya says. As for the sweets and flowers message, he now says, "I admit I was wrong." (New York Times/Information Clearinghouse)
November 29: Vice President Cheney continues to insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the overthrown Iraqi government was in close collusion with al-Qaeda terrorists, and that international terrorists are primarily responsible for the fighting in Iraq now. "Iraq has now become the central front in the war on terror," he said at a recent set of fund-raisers. "We are aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq, defeating them there, so we do not have to face them on the streets of our own cities." While the line generates applause from the faithful, it also flies in the face of the facts. Military and intelligence analysts say it gives the impression that those carrying out terrorists acts against United States and allied forces are internationally organized with the power and reach to wage war on America's shores. As Cheney and President Bush use the rhetoric, experts say the White House is giving Americans a false impression of who the terrorists in Iraq are and their reasons for conducting deadly attacks. "Militarily, their statements are almost absurd," says Anthony Cordesman, a national security and military intelligence expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is no evidence of activity by extremist terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda." White House officials say the line captures the essence and the urgency to defend America from the nontraditional, guerrilla-type warfare that's becoming an everyday occurrence in Iraq. A senior administration official, speaking anonymously, says Bush and Cheney's remarks reflect the belief that there are "al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda types" behind the terrorism in Iraq. "The president, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, [Gen. John] Abizaid have talked about foreign fighters on Iraq soil, foreign jihadists' will to inflate terror," the official says.
But Cordesman and other analysts say military officials in Iraq already have an idea where the bulk of the terrorist threat there is coming from: the locals. Abizaid, the top military official in the region, said two weeks ago that most of the resistance and violence in Iraq have been spawned by former members of Iraq's Baath Party and other groups loyal to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who are waging a low-intensity war to return him to power. Abizaid said the resistance may only number 5,000, but they are a dedicated and dangerous bunch. (A recent CIA document puts the figures closer to 50,000.) Cordesman estimates that about 95 percent of the terrorist threat is from Saddam loyalists. The argument by Bush and Cheney that fighting the terrorist threat in Iraq will help keep terrorists from US cities diminishes the White House's original stance for going to war, says Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst for the Brookings Institution. Bush initially said that Saddam's brutality toward his people, his decision to ignore countless U.N. resolutions and the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that threatened to destabilize the Middle East justified going to war. By now describing the war as an effort to get the terrorists before they get to America, "the administration, in a strange way, discredits its own case," O'Hanlon says. "It's a weak argument. There aren't that many in Iraq who are foreign fighters who are a threat to US shores. I don't know if it's fear-mongering or false reassuring." Cordesman and others say that Americans won't get the full story on the war on terrorism as long as the White House keeps talking about Iraq as a beachhead. "It doesn't prepare the American people for a war forced on us to fight, for its length, its intensity and risks," he says. "It's the kind of politics that gets you through two weeks." (Knight Ridder/Seattle Times, Truthout)
November 29: Benamar Benatta, an Algerian air force pilot, has languished in a variety of federal prisons since the evening of 9/11, mostly in solitary confinement. The problem? Benatta has never been charged or even formally accused of wrongdoing of any kind, and the US government has formally acknowledged for two years that Benatta has no connections to any terrorist groups. "Two years ago, I had hopes. I was okay," says Benatta. "Now I lie in my cell and think: 'What has become of me?'" Benatta was jailed the night of the attacks when he was detained and found not to have the proper documentation, including a valid visa. After that, as the Washington Post writes, "It was as though Benatta became invisible. His name never appeared on lists of detainees. His family in Algeria believed he had vanished. No defense attorney knew of his existence until a federal defender in Buffalo was assigned his case in late April 2002. The federal government has few explanations for what happened. In legal briefs, the US attorney in Buffalo blamed some of the delays on bureaucratic wrangling between prosecutors and the US Marshals Service, and the confusion that followed the terrorist attacks. But in the documents, US Attorney Michael A. Battle of the Western District of New York ultimately acknowledged that such conditions could 'not justify violating the defendant's rights.'"
In 2003, federal Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder examined Benatta's case and found a study in governmental excess. Schroeder issued an unsparing report in September, writing that federal prosecutors and FBI and immigration agents engaged in a "sham" to make it appear that Benatta was being held for immigration violations. Prosecutors trampled on legal deadlines intended to protect his constitutional rights and later offered explanations for their maneuvers that "bordered on ridiculousness," Schroeder wrote. And he found that the government compounded its mistakes by failing to act once it was clear that Benatta was not an accomplice to terrorists. "The defendant in this case undeniably was deprived of his liberty," Schroeder wrote, "and held in custody under harsh conditions which can be said to be oppressive." To keep Benatta imprisoned any longer, the magistrate concluded, "would be to join in the charade that has been perpetrated." Benatta still awaits release, though he is scheduled to have what is called a "removal hearing" at some indeterminate point in the future.
Benatta is just one of many detainees held by US officials for no other reason that expired visas. "Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa -- even by one day -- we will arrest you," thundered Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001. Since then, the Justice Department's own inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, has found that dozens and possibly scores of detainees have been held without charge longer than is allowed by statute, and that a number had been denied access to lawyers for long periods. Fine also found that the FBI took too long to investigate and clear them of connections to terrorism. The inspector general's report also said that corrections and court officers in the New York region had subjected detainees to "patterns of verbal and physical abuse." While Benatta did not speak with Fine's investigators, he was held in the same wing of the same prison they examined, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and his descriptions of being threatened and mocked by corrections officers closely track the report's findings. "This is one of the worst cases we've seen," says Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which has sued the government to stop the holding of detainees without recourse to lawyers. "This is a perfect example of how the government has played a shell game with detainees for months and months."
Ironically, Benatta left Algeria because of his conflict with Islamic fundamentalists as well as with the Algerian military, who is notorious for human rights abuses. "I had a problem with the terrorists who wanted to kill me and with the military, which was beating and torturing people," he says. "My parents knew I did not intend to come back." The government does not dispute much of the account of Benatta's mistreatment. Judge Schroeder discovered numerous violations of the detainee's rights during his first weeks of detention. He noted that INS lawyers did not file legal papers to transfer Benatta until a week after he had arrived in New York, an action the magistrate termed "a sham." Schroeder also found "damning evidence" that INS lawyers improperly "colluded" with the FBI and federal prosecutors to use immigration procedures as a "subterfuge" to "spirit" Benatta to New York City. Once there, the government "in essence arrested" Benatta for the purpose of conducting a criminal investigation of him and did not allow him to speak with a lawyer. These actions, Schroeder wrote, violated Benatta's Sixth Amendment rights to a speedy trial. At the high-security detention center in Brooklyn, Benatta was placed in a solitary cell -- known by prisoners as "the box." His cell was illuminated 24 hours a day. The guards wrote "WTC" in chalk on his cell door and, he said, for weeks they would knock loudly on the door every half-hour to wake him up. He had no access to books, television or a lawyer. For weeks, he could not leave the cell except when FBI agents arrived to interrogate him about his job, ethnicity and religious beliefs. "In the box, I had no right to shave, to shower, nothing," Benatta says. "By the end of a month, I had a huge beard, and I couldn't even walk. You feel in there that one day is one month." He recalled being forced to strip while guards mocked him. He said guards knocked his head against the elevator wall while he was in manacles and one time pulled his waist chain so tight he had trouble breathing. "For three or four months, you couldn't talk or they would punish you," he said. "Then maybe things started to calm down." Fine's report stated that "we believe there is evidence supporting the detainees' claims of abuse." The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District has declined to prosecute any prison guards.
On November 15, 2001, the FBI cleared Benatta of any terrorist connections. Benatta was not informed until five months later of the FBI's decision. He continued to languish in solitary confinement with no access to a lawyer. On December 12, 2001, Buffalo, NY prosecutors obtained an indictment against him on charges related to carrying false identification papers; again, Benatta was not informed and was not offered an attorney. He learned of the charges in April 2002, and refused a plea bargain that would have essentially reduced his sentence to time served. For the first time he was provided with a lawyer, federal defender Joseph Mistrett, who says of his client, "It's so outrageous what happened to this guy. I was offended as an American citizen." Though the government has dropped some of the charges against him and tacitly admitted that he was mistreated, Benatta still faces a difficult time. He still faces charges related to his immigration status, and knows that if he is forced to return to Algeria, he will be killed or jailed almost immediately by the military. But he remains sanguine. "I don't blame the United States," he says. "They've never had to deal with terrorists, and 3,000 people die; that's a lot." After the criminal charges against Benatta were dropped, lead prosecutor Battle refused to apologize to him. Benatta responds, "I don't need an apology. I just want them to stop accusing me." (Washington Post)
November 29: Experts question US General Ricardo Sanchez's statement that it has been a "great two weeks" for American forces in Iraq. That "great two weeks" includes the single deadliest attack against US forces since the end of the invasion, the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters in what is believed to have been a ground-to-air missile attack. Six Spanish intelligence agents were killed in Baghdad. And two hotels and the Ministry of Oil were attacked by rockets fired from donkey-drawn carts at the height of "Operation Iron Hammer," an elaborate US anti-insurgency operation using heavy weaponry in and around the capital. Sanchez points out that the daily average number of attacks against American forces had fallen by more than 30 per cent in the past 14 days, and was down to an average of 22 "engagements" a day; he mentions, but does not include, the increase in attacks on friendly Iraqis by anti-American forces. During that same two weeks, an audiotape of Saddam Hussein surfaced, in which he calls for Iraqis to resist the occupation. This development was taken so seriously by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council that it banned the Arabic satellite TV station which aired the tape, al-Arabiya, from broadcasting from Iraq on the grounds that it was inciting violence. The ban has reinforced cynicism about the occupation among. Iraqis point out that censoring the media hardly squares with the Bush administration's promises to bring freedom and democracy. "This only makes opposition to the US stronger," says al-Arabiya's Wahad Yacoub. While media watchdogs and civil liberties groups decry the action, the US government applauds the decision to muzzle al-Arabiya. (Independent/Free Republic, BBC)
November 29: Army Sgt. Michael Badgley Jr, home on two-week leave from his deployment in Iraq, calls the situation in Iraq "a nightmare." "It's nothing like what the people back home have been hearing," he says. "They're saying the war's over. The war's not over. Now, it's more of a guerrilla war. ...The waste and frustration, everything that goes on over there, it's just a nightmare." Badgley is very complimentary about the job the soldiers themselves are doing, but is less so about how the war is being handled from above. According to Badgley, some of the troops have been told they are there only to provide numbers, and there are more troops in Iraq than there are jobs for them. "Morale over there is very low." He says he has heard about humanitarian projects the United States and its allies are doing, but in his seven months in Iraq he hasn't seen a single food or water distribution point set up or a school being constructed. He characterizes attempts to improve relations with the Iraqi people "was more of a horse and pony show." (Billings Gazette/Independent Media)
November 29: GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist contradicts the rosy picture of Iraq painted by President Bush when he is asked if there is "light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq. Frist responds, "No, it's as bad as it looks." (Memphis Flyer)
November 29: Senior Bush administration officials continue to press the claim that there are demonstrable links between the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda, even though the President and a plethora of experts have proven those claims to be false. A top-secret set of Pentagon documents deliberately leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard formed the basis of the definitively stated, and patently false, article "Case Closed," which flatly claimed to show proof of the Hussein-al-Qaeda connection (see the November 17 entry). According to CIA and FBI assessments, and to outside critics, the case of the al-Qaeda link is anything but proved, and demostrates how willing the administration is to manipulate intelligence for political ends. Democratic Senator Tom Daschle says nothing in the Pentagon report changes his conclusion that no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda exists. "I have heard nothing that would cause me to think differently that I've been led to believe for months," Daschle says. He also says that the leak of the report raises deeper issues of "how intelligence is being used."
The secret memo, authored by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, reiterates disproven claims that 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, and groundless claims that the Hussein regime taught bomb-making techniques to al-Qaeda operatives in the Sudan. The memo omits critical information that would disprove the claims. Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the only thing truly new in the Feith memo is the detailed citation of specific intelligence reports: "disturbing," he says, "because it's blowing an awful lot of intelligence." Benjamin and others believe the memo is evidence of the conflict between neoconservative hard-liners and more moderate voices within the administration. Well before his memo leaked, Feith was under attack by critics who claimed he single-handedly set up his own intelligence network within the Pentagon to produce assessments free of CIA influence. Feith mocked his accusers, noting that the much-discussed intelligence operation was in fact two people: "They did a project for about three months, and then another two people did a follow-on project for about six or seven months," Feith claimed. "What those people did in that so-called intelligence unit...was simply help me read and absorb the intelligence provided by the intelligence community, the CIA and other members." Like the memo, Feith's statement is based on deliberate lies; Feith's secretive operation, the Office of Special Plans, is much broader and much more influential than he portrays it to be.
The conflict is evidenced by dramatically different statements from two senators. Republican Christopher Bond echoes the Bush party line by saying he is confident any past al-Qaeda-Iraq link will eventually emerge. What's more important now, he said, is that "al-Qaeda forces are engaging us in battle in Baghdad and surrounding areas today -- and that it's better to be fighting them in Baghdad than in Boston or Ballwin, Missouri." Statements such as Bond's have been made by numerous administration officials and supporters, including by talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. A different tack is taken by Democrat Richard Durbin, who says the leak of the Feith memo reflects an administration increasingly desperate to justify its policies in Iraq. "Two things have happened," Durbin says. "One is that the evidence so far doesn't support their premise for going to war. Second is that the intelligence agencies, and in particular the CIA, are fed up with making excuses for things that have happened and taking the blame. [CIA officials] are brutally honest in their briefings about Iraq today and they pull no punches. It's a real change in this town -- and I think it's why this memo was leaked." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
November 29: A Muslim appointed by President Bush to a religious freedom panel charged the president's policies are driven by a Christian, religious fundamentalism from the colonial era and urged that Bush not be re-elected. Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, originally of Egypt, was appointed by Bush to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent panel established by Congress that makes policy recommendations to the president and secretary of state. El Fadl has warned Muslim groups in the US that Bush "is a Christian religious fundamentalist and that the group around him, of the likes of [Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz and others, hold the same beliefs that accompanied colonialism's entrance to the Muslim countries in the 19th century." El Fadl says that during the 2000 presidential campaign, he warned U.S. Islamic groups not to side with Bush. "Unfortunately, because of shortsightedness and ignorance, the Islamic organizations helped Bush reach the White House," he says. "I met with many leaders of these organizations, and I told them that I have known Bush well since he was governor of Texas, where I live, and I am familiar with his bad policy, which does not bode well." He goes on to say that when Bush became president, "there was a revolution in American policy. ...He brought in religious Christian people. In the field, Bush permitted missionaries into Iraq before medicines. He is the first president in the history of America whose policy includes supporting Christian missionaries and applying pressure through them on some countries. He links them with continued American aid to some countries. ...Bush says that he respects Islam and wants to spread democratic standards in the Islamic countries. When we ask him what exactly these democratic standards that he calls for are, he has no answer, as if Islam was permitted to exist only provided that it was Islam according to American standards." (World Net Daily)
November 29: Former Democratic candidate for Congress Peter Buckley of Oregon writes of his experience protesting against a Bush appearance from a "free speech zone," "We were not allowed anywhere near any kind of position where the president, or the media which follows him, would see or hear us. This is not America. This in not the land of the free and the home of the brave. This is some other country. I'm a patriotic American. I want the country I was raised to believe in, a country strong enough for political discourse and debate, with leaders courageous and decent enough to have the willingness to listen to all citizens, not just those who parrot their own views. ...The effort being made to hide political opposition in this country is more than cowardly, it's un-American." Brett Bursey was arrested in South Carolina for refusing to move to a designated "free speech zone" during a Bush appearance; while local charges of trespassing have been dropped, he still faces federal charges of violating "restricted access areas" near the president. Eleven members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have written a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft requesting that the charges against Bursey be dropped: "As we read the First Amendment to the Constitution, the United States is a 'free speech zone.' In the United States, free speech is the rule, not the exception, and citizens' rights to express it do not depend on their doing it in a way that the president finds politically amenable." (Casper Star-Tribune/Billings Gazette)
November 29: Five black military veterans accuse Kellogg, Brown, & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, of discrimination. One, a Marine veteran with 21 years of service, claims that he was paid less than his colleagues, was forced to endure racial epithets, was passed over for promotion in favor of less-qualified people who were white and ultimately lost his job. A former Army staff sergeant says he lost his job when KB&R fired 84 percent of the blacks in his unit. Two other claimants, a former Army major and a former sergeant, said that, in separate incidents, they were told their jobs were no longer necessary, only to learn that white employees were promptly given their old positions. A fifth man, a former Air Force sergeant, said that he was repeatedly denied employment at KB&R when he applied in person for jobs at the company but received an offer when he sent his résumé via fax; the offer was rescinded before he could start. "I was devastated," says Wayne Whiting, the former Army staff sergeant. Whiting says his supervisor told him, "You're not the right man and color for this job." A black personnel specialist said to another claimant in an e-mail: "You are not the only one over here who has or is being screwed. Go for what you feel is right for you." He and the other four men have begun arbitration proceedings against Halliburton and KB&R. "I was a former military guy, now a retired military guy, and I was well known in logistics, and I was just surprised that a company of this magnitude could go on to treat their employees with no kind of respect whatsoever." The accusations are particularly troublesome for KB&R because of the company's strong ties to the military. (New York Times/US Labor Against War)
November 29: An attempt to tar Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark fails when his former commanding officer confirms that Clark had no role in the planning and execution of the offensive against the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas in 1993. Several news stories have attempted to claim that Clark was involved in the debacle in Waco, but Army Lieutenant General Horace Grady Taylor, Clark's former commander, who ran the Fort Hood military base 60 miles from the site of the Waco siege, says, "Clark's totally innocent in this regardless of what anybody thinks about him." An Army division commanded by Clark did supply some equipment for the 51-day standoff, and Clark's deputy, now the Army Chief of Staff, did take part in a government meeting about the standoff five days before the destruction of the compound. No word has been released as to the source of the spurious allegations against Clark. (Chicago Sun-Times)
November 29: An Army soldier claims she was raped while at her post in Kuwait. "The soldier is being provided with medical care and emotional support," says a brigade spokesperson, but other female soldiers are cautious. "It's sad. You can't trust your own people," one female supply sergeant says. Days later, the soldier tells her mother that the Army has isolated her from her unit and denied her counseling and other support, including a visit from a chaplain. Her mother was told, after she angrily contacted the Army, that a chaplain would be provided for her daughter, and that she could expect her daughter to be sent home soon. "she's traumatized," says the mother. "she's not good, but at least I got to hear her voice. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She has no contact, really, with anybody." The family has asked for help from Senator Arlen Spector's office. The soldier's account says that she was struck from behind by a masked man with an American voice, beaten unconscious, and raped while she was unconscious. Later, the family is informed that their daughter attempted suicide by overdosing on prescription narcotics. "she got medical attention, but they cut her loose again," her mother reports. "There's no one with her, watching her, to make sure it doesn't happen again. And that's my major concern." The victim has only met with a chaplain once and is still being kept in isolation. (Sacramento Bee, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
November 29: Billionaire currency speculator George Soros, a refugee from fascist and communist governments in his native Hungary, has committed his fortune towards unseating the Bush administration in 2004. Bush "is a danger to the world," he says; removing Bush from power is "the central focus of my life." He describes his quest to dispatch the president as "a matter of life and death." Soros is best known for his help in defeating the administration of Eduard Shevardnadze in the former Soviet republic, and his founding of Open Society Foundations promoting democracy in about 50 countries around the world. The Toronto Star writes, "soros has long been credited with doing more than any other individual to promote democracy in Eastern Europe, before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Apart from a $300 million university he financed in Budapest, Soros has spurned typical bricks-and-mortar vanity projects in favour of low-key, grassroots campaigns to subvert ruling oligarchies. Legendary Soros ploys include his distribution of 1,100 photocopiers in pre-Internet Hungary to foster an underground media and impromptu grants of $500 to each of 35,000 Russian scientists and academics after the country's economic collapse. And the rudimentary fresh-water system Soros helped build in war-torn Sarajevo to keep residents from succumbing to sniper fire when they visited the city's few public wells."
Soros has made an enemy of the oil and mining cartels by demanding they publicly report the royalties they pay to the regimes in Third World countries -— as they are obliged to do in more developed nations. He consistently demonstrates that the oil and mining consortiums do little for the countries they operate in except strip them of natural resources and fatten the oligarchies of those countries. Soros is adamant in his loathing for Bush. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans," Soros said earlier this month, evoking the Nazi persecution that prompted the Jewish Soros family to adopt false identities to escape the Holocaust. US conservatives have attacked Soros for his monetary support of the Democratic Party and for his Jewish heritage. The Republican National Committee declares that "soros has purchased the Democratic party;" a column in Conrad Black's Jerusalem Post warns last week that Soros undermines world Jewry by "unwittingly parad[ing] the shadow of the Court Jew, the Wandering Jew, and the medieval money lender who for centuries fed anti-Semitism's sick imagination." And a recent Washington Post editorial complains "no one wants one deep-pocketed person picking the next president." Democrats pay little attention, reminding Republicans that they never balked at the billions of dollars contributed to their causes by Richard Mellon Scaife, among others; they point out that the left wing of American politics has long needed a counterpart to the hard-right journals and campaign contributions made by the Scaife empire.
Soros draws a parallel between the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military action with the dot-com boom and bust, in which investors sabotaged the undoubted commercial potential of the Internet by allowing themselves to get carried away with speculative excess. Bush, Soros argues, has similarly extrapolated the undeniable security challenge of post-9/11 America into a self-defeating agenda of US power projection that is turning the world against America. Calling for old-fashioned police work to deal with terrorism, and citing his own network of grassroots activities in promoting democracy, Soros makes a pitch for "increased foreign aid or better and fairer trade rules" that no longer shut developing-world imports out of First World markets. "The framework within which to think about security is collective security," Soros says, invoking the multilateralism that won the Cold War. "Neither nuclear proliferation nor international terrorism can be successfully addressed without international co-operation."
Soros holds Bush's career as a businessman in contempt. Bush established his political bona fides by pointing to his business success in pocketing a handsome sum from the 1986 sale of his Texas oil exploration outfit, Spectrum 7, to a firm called Harken Energy. But the attraction to Harken of Spectrum 7, an inch away from insolvency at the time, was that it was run by a son of the then US vice-president. Harken, as it happens, was owned in part by George Soros. No stranger to crony capitalism, Soros recently recalled the genesis of the Harken-Spectrum 7 transaction. "Bush was supposed to bring in the [Persian] Gulf connection. But it didn't come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. [Bush] was not much of a businessman." (Toronto Star)

November 30: Coordinated Iraqi ambushes on US convoys outside the northern city of Samarra draws a heavy response from American forces, resulting in a "rolling firefight" throughout the city that causes the deaths of at least 46 Iraqis, though the numbers of dead are in dispute -- the original story claimed 200 guerrillas dead, later reports pinned the number at 54. The convoys were transporting money to two Iraqi banks for a currency exchange of old Iraqi dinars for new Iraqi currency; they were originally reported as mere supply convoys. 5 US soldiers and one civilian were wounded. According to Iraqi police, only eight Iraqis were killed, including an old man on his way to a religious shrine. Links to guerrilla groups called "Fedayeen Saddam," or "Saddam's Martyrs," could not be established, though some of the attackers wore uniforms similar to those associated with the groups.
A soldier involved with the attacks believes that Iraqi police tipped off the guerrillas as to the location and contents of the convoys. He says of the US counterattack, "[M]ost of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, Brads and armored Humvees hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of 'Iron Hammer' is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents. ...The ROE [rules of engagement] under 'Iron Fist' is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them regardless of who else is inside. It seems to many of us this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don't know if we kill anyone, because we don't stick around to find out. Since we are armored troops and not trained to use counter-insurgency tactics, the logic is to respond to attacks using our superior firepower to kill the rebel insurgents. This is done in many cases knowing that there are people inside these buildings or cars who may not be connected to the insurgents. The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces, knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don't. Of course in too many cases, if the insurgents bait us and goad us into leveling buildings and homes, the people inside will then hate us (even if they did not before) and we have created more recruits for the guerillas. ...We drive around in convoys, blast the hell out of the area, break down doors and search buildings; but the guerillas continue to attacks us. It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against these people. ...As one would expect from using our overwhelming firepower, much of Samarra is fairly well shot up. The tanks and Brads rolled over parked cars and fired up buildings where we believed the enemy was. ...Not all the people in this town were hostile, but we did see many people firing from rooftops or alleys that looked like average civilians, not the Fedayeen reported in the press. I even saw Iraqi people throwing stones at us. I told my soldiers to hold their fire unless they could indentfy a real weapon, but I still can't understand why somebody would throw a stone at a tank, in the middle of a firefight. Since we did not stick around to find out, I am very concerned in the coming days we will find we killed many civilians as well as Iraqi irregular fighters. I would feel great if all the people we killed were all enemy guerrillas, but I can't say that. We are probably turning many Iraqi against us and I am afraid instead of climbing out of the hole, we are digging ourselves in deeper."
On December 5, Julian Manyon, a journalist with Britain's ITV, challenges the US military's story. His research indicates that the eyewitnesses' story of 8 civilians dead is accurate, and the US's fluctuating claims of first 200, then 54, dead insurgents is wrong. "The US military spokesman, who caused an excited ITV news desk to wake me at 1 am, claimed that they had defeated co-ordinated attacks by about 200 'terrorists', some of them wearing the uniform of the feared Saddam Fedayeen," Manyon writes. "We arrived half expecting to see the bodies of dead insurgents littering the streets. Instead, at the town cemetery, we found that one of the first bodies to be buried under the speedy Muslim rite was that of a female employee of the town's drugs factory, Ameera Sahil, who had been shot dead while waiting for a bus near the factory gate." The local hospital's numbers were eight dead and about 30 wounded. "The truth of this feat of American arms seems to be something like this: relatively small numbers of Saddam loyalists and local men fired on the American convoys and were met with a blizzard of machine-gun and automatic grenade fire," he notes. Iraqi officials in Samarra have accused American soldiers of spraying fire at random people on the city's streets and killing civilians, an account that tallies with Manyon's description. Numerous instances of US military "spin" and false reports have been noted before, from the false reports of Iraqi Scud missiles being fired during the invasion to numerous reports about towns being "taken" when, in fact, they were not. Tony Blair repeated a false story of two British soldiers being captured and executed, and backed off when angry family members confronted him with statements from the commanding officer verifying that the two were killed in action. Reports of the death of Ali Hassan al-Majid, or "Chemical Ali," were spread repeatedly, only to later be proven false. And one of the biggest instances of "spin" surrounds the attack on the Palestine Hotel which killed three journalists; stories of Iraqi sniper attacks were later displaced by eyewitness accounts of US tank fire on the hotel.
Journalist Seymour Hersh points out that Samarra was, before the invasion, a well-known hotbed of anti-Hussein sentiment. But instead of winning the "hearts and minds" of the thousands of Iraqis in and around Samarra who hated and opposed Hussein, the heavy-handed and often ruthless tactics of the US occupation forces have driven those Iraqis to join the insurgency. "Many Samarra natives -- who had served with distinction in the Ba'ath party and the armed forces -- were purged or executed during the course of the three decades of rule by Saddam and his cronies from the rival town of Tikrit," wrote terrorism expert Ahmad Hashim of the US Naval War College in August. "The type of US force structure in Iraq -- heavy armored and mechanized units -- and the psychological disposition of these forces which have been in Iraq for months is simply not conducive to the successful waging of counter-insurgency warfare." (CNN, CNN, Soldiers for the Truth, Guardian)
November 30: Two South Korean electricians are killed and two more are wounded by Iraqi gunmen near Tikrit. And in Baghdad, a Colombian civilian contractor, an employee of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root, is killed. (AP/Salon)
November 30: The Shi'a majority in southern Iraq is seeking to break away from the authority in Baghdad and establish its own autonomy. The recent targeted shooting of Baathists, mainly Sunni Muslims who sought to stay behind in the region after the defeat of the regime, and systematic sabotage of power lines going to Baghdad are seen by some as the first aggressive moves of an embryonic Shi'a confederacy. Last week, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's senior Shi'a cleric, rejected American plans for transfer of power to an indirectly elected transitional government, and called for direct elections. This highlighted the new-found confidence and influence of the Shi'as. British forces, which have faced far less opposition from the Shi'as in the southern region of Iraq than the US military has in the so-called "sunni Triangle" around Baghdad, aren't sure yet how to respond to the Shi'as embryonic push for independence. The British have worked hard to keep the levels of tensions down, but may yet take a harder approach to squelch Shi'a independence in the near future. Farid Haider Mohammed, a Shia activist who was imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime during the uprisings in 1991 that followed the 1990-91 Gulf War, says: "It is no big secret that the power lines were sabotaged to keep our power here. You look at the wealth that flowed to Baghdad from us, and so little came back. That is not going to happen again. Look at all these televisions and radios. People have the money now to buy them. The British are alright for now, but they should not outstay their welcome." (Independent/Free Republic)
November 30: The city of Samarra has long been a center of opposition to the Hussein regime. As such, US military officials believed Samarra would be an excellent place to begin winning over Iraqi "hearts and minds." It has not proven so. One resident points to the community soccer field, now rendered unusuable by repeated US attacks, and says, "Is this what the Americans mean by winning our hearts?" Samarra's US-appointed mayor, Shaker Mohammed, says, "The Americans made serious mistakes from the very beginning. ...When U.S. soldiers search houses at night, they tie up the men and they frighten the women and children. This breeds resentment." Laborer Akram Shouk, who suffered tremendous personal and family loss under Hussein, says, "I hated Saddam because of all the pain he caused my family. I was very happy when the Americans got rid of him. I thought they would help us improve our lives." Shouk was disillusioned when troops raided his home one night last month. Shouk says that around twenty soldiers surrounded his house, broke down the metal door, took him and his two teenage sons outside, put sacks on their heads and tied their arms with plastic handcuffs. The soldiers then spent two hours searching the three-room house for weapons and pro-insurgent material. "They broke some of my dishes, damaged my furniture and they dragged mud all over my floor," says Shouk's wife. "They didn't find anything, so they just left," Shouk continues. "They terrorized us and they didn't even apologize." Field guard Ali Abdullah is adamant. "No matter how much food they hand out or how many schools they say they're going to build, we're never going to accept the Americans here," he maintains. "They are occupiers and we will drive them out." Tribal leader Even Maher, imprisoned by Hussein for six years, speaks of the potential for major resistance: "As politicians, we want to have a dialogue with the Americans. We want to resist their occupation politically, but if we find that road is closed, then we will have to resist them another way." Mahmoud Hassan, a street vendor, says, "All the mosques here talk about fighting the Americans. No one in Samarra has anything good to say about the Americans, unless he's a collaborator." (NY Newsday)
November 30: Iraq's above-ground oil refineries and pipelines are being repaired, but as of now very few efforts have been made to address the underground problems with Iraq's oil reservoirs. American and Iraqi experts say these problems could severely limit the amount of oil those fields produce. In northern Iraq, the large but aging Kirkuk field suffers from too much water seeping into its oil deposits; similar problems are evident in the sprawling oil fields in southern Iraq. Experts familiar with the Iraqi oil industry have said years of poor management damaged the fields, and some warn that the current drive to rapidly return the fields to prewar capacity risks reducing their productivity in the long run. "We are losing a lot of oil," says former oil minister Issam al-Chalabi. He says it "is the consensus of all the petroleum engineers" involved in the Iraqi industry that maximizing oil production may be detrimental to the reservoirs. A 2000 United Nations report on the Kirkuk field said "the possibility of irreversible damage to the reservoir of this supergiant field is now imminent." The complications in Iraq are common in aging fields, whose management is a balance of geology, physics and economics. Engineers often compare oil reservoirs to a bottle of soda, which has a high level of energy when full but loses energy as it is depleted. Engineers use a variety of methods to maintain the pressure needed to bring the oil to the surface, including injection of gas or water into the fields. Pumping oil too quickly can upset the balance, leading to more gas and water migrating into the wells and ultimately making extraction of oil uneconomical. Oil experts said Saddam Hussein demanded high production, but UN economic sanctions precluded Iraq from acquiring the sophisticated computer-modeling equipment and technology required to manage older reservoirs properly. As a result, despite the ingenuity of Iraqi engineers, the fields have suffered. Oil experts working for the United Nations found that some reservoirs in southern Iraq "may only have ultimate recoveries of between 15 percent and 25 percent of the total oil" in the field, as compared with an industry norm of 35 to 60 percent. (New York Times/3D Frontier)
November 30: Nine Britons being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility are to be returned to Britain before Christmas, according to a deal being finalized between the US and British governments. The 'returns policy' is believed to be the leading option being considered in Washington, which has made clear that it wants to end the tension between the US and Britain over the issue; the British government has been after the US to release the nine for two years. The nine will either plead guilty to charges, and serve time in British prisons, or be returned without being charged. 20 other inmates are also to be released, and Australia is also finalizing a deal for release of their prisoners. British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who is working with the suspects, says, "The British Government has finally realized it has to help the Americans out of the corner they have painted themselves into. This deal will most likely consist of the British having to plead guilty on some nonsense charge and come back here to serve their sentence." He continues, "The Americans just want these people to plead guilty so that it looks as if they have been telling the truth that these are all 'bad dudes.' We know that is nonsense. There is no evidence of any kind against them. In one man's case all he was doing was running a school." (Guardian)
November 30: Retired Navy Rear Admiral Don Guter, Rear Admiral John Hutson and Marine Brigadier General David Brahms file a Supreme Court amicus brief challenging the Bush administration's indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at the Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Guter and Hutson are former judges advocate general of the Navy. While Guter says he "fully support[s] the war on terrorism," he and his colleagues worry that lengthy incarcerations at Guantanamo without hearings will undermine the rule of law and endanger US forces. He says, "For me it's a question of balance between security needs and due process, and I think we've lost our balance." The brief is filed on behalf of 16 detainees held for almost two years. The government contends that all are enemy combatants, most captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have no legal rights, prisoner of war status or access to federal courts. The Supreme Court will hear the case next year. "This may be one of those cases that comes along every 50 years -- there's that much at stake," says Eugene Fidell, president of the nonpartisan National Institute of Military Justice. Former federal judges, diplomats and even American POWs from World War II also have filed briefs urging the Supreme Court to reconsider lower court rulings on the detainees that favored the administration.
Guter originally favored holding prisoners at Guantanamo, but he thought their detention would be temporary. "We would be safe, the detainees would be safe from reprisal," Guter says. "But many of us expected some sort of hearings by now for some of these people. The crux of this is, how long can we hold people without anything? It's now two years, and that's troubling." Guter and his colleagues believe the administration and Pentagon missed a chance to provide quick hearings called for in international conventions on the treatment of prisoners to determine if the captives were probably enemy combatants. "somehow, in the fog of war, we skipped over that," says Hutson. Instead, President Bush ordered the creation of military tribunals to try some captives. But those trials have been delayed by debate over rules and by complicated negotiations with Britain, Australia and other countries that have nationals held prisoner at Guantanamo. For two years, the Bush administration has described the detainees as "the worst of the worst" and "killers." The three former officers are skeptical, noting that 88 have been released so far from the prison camp. "We're trying to separate the goat-herders from the real terrorists, and that's not easy, but I'm not convinced they're all guilty," says Hutson. The trio also worries that the Guantanamo precedent will make it easier for other countries, groups and warlords to hold Americans, keep them isolated and ignore the Geneva Conventions. "If we want the world to play by the rules, we have to be on the moral high ground," says Brahms. Brahms, who was the Marine Corps' principal legal adviser on POW issues when the Vietnam War was ending, recalls that US forces in Vietnam tried to follow the Geneva rules on POWs, and that gave them some leverage with North Vietnam, which was holding US prisoners. "International pressure was important, and they [North Vietnam] played a little more by the rules toward the end," Brahms says. There may be an inclination in the military to go along with indefinite detentions, Guter said, but it's misplaced. "We took an oath to defend the Constitution," he says, "not the president or secretary of defense." (Knight Ridder/Fort Wayne Sentinel)
November 30: Viet Dinh, the chief author of the USA Patriot Act and who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, says that he thought the government's detention of Jose Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review. While Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise. Dinh says the case is "unsustainable." Another top former Justice Department official, Michael Chertoff, who headed the department's criminal division, says he believed the government should reconsider how it designates enemy combatants. "Two years into the war on terror, it is time to move beyond case-by-case development," Chertoff said last month. "We need to debate a long-term and sustainable architecture for the process of determining when, why and for how long someone may be detained as an enemy combatant, and what judicial review should be available." Chertoff, a federal appeals court judge, later said that there is a need to reexamine procedures for combatants. "Inevitably, decisions of war are made with imperfect information," he said. "Perhaps the time has come to take a more universal approach." Dinh's remarks amazed some legal experts. "The person next to me said, 'My God. He is saying that the Padilla case is wrong!'" says Harvard law professor Philip Heymann, who agrees that the administration view in the case is wrongheaded. "There has to be some form of judicial review and access to a lawyer," says Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. "That is what habeas corpus was all about. That is what the Magna Carta was all about. You are talking about overthrowing 800 years of democratic tradition." (Los Angeles Times)
November 30: A US soldier in Kosovo wonders why his fellow soldiers in Iraq haven't yet received the body armor they need to ward off Iraqi guerrilla attacks. He writes, "There's little to no threat to any of us here compared to the troops in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Certainly there always exists the possibility of something happening here. But in Iraq it's not simply a possibility. Several times a day, day after day, the need for this body armor is demonstrated. With every incident that occurs in Iraq in which a soldier is lost due to substandard body armor, the other soldiers and I who have the armor but don't need it have to live with the guilt of their loss. I'm personally embarrassed to even have the Interceptor vest. The sad truth is that we rarely wear the vests. They're seen as one more piece of useless equipment that soldiers are forced to tote along with them on patrols. A lot of us are often left to wonder how the US military can be so incompetent and so seemingly brainless. How was something like this allowed to happen? What command personnel would submit a request at this time for this level of armor for the troops in Kosovo? Moreover, what kind of person would even knowingly consider approving such a request? ...[T]he military has failed its fighting soldiers." The soldier, who writes to the European edition of Stars and Stripes, also questions the provision of "up-armored" Humvees to troops in Kosovo when the forces in Iraq are lacking them. "Is the U.S. military so crippled by its enslaving obsession with paperwork, tracking and accountability of supplies and equipment that it doesn't see what's happening, or is it simply turning a blind eye? I consider it to be a combination of both." (Eurpoean Stars and Stripes)
November 30: President Bush is on pace to reach his goal of raising $170 million for campaigning in a primary in which he is unopposed. $170 million is a record-breaking amount of campaign money, made more notable by the fact that Bush will have to spend none of it combating a GOP challenger. Both Bush and leading Democratic challenger Howard Dean have built huge grass-roots organizations aimed at getting out the vote and energizing the electorate. New campaign finance regulations limiting "soft money" expenditures have made both parties more reliant on volunteers and on people-to-people contact as opposed to high-tech, television-based campaigns. (Washington Post)
November 30: Middle East expert William Beeman writes of the Thanksgiving fly-in to Baghdad by President Bush that it was primarily designed to steal the media attention from the impending Baghdad visit by Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed. "The president's high-profile event successfully masked the senators' profiling of the failures of the Afghanistan reconstruction, to the detriment of the abandoned Karzai government," Beeman writes. More importantly, in Beeman's opinion, the visit underscores the fact of American domination of Iraq, a message that will do little to bring peace and stability to the nation. "For Iraqis, the 'fly-in' was more than a little arrogant, showing that the U.S. leader could pop in any time he wished without consulting any Iraqi official or seeking prior permission. Once on the ground, the pep talk that Bush gave to the troops was nothing more than a stump speech. It repeated a range of myths and inaccuracies about the conflict to the troops, including the oft-repeated, incorrect claim that those who are fighting American forces in Iraq are 'Saddam's [Hussein] henchmen.' His claim that 'We will prevail!' is fast becoming a slogan for the president -- one he may live to regret. His advice to Iraqis was a call to submit to the American construction of the war and the occupation -- something they clearly are not ready to do. The president's trip may have given a boost to the troops, and painted him in a heroic light for Americans at home, but his visit will not change anything on the ground in Iraq. The disorder that accompanies the US occupation continues, as well as the indecision concerning the transition to self-governance for Iraqis. ...It becomes increasingly clear that for the Bush administration, victory means domination of the Iraqi political process. The Iraqis know this. That is why so many different groups--at least 15 different bodies with differing political opinions and agendas -- are resisting the occupation. In the end the American strategy will fail, because it lacks ground-level Iraqi support. The real victory for America would be to leave Iraq in purely Iraqi hands, with the complete confidence of the Iraqi people that they are indeed free, and not part of yet another colonialist regime." (Chicago Tribune/American Anthropological Association)
November 30: Columnist Richard Gwyn quotes British jurist Lord Steyn on the lawlessness of the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, "Guantanamo Bay must be one of the lowest points in the distinguished story of United States jurisprudence." Steyn continued, "There is no rule of law in Guantanamo; that is the whole idea," Steyn observed of the US legalism of using the fact that the prisoners did not wear uniforms as justification to exclude them from the protections of the Geneva Convention. Instead, they are to be tried by secret military tribunals with the power to impose death sentences. There was not "a vestige of legitimacy in domestic or international law," to this interpretation, said Steyn. Steyn quoted an American authority's observation that these procedures "are the kinds of trials one associates with the most lawless totalitarian regimes." He then asked the essential question: "What must authoritarian regimes, or countries with dubious human rights records, make of the example set by the most powerful of all democracies?" Gwyn goes on to call for the Bush administration to re-examine its actions regarding Guantanamo and the way it treats terror suspects in general, pointing out that as the world's leading democracy, the US has the obligation to hold to a higher standard than the excesses and criminalities of your average thuggish totalitarian regime. Instead, it risks sinking lower than that particular standard. "Today, Bush is projecting outwards an image of American lawlessness," Gwyn concludes. "Eventually, the war on terror will be won, although it will be long and hard. But it will be a Pyrrhic victory if, by then, the U.S. and other democracies will have lost, or at best have compromised, the rule of law that is democracy's essence." (Toronto Star)
Late November: General Ralph Eberhardt, commander of the new US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), mandated to coordinate the military's involvement in domestic law enforcement, says his command must focus on "the home front" in the war on terror: i.e. domestic dissent. Eberhardt says that while NORTHCOM will not do any spying itself, it will receive and use information from the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit, an agency created after 9/11 to spy on foreign terror suspects but whose mandate was broadened in August 2002 to spy on American citizens, including maintaining a huge database of credit card transactions, intercepted communications, and the like. Reporter William Arkin writes, "There can be no other conclusion: Domestic spying is back." (Los Angeles Times/Mark Crispin Miller)
Late November: FBI investigator Jack Eckenrode, heading the investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent, decides to have White House officials sign statements waiving any confidentiality agreements they have with journalists. That way Eckenrode can tell reporters that their sources have waived their right to confidentiality, and have more leverage in finding out who told what to whom. Eckenrode gets his waivers, which are dismissed by most journalists as inherently coercive. Lewis Libby's lawyer later says that Libby signed the waiver feeling that if he did not, he would be fired. The signal was clear: this leak investigation was serious. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

"[The attacks on the Dixie Chicks] reminded me of things I'd read about Berlin in 1938. It pissed me off." -- Merle Haggard, November 26, 2003, quoted in Buzzflash

Back to November 2003

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

November 2003:

Week Four

GOP orchestrates Medicare bill passage by breaking House rules

Domestic terror case ignored by media

Secretive Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad by Bush

Quick Navigation Menu

2003 Month by Month

2004 Month by Month

2005 Month by Month

2006 Month by Month

2007 Month by Month

Other Pages On This Site

Copyright © 2002-2007 Max Black