October 2003: Week Three: This Far and No Further

Back to October 2003 | On to October 2003: Week Four

October 15: The UN Security Council surprises many by unanimously approving a US-sponsored resolution asking for military and financial assistance for the US in Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
The vote is seen as a victory for the Bush administration, who had lobbied hard for passage. Previously, France, Germany, and Russia had announced their intentions to abstain from the vote, but in the end, they voted yes. Secretary of State Colin Powell says, "I think the major disagreements of the early part of the year -- to go to war or not to go to war -- that's over. ...What we have been debating the last several weeks is how best to create the peace -- not whether to go to war or not -- and how best to create a new government in Iraq that will be representative of its people and live in peace with its neighbors. I think we are all now agreed to that." Veteran political correspondant Fred Kaplan characterizes the resolution as "toothless." Kaplan writes, "The resolution essentially changes nothing. Its drafters have paid lip service to accelerating the process of Iraqi self-governance and strengthening the United Nations' role in this process. But a close reading of the resolution indicates that all power remains in American hands, that no real authority is transferred to the United Nations, and that a new Iraqi government remains a long way off. The resolution may pass, but the act will have no effect. It will not compel or persuade other countries to donate money or manpower. Nor will it convince anyone who needs convincing on the ground in Iraq that the U.S. occupation is short-term or legitimate. In short, the resolution fails to accomplish the main diplomatic tasks at hand -- to share the burdens of building postwar Iraq and to quell the violent resistance so the rebuilding can proceed securely." (CNN, Slate)
October 15: It is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration wants the requested $87 billion for Iraq to be in the form of grants, not loans, for one simple reason:
Iraq war and occupation
it intends to launder the bulk of that money through its business cronies and receive some of it back in political contributions, while the bulk of the remainder goes into the coffers of administration-friendly corporations. Reporter Robert Trilling writes, "Against the backdrop of a treasury-draining scheme to remake the world, a few million dollars in corporate contributions to a sitting president may seem insignificant, but one can be sure they matter to Bush -- and to his political opponents. For Democrats, the spectacle of a Republican administration larding out contracts to close allies is a political disaster. ...Iraq is being set up for auction, and in Washington and Baghdad, the administration is lining up bidders. Lawyers and lobbyists, many with deep ties to the Republican electoral machine, are corralling investors ready to join in the enormous gamble. 'If you go to the Four Seasons and shout out "Who's working on a deal in Iraq?" everybody there will raise their hand,' said Ed Rogers, one of the GOP's top lobbyists in Washington.... With non-American companies frozen out, and the UN withdrawing its mission, U.S. firms will be on their own, just the way the administration wants it. " Firms like Halliburton, its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root, Bechtel, and others are already repaying their huge, lucrative Iraq contracts with fat campaign contributions to the GOP and to Bush's re-election campaign fund. Middlemen firms like the emergent New Bridge Strategies have been formed to guide new Iraqi contracts to GOP-friendly corporations. (New Bridge is closely linked with GOP lobbying firm Barbour, Griffith, and Rogers; former GOP chairman Haley Barbour and BGR founder Ed Rogers are two of New Bridge's executive directors. New Bridge's chairman, Joe Allbaugh, is a long-time Bush crony and recent head of FEMA; he resigned that post to take the chair of New Bridge. Trilling writes of Allbaugh, "...he may not be leaving Bush's circle so much as becoming a different kind of operative, able to bind corporate and lobbying dollars to White House priorities.") Campaign finance expert Thomas Ferguson says, "Forget all the talk about Arab democracy. The election these guys are focused on is right here at home." (Village Voice)
October 15: The federal commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has subpoenaed the Federal Aviation Administration, after discovering that the agency had withheld a variety of tapes and documents that were "highly material to our inquiry.
9/11 attacks
...It is clear that the FAA's delay has significantly impeded the progress of our investigation." The commission warns that other executive brance agencies may have documents and material subpoenaed in the near future. The resulting delays could force the commission to extend its investigation beyond May 2004, when it is supposed to finish its task. The possibility of an extension worries the Bush administration, since it could mean the public release of a potentially embarrassing report in the heat of 2004's presidential campaign. One of the main focuses of the commission's investigation is whether or not the FAA, NORAD, and other reacted too slowly to the hijacking of four aircraft the morning of the attacks; the panel and its staff are alarmed by discovering they had not been provided with detailed transcripts and other information about communications on that day between the the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the unit of the Pentagon that is responsible for defending American air space. Some of the data sought by the commission concerns the critical 29 minutes between the time the FAA knew the commercial flight that eventually hit the Pentagon had been diverted and notification of the North American air defense command. The FAA says it intends to fully cooperate with the investigation. "I am deeply concerned to learn that the F.A.A. has apparently both misled and failed to adequately respond to the 9/11 commission's request for documents," says Republican Senator John McCain, who cosponsored the bill that created the commission last year. Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, the lead Democratic sponsor, says that the significance of the subpoena was clear: "This administration is standing in the way of a thorough and searching inquiry." (New York Times, Memphis Commercial Appeal)
October 15: An International Institute for Strategic Studies report shows that the Iraqi war has swelled the ranks of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and "galvanized the Islamic militant group's will."
Islamist terrorism
The report calls the US efforts to claim that it is winning the war on terrorism as "overconfident." The IISS is one of the most respected sources for information on military capabilities and readiness of countries around the globe. The report recommends that the US impose security in Iraq to prevent the country from "ripening into a cause celebre for radical Islamic terrorists." "Nation-building" in Iraq is paramount and might require more troops than initially planned. "On the plus side, war in Iraq has denied al Qaeda a potential supplier of weapons of mass destruction and discouraged state sponsors of terrorism from continuing to support it. ...On the minus side, war in Iraq has probably inflamed radical passions among Muslims and thus increased al Qaeda's recruiting power and morale and, at least marginally, its operating capability. ...The immediate effect of the war may have been to isolate further al Qaeda from any potential state supporters while also swelling its ranks and galvanizing its will." It says that 18,000 veterans of al Qaeda's Afghan training camps were still probably operating worldwide "with recruitment continuing and probably increasing following the war in Iraq." (Reuters/Wired News)
October 15: Several senior prosecutors in both the Justice Department and the FBI criticize Attorney General John Ashcroft for not recusing himself from the investigation of the administration's CIA leak,
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
and for not appointing a special counsel to impartially investigate the incident. The prosecutors represent a cross section of experienced criminal prosecutors and include political supporters of Ashcroft at the department's headquarters in Washington as well as US attorneys' offices around the country. They fear that Ashcroft could be damaged by continuing accusations that as an attorney general with a long career in Republican partisan politics, he could not credibly lead a criminal investigation that centered on the aides to a Republican president. Democrats have criticized each step of the inquiry as tainted by Ashcroft's relationship with the White House. Ashcroft has parted with the thirty-year tradition of the Attorney General attempting to maintain a certain distance from the White House; instead, Ashcroft is an open ally and confidant of Bush and his inner circle. (New York Times)
October 15: White House PR flack Dan Bartlett appears on ABC's Nightline to complain about the press's "unfair" coverage of the Bush administration, particularly in regards to Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
Bartlett says that the media doesn't provide "the full picture" of the "incredible amount of progress being made in Iraq." He calls for a "debate about the content as well as the judgment of what makes news." Violence in Iraq shouldn't be reported, he says, because it is "old news" and not representative of what is happening in Iraq today. Instead, Bartlett says, the news stories on Iraq should be about "freedom."
Anchor Ted Koppel, no favorite of the White House, counters by reminding Bartlett that the information provided from the White House has often been suspect, and cites the fact that "the director of USAID was on the broadcast [and] told me that he anticipated that the total cost of the US contribution to the rebuilding of Iraq was going to be $1.7 billion. Clearly off the mark. Paul Wolfowitz made it quite clear that he thought oil production in Iraq was going to be able to pay for the reconstruction of that country. Clearly isn't going to happen." Bartlett dismisses Koppel's objections, and says that he doesn't believe anyone in the administration told "the American people or the Congress or the media one thing, while we completely knew something different." Bartlett argues that Wolfowitz's wildly false assertion that Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq merely a matter of semantics, and tries to rephrase Wolfowitz's statement by saying that Wolfowitz merely said Iraqi oil revenues would "help rebuild the country," a complete restructuring of Wolfowitz's pre-invasion claim that Iraq would "really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
It was only days later that Gannett News Service would reveal that "feel-good" letters purporting to be from soldiers in the field were planted by the Pentagon in the nation's newspapers. At least 11 different newspapers around the country print identical letters supposedly from soldiers posted in Iraq; the letters praise the US's "successes rebuilding Iraq." Many of the signatories, asked about the letters, say they know nothing about them; others say they had been asked to sign a form letter without knowing what they were signing. Gannett learns, and reports, that the letters apparently originated from an Army brigade's public affairs office.
The military is working overtime to control the presentation of affairs in the press. Selected soldiers are allowed to appear on camera, if approved by their superiors and their public affairs officers, but many are not allowed to talk to reporters at all, especially if they have been wounded in combat. The experience of wounded soldiers at Washington's Walter Reed Military Hospital is typical; news reporters and camera crews are not allowed into the buildings at all, and wounded soldiers are not allowed to speak to reporters under virtually any circumstances. Of all people, Cher, the singer and celebrity, questions the refusal to allow the wounded veterans to appear on the news: "Why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president -- why aren't they taking pictures with all these guys?" she asks after visiting veterans at the hospital. "Because I don't understand why these guys are so hidden and why there aren't pictures of them."
It is around this time that, as reported elsewhere in this site, that the White House tries to blame the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln for the staged PR presentation of May 1, 2003, which featured Bush being flown onto the decks and strutting before the cameras in a flight suit. According to the White House spin machine, the entire "Mission Accomplished" theme, so artfully constructed by Scott Sforza and the White House PR division, was actually the idea of the Lincoln's crew, who wanted to celebrate the successful completion of their own mission. Bush just happened to appear under the banner, just happened to show up while the Lincoln was being held offshore for an extra day, just happened to fly in on a Navy fighter. Of course, this entire denial is a blatant and transparent lie. (See the May 2003 page for more details.) "I guess the next thing we're going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier," says retired general Wesley Clark. (Frank Rich p.116)
October 15: Reporter David Corn comments on a press briefing held by White House press secretary Scott McClellan.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
After another reporter asks about a review conducted by the House Intelligence Committee of intelligence about prewar Iraq, which he characterizes as "fragmentary, unsubstantial, and contain[ing] too many uncertainties." McClellan asserts that the administration knew for a fact that Iraq possessed large and unaccounted-for stockpiles of biological and chemical weaponry. He then adds, "And then came 9/11." Corn challenges McClellan, pointing out that all documentation of Iraq's weapons program prove that Iraq had no such weapons stockpiles, including testimony from Colin Powell in February 2001, any number of UN weapons inspections reports, and a fall 2002 report from the DIA. McClellan accuses Corn of twisting Powell's statements and insists that the UN documented the existence of said stockpiles. McClellan refuses to hear Corn's follow-ups and states, "America is safer because Saddam Hussein was removed from power." Corn says that he couldn't get McClellan to address the facts "because he refused to recognize their existence." He characterizes McClellan's response as "bizarre, because that is what is in the public record. ...Refusing to acknowledge reality, it seems, can be effective spin." He wonders if McClellan is deliberately lying or if he, like so many other administration officials, seems to be "detached from reality." (NPR)
October 15: Three American soldiers are killed by a car bomb in the Gaza Strip in the first attack on US troops in the past three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.
Middle East unrest
The three were security guards for American diplomats attempting to mediate a settlement between Israel and Palestinian groups. Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat says, "These are American martyrs that came here at Palestinian request." (AP/Akron Beacon Journal)
October 15: A new memoir by Senator Minority Leader Tom Daschle,
Congressional Democrats
titled Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever, contains an interesting recounting of the first meeting between Daschle and newly elected President Bush. Bush, who initially was very cordial to Daschle, then stated, "I hope you'll never lie to me." Daschle recalls, "That statement caught me up short. What an unusual concern to express in such a meeting. ...I've often wondered since then what George Bush might have been told about me that would make him begin this conversation, this relationship, from an implied position of mistrust." (The Hill)

Limbaugh begins treatment for drug addiction

October 15: Rush Limbaugh checks himself into a $1000/day luxury spa and addiction treatment center, Tucson Sierra, in Tucson, Arizona.
Conservative media slant
Apparently the American media has not given a lot of attention to the details of Limbaugh's addiction, and Limbaugh has been far less than truthful in his own statements. From what is currently known, he began abusing prescription drugs in March 1998, when he began regularly "borrowing" painkillers from his housekeeper, Wilma Cline. (Limbaugh's original story to Cline was that he was suffering from persistent ear pain. The story about upper and lower back pain is a new wrinkle, one he hasn't claimed before. Medically, Limbaugh's ear condition should not have caused him pain.) She was able to keep Limbaugh in pills from prescriptions that her husband had until early 1999, when the prescriptions ran out. After that, Limbaugh began sending Cline to buy illegal, "street corner" supplies of the drugs. Sometime in summer 1999, Limbaugh attended a secret detoxification session at the Addiction Research Institute in New York City which claimed to be able to cure a patient's addiction within a 24-hour period. The detox session, which relies on the supplanting of the opiate buprenorphine for the drugs being abused, is apparently quite popular with celebrities and rich abusers who wish to keep their identities secret. The detox session obviously did not work, because Limbaugh went right back to abusing the drugs, particularly OxyContin, a prescription drug well known on the street as "hillbilly heroin," among other nicknames, because of its ability to give a heroin-like high when crushed and snorted. It is not known whether Limbaugh ever snorted the OxyContin. What is known is that at his worst, he was taking 93 40 mg pills a day, or 3720 mg a day -- a dosage far, far beyond safe tolerance levels (the maximum dosage is 160 mg a day). It is possible that the spinal pain Limbaugh is now claiming may have been actually caused by the OxyContin abuse. At some point in the spring of 2002, Limbaugh went back to ARI for a second one-day detox session, which also failed. Sometime in early 2003, Wilma Cline and her husband reported Limbaugh's drug abuse to the Palm Beach County, Florida, Assistant District Attorney. Limbaugh's famous hearing loss, once diagnosed as a rare condition known as AIED, or autoimmune inner ear disease, may well have been caused by his abuse of drugs. Two of the drugs that he abuses, OxyContin and Vicodin, are known to be ototoxic, or able to destroy a user's hearing. Apparently Limbaugh was originally diagnosed with AIED even though he displayed few of the symptoms.
In its October 11, 2001 issue, Newsweek reported that "his physicians explained that overuse of medications is not a factor in Mr. Limbaugh's case." One of his doctors, Dr. Jennifer Derebery of the House Ear Clinic, has recently said that their original diagnosis of AIED may have been wrong, and that the drug abuse may have caused the hearing loss. After the initial medicinal treatment failed to work, Limbaugh received a cochlear implant in December 2001. Limbaugh has hired lawyer Roy Black to represent him in this situation. Limbaugh was previously highly critical of Black for his successful efforts to defend Kennedy family member William Kennedy Smith from rape charges. Libertarian Party executive director Joe Seehusen says of Limbaugh's exposure, "One thing we don't hear from American politicians very often is silence. By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite. And that's good news, because the next time they do speak up, there'll be no reason for anyone to listen. America's drug warriors are shameless hypocrites who believe in one standard of justice for ordinary Americans and another for themselves, their families and their political allies. That alone should completely discredit them." Seehusen speculates that that the people who are prosecuting the drug war don't even believe in its central premise, that public safety requires that drug users be jailed. "The Bushes and Ashcrofts and McCaffreys of the world may believe, correctly, that individuals fighting a drug addiction deserve medical, not criminal treatment. That would explain why they're not demanding that Limbaugh be jailed. But if that's the case, these politicians have spent decades tearing apart American families for their own political gain. And that's an unforgivable crime." Limbaugh is currently under investigation by the Palm Beach County, Florida district attorney's office. (Italy Indymedia, Libertarian Party, AP/USA Today)
October 15: Village Voice columnist Sidney Schanberg writes, "But beyond all the distortions and exaggerations and falsehoods the Bush people engaged in to rally public support for the Iraq war, what I have never understood, from the 9/11 day of tragedy onward, is why this White House has not called on the American people to be part of the war effort, to make the sacrifices civilians have always made when this country is at war.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
There has been no call for rationing or conservation of critical supplies, such as gasoline. There has been no call for obligatory national service in community aid projects or emergency services. As he sent 150,000 soldiers into battle and now asks them to remain in harm's way longer than expected, the president never raised even the possibility of reinstating the military draft, perhaps the most democratizing influence in the nation's history. Instead, he has cut taxes hugely, mostly for affluent Americans, saying this would put money into circulation and create jobs. Since Bush began the tax cutting two and a half years ago, 2.7 million jobs have disappeared. All this I don't understand. If it's a crisis -- and global terrorism surely is -- then why hasn't the president acted accordingly? What he did do, when he sent out those first tax rebate checks, was to tell us to go shopping. Buy clothes for the kids, tires for the car -- this would get the economy humming. How does that measure up as a thoughtful, farsighted fiscal plan? In effect, George Bush says, believe in me and I will lead you out of darkness. But he doesn't tell us any details. And it's in the details where the true costs are buried -- human costs and the cost to our notion of ourselves as helpers and sharers, not slayers. No one seems to be asking themselves: If in the end the crusade is victorious, what is it we will have won? The White House never asked that question in Vietnam either." (Village Voice)

October 16: Bush says that US troop morale in Iraq is high and that life in Iraq is "a lot better than you probably think.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
Just ask people who have been there." In response, a reservist writes, "Everyone hears that morale is high and it is a bold-faced lie. The only people they [the media? the politicians?] ever talk to are these commanders. The reserve soldiers never get to speak their mind. We are the pawns of this war." (Washington Post/Intervention Magazine)
October 16: Newsweek publicizes the administration's desire to build up public support for an invasion of Iran.
War with Iran
The rationale is more solid than the "evidence" used to convince the American public of the need to invade Iraq. Iran does indeed have a program for developing a nuclear weapon, a program which has caused a strong reaction in the Bush administration. Iran has long been a sponsor of terrorism, although evidence connecting its government to al-Qaeda is not yet strong enough to base an accusation upon. The administration seems to be ignoring the Iranian people's well-documented desire to jettison the harsh policies of past regimes and join the developing world as a civilized, Westernized nation. And in contrast to Iraq's depleted and chaotic military, Iran has a strong military as well as the ability to easily annihilate American forces currently occupying Iraq; the Iranian mullahs believe, probably rightly, than another invasion would drastically overextend the American military and could be beaten back. Newsweek reports, "The troops Washington has on the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, are easy prey for guerrillas, terrorists or mobs any time the mullahs want to play that game. The Iranians don't need to show their hand. They have lines in with the Kurds, they can buy off Sunnis and they know all the players among the Iraqi Shiite majority. A Western official who negotiated with several of the powerful clergy in Najaf and Karbala recently came back to Europe convinced that Tehran had those holy cities completely wired: 'When I talked to the Iranians they knew verbatim -— verbatim —- my conversations with the Iraqi ayatollahs.' At best, there's a stand-off, and a dangerous one for both sides. But the countdown continues." (Newsweek/MSNBC)
October 16: A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) study contradicts the administration's position that the $87 billion request to Congress for Iraqi reconstruction costs is urgently needed.
Iraq war and occupation
The CRS study shows that adequate funding has already been allocated through May of 2004. It suggests that the recently-passed $368.2 billion 2004 Defense funding bill plus the emergency funding Congress passed at the start of the war provides the Army alone with $37 billion in funding for personnel and operations and maintenance, enough to fund operations through early May. Bush, as well as administration officials like Donald Rumsfeld, refuse to discuss the issue with Congress, preferring instead to simply insist on the passage of the funding package without explanation. "I'm not here to debate you," Bush recently snapped to a Republican Congressman who questioned him about particular aspects of the funding bill. He refused to allow the Congressman to speak further. (Daily Misleader)
October 16: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld writes a memo to generals Richard Myers and Peter Pace, along with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, questioning the direction of the "war on terror" in the context of the Iraqi occupation.
Iraq war and occupation
He points out, accurately enough, that the American military is trained and equipped to fight larger wars such as World War II, and copes less well with guerrilla resistance such as in Vietnam and Iraq. He suggests that a new institution might be created to handle the US efforts to eradicate terrorism: "It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere -- one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem." He calls the US results of trying to deal with al-Qaeda "mixed," says that there is slow progress in tracking Taliban leaders, and says "we are just getting started" with dealing with Ansar al-Islam and other terrorist groups. "Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?" he asks. "Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror? Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?"
Rumsfeld writes that we "lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," and asks if the US is "capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" He then asks, "Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions. Do we need a new organization? How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get?' It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog. Does CIA need a new finding? Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course? What else should we be considering?"
It is obvious that Rumsfeld is finally asking questions that others have been asking for months: Democratic Senator Joseph Biden says that Rumsfeld appears to have had an "epiphany," and adds that while Rumsfeld may not yet have shifted policy, the memo is "the first bit of introspection that I've even whiffed coming out of the Defense Department." A Cato Institute spokesman says, "[The] most striking feature is the pervasive pessimism. I think that struck many observers as surprising. And certainly, the secretary seems now more aware both of the difficulties of the war on terrorism and the postwar occupation in Iraq than he was a few months ago. ...It's refreshing in one sense that he is returning to the core problem of radical Islamic terrorism directed against the United States. On the other hand, he should have realized, and his advisers should have realized, that invading and occupying Iraq would be a veritable recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda." Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark says of the memo, "secretary Rumsfeld is only now acknowledging what we've known for some time -- that this administration has no plan for Iraq and no long-term strategy for fighting terrorism."
Middle East scholar Mahnaz Ispahani, who works for the Council on Foreign Relations, says she was impressed that Rumsfeld has finally begun to espouse ideas that have long been held by the more moderate State Department. "I do think this is a shift for him. He's worrying about how much the use of force is actually delivering for the United States in the war on terror, and asking are there alternatives. So this is clearly a shift for him and for [the Department of Defense], that has been so focused on using one resource that the United States has, which is the use of force." DoD officials play down the memo, which is leaked to the press within a week of its issuance, saying that it is just Rumsfeld doing what he always does, probing senior colleagues about major issues. While Rumsfeld is notorious for his "snowflake" memos, meant to "drift down to [the] Pentagon staff, carrying the defense secretary's thoughts and concerns," this is not one of those informal memos, but an official memorandum which carries considerable weight. Certainly the questions and the tone of the memo are in serious contradiction of the official Bush administration position; the statement that a victory in Iraq and Afghanistan would only come after a "long, hard slog" is widely repeated in Congress and the media. Rumsfeld's suggestion to create a private organization to entice radical Muslims to leave the "madrassah" training schools is certain not to be popular among most Muslims. A Pentagon spokesman says the memo was meant to raise "big questions that deserve big thinking." No one seems to know who leaked the memo, and why; some believe that Rumsfeld's critics inside the Pentagon leaked the memo, trying to paint him as waffling on the most important issue of his department and admitting errors -- and thereby, perhaps, hastening his departure from the administration. Others believe that the memo may have been leaked by Rumsfeld's office to place distance between Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and other senior Pentagon advisors who are the chief architects of the Iraq policy and possibly escape some of the blame if and when the situation in Iraq deteriorates further.
Nation writer David Corn echoes the thoughts of many administration critics when he observes, "If Rumsfeld says there is no way to measure success or defeat in the campaign against terrorism, how can George W. Bush declare that he is winning the war? Yet while speaking on September 12 at Fort Stewart in Georgia, before soldiers and families of the Third Infantry Division, Bush said, We're rolling back the terrorist threat, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart of its power.' As Rumsfeld might put it, according to what metrics, Mr. President?" He goes on to point out that while Bush repeats the mantra that Iraq is the core of the US effort to stop terrorism, Rumsfeld barely mentions Iraq, instead focusing on combating terrorism at its roots -- asking aide to think about ways to counter the radical Islamic madrassas that teach young Islamic students to hate everything Western and other ideas hardly mentioned by the Bush administration as a whole. (USA Today [the actual memo], BBC, Radio Free Europe, The Nation, Washington Post)
October 16: Bush issues an order for all White House and administration officials to stop leaking information to the press, and threatens unspecified consequences to those who continue leaking.
Secrecy of Bush administration
The order is leaked to the press almost immediately. The three-way turf war between the agencies led by Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice is alleged to be the cause for so many of the recent media leaks; observers characterize the situation as "way worse" than the notorious turf wars between the Reagan administration's George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. Bush's response prompts historian Robert Dallek to observe, "What's most revealing is the extent of frustration taking hold. ...It's really reminiscent of Johnson and Vietnam. Members of the Senate... and the media were giving him grief. It sounds like Bush is falling into that pattern. He's blaming the media, much like Johnson did." (Philadelphia Inquirer)
October 16: The UN head of weapons inspections Mohamed El-Baradei says that his inspectors need to return to Iraq to oversee inspections, because the situation is so chaotic and security is so poor that WMDs could go undetected.
Iraq war and occupation
"I'd like to see us going back and doing monitoring for a few years in Iraq, because the situation in Iraq is an absolute mess right now," El-Baradei says. He says there are still people in Iraq with a lot of knowledge about making chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. "They have the know-how and the capabilities" to make weapons of mass destruction, ElBaradei continues. "so from a non-proliferation perspective it's very important for us to complete the job." (Reuters/Alertnet)
October 16: Although 60% of Iraqi citizens remain unemployed, US companies have largely chosen to rely on cheap migrant labor from South Asia, contradicting Bush's statements about having Iraqis rely on themselves to rebuild the country.
Iraq war and occupation
Additionally, members of the Iraqi Governing Council believe that American contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel are grossly inflating the cost of reconstruction projects. The Iraqi governors told members of the U.S. Congress that Iraqi companies could be doing the work at 10 percent of the cost. (Daily Misleader)
October 16: Former president Bill Clinton corrects the misstatements and rumors about his administration's attempts to inform the incoming Bush administration about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Clinton, while speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the History Channel, says that he spoke directly to president-elect Bush about bin Laden. During the so-called "exit interview," Clinton says he tried to correct Bush's view of the threat posed by bin Laden. "In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defence," Clinton says. "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden." Clinton goes on to say that his inability to convince Bush of the danger from al Qaeda was "one of the two or three of the biggest disappointments that I had." According to Clinton, his priorities would have been first bin Laden, then the creation of a Middle East peace agreement, then dealing with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. "I would have started with India and Pakistan, then North Korea, and then Iraq after that," he says. "I thought Iraq was a lower order problem than al-Qaeda." (Reuters)

Troop morale plummeting; sick and wounded troops not getting decent treatment

October 16: A Stars and Stripes series shows troop morale in Iraq is at its lowest ever.
US veterans
National Guard and reserve troops reported the lowest morale, while Marines and airmen reported much more positive results. Leaders insist that troop morale is fine, but the troops themselves often tell a different tale. They also claim that delegations from home are treated to "dog and pony shows" that distort reality: "When congressional delegations came through," says one artillery master sergeant, commanders "hand-picked the soldiers who would go. They stacked the deck." An NCO with over 20 years' experience tells a New Zealand reporter, "I had one guy tell me all he wanted was to see his little daughter; she was born three days after the war started. He died in the sand holding my hand and crying because his daughter would never know him. Tell me that's f*cking right. Where was George Bush when this kid was gasping for air and spitting his blood on foreign soil?"
He says of Bush, "That *sshole went AWOL and never showed up for duty and then he has the nerve to take us into two different wars that will be going on for years. I do not believe he should be president of this country, he's a complete idiot and he's controlled by madmen with a drive for only profits and getting oil. ...I would like to thank Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Congress for...that nice huge cut they made to Veterans Benefits as soon as the war started. I am in the Reserves after years of active duty and now I cannot get PTSD counseling or many medical benefits I used to take for granted. I knew I would have the benefits because I was laying my life down for my country. Now my benefits are cut by around 2/3 and I have to go to either group therapy or pay for a private counselor out of my own pocket. What happens when someone like me has been through enormous battle stress and combat fatigue and then comes home to no counseling? I'll tell you what is going to happen, he will either kill himself or take a bunch of people with him. Some of the guys coming back are going to have gone through the worst time of their lives with their buddies dying and getting hurt, and then they'll find out they got screwed out of any counseling. It is the greatest disservice America is committing against soldiers who fought for this country and may come back wounded or horribly scarred. Medical services, school aid to dependents, school aid for the vets, all slashed to the bare bones; mental health and drug and alcohol counseling are being eliminated or the waiting lists will be years long for whatever services manage to survive. That is one thing the American people still have not really caught on to is the fact that while they were screaming out 'Support Our Troops' the current regime makers were f*cking the military and veterans out of almost every social program and non essential service that would make life easier. Bush really f*cked us while we were gone. We found out about after being in the middle of heavy fighting for several weeks. It was one of the first things I read in Stars and Stripes, and I thought it was a joke because it was just to hard to believe Congress and our leaders would screw us that bad while we were fighting and dying.
"...It's just like Nam was in the beginning. I was twelve when my dad got back and I'll never forget the pain and agony he lived with the rest of his life. It's kind of what I feel now, I suppose. I never thought I would ever serve in some stuff that's so much like Nam it isn't funny. Now I really see what my pop went through, and if I could I would go back in the past a few months, I would go AWOL or turn conscientious objector on them, but it's too late for that now. I damn sure will not go back over there even if they throw me in Leavenworth. I never could understand how a guy could be a conscientious objector until what I just went through. I wish more guys would stand up and tell Bush and the Pentagon they will not fight their war for oil. We should not have to die for these rich bastards profits and enrichment." When asked to respond to the question of low morale, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez replies, "There is no morale problem." (Stars and Stripes, Scoop, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
October 16: The Senate votes down legislation that would require Vice President Dick Cheney to terminate his ties with his former company Halliburton.
Halliburton
Cheney holds around 400,000 Halliburton stock options, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in deferred compensation, and has been proven to have been instrumental in Halliburton's receiving billion-dollar no-bid contracts in Iraq. (In These Times)
October 16: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad tells a summit of Muslim leaders that Jews ruled the world and recruited others "to fight and die for them."
Middle East unrest
He went on, "The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. ...They get others to fight and die for them." Mahathir, a respected Asian statesman, takes over the chair of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference. Mahathir receives a standing ovation from the gathered leaders, but strong criticism from Israeli and Jewish spokespersons. The Malaysian government later issues a weak and insincere apology ("I'm sorry that they have misunderstood the whole thing," says the foreign minister. "The intention is not to create controversy. His intention is to show that if you ponder and sit down to think, you can be very powerful."), but Mahathir's long reputation for virulent anti-Semitism precedes his commentary. Mahathir also criticizes Muslim nations for their infighting, and accuses them of accomplishing nothing in over 50 years of fighting Israel and world Judaism. (Chicago Sun-Times)
October 16: The new Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lieutenant William Boykin, is in charge of finding and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and other high-profile targets.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Boykin is also an evangelical Christian who sees the war on terrorism as an apocalyptic clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan. Boykin, a much-decorated soldier and 13-year veteran of Delta Force, appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian...and the enemy is a guy named Satan. ...Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army." Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Boykin also claimed to have seen the face of the devil in a photograph of smoke rising from Mogadishu: "Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy," Boykin said to a church audience in 2002 as he flashed his pictures on a screen. "It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy." Last year Boykin proclaimed, "We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this." And of President Bush, he says, "He's in the White House because God put him there. ...He was appointed by God."
Many observers see Boykin's explicitly evangelical message as wrong for the conflict, risking unnecessary alienation of Muslims around the world. Stephen Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Pease and Development, says, "The first lesson is to recognize that whatever we say here is heard there, particularly anything perceived to be hostile to their basic religion, and they don't forget it. ...The phrase 'Judeo-Christian' is a big mistake. It's basically the language of Bin Laden and his supporters. ...They are constantly trying to create the impression that the Jews and Christians are getting together to beat up on Islam.... We have to be very careful that this doesn't become a clash between religions, a clash of civilizations." Former military intelligence analyst William Arkin writes, "is a frightening blunder at a time that there is widespread acknowledgment that America's position in the Islamic world has never been worse." House Judiciary Committee member John Conyers writes a letter to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that says in part, "...[I]t is outrageous that someone who holds such extreme, closed-minded, zealous views would be allowed such a prominent position in our military. ...[Boykin's] statements are disgraceful and wholly inappropriate for a man in his position. These remarks are inflammatory to Muslims in our communities and abroad. While every American has the freedom to speak his mind and express his opinion, it is essential that those who hold high profile, policymaking positions in our government exercise judgment in their public speaking. Lt. Gen. Boykin clearly lacks such judgment. I urge you to reassign or reprimand him; we cannot afford to have such an extremist speaking on behalf of our nation and our military." (Los Angeles Times, Buzzflash, Los Angeles Times/Truthout)
October 16: A disproportionate number of the combat injuries suffered by US soldiers in Iraq affect the brain, according to military sources.
US veterans
Around 20 percent of the wounds suffered by the troops in Iraq have been severe brain injuries, and according to Major General Kevin Kiley, commanding general of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command, that figure does not even take into account milder neural injuries. Kiley estimates that as many as 70 percent of the wounds suffered by US forces in Iraq had the potential for resulting in brain injury. Virtually all who suffer the injuries, say Kiley and others, require extra attention because, unlike lost limbs, severe neural trauma is not always easily spotted. Says one soldier who survived a bullet in the brain, "Head injuries are there. You don't have to see them." (Boston Globe)

"Free speech zones"

October 16: Civil protests directed against Bush and administration officials are increasingly being shunted off to "free speech zones" well away from the officials' scheduled routes. As a result, the protests go unnoticed by both officials and media.
Antiwar protests
One Pittsburgh protester, retired steelworker Bill Neel, was told to leave the crowd of Bush supporters that was gathering along the side of the road where a Bush motorcade was due to pass, and take himself and his sister to the designated "free speech zone." "He pointed out a relatively remote baseball diamond that was enclosed in a chain-link fence," Neel remembers. "I could see these people behind the fence, with their faces up against it, and their hands on the wire. It looked more like a concentration camp than a free speech area to me, so I said, 'I'm not going in there. I thought the whole country was a free speech area.'" After refusing several more times to report to the designated protest area, the 66-year old Neel was handcuffed and arrested on charges of disorderly conduct. Neel's sister argued against the arrest, and she, too, was arrested. Both spent the rest of the day in a firehouse that was serving as Secret Service and police headquarters for the event. Neel later says, "As far as I'm concerned, the whole country is a free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind." At Neel's trial, police Detective John Ianachione will testify that the Secret Service told local police to confine "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a so-called free- speech area. Pennsylvania District Judge Shirley Rowe Trkula will throw out the disorderly conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'?"
Similar events have occured around the country, where Bush supporters are allowed to line the roads and throng around the President with their signs of support, while protesters are chained behind fences and arrested when they refuse to comply. On September 23, the American Civil Liberties Union and fellow plaintiffs NOW, ACORN, USA Action and United for Justice, and a number of other groups and individuals, filed a lawsuit against the Secret Service for denying them their basic right to freedom of speech. "There is some history supporting the notion that all presidents dislike people who don't like them," says Philadelphia ACLU head Stefan Presser, an attorney in the lawsuit. "But this approach of fencing protesters in and removing them from view is unprecedented, and it's gotten worse over the past two years." Another ACLU spokesperson remembers isolated incidents from the Reagan years, and a propensity for Nixon-era police to rip up signs and arresting protesters, but he says he's seen nothing like the orchestrated efforts that are being carried out by the Bush administration. The lawsuit holds that the Secret Service, with the assistance of state and local police, is systematically violating protesters' First Amendment rights via two methods. "Under the first form," the suit says, "the protesters are moved further away from the location of the official and/or the event, allowing people who express views that support the government to remain closer. Under the second form, everyone expressing a view -- either critical or supportive of the government -- is moved further away, leaving people who merely observe, but publicly express no view, to remain closer." In either case, the complaint adds, "protesters are typically segregated into what are commonly referred to as 'protest zones.'" The ACLU holds that the strategy violates the basic right of free speech and assembly, and "insulates the government officials from seeing or hearing the protesters and vice-versa, and it gives to the media and the American public the appearance that there exists less dissent than there really is."
The Secret Service denies all involvement, and blames all of the incidents on state and local police. Local and state authorities in turn say that "the Secret Service has in some cases all but ordered them to pen in protesters...and [makes] recommendations about how that should be done." Allegheny County Police assistant supervisor Paul Wolf, who was involved in planning for Bush's visit to Pittsburgh last fall, says that the decision to pen in Bush critics like Neel originated with the Secret Service. "Generally, we don't put protesters inside enclosures," he says. "The only time I remember us doing that was a Ku Klux Klan rally, where there was an opposing rally, and we had to put up a fence to separate them. What the Secret Service does is they come in and do a site survey, and say, 'Here's a place where the people can be, and we'd like to have any protesters be put in a place that is able to be secured.' Someone, say our police chief, may have suggested the place, but the request to fence them in comes from the Secret Service. They run the show."
Detective John Ianachione, who arrested Bill Neel in Pittsburgh, testified that the Secret Service had instructed local police to herd into the enclosed so-called free-speech area "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views." Explaining further, he added: "If they were exhibiting themselves as a protester, they were to go in that area." Many believe that the policy does not originate with the Secret Service, but from deeper within the White House. Asked specifically whether White House officials have been behind requests to have protesters segregated and removed from the vicinity of presidential events, White House spokesman Allen Abney said, "No comment," but added, "The White House staff and the Secret Service work together on a lot of things." An ACLU representative from Missouri says, "The Secret Service keeps saying that the decision to separate protesters and remove them from view is a local police matter. But these kinds of things only happen when the Secret Service is involved. We've had many visits to St. Louis -- by the pope, by candidates, by dignitaries -- and it's only when the president or the vice president come to town that this kind of thing happens." "We expect to see a lot more of this heading into a campaign season," says another ACLU attorney. The ACLU traces the tactic to the last GOP national convention in 2000. "The GOP tried to reserve every possible space where a protest group might rally," says attorney Presser. "Part of the party's contract with the city of Philadelphia for the convention was that they were given an omnibus permit to use 'all available space' for the two weeks of the convention. They basically privatized the city to block all legal protest." During that convention, the city attempted to require all groups seeking to protest during the convention to apply for permits to get a 15-minute protest time slot, during which they would be allowed to assemble and make their statement in a sunken "protest pit," remote from the Convention Center. Many groups refused, and the result was a series of conflicts with local police and many arrests, most of which were later tossed out by the courts.
Since then, Presser charges, the Bush administration has continued the strategy of using the Secret Service and cooperative local police departments to keep protesters at bay, and not incidentally, out of easy range of the media. "People used to say that Ronald Reagan's was the most scripted administration we ever had," Presser says, "but this Bush administration has gone way beyond that. ..."It seems that these 'security zones' for protesters have very little to do with the president's physical security, and a whole lot to do with his political security." (Salon, ACLU, San Francisco Chronicle)
October 16: Senator Ted Kennedy slams the Bush administration for telling "lie after lie after lie" to defend its policies.
Iraq war and occupation
During a speech that underscores his opposition to the administration's request for $87 billion in new funding for Iraq, Kennedy says, "The trumped up reasons for going to war have collapsed. ...The administration still refuses to face the truth or tell the truth. Instead the White House responds by covering up its failures and trying to sell its rosy version of events by repeating it with maximum frequency and volume, and minimum regard for realities on the ground." Kennedy asserts that the Bush administration has misled the country about every aspect of the Iraqi operation, from its motivation, to its aftermath and the costs incurred. "Our men and women in uniform fought bravely and brilliantly, but the president's war has been revealed as mindless, needless, senseless, and reckless. We should never have gone to war in Iraq when we did, in the way we did, for the false reasons we were given." Observers note that the relationship between Kennedy and the Bush administration has gone from initially cordial and friendly to icy. "They blew it," says one Democratic official of the White House's handling of its relationship with Kennedy. "They came into office and they started to work together on a number of issues, and then they completely dissed him." Kennedy goes on to say, "Nearly six months have elapsed since President Bush flew out to the aircraft carrier and declared `Mission Accomplished' in Iraq. Today, we all know all too well that the war is not over; the war goes on; the mission is not accomplished. An unnecessary war, based on unreliable and inaccurate intelligence, has not brought an end to danger. Instead, it has brought new dangers, imposed new costs, and taken more and more American lives each week. We all agree that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant, and his brutal regime was an affront to basic human decency. But Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one. ...All the administration's rationalizations as we prepared to go to war now stand revealed as double-talk. The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. He was not. We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction. He did not. We were told he was involved in 9/11. He was not. We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaeda. It was not. We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators. They are not. We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. It cannot. We were told the war would make America safer. It has not." (Boston Globe)
October 16: Presidential contender Howard Dean accuses the Bush administration of taking advantage of huge economic deficits in order to undermine Medicare and Social Security.
2004 presidential elections
"I think their principal motivation is to undo the pillars of the New Deal, particularly Medicare and Social Security, by making the budget deficit so big that those programs can't be sustained," Dean says. A GOP spokesperson blames the war on terrorism for the deficits and calls Dean's statement "disturbing." (USA Today)
October 16: Bob Beckel, a veteran Democratic political consultant and gadfly, says of the Bush administration, "These guys make Nixon's crowd look like a bunch of kids shoplifting candy at the local grocery store.
Republican corruption
They have taken the art of character assassination to the point where it is their number-one tool." He says that in the last 20 years, the political climate has "gotten much more partisan and negative. It's gotten much more dependent on money, particularly special interest money. Soft money has been used by certain groups to literally destroy the reputations of good progressive politicians. ...Limbaugh has made this into a fine art. I was the first person to put Limbaugh on television, back in '89 when I had a show for Fox. And I always admired his quick wit and his intellect, but he has gotten increasingly more into the business of character assassination. For example, he referred to John Kerry as 'the presumed Vietnam war hero.' 'Presumed' was the word he used. I mean, that's all you need to know. That's the most ridiculous, absurd statement. Here's a guy who won a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, and 'presumed' is a word that, given the low end of the bell curve that most of Rush's audience is, probably went right by them. But Rush does that."
Beckel discusses the GOP's use of race in politics: "The Right has built the modern Republican Party in the South on race and demonizing blacks. Attaching blacks to Democrats and all that's wrong with government has been the key to their success, especially in the South. And they have gotten away with it by being subtle and having very few people from our side in their face. We're in the business of exposing their tactics, some of which I've had used against me before -- like mailing official government-looking stationery to blacks in precincts in the South, telling them if they vote in the wrong place, they'll get a $5,000 fine and a year in jail. It obviously drove down black turnout. That's one that Jesse Helms' thugs used against Harvey Gant in NC. ...I don't know if you remember when Bush's people used those telephone banks against John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000, accusing him of having a black child and other despicable things. That's one of their tactics. Their use of automatic dialing of untraceable hate messages, phony front groups and other tactics has been elevated to an art form. We understand that, and we also know that it's illegal in most places. ...People were so shocked about what happened in Florida, but for years I've watched these guys in areas with Republican county and state control manipulate the voting process so that the poorest communities deliberately got the worst voting machines. And they were given a smaller amount of money on percentage than white communities to staff them. What happened in Florida got to be a big deal because it was a presidential race, and the entire world was watching, but what happened in Florida has been [the] MO of the Republican right for years. A big part of that is suppressing black turnout. ...The problem for campaigns dealing with these guys is the press tends to call it a political fight and not newsworthy." (Buzzflash)
October 16: Days after the Santa Cruz mayor and the City Council formally asked the US Judicial Department to investigate the possibility of impeaching George W. Bush, some residents are wondering if repercussions might not be underway.
Impeachment
Four days after the letter was delivered, Mayor Emily Reilly's bakery is robbed, with the burglar dodging a sophisticated security system to steal her computer's hard drive and backup drive. Days later, agents of the Food and Drug Administration visit the bakery and interrogate Reilly about the quality of her goods. Other town bakers wonder why Reilly was visited when, in over twenty years of doing business, their firms have never been visited. Reilly refuses to worry: "I think it's a coincidence. I don't think it's healthy to dwell on the possibility of conspiracy. It tends to make people afraid, and I don't think that's a good place to be. I'd rather be positive and move on." (San Francisco Chronicle)
October 16: A small Montana newspaper prints an interesting profile of "Montana's only homegrown billionaire," Dennis Washington.
Republican corruption
Washington is president of the Washington Group International and a long-time supporter of George Bush and the GOP. His WGI fits perfectly with the other firms profiting from the government's lucrative Iraqi contracts: in the words of a British newspaper, "All the American firms to get Iraqi reconstruction contracts have bankrolled George Bush and the Republican Party, or have direct links to USAID." WGI gave almost half a million dollars to Bush's 2000 election campaign. After 9/11, WGI began marketing itself as a "homeland security contractor" (the firm has extensive experience in dam building, environmental cleanup, and weapons destruction). A company spokesperson dismisses the widely held perception that large campaign contributions help well-connected companies land big government contracts, saying, "That's part of the competitive market." In contrast, author Stephen Pizzo writes, "While Vice President Dick Cheney's company, Halliburton, has attracted most of the press attention for its Iraq-related contracts, Halliburton is hardly the whole story. Halliburton's share is but a slice of multi-billion-dollar pie being divided up among a brotherhood of unusually well-connected and economically related individuals and entities." (Missoula Independent)

"Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." -- Lieutenant General William Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, New York Times, 10-17-03, quoted by Brandi Mills

October 17: Both the US House and Senate are expected to pass the $87 billion Iraqi funding request from the Bush administration,
Iraq war and occupation
but the Senate insists that at least $10 billion of that be considered a loan to Iraq, not a grant, against the express wishes of Bush and his officials. (See above items.) The amendment passed by the Senate would transfer the $10 billion into a grant if 90% of foreign debt amassed by Iraq with other debtors such as France and Germany were forgiven by those countries. The funding request is far from settled yet. Republican Senator John Ensign says, "Why should the American taxpayer not be paid back if the taxpayer in France, if the taxpayer in Germany, if the taxpayer in Russia -- countries that were not willing to support us when we were doing what was right in the world -- why should those taxpayers be paid back and not the taxpayers of America?" (CNN)
October 17: Experts reveal that the single vial of botulism toxin found by David Kay's weapons inspection group in Iraq
Iraq war and occupation
is a strain called C. botulinum Okra B, most likely purchased legally from a US organization in the 1980s, and a toxin that has never been successfully used to produce a weapon. "The Soviets dropped it [as a goal] and so did we, because we couldn't get it working as a weapon," says Dr. David Franz, the former commander of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, the Pentagon's lead laboratory for bioweapons defense research. "From the weapons side, it's not something to be concerned about," agrees Dr. Raymond Zilinskas, a former UN inspector who is now director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute in California. A US spokesperson retorts, "[Kay] stated a simple fact. What Dr. Kay said was botulinum B can be used to produce a biological agent. Can that agent be used to produce a biological weapon? You bet." However, the experts are unanimous in their dismissal of the toxin as evidence of any serious bioweapons research. Other evidence produced by Kay that he uses to assert that Iraq was involved in bioweapons research is similarly suspect. Iraq had continued to work with a number of toxins, including aflatoxin, brucella, ricin, and CCHF (Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever).
The aflatoxin research, which was primarily conducted in the 1980s, was never considered a serious threat because of its lack of effectiveness: "It's not particularly toxic, and its primary effects are long term," says Zilinskas. "My feeling to this day is that it was a scam that the scientists put over on the decision-makers because it's easy to produce and the decision-makers wouldn't know it is useless as a biological weapon." While ricin is a highly lethal toxin, it is almost impossible to weaponize: "They gave up using ricin as a weapon," says Franz. "That was the right decision, in my opinion." Because it is so difficult to produce the proper powdered form for aerosol distribution, he adds, "you almost need to be hit by a brick of it to kill you." Brucella is ineffective because it is simple to treat, and evidence that Iraq was working to develop it as a toxin has not been found; as for CCHF, while it is a deadly disease, no evidence of Iraq attempting to weaponize it has been found. Another former UN inspector casts doubts upon Kay's methodology: "Kay...gives the impression [that chemical weapons] were kept with conventional munitions and he'll have to check every shell. That's baloney. They kept them separated from regular munitions, they had separate security, and they had a separate chain of command. They were never co-located with conventional munitions." (Los Angeles Times)
October 17: It is revealed that Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer fought assiduously to weaken the authority of an independent agency being set up to oversee how he spends Iraq's oil profits.
Iraq war and occupation
At one point, he suspended the negotiations for six weeks to show his displeasure with efforts by the agencies, including the UN and the World Bank, to ensure the independence of the new watchdog agency, to be known as the International Advisory and Monitoring Board. In the end, the agencies were able to get ground rules that they could live with, more or less. "The resolution says there must be an independent voice, and there will be," says one official said. "One has to wonder whether this [Bremer's opposition] was a question of ignorance or ill will." The US characterizes the delay as part of an effort to make the process fully transparent and to give the oversight board the proper authority, but members of the agencies involved in the negotiations say that Bremer wanted to restrict the authority's role to mere bookkeeping. (Reuters/Yahoo News)

Sick and wounded US troops held in "squalor"

October 17: Hundreds of sick and wounded American troops are being held in "squalor" in cement barracks at Fort Stewart, Georgia, while they wait, sometimes for months, for medical treatment.
US veterans
Approximately 600 sick or injured soldiers, all either members of the Army Reserves or the National Guard, are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or illnesses. Their living conditions are described as "substandard," and the medical care is so poor that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document given to the soldiers states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11, almost a month without a single doctor's visit for a single wounded or ill soldier. "I have loved the Army. I have served the Army faithfully and I have done everything the Army has asked me to do," says one sergeant, a 27-year veteran and participant in the 1991 Persian Gulf War who has been trying in vain to have doctors find out why he is experiencing intense pain in his abdomen since returning from Iraq in May. "Now my whole idea about the U.S. Army has changed. I am treated like a third-class citizen." After waiting since May for a diagnosis, the sergeant has given up; he has accepted 20 percent of his benefits for bad knees and is going home to his family in Mississippi. "They have not found out what my side is doing yet, but they are still trying," he says. The soldiers are on what the Army calls "medical hold," while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits -- if any -- they should get as a result. Some of the soldiers say they have waited six hours a day for an appointment without seeing a doctor. Others describe waiting weeks or months without getting a diagnosis or proper treatment. The soldiers said professional active duty personnel are getting better treatment while troops who serve in the National Guard or Army Reserve are left to wallow in medical hold. "It is not an Army of One. It is the Army of two -- Army and Reserves," says another soldier, who developed a serious heart condition and strange skin ailment while in Iraq.
Many of the soldiers descibe clusters clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among previously healthy troops. They say the Army has tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing condition" prior to military service. Most soldiers in medical hold at Fort Stewart stay in rows of rectangular, gray, single-story cinder block barracks without bathrooms or air conditioning. They are dark and sweltering in the southern Georgia heat and humidity. Around 60 soldiers cram in the bunk beds in each barrack. Soldiers make their way by walking or using crutches through the sandy dirt to a communal bathroom, where they have propped office partitions between otherwise open toilets for privacy. A row of leaky sinks sits on an opposite wall. The latrine smells of urine and is full of bugs, because many windows have no screens. Showering is in a communal, cinder block room. Soldiers say they have to buy their own toilet paper. They said the conditions are fine for training, but not for sick people. "I think it is disgusting," says one reservist. Another Army Reservist says he has had real trouble seeing doctors about his crushed foot he suffered in Iraq. "There are not enough doctors. They are overcrowded and they can't perform the surgeries that have to be done. ...There are people here who got back in April but did not get their surgeries until July. It is putting a lot on these families." On October 9, Bush spoke in New Hampshire about the role played by National Guard and Army Reserve troops: "Citizen-soldiers are serving in every front on the war on terror. And you're making your state and your country proud." (UPI)
October 17: The Pentagon reveals plans to call up even more reservists and National Guard members to serve in Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
Meanwhile, critics insist that the Pentagon begin planning to rotate some of the longest-serving reserve and Guard units home. Republican John McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, says, "If we don't ease the burden on the Guard and Reserves, we're going to have retention problems." Fellow Republican Senator Trent Lott agrees: "You have to have some sort of rotation scheme for the men or women that are over there that's a limit to how long they'll stay. Then you have to bring in other people, other divisions or other National Guard or whatever." (AP/San Jose Mercury News)
October 17: Attorney General John Ashcroft claims that progress has been made on the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case,
Plame outing
but cites no specifics and won't yet recuse himself from the proceedings. He claims, "I believe that we have been making progress that's valuable in this matter. And we will devote every energy that's available, and every resource that's available at the highest level of intensity." (New York Times)
October 17: Lawyers representing two Saudi princes argue that their clients have diplomatic immunity from lawsuits brought against them relating to the 9/11 attacks.
9/11 attacks
Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz and Prince Turki al-Faisal, formerly head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, have been sued by hundreds of relatives of the victims, who allege that they knowingly contributed money and support to al Qaeda through Islamic charitable organizations. The $1 trillion lawsuit says members of the Saudi royal family paid protection money to Osama bin Laden's group to keep it from carrying out terror attacks in Saudi Arabia. (CNN)
October 17: The US launches a "good news" offensive in Iraq, trying to convince Iraqis that their lots in life are better than they may think.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
Two "poster children" of the offensive are two Baghdad street kids who sell soft drinks on the side of the road. They were spotted by US Commerce Secretary Don Evans during his recent two-day visit, and quickly chosen to put a happy face on the US's public relations assault. The flip side to the "cola kids" is reflected in the Bank of Baghdad, Mowafaq Mahmood, who complains that business is awful: "No one's applying for credit," he complains. As part of the offensive, the American military as well as the Bush administration are ratcheting up their efforts to force the US and world media to present only the approved government version of events in Iraq. One colonel complains that the US media insists on focusing on the stories of the soldiers who are regularly injured and killed in Iraq, but ignore stories like the arrival of new fire trucks in Baghdad. Republican Senator Larry Craig complained on October 6 that the media failed to report that "thousands and hundreds of [Iraqi] children went back to school this week; fellow Republican Senator Mitch McConnell retorted that "Journalism schools teach that news means bad news." In reality, American media outlets across the country reported the story of Iraq's reopening schools, and color photos of Iraq's new fire trucks were sent nationwide by a US newsphoto network. The media also reported that many Iraqi schools couldn't handle the influx of schoolchildren because of the damage caused by rampant looting in April, and that the majority of schools in the poorer neighborhoods of Baghdad and in southern Iraq have not yet been rehabilitated. Commerce Secretary Evans, while riding on a bus through Baghdad, tells reporters, "You know, the impression people get back home is very different from what's going on on the ground." ' His own presence showed that Iraq is safe, Evans says. What he fails to say is that minutes before, the bus had been diverted -- US soldiers had found a roadside bomb that could have killed Evans and everyone on board. (Guardian)

Administration offensive against anti-war protesters

October 17: John Ashcroft's Justice Department is mounting an offensive to prosecute anti-war and anti-Bush protesters by any means available.
Antiwar protests
In Miami, Ashcroft charges the environmental group Greenpeace with "sailor-mongering," an 1872 law designed to keep sailors from being lured from their ships with liquor and prostitutes. Ashcroft chose to charge Greenpeace with the obscure violation after some of their members boarded a vessel near the port of Miami, a ship that was illegally involved in smuggling mahogany. Observers call the charges an "unprecedented attack on the First Amendment" and characterize them as part of a "broader campaign to protect the nation against free speech, a campaign that has converted environmentalists into 'sailor-mongers' and nuns into terrorists." Earlier, Ashcroft filed charges against two nuns for obstructing national defense, a felony that netted both nuns over two years in federal prison. The nuns had gone to a missile silo housing a Minuteman III nuclear missile, painted crosses on the cement cap protecting the missile, and sang religious songs while awaiting arrest. Environmental and anti-war groups have noted that Ashcroft's Justice Department refuses to prosecute identical offenses perpetrated by right-wing protest groups such as the Cuban-American Democracy Movement. (Los Angeles Times)
October 17: In a speech to the Senate, Senator Robert Byrd says,
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
"[The fairy tale of the emperor with no clothes] seems to me very like the way this nation was led to war. We were told that we were threatened by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but they have not been seen. We were told that the throngs of Iraqi's would welcome our troops with flowers, but no throngs or flowers appeared. We were led to believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but no evidence has ever been produced. We were told in 16 words that Saddam Hussein tried to buy 'yellow cake' from Africa for production of nuclear weapons, but the story has turned into empty air. We were frightened with visions of mushroom clouds, but they turned out to be only vapors of the mind. We were told that major combat was over but 101 [as of October 17] Americans have died in combat since that proclamation from the deck of an aircraft carrier by our very own Emperor in his new clothes. Our emperor says that we are not occupiers, yet we show no inclination to relinquish the country of Iraq to its people. Those who have dared to expose the nakedness of the Administration's policies in Iraq have been subjected to scorn. Those who have noticed the elephant in the room -- that is, the fact that this war was based on falsehoods -– have had our patriotism questioned. Those who have spoken aloud the thought shared by hundreds of thousands of military families across this country, that our troops should return quickly and safely from the dangers half a world away, have been accused of cowardice. We have then seen the untruths, the dissembling, the fabrication, the misleading inferences surrounding this rush to war in Iraq wrapped quickly in the flag. The right to ask questions, debate, and dissent is under attack. The drums of war are beaten ever louder in an attempt to drown out those who speak of our predicament in stark terms. Even in the Senate, our history and tradition of being the world's greatest deliberative body is being snubbed. This huge spending bill has been rushed through this chamber in just one month. There were just three open hearings by the Senate Appropriations Committee on $87 billion, without a single outside witness called to challenge the Administration's line. But the time has come for the sheep-like political correctness which has cowed members of this Senate to come to an end. The Emperor has no clothes.
"This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods. Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this Administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods. The President asks for billions from those same citizens who know that they were misled about the need to go to war. We misinformed and insulted our friends and allies and now this Administration is having more than a little trouble getting help from the international community. It is perilous to mislead. The single-minded obsession of this Administration to now make sense of the chaos in Iraq, and the continuing propaganda which emanates from the White House painting Iraq as the geographical center of terrorism is distracting our attention from Afghanistan and the 60 other countries in the world where terrorists hide. It is sapping resources which could be used to make us safer from terrorists on our own shores. The body armor for our own citizens still has many, many chinks. Have we forgotten that the most horrific terror attacks in history occurred right here at home!! Yet, this Administration turns back money for homeland security, while the President pours billions into security for Iraq. I am powerless to understand or explain such a policy. I have tried mightily to improve this bill. I twice tried to separate the reconstruction money in this bill, so that those dollars could be considered separately from the military spending. I offered an amendment to force the Administration to craft a plan to get other nations to assist the troops and formulate a plan to get the U.N. in, and the U.S. out, of Iraq. Twice I tried to rid the bill of expansive, flexible authorities that turn this $87 billion into a blank check. The American people should understand that we provide more foreign aid for Iraq in this bill, $20.3 billion, than we provide for the rest of the entire world! I attempted to remove from this bill billions in wasteful programs and divert those funds to better use. But, at every turn, my efforts were thwarted by the vapid argument that we must all support the requests of the Commander in Chief.
"I cannot stand by and continue to watch our grandchildren become increasingly burdened by the billions that fly out of the Treasury for a war and a policy based largely on propaganda and prevarication. We are borrowing $87 billion to finance this adventure in Iraq. The President is asking this Senate to pay for this war with increased debt, a debt that will have to be paid by our children and by those same troops that are currently fighting this war. I cannot support outlandish tax cuts that plunge our country into potentially disastrous debt while our troops are fighting and dying in a war that the White House chose to begin. I cannot support the continuation of a policy that unwisely ties down 150,000 American troops for the foreseeable future, with no end in sight. I cannot support a President who refuses to authorize the reasonable change in course that would bring traditional allies to our side in Iraq. I cannot support the politics of zeal and 'might makes right' that created the new American arrogance and unilateralism which passes for foreign policy in this Administration. I cannot support this foolish manifestation of the dangerous and destabilizing doctrine of preemption that changes the image of America into that of a reckless bully. The emperor has no clothes. And our former allies around the world were the first to loudly observe it. I shall vote against this bill because I cannot support a policy based on prevarication. I cannot support doling out 87 billion of our hard-earned tax dollars when I have so many doubts about the wisdom of its use." (Robert C. Byrd)
October 17: Halliburton CEO David Lesar circulates an e-mail among company executives outlining talking points to defend the company against allegations of overcharging the US government in its Iraq operations.
Halliburton
In a memo entitled "Defending Our Company," Lesar said he was offended by the criticism but cautioned employees to be positive in their letters. "We should avoid stooping to our critics' level of dialogue, no matter how tempting that may be," he wrote. He said the critics are "distorting our efforts" to restore Iraq's oil industry and provide other services to the US military in Iraq. Among Lesar's suggestions for the letters to newspapers: "Halliburton makes our troops more comfortable in a difficult environment by bringing shelter, supplies, clean uniforms and mail from home." Halliburton is proud to offer its global resources at this critical time in the Middle East." "Halliburton has successfully helped to restore needed services in Iraq that will help bring some sense of normalcy for those who have suffered losses." The e-mail also included suggestions for making the letter effective, telling employees to "write from the heart and use your own words and, where possible, use firsthand stories." "It's OK to show your pride in your work and your co-workers, and to mention your own experience with Halliburton," Lesar said. According to published reports, however, as few as 20 percent of American soldiers in Iraq have access to purified water and entire units are suffering from dysentery. One senior military commander wrote that soldiers were "using hoses from an Iraqi latrine stall to get water enough to maintain their hygienic needs." (Daily Misleader, Daily Misleader [original Halliburton e-mail], AP/Fox News)
October 17: Philadelphia Mayor John Street leads his Republican rival in recent polls, reflecting citizens' anger at the FBI clandestine bugging of the mayor's office.
Election fraud
Street claims the federal government is interfering with his re-election bid. On October 7, police found an electronic listening device in the mayor's office; since then, federal officials have confiscated Street's handheld computer and raided the offices of the city pension board, finance department and treasurer as well as the office of one of Street's top political allies. Street's supporters believe the FBI probe and corresponding raids are campaign-related attempts to help Republicans win the state of Pennsylvania in the 2004 presidential election. "The media learned of (the raids) before we did," says Street spokesman Dan Fee. "The way they are handling this and the timing of it raises serious, serious questions." A week later, FBI reports show that no incriminating material were recorded by the bug during its two weeks of functionality. Street will go on to win the mayoral election, in part because of outrage over the bugging. (Reuters/CNN, Philadelphia Inquirer)

October 18: The House and Senate vote overwhelmingly to approve the bulk of Bush's request for $87 billion in funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iraq war and occupation
The House turns back a number of attempts to make $10 billion of that a loan instead of a grant for Iraq. Some expenditures, including money to establish a new postal service, is cut from the final proposal, and some Congressional members insist that they will continue to fight to make some of the money a loan. Senator Robert Byrd votes against the funding request, and says, "Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods." (Chicago Tribune)
October 18: Iraqi defector Khidir Hamza, who co-authored the book Saddam's Bombmaker which appeared just before the 2000 election, has been outed as a fraud.
Iraq war and occupation
Hamza helped perpetuate the lie that Iraq was on the brink of developing nuclear weapons and was an imminent threat to the US and to the world, an argument that helped push Americans towards supporting an invasion of Iraq. Weapons inspector David Kay and Bush defense advisor Richard Perle, among others, promoted Hamza's book. Perle supported Hamza's statements that after the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osiraq nuclear facility outside Baghdad, Saddam Hussein ordered future nuclear facilities to be dispersed at four hundred sites across the nation. "Every day," Perle said, these sites "turn out a little bit of nuclear materials. ...Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best, do we wait and hope he doesn't do what we know he is capable of...or do we take some preemptive action?" As one after another of the "facts" Hamza provided have been shown to be lies, an IAEA representative asked General Hussein Kamal about Hamza. Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, is an expert on Hussein's weapons programs and one of the most reliable sources of information about Iraq's weaponry. Kamal said of Hamza, "He is a professional liar. He worked with us, but he was useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything." According to Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi expert who worked with Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission until 1998, Hamza "did not, even remotely, get involved in any scientific research –- except for journalistic articles -– dealing with the fission bomb, its components or its effects" -- a far cry from the nuclear weapons expert Hamza paints himself to be. Khadduri says that Hamza was in Iraq's nuke program for a few months, but was "kicked out of the program at the end of 1987 for stealing a few air conditioning units from the building assigned to his project." Hamza "retired from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and became a college lecturer, a stock market swindler and a shady business middle-man." Currently Hamza is traveling with David Kay in search of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. (World Net Daily, New Yorker)

October 19: An internal State Department review of the Iraq situation predicted many of the problems plaguing the American occupation.
Iraq war and occupation
As of April 2002, the State Department project brought together over 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people, and other experts to study topics from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy. Their findings included a much harsher assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react badly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society. Some officials say that until recently, the Pentagon all but ignored the findings of the $5 million study, though the Pentagon claims that its officials took the findings into account. The study is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq. The report read in part, "The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting...." It urged American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key government facilities." Remarkably, the military office initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of the report until February 2003, less than a month before the invasion. The staff of General Jay Garner, the first administrator of postwar Iraq, wanted to have the head of the project, Tom Warrick, join it, but Warrick's appointment was blocked by senior Pentagon officials. "It was mostly ignored," says one senior defense official. (New York Times)
October 19: The FBI concludes Zacarias Moussaoui, long termed "the 20th hijacker" in the 9/11 plot, had no involvement in the planning or execution of the strikes.
9/11 attacks
The FBI states that is has long believed that Moussaoui "played no part in the 9/11 scheme and was only a minor player in al-Qaeda." This is a radical shift from previous FBI statements that Moussaoui was a major player in the 9/11 planning. Moussaoui, who has acknowledged that he was a member of al-Qaeda but denies any involvement in the 9/11 operations, is currently in a legal limbo while prosecutors wrestle with Judge Leonie Brinkema's ruling that because the government refuses to allow Moussaoui to interview captured members of al-Qaeda, the prosecution cannot allege that he was directly linked to the attacks. Moussaoui has argued that the captured al-Qaeda members could provide evidence that he was not involved in the September 11 plot. (SA/News24)
October 19: Research scientist Dr. Thomas Butler, of Texas Tech University, is suspected of misleading the FBI in reporting 30 vials of bubonic plague as missing and possibly in the hands of terrorists.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Butler was working with an antidote to a weapons-grade form of plague: "I was working with a specific antibiotic called gentimycin, which our FDA wants, if effective in plague, to add to the national stockpiles for use in a possible bio-terrorist attack," says Butler. When Butler made the report in early 2003, 60 FBI agents responded. He was questioned for nine hours, and his lab and home searched. After finding no evidence of a break-in, the FBI concluded there had been no theft and focused on Butler. "They presented me with their evidence of the investigation that pointed to only one possibility, and that was accidental destruction," says Butler. He claims that he never destroyed any of the vials, but the FBI still pressured him to sign a statement that he had "accidentally destroyed" the vials, and that he had destroyed them well before he made the report -- in other words, he lied to the FBI. Butler says that the FBI assured him he would go free if he just admitted to the accidental destruction; he signed the confession and instead of being freed, he was hauled away in chains, charged with lying to the FBI. "I was tricked and deceived by the government. I feel I was naive to have trusted them and the assurances they gave me," he says. "They wanted to conclude the investigation and, they told me, reassure the public that there was no danger to the public."
Butler isn't sure what happened to the plague vials, but he speculates that they were inadvertently destroyed by FBI searchers. Once the US's leading researcher on bubonic plague, Butler is now facing the ruins of his career and 69 felony charges totaling 400 years in prison. "There is no question that the government should have and did take this seriously,” says Butler's lawyer Johnathan Turley. "They had to. He took it seriously. How this got to this point, I'll never know. This is a train wreck." Turley says that after the initial charge of lying, the government kept adding new counts to the indictment: smuggling, mail fraud, embezzlement, theft, "shadow" agreements with pharmaceutical companies and tax evasion. Turley accuses the government of persecuting Butler. The prestigious National Academy of Sciences has written Attorney General John Ashcroft to protest the government's handling of the case. Butler is only the second case of a US academic taken up by the NAS; the first was Wen Ho Lee, the physicist that the government wrongly imprisoned on charges of spying for China. "There's a lot of things alarming about this case," says Turley. "And it's not just a question of missing vials. I'm alarmed about the entire bloody case." (CBS, Washington Post)

October 20: Bush has used his eight-day swing through six Asian countries to emphasize the war on terrorism and global security, say high-level administration officials.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
"The president is going with very little of economic importance in his pocket, to a part of the world where US relations have to a great extent been about economic ties," says security expert Kurt Campbell. "Now it's basically all security all the time." The visits, which have been tailored to tie in to Bush's PR campaign to put a brighter spin on the Iraqi situation, have angered some Asian governments, who wish to hear less about terrorism and more about the world's economic problems and regional concerns such as the nuclear threat from North Korea. "What's most needed in Asia are the very things the president is least likely to do," says Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. At the top of Mr. Cirincione's list is "getting serious about negotiating an end to North Korea's nuclear program." He also includes a push to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, redoubled efforts to reduce tensions between India and Pakistan, and more focused attention to Iran's nuclear program. Efforts like the Proliferation Security Initiative, which the president unveiled in a speech in Warsaw last May, are "a good idea," Cirincione adds, "but it's not a substitute for core policy on solving the most pressing problems." (Christian Science Monitor)

Administration infighting over bad pre-war intelligence revealed; "stovepiping"

October 20: According to an exhaustively researched article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the Senate Intelligence Committee is working to find out just why prewar intelligence estimates of Iraq's weapons stockpiles were in such error.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
One intelligence analyst says, "The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily." Problems include a lack of quality control and contradictory assessments coming from different agencies at the same time. The committee has found that UN inspection teams and the IAEA provided much more accurate intelligence than anything provided by US agencies: "some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was," says the analyst. "If you look at them side by side, CIA. versus United Nations, the UN agencies come out ahead across the board." Another part of the problem is the Bush administration's early decision to bypass the usual procedures for "vetting" intelligence. A retired CIA officer explains vetting thusly: "Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?" Vetting is especially important when dealing with foreign-agent reports, which sometimes contain potentially explosive allegations that can trigger major policy decisions. Usually, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities -- a process known as "stovepiping" -- without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Instead, the Bush administration "dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them," asserts Kenneth Pollack, a former NSC expert on Iraq and author of the book The Threatening Storm. "They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack continues. "They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information." Eventually the administration won out over the intelligence agencies, according to one former CIA official. "The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame [CIA director] George Tenet for not protecting them. I've never seen a government like this."
Greg Thielmann, a State Department expert on disarmament, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liason for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton: "Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business," Thielmann says. "We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That's what being a professional intelligence officer is all about." Instead, "Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR [the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research] was not telling him what he wanted to hear." Soon, Bolton shut Thielmann out of Bolton's early-morning staff meetings. "I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, 'The Under-Secretary doesn't need you to attend this meeting anymore.'" When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, "The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family." Bolton began demanding that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. Up until this point, officials such as Bolton had received data only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of the INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, says Thielmann, was "to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled." Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. Essentially, Bolton ran his own intelligence operation without any guidance or support. "He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly," Thielmann says. Bolton admits to changing the procedures, and justifies his actions: "I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn't getting and that the INR analysts weren't including. I didn't want it filtered. I wanted to see everything -- to be fully informed. If that puts someone's nose out of joint, sorry about that. ...There was no place for INR or anyone else [at my staff meetings]."
Similar problems cropped up in the Pentagon, where Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and his colleagues were busily pushing the Iraqi National Congress, under the leadership of exile Ahmad Chalabi, as a prime candidate for helping to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They assumed that Chalabi would be given a hero's welcome by the Iraqi people. One official says that the usual procedure would be to produce studies based on alternate outcomes -- "a 'what could go wrong' study, in the words of one official. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What's Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don't have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?" Instead, Wolfowitz and his team refused to hear any alternatives. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study's exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. "Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads," the official says. "You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails."
The administration also found itself contradicting international findings about Iraq's putative nuclear weapons program. In October 1997, the IAEA concludes an exhaustive study of Iraq's nuclear program and reports that Iraq has no nuclear weapons. "There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." The report noted that Iraq's nuclear facilities had been destroyed by American bombs in the 1991 Gulf War. The study's main author, Garry Dillon, a British nuclear-safety engineer who spent twenty-three years working for the I.A.E.A. and retired as its chief of inspection, will say in 2003 that it was "highly unlikely" that Iraq had been able to maintain a secret or hidden program to produce significant amounts of weapons-usable material, given the enormous progress in the past decade in the technical ability of IAEA inspectors to detect radioactivity in ground locations and in waterways. "This is not kitchen chemistry," Dillon says. "You're talking factory scale, and in any operation there are leaks." The Bush administration had no evidence to contradict the IAEA report, but they did have reports from defectors who said that Iraq had recently made dramatic gains in recreating nuclear weapons. Those stories did not bear up under scrutiny. In December 2001, the INR, with Thielmann's participation, reported to Colin Powell that there had been no change in Iraq's nuclear weapons production capability since the IAEA report. Thielmann says that the report "basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted." However, the defectors had the ear of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials; the INR report, like the IAEA reports and the UN inspectors' findings, were essentially ignored.
Rumsfeld had long believed that US intelligence didn't go far enough in their analyses of information. After he took control of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence unit under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Donald Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials. The fable of the "Nigerian yellowcake uranium" purchase originated with a public visit to Niger and three other African nations by Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican. The Italian intelligence agency SISMI passed along a report on Zahawie's visit to the US, and speculated that Zahawie might have actually gone to Niger to purchase yellowcake uranium on behalf of the Iraqi government. If true, this would prove that Saddam Hussein was indeed trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program, and give the lie to the IAEA and UN. Unfortunately, the SISMI report was deemed unreliable, and described as crude and amateurish. "I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that," says one CIA consultant, "but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me." No credible support for the SISMI report has ever been found. However, the report's unreliability did not stop it from being stovepiped directly to Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials, who fastened on it as "proof" that Iraq posed a credible threat to US security. Dissatisfied with the CIA's conclusions about the report, Cheney began a year-long pressuring of the intelligence agency to reevaluate the report and give it more credibility.
A former aide to Cheney says that as the push to invade Iraq intensified, Cheney's office, run by chief of staff Lewis Libby, became increasingly secretive about Iraqi intelligence, and showed an increasing resistance to allow the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet the intelligence. "It was an unbelievably closed and small group," says the aide. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. "There's so much intelligence out there that it's easy to pick and choose your case. ...It opens things up to cherry-picking." By early 2002 the SISMI report, still unverified, began to appear in administration warnings about the Iraqi nuclear threat. On January 30th, the CIA published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, "Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program." A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, "With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it." This stance was deeply divisive to the CIA. Director George Tenet, stung by criticisms about his agency's failure to predict the 9/11 attacks, was seen by many CIA analysts and agents as far too eager to give the Bush administration what it wanted. Pressure increased on CIA analysts to provide intelligence analyses conforming to the "worst-case scenarios" desired by the administration. "They got pounded on, day after day," says one senior Bush Administration official, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. "Pretty soon you say 'F*ck it.'" And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
The February 2003 trip to Niger by former ambassador Joseph Wilson backfired badly for the administration; instead of finding, or concocting, proof that the uranium sale was real, Wilson came back with proof that the story was bogus. Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but "I heard nothing about what the Vice-President's office thought about it." (Cheney's office insists Cheney doesn't even know Joseph Wilson, and knew nothing about the trip until reading about it in the papers.) After Bush's private decision to go to war with Iraq in March 2002, efforts directed at combating al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were abruptly redirected towards the Persian Gulf. Major personnel reassignments took place. Meanwhile, Chalabi's defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President's office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. "They'd pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided," says Thielmann. "There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi's sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President." Classified defector reports were routinely leaked to the press, but subsequent CIA and INR analyses of the reports, which tore the defectors' assertions to shreds, were kept secret. "It became a personality issue," says one Pentagon consultant of the Bush administration's handling of intelligence. "My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources."
The intelligence communities were completely subordinate to the administration's wishes. And Chalabi was given $90 million in federal funds by Cheney and Wolfowitz, who persuaded Bush to pay up. The State Department opposed the transfer, pointing out that Chalabi hadn't accounted for monies previously provided him, but Cheney and Wolfowitz ran roughshod over any and all objections. One former White House official recalls, "The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn't given the money to Chalabi." Cheney said, "Here we are, denying him money, when they [Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress] are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMDs." The administration made the decision in late 2002 to sharply escalate the rhetoric about Iraq's supposed WMD programs, in large part to affect the midterm elections, and also to influence a pending Congressional resolution authorizing Bush to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq to protect America's national security. Bush also arranged for support from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who willingly took his place at Bush's side in calling for war against Iraq. At Blair's behest, his government produced a dossier about Iraq's WMD programs which later proved to be stuffed with bad information, half-truths, and outright fabrications.
The administration was also using documents provided by Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba to bolster its claims; Burba had obtained the documents while trying to put together a story about the Nigerian uranium, but found that the documents were forgeries and the story was false. A CIA official says of the Burba documents, "The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming, and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy." Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the CIA to the Pentagon. "Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false -- until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed." The administration began publicly accusing Iraq of trying to purchase Nigerian uranium. Hersh has found two possible explanations of who actually produced the forged documents. One, favored by Italian journalists, is that SISMI officials produced the documents for Burba's story. The second, believed by many US intelligence officials, is that the documents were forged by disgruntled retired American intelligence agents. "The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," says a former high-level CIA officer. "They said, 'OK, we're going to put the bite on these guys.' ...Everyone was bragging about it -- 'Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he says, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI intelligence. "They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go -- to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence. ...They thought it'd be bought at lower levels -- a big bluff." The thinking, he says, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control. ...What's telling is that the story, whether it's true or not, is believed" -- an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the CIA under the Bush administration, says Hersh. After Bush mentioned the Niger allegation in the State of the Union address, says the former CIA officer, panic swept through the CIA. "They said, 'Holy sh*t, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!' They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it? They had to build a backfire. The solution was to leak the documents to the IAEA."
The IAEA had been asking for the proof of the Nigerian allegations since September 2002 without results; after finally receiving the documents in mid-February, the IAEA quickly concluded they were forgeries. (Note that the documents only were given to the IAEA after Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he made a compelling, and fraudulent, case for Iraqi WMDs.) It was only in May, after the toppling of the Hussein regime, that Joseph Wilson began going public about the Bush administration's dishonesty about the Nigerian uranium. "I gave them months to correct the record," he said, speaking of the White House, "but they kept on lying." The intelligence community was astonished when the administration blamed them for the faulty claim. Shortly afterwards, Wilson's wife was outed as a CIA agent by a pair of administration officials in an apparent act of revenge; the leak has not yet been traced, and many believe the administration doesn't want it traced. One strong source of intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear program is the number of former Iraqi scientists who worked in Hussein's weapons industry and for the monitoring agency; many of them are being held incommunicado in the Baghdad airport and other locations. One senior scientist not in captivity, Jafar Dhia Jafar, was debriefed by the CIA and British intelligence; Jafar insists that Iraq never had any nuclear weapons or WMDs of any kind. He says that after the 1991 Gulf War, Hussein told the scientists to "give them [the UN] everything." Hussein's reasoning was that before the Gulf War, Iraq's enemies were regional. After the war, it was clear that the US was Iraq's prime adversary, and that WMDs that might be effective against local enemies would do little good against the US. Therefore the WMD programs were shut down. Jafar says there's a simple reason why the UN could not account for some 6,000 warheads filled with chemical toxins; Iraq lied about the number of missiles it used against Iran in their decade-long war, and dropped many, many more on Iran than it would admit to. The IAEA, usually the most skeptical of oversight groups, has validated Jafar's testimony. (New Yorker)
October 20: An audiotape released on October 18 by the al-Jazeera television network has been authenticated as almost certainly being recorded by Osama bin Laden.
Islamist terrorism
In the tape, bin Laden warns Iraqis against cooperating with US forces and urged youth in neighboring nations to join a jihad, or holy war, against the Americans. "We reserve the right to respond at the appropriate time and place against all the countries participating in this unjust war, particularly Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland, Japan and Italy," bin Laden said. "The Islamic countries who participate will not be exempt, especially the Gulf countries, most prominent among them is Kuwait, the launching base for infantry troops of the crusaders." (CBS News)
October 20: There may be a much simpler reason why Condoleezza Rice was given the responsibility,
Congressional oversight
as head of the new Iraq Stabilization Group, for disbursing huge amounts of US funds slated for the rebuilding of Iraq's and Afghanistan's infrastructures, and said responsibilities were taken away from Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. As National Security Advisor, Rice is exempt from Congressional oversight; therefore, no Congressional questions about how monies are spent will need to be answered if they lead to Rice's department. Rice does not have to answer to Congress for anything, which makes her much less vulnerable to questioning and investigation than Rumsfeld. (Buzzflash)
October 20: Sick and injured US reservists are angry at the lack of medical care they are receiving.
US veterans
Wounded soldiers routinely wait from two to six weeks before receiving needed surgery, while they wait in squalid conditions in Fort Stewart, Georgia. At present, 633 sick and wounded National Guardsmen and reservists are waiting on what the military terms "medical hold." The garrison commander acknowledges the poor conditions and interminable waits, and says, "We would like to do better." "They are being treated like dogs," says one officer who works at the base. Soldiers who pay $10/day can stay in smaller, shared rooms with air conditioning and plumbing; most soldiers are living in large, communal barracks with no indoor plumbing and no air conditioning. "I've been in [the military] for 30 1/2 years and never thought the Army would turn on its own like this," says one injured Guardsman, who has been waiting for treatment since he injured his back on the first day of the war. "I am not in a case by myself. They are telling you it's going to be four to six months if you're going through a medical evaluation.... We're being treated so differently from the active duty troops, it's not funny." "This is about what the administration says versus what they do," says the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. After the news breaks in the American media, those in charge of the base work to improve some conditions, including putting up partitions between bunks and planning to bring in more doctors. Another soldier waiting since May for treatment speculates, "I don't believe they planned for it. They don't have enough doctors and facilities to take care of them." He believes the Pentagon didn't plan for extensive casualties in Iraq. Veterans' groups note that the delays faced by these soldiers are similar to those faced by veterans trying to receive care from VA hospitals. (AP/Tallahassee Democrat)
October 20: Deputy Undersecretary of Defense General William Boykin apologizes for his remarks that cast the war on terrorism in terms that offended Muslims around the world, but the Pentagon deletes the part of his apology that had him promising not to speak at religious events.
Partisan Bush appointees
The Pentagon also deletes a statement that affirms Boykin's belief that George W. Bush won the Presidency due to divine intervention. The director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, Nihad Awad, says, "This apology should be appreciated, but the question is do we want a person with extremist views...in this position in the war on terror. If he continues to be there it sends a very negative message to the Muslim world." Boykin also fails to address his belief that he saw some kind of demonic face in a picture of smoke over a 1993 battle in Somalia, and that two more hijacked planes were heading for Washington on the morning of 9/11 and "were thwarted by the hand of God." (CNN, Washington Post, TomPaine.com)

October 21: Thousands of additional reserve and National Guard personnel have been notified that they are to be mobilized for duty in Iraq,
Iraq war and occupation
for terms as long as two years. Pentagon officials say they are trying to bring some of the soldiers already deployed for a year or more home, and do not anticipate more callups, though they don't rule out further deployments of reservists and Guardsmen. (New York Times/Truthout)

More budget cuts on veterans' benefits

October 21: President Bush's 2004 budget request asks for further cuts in spending on veterans, contradicting his statement to veterans' groups that "Veterans are a priority for this administration...and that priority is reflected in my budget."
US veterans
In 2002, when he could have approved an emergency funding bill that included $275 million for medical care of veterans, he said, "We'll spend none of it." Now the proposed 2004 budget request for the Veterans Administration will cut even more spending for its already desperately underfunded health care system. The American Legion calculates that Bush's 2004 request "comes $1.9 billion short of maintaining an inadequate status quo." A task force commissioned by Bush himself has reported that federal funding to handle the ailments of former soldiers continues to be considerably less than their needs. In the past ten years the spending per patient dropped from almost $15,000 to less than $5,000. Overall the Bush administration will cut $3 billion from funding for VA hospitals. (Daily Misleader, Ian Williams)

Administration bans all media coverage of returning dead from Iraq

October 21: The Bush administration orders the banning of all media coverage of the return of dead soldiers to their respective home bases, and defends Bush's decision not to attend any memorial services for the fallen.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
According to a Defense Department order, "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Delaware] base, to include interim stops." Apparently the idea is to minimize the amount of publicity the returning slain soldiers receive, and thereby reduce the amount of "negative" publicity received by the administration. Joe Lockhart, former press secretary for the Clinton administration, says, "This administration manipulates information and takes great care to manage events, and sometimes that goes too far. For them to sit there and make a political decision because this hurts them politically -- I'm outraged." Pentagon officials insist the decision is simply to protect the families' interests and privacy, and ensure that some soldiers don't receive undue attention. Another admitted consideration is the desire for Bush, who has yet to attend a single memorial ceremony, not to be trapped, as many feel Lyndon Johnson was trapped during Vietnam, defending daily body counts of returning dead soldiers. "I have to say, I think we have to note tragedies of this magnitude," says Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. "I think it needs to be expressed over and over by the president, and I think all deference ought to be given those dead and wounded who return home." Some families don't swallow the administration's rationale. One family member of a dead soldier suggests that Bush and his own family members need to experience Iraq for themselves. "Then he'll realize what's going on," he says. "As long as they ain't over there, he don't care." White House spokesman Dan Bartlett notes that Bush sends a note of condolence to every killed soldier's family, and has met with some families during appearances at military bases. Bush reportedly thought that Bill Clinton's public meetings with families of dead US troops from Somalia was mere explotation of their grief for political gain; apparently he does not feel the same way about his father, who when he was president, went to a number of memorial services for fallen soldiers from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. (Washington Post, New York Times)
October 21: House Democrats Henry Waxman and John Dingell write a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers' Directorate of Military Programs with evidence of gross and illegal overcharging for importing gasoline into Iraq by Halliburton.
Halliburton
It is a follow-up to their letter of October 15 to the Office of Management and Budget, which asserts that Halliburton is profiteering from its provision of gasoline to Iraq. This second letter provides clear proof that Halliburton is profiteering, proving that Halliburton charges between 66% and 88% more for gasoline than SOMO, Iraq's state-owned oil company, after using the same vendors and suppliers as Halliburton. Further, some of the funds used to pay Halliburton for gasoline are coming from the humanitarian funds earmarked for Iraq's UN-sponsored Oil for Food program: Waxman and Dingell write, "Although it initially appeared that Halliburton was gouging only American taxpayers, it now seems that the company is overcharging the humanitarian Oil for Food program and the Iraqi people as well. This significantly compounds the implications of Halliburton's actions." Waxman and Dingell urge an immediate investigation, a forcible reimbursement from Halliburton, and the prohibition of Halliburton from receiving further oil reconstruction contracts in Iraq. So far Halliburton has received over $700 million in funds from the Army Corp of Engineers to provide gasoline to Iraq. It is slated to receive $900 million of the $87 billion government funding request; according to some sources, at least $200 million of that is unnecessary and will end up in Halliburton's corporate coffers, on top of hefty oil profits already rolling in. Halliburton denies the allegations of overcharging. (House Committee on Government Reform, New York Times/CommonDreams, Cleveland Plain Dealer)
October 21: The House of Representatives votes along party lines to eliminate an amendment to the $87 billion Iraqi spending bill
Iraq war and occupation
that would have granted each member of the armed forces a one-time, $1,500 bonus for their service in Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom. The bonus money -- $265 million -- would have come from the account set aside to import oil products under the Iraq Relief and Reconstructions Fund, which is grossly overfunded, according to observers, and will probably end up going largely into Halliburton's pockets. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
October 21: US officials believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, is the man responsible for killing journalist Daniel Pearl.
9/11 attacks
Pearl was kidnapped in January 2002 and murdered shortly afterwards. Authorities will not say what leads them to believe that Mohammed is Pearl's killer; they say that Mohammed may or may not stand trial for the slaying in the future. (CNN)
October 21: The House of Representatives passes a bill requiring university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding.
Bush administration's contempt for democracy
This bill was sparked by debates about Middle East Studies departments at a variety of American universities and colleges, described by neoconservative critics as hotbeds of anti-American teachings. Others see it as yet another attempt by neoconservative thinkers and legislators to legislate their beliefs as the only ones sanctioned by federal approval: "Since they are the mainstream in Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political capital to education,'" says Columbia University's Rashid Khalidi. After 9/11, hardline supporters of Israel and their neoconservative allies mounted an attack on academics who study the Middle East and Arabian culture.
Shortly after 9/11, an organization calling itself the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and conservative Democrat Joseph Lieberman, published a report called "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," which listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the "weak link" in the war on terror. Other right-wingers have written books and are maintaining Web sites accusing the Arab-American studies departments of everything from blind acceptance of Islamic radicalism to outright collaboration with terrorists. Now, with HR 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, the House has taken sides. If it becomes law, it will create a board to monitor how federally funded international-studies centers impact national security. The board will evaluate whether supporters of American foreign policy are adequately represented in university programs; it also mandates that universities cooperate fully with government recruiters and security agencies, including letting representatives sit in on classes and speak to students. Even more far-reaching, the bill mandates that these departments now train all of their students for government service. Conservatives, says influential right-wing academic Martin Kramer, "need to be able to compete on a level playing field with others."
NYU's Zachary Lockman explains, "There's the threat that centers will be punished for not toeing the official line out of Washington, which is an unprecedented degree of federal intrusion into a university-based area studies program." Far from merely "leveling the playing field," it seems that conservatives like Kramer (a colleague of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other hardline Israeli supporters in the Bush administration) and the ACTA want to mandate any other viewpoints out of existence by federal fiat. Middle Eastern history professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan warns that the International Studies Act will give the field's most vociferous critics the opportunity to sit in judgment of their doctrinal opponents: "One of the subtexts is they don't like criticism of Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down. ...I could imagine the board making it a criterion that the politics of a faculty are not balanced, so the university must balance things out by hiring pro-Likud scholars, or else funding could be withdrawn."
Currently 17 Middle Eastern studies centers exist in the US, most of them at the nation's top universities: Harvard, Columbia, New York University and the University of Chicago. They receive Title VI grants to fund graduate student fellowships and to do community outreach and education, including activities like training high school teachers about Middle Eastern issues and providing insight on the region to the media. No Title VI money is used for professor salaries. Kramer believes that these centers are overrun with disciples of the "sinister"Edward Said, one of the most influential Arab-American scholars of the twentieth century and a passionate advocate of Arab rights and culture. Kramer believes that the centers are packed with scholars who write and teach from a "third-worldist perspective," not from a pro-American stance as he would mandate. David Horowitz, a right-wing pundit who has spent much of his career documenting and fighting what he claims is rampant leftist bias in academia, says that in 1979, 3 percent of Middle Eastern scholars were non-Western. "As a result of leftist control of hiring, now 50 percent come from Middle Eastern countries," he says. One might not think it was surprising that a significant percentage of scholars working in a field with a specific regional, cultural and religious emphasis would be from that region, but Horowitz apparently regards many Middle Eastern scholars as mere mouthpieces for their countries' terrorist ideologies. "These are fascist countries!" says Horowitz. "They're Islamofascist countries, and they support terror."
Salon writes, "To restore balance to this degraded field, conservatives propose a kind of ideological affirmative action. They want to see a revolution in the ethos of contemporary universities, in which scholars will devote themselves to pulling their weight in the war on terror. That means schools must be compelled to seek out faculty devoted to furthering American interests. If this sounds oddly like a flag-waving version of the extreme academic left's strident calls for 'engagement,' that doesn't trouble the conservatives. As Kramer writes, "Middle Eastern studies must regain their relevance, or risk becoming 'Exhibit A' in any future case against public support for area studies. They can best achieve this by rediscovering and articulating that which is uniquely American in the American approach to the Middle East. The idea that the United States plays an essentially beneficent role in the world is at the very core of this approach." Cole calls Kramer's approach a dangerous fantasy, saying that "the neocon vision of Middle Eastern studies as post-orientalist bubble is a deranged fantasy. (The expression 'orientalist' refers to Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism, which argued that racist blinders led the West to see people of color as 'exotic' Others.) 'These arguments that Kurtz, Kramer and others make are only plausible if you don't actually refer to reality,' [Cole] says. As an example, he reels off the backgrounds of political scientists at centers receiving Title VI grants. 'The political scientist at the UCLA Middle Eastern center is Leonard Binder, one of the greats of the field, who fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war. At the University of Washington in Seattle, the political scientists of the Middle East are Ellis Goldberg, who does rational choice and political economy, and Joel Migdal,' a Harvard Ph.D. whose latest book is Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society. At the University of Michigan,' Cole continues, 'our political scientist is Mark Tessler, who does survey and opinion research. He has a Ph.D. from Hebrew University. There's Gary Sick at Columbia, who served on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. We could go on.'"
Khaladi suggests that many of these neocon academics are university failures -- "lightweights" -- who are trying to achieve by government intervention what they couldn't achieve on their own scholarly merits. Khaladi suggest that they could, if they desired, do what others do who want more attention paid to a neglected field. "They could raise money for a chair in terrorist studies," he says. "The problem is they want respectability. They want to displace virtually everybody who teaches the Middle East in this country from the center and say the center is between us and them. They want the academic respectability that comes with having federal funding. They want to move from the extreme fringe."
"Clearly, Martin Kramer and his colleagues see themselves as an embattled minority who have been unfairly excluded from academia by what they see as the liberals and leftists who run Middle Eastern studies in the United States, so they want the federal government to come in and somehow make sure people like them get hired or their views get more attention," says Lockman. Khalidi says the threat that HR 3077 poses to Middle Eastern studies in America is "deadly serious." The bill, he says, would do one of two things. Either it would "impose the teaching of one twisted version of Middle East reality, what I call terrorology, impose it at the taxpayers' expense as one central element in the way the subject is taught. Or, by subjecting self-respecting universities to conditions they will not under any circumstances accept, it would curtail the teaching of the Middle East." Cole says scholars will have a hard time convincing their bosses to give up funding. "It may be that some centers would forgo it if the interference looks like it's too heavy-handed," he says. "But it's really hard to go to a dean and ask to throw away $200,000 a year if the criteria that has to be met could be met in some way that isn't completely odious to the university. There would be pressure to meet it."
Many members of these departments are outraged and threatened by the idea that the government is meddling with academic freedom. Many find it galling that those who call for government intervention are the very neoconservatives whose predictions about Iraq have proven so horrendously false. "The thing that burns me, these are the guys who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And they're coming back and telling us that our scholarship is shoddy and we need to be overseen by them?" Khaladi compares the assault on academia with the assault on American intelligence earlier in the year; when the CIA and other agencies failed to confirm right-wing projections and assumptions about Iraq, they were assailed. Salon writes, "Once again, conservatives are questioning the competency of those who don't agree with them about the Middle East, insisting their views would triumph if only they weren't suppressed by a mandarin establishment in need of immediate reform. And just as Pentagon hawks set up their own intelligence office when the CIA didn't tell them what they wanted to hear about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, now the neocons are trying to do the same thing in academia. 'Neoconservatives want to substitute zealotry and true belief for real expertise,' Khalidi says. 'They're not just after us in the Middle East field. They're not just after academics. You see this inside the military, inside the intelligence community. You see this in the way the State Department has been treated. Anybody who knows anything about anything is suspect. Unless you have the right views you are not allowed to speak, and if you do, you do so at your peril.'" (Salon)

Back to October 2003 | On to October 2003: Week Four

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

October 2003:

Week Three

Limbaugh begins treatment for drug addiction

Troop morale plummeting; sick and wounded troops not getting decent treatment

"Free speech zones"

Sick and wounded US troops held in "squalor"

Administration offensive against anti-war protesters

Administration infighting over bad pre-war intelligence revealed; "stovepiping"

More budget cuts on veterans' benefits

Administration bans all media coverage of returning dead from Iraq

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