September 2003: Week Four: This Far and No Further

Back to September 2003

September 22: A draft copy of the US's proposed resolution to the UN reaffirms US control over Iraqi affairs,
Iraq war and occupation
but incorporates a few suggestions from other countries. A diplomat familiar with administration thinking summarizes the American policy as "talk to the Germans, buy off the Russians and isolate the French." Another was less polite, saying Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, had characterized the approach as "ignore, reward and punish." (Mother Jones)
September 22: Bush's upcoming speech to the UN will not include a promise to speed up the transition from American occupation to Iraqi self-rule, though the speech will demand money and troop deployments from UN members.
Iraq war and occupation
While a French plan proposes a two-step process that would result in Iraqi self-rule within six to nine months, Condoleezza Rice says the plan "would somehow try to transfer sovereignty to an unelected group of people" and "just isn't workable." Bush's speech will be preceded by a speech from UN president Kofi Annan which will sharply criticize the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. (Chicago Tribune)
September 22: Bush has a simple, perhaps simple-minded, explanation of why the US hasn't found any Iraqi WMDs. "I think [Saddam Hussein] hid them," Bush tells Fox News's Brit Hume. "I think he dispersed them. I think he is so adapted to deceiving the civilized for a long period of time that it's going to take a while for the troops to unravel. But I firmly believe he had weapons of mass destruction. I know he used them at one time, and I'm confident he had programs that would enable him to have a weapon of mass destruction at his disposal." (Frank Rich [PDF file])
September 22: Ahmad Chalabi, the man whom the Bush administration selected to be president of the Iraqi Governing Council, seems to be turning against his former political masters.
Iraq war and occupation
Chalabi is defying US calls for a slow, deliberate march towards restoring Iraqi independence, instead calling for Iraqis to begin governing their own country now. He insists that Iraqis be given at least partial control of the finance and security ministries as a start. He also opposes the idea of more troops coming into the country, especially from other countries. Chalabi says he is hoping that the unelected governing council receives sovereign status from the UN General Assembly, an option that the Bush administration opposes. "We want to claim Iraq's seat at the United Nations," he states. Chalabi has sent representatives to France and Germany to discuss putting Iraqis back in charge under a new UN mandate that would end American control of the occupation, even if American troops remain in Iraq. He also plans to tell the US Senate that the UN could save billions of dollars on Iraq's reconstruction by allowing an Iraqi administration to handle it. Predictably, the Bush administration's opposition includes charges of treachery. "People in D.C. are accusing us of conspiring with America's enemies," one of Chalabi's aides says. But Chalabi insists he wants to keep working with the US, and retain US troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future. (New York Times)
September 22: Paul Bremer, the top American official in Iraq, says that the Iraqis are not ready to rule themselves, and rejects any quick handover of sovereignty before a constitution is drawn up.
Iraq war and occupation
"The path to sovereignty is very clearly laid out," he says. "There must be a written constitution.... There must be a written constitution followed by democratic elections. That will then lead to a fully sovereign Iraqi government. This will happen as quickly as Iraqis can write the constitution." (CBS News)
September 22: The US occupying forces in Iraq have decided to allow free-market reforms in the Iraqi economy that will allow foreign ownership in every sector except oil.
Iraq war and occupation
Previously these elements of the Iraqi economy could only be owned by Iraqis; the new decision will allow foreign corporations to potentially dominate Iraqi banking, manufacturing, and other key economic sectors. (Washington Post)
September 22: Bush admits that he does not read the news, and what information he receives, he gets from his personal aides.
George W. Bush
"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." When asked by reporter Ken Auletta, "Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking?" Bush replies, "You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that." Auletta says he spoke with Bush officials who expanded on his statement: "That's his attitude. And when you ask the Bush people to explain that attitude, what they say is: We don't accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of 'Gotcha.' Oh, you're interested in headlines, and you're interested in conflict. You're not interested in having a serious discussion...and exploring things." Such a statement dismisses the Constitutional mandate that a free and unrestrained press serves as a "check and balance" on the government. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, PressThink)
September 22: The diaries of top Blair official Alastair Campbell reveal a deep and abiding anger towards BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan,
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
going a long way towards proving that the Blair administration's exposure of Dr. David Kelly was motivated by personal feelings and not for national security reasons as previously claimed. Excerpts from Campbell's diaries were published upon demands from Kelly's family and the BBC. In his diaries, Campbell appears as a man who has a personal vendetta against the BBC, and is determined to "out" Kelly in an attempt to discredit BBC reports of the "sexed-up dossier" filled with misinformation about Iraq's weapons programs. Campbell, along with Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon, planned to out Kelly as part of a strategy to "f*ck Gilligan" and discredit the reports. Both Campbell and Hoon deny that they were able to follow through with their plans to expose Kelly, though Hoon has already admitted that he had approved of the plans. (Scotsman)
September 22: The widow of a man killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center sues Bush and other government officials, contending their negligence of airport security resulted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
9/11 attacks
The wrongful death lawsuit by Ellen Mariani, whose husband, Louis Neil Mariani, was a passenger on Flight 175 that hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center, is part of her campaign to "get to the truth of what happened on September 11." Her lawyer says, "We just don't believe the federal government has been honest with us." Mariani was one of the first family members to file a lawsuit against the airlines involved in the hijacking. Mariani's suit names Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Council on Foreign Relations. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
September 22: Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton accuses the Bush administration of trying to implement a "radical right-wing agenda,"
"Vast right-wing conspiracy"
including the attempt to dominate the globe militarily and dismantle the legacy of her husband, previous President Bill Clinton. "I've got to realize it's nothing personal," she says. "They want to undo Johnson, Truman, Franklin Roosevelt. They want to undo the New Deal. ...It boggles the mind. ...There are a lot of big challenges in the world right now, things that are really quite difficult to deal with, whether we talk about Iraq or the Middle East or North Korea. And yet in the face of all those challenges this administration has the time to figure out how to take overtime away from millions of hardworking Americans." (Fox News)
September 22: Medea Benjamin, founding director of human rights organization Global Exchange, has harsh words for Paul Bremer and the Bush administration following her return from Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
On PBS's News Hour, she opens by responding to Bremer's ideas for reorganizing Iraq, "Bremer doesn't have an idea what he's doing. I just came back from Iraq, it's a disaster, people don't have electricity, water, garbage collection, sewage collection, jobs. They're angry, they're bitter. They say the United States money is not getting down to the people, it's going to Halliburton, it's going to Bechtel. We should not approve this $87 billion, instead there should be immediate transition over to the United Nations and as soon as possible to Iraqi self rule." Her counterpart, Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, claims that restoring power, water, and other amenities couldn't be done within six months, and Benjamin retorts, "It certainly can and should have been done in six months. The electricity should be up and running, if the Iraqis were in charge they would have done it themselves. The water supply should be running, the telephone system should be up and running. There is no reason to have this chaos that's in Iraq right now. And it's because the US Administration doesn't have a clue about what it's doing. That's why it needs to be an immediate transition the UN, and then to the Iraqis who know how to rebuild their own economy much better than Paul Bremer." About the $87 billion request from the administration, Benjamin says, "[W]e've done miserably, Ray. Just think -- Halliburton is making $2 billion, Bechtel is making $1 billion. And they haven't been able to turn on the electricity or turn back the water supply. They can't do the job, plus they're wasting massive amounts of money. Even the governing council that was hand-appointed by the US is saying that the money being spent is being wasted because it's US companies in charge instead of Iraqis. ...The resentment will only grow unless the US turns this over to a legitimate authority, which is the United Nations, which will have a quick time line for Iraqi self rule and that the money that is pledged by the US and the international community -- and let's remember the international community will not pledge money unless it is in the hands of the United Nations -- and that money should go directly to Iraqis and not to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel that are profiteering from this war." (PBS)
September 22: Australian investigative reporter John Pilger claims he has evidence that the Bush and Blair administrations knew as far back as early 2001 that Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and posed no threat to US or world security.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Pilger appears on British TV claiming that US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat. Pilger says that Rice stated after the 9/11 attacks that the US "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities" to attack Iraq and claim control of its oil. Pilger shows a video from February 24, 2001 of Colin Powell saying "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." Two months later, Rice reportedly said, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." According to Pilger, this confirms that Bush, and later Blair, had to have known that the entire program of mounting a war against Iraq was a deception. Pilger also links Australian PM John Howard to the Bush/Blair deception: "I think it's very serious for Howard. Howard has followed the Americans and to a lesser degree Blair almost word for word. ...I just don't believe you can be seen to be party to such a big lie, such a big deception and endure that politically." As of now, Pilger has not presented any evidence to support his claims that have not already been divulged elsewhere. (Sydney Morning Herald)
September 22: The 2004 election will be "the fight of our lives," claims Ralph Reed,
2004 presidential elections
the former head of the Christian Coalition and the southeastern regional chairman for President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Reed says that every gain made in the last 10 years is threatened by a Democratic resurgence among voters. "We are going to have to go wherever and whenever to do what we have to do." Utah Democratic Party Chairman Donald Dunn responds, "They're worried. And they should be. ...A year and a month from now, when people are making their decision at the polls, they're going to be looking at their pocketbooks. The surplus is gone. The economy is down. Republicans have become the borrow-and-spend party. President Bush can only hide behind the themes of war and protecting America so much." (FindLaw)
September 22: During a velvet-gloved interview of President Bush by Fox News anchor Brit Hume,
George W. Bush
Bush gives an interesting answer to a question about his news-gathering habits. Hume asks, "How do you get your news?" and Bush responds, "I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you've got a beautiful face and everything." The interview is one of the sources for the revelation that Bush doesn't bother to read the news, and instead gets all of his information from brief discussions with Card and Condoleezza Rice, but no one follows up on the "beautiful face" remark. (Fox News)

Bush makes insulting speech to UN

September 23: Bush makes his long-anticipated speech to the United Nations today.
Iraq war and occupation
He does not get a favorable reception. Without apologizing, Bush declares that the Security Council had been "right to demand that Iraq destroy its illegal weapons and prove that it had done so" and "right to vow serious consequences if Iraq refused to comply." The United States, he said, had not only unseated Saddam Hussein but also defended "the credibility of the United Nations." He also claims that the US is "committed" to the UN, and asks for UN support of the Iraq occupation. It is plain that most members do not agree with Bush's assessment of Iraq and the effect it has had on the UN. French President Jacques Chirac is stern in his rebuke of Bush's statements, saying, "No one can act alone in the name of all and no one can accept the anarchy of a society without rules. ...The war, launched without the authorization of the Security Council, shook the multilateral system. ...The United Nations has just been through one of the most grave crises in its history. ...In an open world, no one can live in isolation, no one can act alone in the name of all, and no one can accept the anarchy of a society without rules. T here is no alternative to the United Nations." Chirac calls for an immediate transfer of power to the Iraqi people and a gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi soil. He also says France will not veto a UN resolution to ask for more UN troops and UN funds to be sent to Iraq. A US diplomat says, "He gave a very sincere speech, but I don't think there was anything new. The situation in Iraq is getting more difficult every day, and so is the atmosphere at the United Nations."
Chirac's sentiments are echoed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who warns that pre-emptive unilateral military action without the authorization of the UN risked undermining the UN's authority. "My concern is that it could set precedents resulting in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without credible justification." As a result of the Iraqi crisis, the UN, he said, was at a "fork in the road," facing a moment in time "no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded." The generally hostile response towards Bush's UN speech is in part caused by Bush's repetition of discredited allegations that are intended to justify the US invasion of Iraq. "The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder, and refused to account for them when confronted by the world," says Bush. He continues to characterize the resistance in Iraq as "holdovers" from the Hussein regime, ignoring findings from his own intelligence agencies that show most of the resistance is coming from ordinary Iraqis who hate and fear the US presence. He also makes a veiled slap at Jacques Chirac and France's proposal for a speedier transition towards Iraqi self-governance by saying, "The primary goal of our coalition in Iraq is self-government for the people of Iraq, reached by orderly and democratic means...[the] process must unfold according to the needs of Iraqis - neither hurried nor delayed by the voices of other parties." Worse, in his speech, Bush relegates the UN to a subordinate role, telling the members that the UN will not be allowed to do much more than help write a constitution, helping train civil servants, and supervise elections.
Democratic candidates for president slam Bush's speech to the UN, calling it a case of too little offered too late. "[O]nce again he has failed to tell us exactly what role he expects the United Nations to play now and what timetable he envisions for the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people," says Senator John Kerry. Senator Joseph Lieberman says Bush's speech was an "11th-hour, half-hearted appeal" delivered in an "I told you so" tone that would make it even less likely to appeal to world leaders. Representative. Dennis Kucinich calls the speech "further proof that the war against Iraq was a complete failure" that has harmed US standing, depleted funds from domestic priorities and distracted from the war on terror. Senator Bob Graham accuses Bush of trying to force other nations to comply with US demands with his "do it my way or the highway" approach: "He missed an opportunity once again to unite the world against terrorism and rekindle relationships with our long time allies." (New York Times, CNN, Independent, Reuters, Slate/MSNBC, CNN, Peter Singer)
September 23: Republicans escalate their rhetoric in response to Senator Edward Kennedy's charges that the war in Iraq was a fraud.
Conservative smear campaigns
Tom DeLay makes the most extravagant response, saying that "Kennedy's brand of hate speech has become mainstream in the Democratic Party. ...Senator Kennedy owes the president and the country an apology, but we all know no apology will come." He called Kennedy's remarks worthy of the Jerry Springer show. Other Republicans criticize the charges, but are more temperate. "This is a serious charge and it deserves a serious response," counters Senator Robert Bennett, who quoted former President Clinton's concerns about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "The senator from Massachusetts has made charges he cannot substantiate." Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison chastises Kennedy for his Texas "slur," and adds, "sometimes I think, when I hear people talking, that they have forgotten that America was attacked." Kennedy refuses to apologize and instead amplifes and extends his earlier comments, charging that it is American soldiers who are paying for Bush's failures in Iraq. "The administration is muddling through day-by-day, while the lives of our soldiers are at risk and their families worry here at home." He also calls on Bush to account for the money his adminstration has already spent in Iraq before asking for another $87 billion. When he is asked about the controversy over his statements, he retorts that Americans have important questions about the war, and "I intend to continue to raise them." Bush himself calls Kennedy's remarks "uncivil." (Jim Jordan, the campaign manager for Senator John Kerry, observes that it is "always amusing to see anybody from the Bush administration accusing Democrats of uncivility.") Democrats said the GOP should not brand critics as unpatriotic for raising legitimate concerns about the administration's plan for Iraq. "Any time somebody speaks out criticizing this administration or its policies, there is this orchestrated concerted effort to attack those who criticize," says Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. "Criticizing those who are vocal in their personal criticism, their approach, their concerns, is McCarthyesque." (Guardian, Boston Globe)
September 23: According to documents given to Congress by the Bush administration,
Iraq war and occupation
as part of the $20.3 billion requested for Iraqi reconstruction, it wants $100 million for an Iraqi witness protection program, $290 million to hire, train and house thousands of firefighters, $9 million to modernize the postal service, including establishment of ZIP codes, $150 million for border security, $100 million to protect (and perhaps relocate overseas) 100 witnesses and their families who testify against former government officials, terrorist groups or organized crime figures, $67 million to hire, train and equip 20,000 guards to protect Iraqi government facilities, $100 million to hire 50 experts to investigate crimes against humanity by Saddam Hussein, $99 million to build and renovate 26 jails and prisons, $2.9 billion to rebuild and upgrade the country's electrical system, $2.1 billion to rebuild Iraq's oil industry, $2.8 billion to provide drinkable water to most of Iraq's population, $130 million for irrigation and drainage projects, $125 million to rebuild railroad tracks, $100 million for new housing, $150 million for a new children's hospital in Basra, and $35 million to subsidize on-the-job training for private businesses. The money is part of the $87 billion requested by the administration for military and civil operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Democrats question the administration's request for such a huge amount of money. "The administration fought against a $200 million boost for America's police officers, firefighters and paramedics," says Senator Robert Byrd. "But Iraqi first responders would get $290 million through this" proposal. (AP/San Jose Mercury News)
September 23: Robert McKee, a former ConocoPhillips executive, has been appointed the new senior adviser to the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
He replaces Shell Oil's Philip Carroll, after a mere five-month tenure. McKee is drawing heavy criticism for his close ties to Halliburton Oil. Senator Henry Waxman objects to McKee's appointment, saying, "The administration continues to create the impression that the fox is in charge of the hen house. ...Given Mr. McKee's close relationship with Halliburton, he's an odd choice to hold them accountable for the billions of dollars they are charging American taxpayers." (Houston Chronicle)

Administration anti-protest policies challenged

September 23: The American Civil Liberties Union files a lawsuit requesting that the US Secret Service be prohibited from from keeping anti-Bush protesters far away from presidential appearances while allowing supporters to display their messages up close.
Antiwar protests
The ACLU files the lawsuit in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of four advocacy organizations that claim the Secret Service forced them into protest zones or other areas where they could not be seen by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or be noticed by the media covering their visits. "The pattern we found was at presidential and vice presidential appearances, protesters were restricted to areas where they were out of sight, out of earshot and often out of mind," says an ACLU representative. "Protecting our nation's leaders from harm is important. Protecting our nation's leaders from dissent is unconstitutional." The lawsuit challenges the legality of the Bush administration's concept of "freedom of speech zones," where dissenters and protesters are "allowed" to demonstrate, often behind fences or barricades, far away from either the government officials or the media, which essentially renders them invisible and irrelevant. (Guardian)
September 23: A recent book, Losing Bin Laden by Richard Miniter, makes a number of erroneous claims concerning the Clinton administration supposed failures in hunting down Osama bin Laden.
Clinton Administration
Two NSC members from Clinton's administration, Roger Cressey and Gayle Smith, make a number of corrections. Miniter revisits old claims that the Clinton administration turned down an intelligence folder on bin Laden from Sudanese intelligence sources, and that the CIA turned down a Sudanese offer to extradite bin Laden to American custody. The source for these claims is a single, oft-discredited Sudanese intelligence officer named Fateh Erwa. The Sudan never approached anyone within the administration with any offers of intelligence on bin Laden. Far from being turned down by the CIA for offering intelligence on bin Laden, the CIA repeatedly pressured Sudanese intelligence for information concerning bin Laden and al-Qaeda, intelligence that was never forthcoming. During this period of time, the mid-90s, Sudan was one of the most fierce supporters of terrorism in the world; under strongman leader Hassan Turabi, Sudan was a sanctuary, training base and active supporter for a range of Islamic terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda. Miniter also claims that Clinton failed to retaliate when the USS Cole was attacked in 1999, and uses this claim as support for his general assertion that Clinton "refused to wage a real war on terrorism." In reality, Clinton waited for US intelligence to be sure that al-Qaeda, and not other terrorist groups who were also suspected of carrying out the attack, was the true perpetrator of the assault on the Cole. Such definitive information was not secured until after Clinton had left office.
Cressey and Smith write, "Even without conclusions from the FBI and CIA on the Cole, bin Laden and his lieutenants were still hunted to the last day of Mr. Clinton's presidency for al Qaeda's 1998 attacks on our two embassies in Africa. And if the Clinton administration dropped the ball in responding to the Cole bombing, why didn't the incoming Bush administration pick it up in January, 2001?" Miniter also alleges that Clinton stopped a 1998 special forces mission against an al-Qaeda camp because he could not "stomach sending thousands of troops into harm's way." Once again, Miniter's attempts to paint Clinton as a coward are dispersed by the facts. Clinton was demonstrably ready to give his approval to the mission in question. In fact, he approved every plan proposed to him by the CIA and the US military for action to be taken against bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The particular mission in 1998 was scrubbed due to objections from senior Pentagon officials, who felt that the mission had an unacceptably high chance of failure due to inconclusive intelligence. Cressey and Smith conclude, "For eight years the Clinton administration fought hard to counter terrorism, and while we didn't accomplish all that we hoped, we had some important successes. The current administration faces many of the same challenges. Confusing the American people with misinformation and distortions will not generate the support we need to come together as a nation and defeat our terrorist enemies. " (Washington Times)
September 23: Iconoclastic columnist Jimmy Breslin declares war on the Bush administration's propensity for lying and deceit.
Iraq war and occupation
In a column for Newsday, Breslin says of the list of US soldiers dead in Iraq, "George Bush told lies and they died." He goes on: "First, your government lied to ensure Bush's re-election. Who votes against a president in time of war? And even better, you get oil with the winning election. So Bush lied to you. Not misstatements. Lies. He and his people threw away their honor and consciences to lie to the people they had sworn to protect. The lies of Washington put young men from Seymour, Tenn., and Maspeth, Queens and Palos Hills, Ill., into boxes. And that, dear reader, is quite a lie. At the start, Bush claimed that Iraq had poison gas and was making nuclear weapons. Soon, they will poison us all and blow us up. His proof was documents forged by elementary-school pupils. Still, Bush used it in his State of the Union speech.
"...Look now at the lie that George Bush carries into the United Nations today: We went into Iraq because they were part of the World Trade Center attack. That's what they told you, and Americans, who honor their government, believed what their government told them. And so did all those young people as they were about to put up their lives in the desert. On Oct. 14, 2002, Bush said, 'This is a man [Saddam] that we know has had connections with al-Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al-Qaeda as a forward army.' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, on Sept. 26, 2002, 'Yes, there is a linkage between al-Qaeda and Iraq.' Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said on Sept. 25, 2002, 'There have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al-Qaida going back for actually quite a long time.' They knew exactly what they were saying and what it would do. It was using a Big Lie in an age of screens and faxes. What did you think it was, a government telling you the truth? Why should they do that? At summer's end, suspicions rose. It was time to change the lie before it became a liability. How do you do that? By using the ultimate con: telling the truth.
"Here in the world of professional lying is how you use the truth to defuse a lie when it becomes dangerous to keep: Suddenly, Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 16 announced, 'I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.' That same day, Condoleezza Rice jumped up and chirped, 'And we have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either...direction or control of 9/11. What we've said is that this was someone who supported terrorists, helped train them.' And then the next day, George Bush said, 'There's no question that Saddam Hussein has al-Qaeda ties. We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11 attacks.' So the three now say that they never said that Hussein was involved in the World Trade Center attack. Look up what we said. We never said it. Of course they did. Anybody who thinks they didn't is a poor fool. Take a half-word out of a sentence, replace it with a smug smile or chin motion and the meaning is there. Saddam was in on the Trade Center with bin Laden. Of course Bush and his people said it. Then go to the whip, go to the truth. Only the strong memory is an opponent, and there are few of them. Otherwise, the only thing that can remind people and maybe even inflame them are these dead bodies coming back from Iraq to Heber, Calif. They arrive here in silence." (Newsday)
September 23: In some of the harshest criticism yet voiced from the Democratic candidates for President,
2004 presidential elections
former Vermont governor Howard Dean lambasts the Republican right. Pointing to an American flag, he says, "This flag does not belong to Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney. This flag belongs to us and we want our country back." Dean goes on to say, "The extreme right wing has shown nothing but contempt for democracy. ...[A]t every turn, the Bush administration has turned the Constitution on its head." (Guardian)
September 23: Conservative columnist and commentator Tucker Carlson tells Salon of a bizarre confrontation he recently had with Bush public relations chief Karen Hughes.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
"Karen Hughes accused me of lying," he says. "And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane...the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness...." (Buzzflash)

September 24: With two US soldiers arrested for possible espionage and a third under investigation, security at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is under serious scrutiny.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi is behind bars at a California Air Force base, facing 32 criminal charges, some of which could earn him the death penalty. He is suspected of transmitting information to and from possible terrorists located in Syria. Army Captain Yousef Yee, a Muslim chaplain, has been held without charges since September 10 while the Army investigates possible breaches of security on his part. A third military member under investigation is believed to be a member of the US Navy. (AP/San Jose Mercury News)
September 24: Taliban members return from a secret meeting with leader Mullah Omar and vow to step up fighting against US forces in Afghanistan.
War in Afghanistan
The meeting, held on September 17 somewhere in southern Afghanistan, featured Omar rejoicing in news of recent Taliban attacks on US positions and exhorting his followers to step up their assaults. (Reuters)
September 24: The Iraqi Governing Council denies access to the council's governing sessions to two Arab satellite TV networks, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, for what it calls "irresponsible activities" that threaten the country's "democracy and stability" and encourage terrorism.
Iraq war and occupation
The ban is slated to last for two weeks. The council accuses the stations of violating vague "media-conduct rules" outlined for the first time in today's ruling. Those rules include a ban on statements promoting the return of the Baath Party or provoking sectarian strife. Several council members have made little secret of their disdain for al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which they accuse of glorifying resistance attacks and being overly critical of Iraqi politicians who are cooperating with U.S. occupation forces. The decision is "sending a signal that we will not any longer tolerate bad behavior by the media," says Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, chairman of the council's media committee. "The signal will come out loud and clear. They will understand." The US Committee to Protect Journalists called the council's decision "deeply troubling." Joel Campagna, the CPJ's Middle East program coordinator, says, "Penalizing media outlets sets a poor precedent and raises serious questions about how Iraqi authorities will handle the broadcast or publication of negative news. ...The Governing Council should encourage open media." (Washington Post)

Aqila al-Hashimi assassinated

September 25: Iraqi Governing Council member Aqila al-Hashimi, who was shot by unknown assailants on September 20, dies of her wounds.
Iraq war and occupation
Hashimi's assassination is widely seen as an attempt to threaten any Iraqis working with the US, and is a severe blow to attempts to rebuild the government under US guidance. (Guardian, CNN)
September 25: Secretary of State Colin Powell tries to explain away his statements of February 2001, where he asserted to Egyptian governmental officials that Iraq had not developed "any significant capacity" of weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to neighboring countries.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Asked why he changed his assessment, Powell says: "I didn't change my assessment...I did not say he [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] didn't have weapons of mass destruction. ...He was a threat then. The extent of his holdings were yet to be determined. It was early in the administration and the fact of the matter is it was long before 9/11. ...A lot changed between February 2001 [and the invasion], but I don't find anything inconsistent between what I said then and what I've said all along." In 2001, Powell told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek that UN sanctions were working: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place." After 9/11, the Bush administration reversed course and began actively pursuing regime change in Iraq. (Reuters)
September 25: General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of US Central Command, is harsh in his assessment of the Bush administration's Iraqi strategy.
Iraq war and occupation
In an appearance on Nightline, Zinni compares the push for the war with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident that President Johnson used to justify a war in Vietnam. Zinni says, "I'm suggesting that either the [prewar] intelligence was so bad and flawed -- and if that's the case, then somebody's head ought to roll for that -- or the intelligence was exaggerated or twisted in a way to make a more convenient case to the American people." Zinni believes that Hussein had maintained "the framework for a weapons of mass destruction program that could be quickly activated once sanctions were lifted," but such a program, while worrisome, did not immediately endanger the United States. Zinni questions whether Bush deliberately misled the public and not shared with it the true reason for the war: "If there's a strategic decision for taking down Iraq, if it's the so-called neoconservative idea that taking apart Iraq and creating a model democracy, or whatever it is, will change the equation in the Middle East, then make the [public] case based on that strategic decision. ...I think it's a flawed -- like the domino theory -- it's a flawed strategic thought or concept. ...But if that's the reason for going in, that's the case the American people ought to hear. They ought to make their judgment and determine their support based on what the motivation is for the attack."
He is more careful in his choice of words than he was a few weeks before, when, during an address to a military forum, he accused the Bush administration of having no idea of what they were getting America into: "I've spent the last 15 years of my life in this part of the world. And I'll tell you, every time I hear...one of the dilettantes back here speak about this region of the world, they don't have a clue. They don't understand what makes them tick. They don't understand where they are in their own history. They don't understand what our role is. ...We are great at dealing with the tactical problems -- the killing and the breaking. We are lousy at solving the strategic problems; having a strategic plan, understanding about regional and global security and what it takes to weld that and to shape it and to move forward." Zinni took an indirect slap at Donald Rumsfeld's chillingly blasé dismissal of American casualties: "We should be...extremely proud of what our people did out there. ...It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties and the sacrifice that's being made. It also kills me when I hear someone say that, well, each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, they're insignificant statistically. ...When we put [our enlisted men and women] in harm's way, it had better count for something. It can't be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out." He concluded, "U.S. troops should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting -- our generals will take care of that -- but for the aftermath and winning that war. Where are we, the American people, if we accept this, if we accept this level of sacrifice without that level of planning? Almost everyone in this room, of my contemporaries -- our feelings and our sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and lies, and we saw the sacrifice. We swore never again would we do that. We swore never again would we allow it to happen. And I ask you, is it happening again? And you're going to have to answer that question, just like the American people are." (The Nation)

More Bush PR -- "good news" from Iraq

September 25: The Bush administration is unveiling a massive new public relations campaign to sell "good news" about Iraq to Congress and the American people in an attempt to secure the $87 million request for additional funding.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
The new marketing scheme involves having top officials, including Bush himself, made available for safe and scripted media ops where they tout the administration's line on Iraq. Within the last few days, Bush gave a 30-minute interview to Fox News's Brit Hume, along with a 20-minute on-camera tour; national security advisor Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's Nightline and gave interviews to Hume and right-wing talk show hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. According to a September 15 article in PR Weekly, White House communications director Dan Bartlett has met with GOP "message leaders to discuss new tactics, and a portion of the weekly conference call between the Republican leadership and senior White House aides has now been set aside to deal specifically with the issue." Professor Juan Cole, a Middle East expert, says, "There is still 60% unemployment and extensive poverty, electricity is chancy, hurting many businesses, no land telephone lines are functioning in Baghdad, and no 911 emergency services for those who fall ill are available. There is a massive crime wave, with assassinations, car-jackings, burglaries and kidnappings, in Baghdad and Basra, the major cities. Few trust the banks. Women who are in any way public figures are subject to harassment, even assassination." Cole also questions the veracity of the so-called success stories. "Although the universities are 'open' [one of the major success stories touted by the administration], Basra University was completely looted and lacks basic facilities, including a proper university library [burned] or computers [stolen]. I guess they are back to clay tablets. And while it is technically true that the hospitals are open, and that large-scale looting of their medicines seems to have been halted, most of them are not operating at an acceptable level." As the administration's campaign progresses, watch for an inundation of "good news" stories from the press. (Working for Change)
September 25: New Bridge Strategies, LLC, is a new company specifically formed to, in its words, "[assist] clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq."
Republican corruption
The chairman and director of New Bridge is Joe Allbaugh, Bush's former head of FEMA; previously Allbaugh served as Bush's chief of staff during Bush's term as governor of Texas, and as the campaign manager for campaign manager for Bush-Cheney 2000. Allbaugh is a member of Bush's innermost circle of advisors, nicknamed the "Iron Triangle," along with Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. Other directors include vice chairman Edward Rogers and Lanny Griffith, both lobbyists who were assistants to the first President George Bush and now have close ties to the White House. Rogers once had close financial ties to Saudi Sheik Kamal Adham and BCCI, the bank that was repeatedly investigated for fraud and terrorist ties under the first Bush administration. President John Howland is a principal of Crest Investment in Houston and was president of American Rice, once a major exporter to Iraq. Other senior officials include Richard Burt, former ambassador to Germany under Ronald Reagan as well as a former assistant secretary of state, and Lord Powell, a member of the British House of Lords and an important military and foreign-policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Josh Marshall writes, "[N]ow Allbaugh's running an outfit that helps your company get the sweetest contracts in Iraq[.] That sound right to you? Think he'll have any special pull?" (New York Times, Talking Points Memo, New Bridge Strategies)
September 25: A Congressional report concludes that Vice President Dick Cheney does, indeed, still have financial connections with his former firm, Halliburton.
Halliburton
The report says that the deferred compensation that Cheney receives from Halliburton as well as the more than 433,000 stock options he possesses "is considered among the 'ties' retained in or 'linkages to former employers' that may 'represent a continuing financial interest' in those employers which makes them potential conflicts of interest." Senator Frank Lautenberg, who requested the report, says, "As this CRS report shows, the ethics standards for financial disclosure is clear. Vice President Cheney has a financial interest in Halliburton." Though Cheney is clearly in violation of federal ethics laws, the President and Vice President are considered "above the law" in this instance and are not subject to having the ethics laws enforced against them. (CNN)
September 25: Senior military correspondant Joseph Galloway believes that in three years, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides have virtually ruined the US Army:
US military
"It took the better part of 20 years to rebuild the Army from the wreckage of Vietnam. With the hard work of a generation of young officers, blooded in Vietnam and determined that the mistake would never be repeated, a new Army rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of the old, now perhaps the finest Army in history. In just over three years, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his civilian aides have done just about everything they could to destroy that Army." Galloway says that Rumsfeld has worked the Army nearly to death: "Under Rumsfeld, by next spring 30 of the Army's 33 combat brigades will either be in Iraq or on their way home from Iraq. Some of them will come home from Iraq and head almost immediately to Afghanistan or Bosnia or South Korea or the Sinai Desert. More than 20,000 Army Reservists and National Guardsmen will be finishing one-year tours in Iraq, and thousands more will be called up to do their year. How many will be willing to re-enlist if they're faced with endless deployments on thankless missions in the far reaches of empire?"
Rumsfeld has neglected the Army's training and education: "With an operations tempo this high, there's little time for units to do much more than repair their equipment and send their soldiers home on leave with long-neglected families before it's time to deploy again. There's no time for divisions to rotate to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., to maneuver their Abrams tanks and Bradleys and train to win the wars. There's no time for non-commissioned officers -- the sergeants who are the backbone of any great army -- to go to the schools they need to get better at their jobs and earn promotions." Rumsfeld has politicized the Army promotion system for three- and four-star generals: "Rumsfeld and his civilian aides such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and his military handmaidens have intruded deeply and harmfully into the way the services promote their leaders. Where once the Army would send up its nominee for a vacant billet, now it must send up two or three candidates who must run the gantlet of personal interviews in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Not just Rumsfeld, but all of his civilian experts who never wore a uniform." Rumsfeld has tried to win the Iraqi war on the cheap: "Rumsfeld and company have embraced, on the basis of a fleeting success in Afghanistan and a flawed success in Iraq, a theory that all that's needed to win our wars is air power and small bands of Special Operations troops. Stealth bombers and snake-eaters. On the strength of this, they've refused all pleas for an urgently needed increase in the strength of an Army that has been whittled down to pre-World War II levels of 485,000 soldiers. They still deny that there's a guerrilla war raging in Iraq, where 130,000 American soldiers are trying to keep the peace in a nation the size of California with 25 million people. Because reinforcement would be an admission that Rumsfeld and company were wrong in their belief that war would end quickly, their hand-picked Iraqi exiles would take over and the soldiers would come home in a few months." (Aberdeen News)
September 25: CNN's Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson, a conservative pundit, jokingly gives out the Fox News bureau's main phone number as his own home number during an exchange with liberal co-host Paul Begala about telemarketers.
Conservative smear campaigns
Soon after, Fox News puts up a Web story listing Carlson's real home phone number. That evening, Carlson and his family receive numerous death threats and other obnoxious phone calls from angry Fox viewers. The next day, Fox changes the Web site to show CNN's Washington bureau phone number for contacting Carlson, but fails to apologize to Carlson for violating his privacy. (The second link in this item is a mirror of the original Fox web page. We can only hope that Carlson has changed his phone number. Please understand that I do not advocate calling Carlson or anyone else at their homes for the purpose of pranking or harassing them.) (Fox News, Fox News/Meepzorp)

September 26: CIA Director George Tenet asks the Justice Department to investigate claims that the Bush administration broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees, Valerie Plame Wilson, in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, who discredited administration claims that Iraq sought to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Plame outing
Wilson publicly debunked the Bush administration's claim about the uranium, leading to a public retraction and providing further proof of the administration's skein of lies about the Iraq situation. A week later, right-wing columnist said that two unnamed sources revealed to him that Plame, Wilson's wife, was a covert CIA agent specializing in WMDs. Revealing the identities of covert officials is a violation of two laws, the National Agents' Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act. Wilson has publicly suggested that chief Bush advisor Karl Rove may be responsible for the leak. Rove denies the charge. The CIA is still assessing the possible damage to their overseas intelligence network caused by the leak. Senator Charles Schumer, who has been pushing the FBI to investigate the disclosure since July, said on September 25 that the leak "not only put an agent's life in danger, but many of that agent's sources and contacts." The request by Tenet was actually made on September 16, but the CIA and DOJ manage to keep the news of the request secret for ten days. (MSNBC, Washington Post, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
September 26: Following a second, smaller bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq,
Iraq war and occupation
the UN has resolved to bring home all but a skeleton staff at that HQ. UN statements indicate that Iraq and the US are failing to provide proper security for staff members. (Guardian)
September 26: Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean observes that the Bush administration has cobbled up its own "official secrets act," which for the first time in American history makes it a crime to leak information from the government to the media or to private citizens:
Bush administration's contempt for democracy
"Bush's Justice Department has effectively created one of the world's most encompassing, if not draconian, official secrets acts. If Attorney General John Ashcroft has his way, we will see many more prosecutions of this ilk. Ashcroft has told Congress he wants a 'comprehensive, coordinated, Government-wide, aggressive, properly resourced, and sustained effort' to deal with 'the problem of unauthorized disclosures.'" Ashcroft is careful not to characterize "authorized leaks" that the Bush administration deliberately lets loose to shape public opinion; these laws, which Dean says are deliberately twisted and misinterpreted to apply to situations they were never intended to cover, will only be brought to bear against leaks the administration feels is detrimental to their own purposes. In 1986, the Reagan administration caused a firestorm of controversy by convicting Navy intelligence analyst Samuel Morison of leaking improper information under the 1917 Espionage Act (Morison sent classified photos of a Soviet aircraft carrier to Jane's Defence Weekly). Morison was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, while scores of legal experts and media observers challenged the improper use of the Espionage Act for the prosecution of Morison. (In 2000, President Clinton pardoned Morison.)
Ashcroft's Justice Department is using a similar twisted interpretation of the Espionage Act to prosecute low-level DEA intelligence analyst Johnathan Randal, who leaked unclassified information about Lord Michael Ashcroft, one of the richest and most prominent conservatives in Britain, to the British press. Apparently Ashcroft, who is no relation to the Attorney General, has been involved in drug dealing and money laundering in his tax haven, Belize; after the revelations hit the British press, Ashcroft resigned as the treasurer of the Conservative Party. As a result of a libel suit filed by Ashcroft against the London Times, the US Justice Department traced the information leak to Randal. Ashcroft hired an Atlanta lawyer to encourage the Justice Department to prosecute Randal. In February 2002, Randal was indicted by Bush's new U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, William Duffey Jr., a former Deputy Independent Counsel who worked for Ken Starr in Arkansas. Faced with a 20-count indictment and a possible 580 years in prison, Randal chose to plead guilty to one charge, and was sentenced to a year in prison along with a $70,000 fine. Duffey told the New York Times that he saw the prosecution of Randal as "a warning to other government workers." Dean writes, "But what warning, exactly? The information was not classified. It did not compromise any investigator, investigation, or investigative method. Clearly, the warning is this: Keep your mouth shut at all costs, no matter how intensely a leak might be in the public interest, and no matter how integral leaking might be to the way a free press operates. In short, the message is: Never blow the whistle." (FindLaw)

September 27: The Iraqi Governing Council, created by the US to advise senior administrator Paul Bremer, is showing an increasing amount of independence from US direction as it presses for self-rule, from a push for sweeping economic changes to a move toward normalizing trade relations with Syria and Iran.
Iraq war and occupation
The Bush administration points to the council's new assertiveness as evidence that democracy is flourishing in Iraq, but is privately determined to rein in the council and keep it pointed towards policy objectives in line with US aims. A UN resolution that formally grants sovereign status to the council is expected soon, and shortly after than loans from international agencies; the council wants a greater say in how that money will be spent. Republican Congressman Don Young says that council president Ahmad Chalabi, a grateful recipient of US support while in exile, "now seems like he is no longer one of us. He seems to be one of them now." (Boston Globe)
September 27: Some Democratic senators have a hard time swallowing all of the $87 million funding requests for Iraq, and suspect that much of the money is being squandered.
Iraq war and occupation
They criticizs the cost of prison building, at $50,000 a bed, and of enrolling 100 families in a witness protection program at a cost of $100 million: "That is $1 million a family," says Senator Kent Conrad. "That is a pretty good deal." Senator Tim Johnson wants an explanation of the $9 million set aside for Iraq to develop ZIP codes: "How has Iraq made it for these thousands of years without Americans helping them develop a ZIP code? It is amazing. ...What a generous thing for this administration to do for other people on the other side of the planet, on our dime, borrowing money to do it." He continues, "[W]e all want to help the children of Iraq, but I have got to tell you, I have children in South Dakota, particularly on my Indian reservations, who have access to virtually no health care at all." Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is concerned that the administration is willing to help Iraq but can't come up with money to fund two pressing Illinois priorities, a statewide communications system for law-enforcement agencies and fire departments to bolster security in case of a terrorist attack, and the growing needs of the educational system under Bush's No Child Left Behind program.
Even some Republicans have publicly stated that they would prefer loans instead of massive bequests. Republican representative Tom Feeney says, "I don't deny the need for any of the things the Democrats are complaining about. My bottom line is, should we find a way to set up the Iraqi system so that we can successfully build the country and then have the beneficiaries of that building repay the American taxpayers. That is not unreasonable to ask." Donald Rumsfeld leads the charge of administration officials to Capital Hill to defend the request. Rumsfeld says, "If we fail to invest in the Iraqi police, the Iraqi border patrol, the Iraqi civil defense and the Iraqi army, they are not going to be able to provide for their security, and they are going to continue to be dependent on foreign troops -- ours and the coalition's." Democrats are asking for the request to be split into separate parts to be considered and voted on independently, but concede that the likelihood of that happening is remote. Two Democratic senators intend to add an amendment to the funding bill that would require competitive bidding on most aspects of the funding targets. (Chicago Tribune)
September 27: The father of a US soldier killed in Iraq blames President Bush for his son's death.
Iraq war and occupation
"My son died because Bush lied," says Fernando Suarez, whose son Jesus was one of the first casualties in Iraq. Suarez speaks to the press in preparation for an eight-city antiwar demonstration slated for September 28. "It is time for these troops to come home. ...Neither my wife nor my family want more children to die in this illegal war. We are no less patriotic for wanting peace. Bush wants $87 billion for this war, but what does he give us for our schools?" A father of two soldiers currently serving lent his name to a full-page ad in the September 26 New York Times that demands the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The ad goes on to accuse Bush and his administration of misleading the public about weapons of mass destruction. "Donald Rumsfeld Betrayed My Sons and Our Nation. It's Time For Him to Go," reads the ad's headline, which was signed by Larry Syverson from Richmond, Virginia. The ad was paid for by MoveOn.org, an Internet-based organisation in San Francisco, and the Win Without War coalition. "I'm in awe at the courage of my sons and the honourable service that they give," Syverson writes. "But the leaders they serve have not acted honorably. They have failed my sons. They have failed all of us. At the very least, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must go." (Guardian)

September 28: The New York Times finally prints an article publicly acknowledging that the Iraqi National Congress and its head, Ahmad Chalabi, have been engaged in spreading lies and disinformation about Iraq's WMD capabilities for over a year.
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
The article also acknowledges that the Times itself has been hoodwinked by Chalabi's misinformation. Journalist Amy Goodman writes, "The Times confession was too little, too late. After an unnecessary war, during a brutal occupation, and several thousand lives later, the Times obliquely acknowledged that it had been recycling disinformation. [Times reporter Judith] Miller's reports played an invaluable role in the administration's propaganda war. They gave public legitimacy to outright lies, providing what appeared to be independent confirmation of wild speculation and false accusations." Industry publication Editor & Publisher observes, "What Miller has done over time seriously violates several Times' policies under their code of conduct for news and editorial departments. ...Miller strikes right at the core of the regular functioning news machine." Though the Times indirectly admits participating in the Bush administration's campaign of disinformation about Iraq, it fails to change its behavior; two weeks before, it published an article by Miller that repeated unsubstantiated charges that Syria is stockpiling WMDs. The article is a virtual transcription of testimony given by neoconservative John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control, to Congress, and contains a curious caveat: the testimony "was provided to the New York Times by individuals who feel that the accusations against Syria have received insufficient attention." (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
September 28: The House Intelligence Committee finds that the US intelligence community usedf outdated, "circumstantial [and] fragmentary" information with "too many uncertainties" to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
The committee spent four months probing 19 volumes of classified information used by the Bush administration to make its case for war, and found "significant deficiencies" in the intelligence community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq. Chairman Porter Goss, a Republican, and ranking Democrat Jane Harman say in a letter accompanying the upcoming committee report, "The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist." The letter is sent to CIA director George Tenet. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow counters by accusing the committee of failing to conduct "a detailed inquiry on this study." Harlow adds, "The notion that our community does not challenge standing judgments is absurd. ...To attempt to make such a determination so quickly and without all the facts is premature and wrong. Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject. The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black-and-white facts. The judgments reached, and the tradecraft used, were honest and professional--based on many years of effort and experience."
Like a similar report from the Senate Intelligence Committee still in the works, the committee Republicans, led by Goss, worked hard and more or less successfully to deflect any blame from the Bush administration and place it on the intelligence committee, though a source in Congress says Goss "does not believe that [the intelligence] community's judgments were inaccurate."
The committee is particularly critical of the intelligence used to determine that Iraq had a burgeoning nuclear weapons program. "Our examination has identified the relatively fragile nature of this information," says the letter, which goes on to note internal intelligence agency disputes about whether Iraq attempted to buy high-strength aluminum tubes that could be used in nuclear weapons manufacture, and points out the dual-use nature of equipment in other attempted purchases cited in the NIE. And, write Goss and Harman, the administration's assertion that it has more concrete information about Iraq's nuclear weapons that it can disclose is little more than smoke. "We have not found any information in the assessments that are still classified that was any more definitive," they write. On this point, the letter says the committee "had reviewed extensively the allegations that there was a disconnect between public statements by administration officials and the underlying intelligence." It continues, "We do believe...that if public officials cite intelligence incorrectly, the IC [intelligence community] has a responsibility to go back to that policymaker and make clear that the public statement mischaracterized the available intelligence." (Washington Post/Global Policy Forum)
September 28: Beating the dead horse one more time,
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Condoleezza Rice tries to resurrect the notion that Iraq may have been complicit in the 9/11 attacks. "Saddam Hussein -- no one has said that there is evidence that Saddam Hussein directed or controlled 9/11," she tells NBC reporter Tim Russert, "but let's be very clear, he had ties to al-Qaeda, he had al-Qaeda operatives who had operated out of Baghdad." (Frank Rich [PDF file])

Justice Department begins investigating Plame outing

September 28: CIA director George Tenet has asked the Justice Department to investigate an allegation that White House officials leaked the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to journalist Robert Novak.
Plame outing
Novak printed Plame's name on July 14 (see related items throughout this site) after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilsoh, publicly challenged Bush administration claims that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Niger for possible use in nuclear weapons. The claim has long been disproven; Bush backed away from the claim after reiterating it several times, most notable in the January 2003 State of the Union address. Novak has said his sources are two senior administration officials.
The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law. The Intelligence Protection Act, passed in 1982, imposes maximum penalties of 10 years in prison and $50,000 in fines for unauthorized disclosure by government employees with access to classified information.
A senior administration official has confirmed that days before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political firestorm over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," says the senior official. Sources familiar with the conversations say the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility. They allege, falsely, that that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife." A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game." (Editor's note: The sources are confirmed, in 2006, to have been, among others, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, political manager Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, among others. Novak's two sources were Rove and Armitage.)
The official refuses to name either the leakers or the journalists. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official says the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility." As for Wilson, he says that he believes Karl Rove is one of the leakers. On August 21, at a public forum in Seattle, Wilson said that it is of keen interest to him "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."
Of course, White House press secretary Scott McClellan denies any knowledge of any leaks about Plame. "That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing," McClellan said yesterday. "I don't have any information beyond an anonymous source in a media report to suggest there is anything to this. If someone has information of this nature, then he or she should report it to the Department of Justice." McClellan says of Wilson's accusations against Rove, "It is a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true." McClellan was asked about Wilson's charge at a White House briefing on September 16 and said the accusation is "totally ridiculous."
Tenet sent a memo to the Justice Department questioning whether a leaker had broken federal law by disclosing the identity of an undercover officer. The Justice Department is determining whether a formal investigation is warranted. Tenet "doesn't like leaks," according to an intelligence official.
Many believe that the White House was not only trying to destroy Wilson's credibility, but trying to sabotage the credibility of the CIA, whom the White House blames for providing it with poor intelligence regarding Iraq. Though Tenet and other CIA officials had repeatedly stripped references to the Iraq-Niger uranium deal from earlier speeches, Bush and his officials blame Tenet for the inclusion of the now-discredited uranium claim -- the so-called "16 words" -- in the State of the Union address in January. Tenet later issued a statement taking responsibility for the CIA's approval of the address before it was delivered, but made clear the CIA had earlier warned the White House not to use the allegations about uranium ore. After an ensuing rush of leaks over White House handling of intelligence, Bush's aides said, belatedly, they believed in retrospect it had been a political mistake to blame Tenet.
When Novak told a CIA spokesman he was going to write a column about Wilson's wife, the spokesman urged him not to print her name "for security reasons," according to one CIA official. Intelligence officials said they believed Novak understood there were reasons other than Plame's personal security not to use her name, even though the CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover. (Editor's note: It is later confirmed that outing Plame caused tremendous damage to the US intelligence community. Plame had been a covert agent overseas, and her outing caused dozens of CIA assets in other countries to become exposed. Additionally, when Plame was outed, she was the operations chief for the Joint Iraq Task Force, the CIA organization charged with finding out what they could about Iraqi WMDs.) Last night, Novak said, "They said it's doubtful she'll ever again have a foreign assignment. They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name. It was a very weak request. If it was put on a stronger basis, I would have considered it." Novak is very familiar with the infrastructures of various organizations and agencies in Washington; it is highly doubtful that he did not understand the ramifications of his outing of Plame. It is obvious, though Novak will not admit it, that he accepted the damage to US intelligence efforts against Iraq and against terrorism in order to do the White House's bidding.
Wilson was acting US ambassador to Iraq during the run-up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. He was in the diplomatic service from 1976 until 1998, and was the Clinton administration's senior director of African affairs on the National Security Council. He is now an international business consultant. Wilson has said the mission to Niger was unpaid except for expenses. Wilson says he believes an inquiry from Cheney's office launched his eight-day mission to Niger in February 2002 to check the uranium claim, which turned out to be based on forged documents. "The way it was briefed to me was that the office of the vice president had expressed an interest in a report covering uranium purchases by Iraq from Niger," Wilson says. He adds that if Novak's account is accurate, the leak was part of "a deliberate attempt on the part of the White House to intimidate others and make them think twice about coming forward." Sources said that some of the other journalists who received the leak did not use the information because they were uncomfortable with unmasking an undercover agent or because they did not consider the information relevant to Wilson's report about Niger. (Editor's note: those reporters include NBC's Tim Russert and David Gregory, the New York Times's Judith Miller, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, Time's Matthew Cooper, Matthew Duffy, and John Dickerson, and others.)
Democratic senator Charles Schumer, who has been pushing the FBI to investigate the disclosure since July, said yesterday that it "not only put an agent's life in danger, but many of that agent's sources and contacts."
The White House is thrown into disarray by the Post article that forms the basis of this item. Who is the source that knows so much about the Plame outing, officials wonder, including the fact that six reporters were told of Plame's identity? Who are Novak's sources -- Rove almost certainly has to be one, but who is the other? Conspiracy theories abound, with one alleging that the CIA itself is orchestrating this media coverage in order to deflect attention from a recent House intelligence committee report slamming the agency for its own intelligence failures. The article has a few minor errors, corrected by Allen in later editions -- i.e., his source is an "administration aide," not a "senior administration official, and the story's allegation that the White House officials spoke with all six reporters before the Novak column saw print cannot as yet be confirmed. Those errors will be enough for White House officials to scream that the entire story is a fabrication. (Washington Post, Air America/MediaMatters [link to audio], Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

September 29: As the media flap over the CIA leak of veteran WMD expert and undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson escalates, the Bush administration denies that Bush's top political advisor Karl Rove is the source of the leak.
Plame outing
Rove himself flatly denies having any knowledge of the leak to ABC News producer Andrea Owen. Scott McClellan tells reporters, "I've known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask Karl, because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct." Minutes later, McClellan contradicts himself somewhat, saying, "I have spoken with Karl about this matter.... I've made it very clear that he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was."
McClellan skips over the fact that almost everyone inside the White House assumes -- correctly, as it turns out -- that Rove must be one of the leakers. Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband and the former ambassador who revealed that the Bush administration lied when it claimed Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger, claimed earlier that he believed Rove was the source of the leak, but now has clarified his statement to say that he can't be sure Rove leaked the information. Wilson says, "I have people, who I have confidence in, who have indicated to me that he [Rove], at a minimum, condoned it and certainly did nothing to put a stop to it for a week after it was out there. Among the phone calls I received were those that said `White House sources are saying that it's not about the 16 words, it's about Wilson and his wife.' And two people called me up and specifically mentioned Rove's name." Rove is indeed one of the sources, but no one is admitting that just yet. Many Democrats and some Republicans are calling for a special investigator, independent of the Justice Department, to be named to look into the charges.
McClellan says one more thing that will come back to haunt the administration: Bush has "made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in the administration." Fine words, and a claim that Bush has no intention of standing behind. Later in the day, Bush himself tells reporters, "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of." Apparently Bush means "taken care of" in the sense of "protected" and "hidden from public and prosecutorial view."
What few outside the White House know is that within minutes of the announcement of the CIA request for an investigation, conservative columnist Robert Novak, who outed Plame in July, calls Rove to assure him that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation. FBI investigators quickly learn of the Novak-Rove conversation and, worried that the two may have concocted a cover story during that conversation to protect Rove, they brief Attorney General John Ashcroft on the matter. But apparently the idea of a nationally known columnist colluding with a senior White House official to stymie the FBI doesn't bother the nation's highest law enforcement official. Until Ashcroft finally recuses himself for an array of conflicts of interest on December 30, he will work to delay and obfuscate the investigation instead of push it forward.
Eventually, Rove will tell the grand jury hearing evidence on the leak that during his phone call with Novak, the columnist said, in paraphrase, "You are not going to get burned" and "I don't give up my sources." Rove had been Novak's confirming source for Plame's identity, where Novak outed her as an "agency operative." Rove and Novak had talked about Plame on July 9, five days before Novak's column was published. Rove also tells the grand jury that in his conversation with Novak, the journalist referred referred to a 1992 incident in which Rove had been fired from the Texas arm of President George H.W. Bush's re-election effort; Rove lost his job because the Bush campaign believed that he had been the source for a Novak column that criticized the campaign's internal workings. In their phone call today, Novak says he will ensure that nothing like that happens in the CIA-Plame leak probe. According to Rove's later testimony, Novak says, "I'm not going to let that happen to you again." Rove believes that Novak means he will say that Rove is not a source of information for the column about Plame. As part of his muddying the evidentiary waters, Rove will further say that he believes he might not be an actual source for Rove, because, according to Rove, when Novak mentioned to him that Plame worked for the CIA, Rove responded that he had heard the same information. Rove will recall the telephone call as a "curious conversation."
Many inside and outside of the Justice Department believe that Rove and Novak improperly, if not illegally, collude in "getting their stories straight" during their phone call. Attorney Stephen Brand, who has represented numerous clients in several special-prosecutor investigations, says, "It is the better part of wisdom and standing instruction that witnesses to an investigation do not talk to other witnesses about the case when the case is still pending. It raises the inference that they are comparing each other's recollections and altering or shaping each other's testimony." He adds that there is a "thin line between refreshing each other's recollections...and suborning someone to lie under oath." Mark Feldstein, the director of journalism programs at George Washington University, says that he believes Novak flaunted the ethical standards of journalism by reaching out to Rove after the criminal investigation had commenced. He says, "A journalist's natural instinct is to protect his source. Were there no criminal investigation, it would have been more than appropriate for a reporter to say to a source, 'Don't worry, I'm not going to out you.' But if there is a criminal investigation under way, you can't escape the inference that you are calling to coordinate your stories. You go very quickly from being a stand-up reporter to impairing a criminal investigation."
Investigators will also come to believe that after this phone call with Novak, Novak changes his account of the July 9 conversation with Rove to give the impression that Rove and other White House officials had a far more passive role in leaking Plame's name than actually occurred. In other words, Novak will misrepresent the facts -- lie -- to investigators in order to protect Rove and the White House. On July 22, 2003, eight days after the publication of Novak's column on Plame, Newsday reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce quoted Novak as telling them in an interview that it was White House officials who encouraged him to write about Plame. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Newsday quoted Novak as saying about Plame. "They thought it was significant. They gave me the name, and I used it." Novak's statement shows that Rove was not passively, but actively, involved in trying to expose Plame's CIA job.
Interestingly, today after speaking with Rove, Novak indeed changes his version of events. "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this," he now says. "In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report [on his Niger trip], when [the official] told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years' experience in Washington, I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July, they confirmed Mrs. Wilson's involvement in a mission for her husband on a secondary basis, who is -- he is a former Clinton administration official. They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else." Novak says that Newsday's Phelps "badly misquoted" him. Phelps, who is Newsday's Washington bureau chief, denies Novak's allegations, saying that he took accurate notes of his interview with Novak and reported exactly what Novak told him. And other journalists and government witnesses will confirm Newsday's version of events, demonstrating that Rove is lying to the public and his journalistic colleagues as well. And journalism professor Geneva Overholser questions the propriety of Novak's using Rove as a source on the Plame story if, in fact, Rove had passed along only unsubstantiated gossip as he later claims. "It's very hard for me to believe that any journalist would write a story of such importance based on someone making an offhand comment that 'I heard that too,'" she says. Overholser is a former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board and a former editor of the Des Moines Register. "A comment like that could mean that it's just the gossip going around. That means something very different than an affirmation to go with a story. If that was the basis for Novak's story, it was the slimmest of reeds."
Investigators believe that Novak changes his story to support Rove's version of events, which has it that Rove did not learn Plame's identity from classified sources (he did -- see earlier items in this site), was not part of a campaign with Lewis Libby or any other White House official to discredit Wilson and out Plame (he was), and that any information that he provided Novak and Cooper about Plame's CIA job was only unsubstantiated gossip (it was not). Rove will tell the FBI and Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury that he couldn't remember where he first learned of Plame's identity, though he believes he learned it from a journalist. Rove is lying; he learned of Plame's identity from either Dick Cheney or Libby. He will also testify that he heard more about Plame from Novak, who had originally called him on July 9 about an entirely different matter. It was only at the end of their conversation that Rove heard that Plame worked for the CIA and had some role in sending her husband on his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, Rove will testify. Having been told this information by Novak, Rove tells the FBI, he simply said he had heard the same thing. He claims that he doesn't learn anything about Plame from Libby until two days after his conversation with Novak, on July 11, when he told Libby about his conversation with Novak. Again, to be repetitive, Rove is lying.
Any criminal charges against Rove will likely hinge on testimony from Novak, and, according to a mutual friend, any such "flipping" is highly unlikely. The friend doubts that Fitzgerald could get a conviction "as long as neither [Novak nor Rove] breaks, and there is no reason for them to, no matter how much evidence there is. These are two people who go way back, and they are going to look out for each other." (ABC, National Journal, Frank Rich [PDF file])
September 29: Bush aides promise to cooperate with the Justice Department investigation into the White House leak that exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.
Plame outing
Democrats insist that the Bush administration will not honestly investigate itself, and are continuing to call for an independent probe, though the Bush administration continues to refuse to name an independent counsel. Security advisor Condoleezza Rice claims to be completely in the dark on the subject. Attorney General John Ashcroft will head the Justice Department probe; Ashcroft is a partisan Bush loyalist and a former client of Karl Rove's, an inherent conflict of interest that he will ignore.
An administration aide confirmed earlier that two unnamed White House sources cold-called at least six different journalists to "out" the CIA agent. One of the journalists was Robert Novak, who is a reliable watercarrier for the administration and other right-wing sources; he dutifully printed the information in his next column. Novak also used her maiden name, Plame, which she used overseas as part of her intelligence work, but does not use publicly. Around that same time, four television reporters called Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, and encouraged him to identify his wife in their reporting, according to Wilson. Wilson also notes that in the week after the Novak column appeared, several journalists told him that the White House was trying to call attention to his wife, apparently hoping to undermine his credibility by implying he had received the Niger assignment only because his wife had suggested the mission and recommended him for the job. "Each of the reporters quoted the White House official as using some variation on, 'The real story isn't the 16 words. The real story is Wilson and his wife.' The time frame led me to deduce that the White House was continuing to try to push this story." Wilson identifies one of the reporters as Andrea Mitchell of NBC News; Mitchell refuses to comment. Novak has later attempted to paint Plame as a mere "analyst" and not an overseas operative, a characterization that has repeatedly been proven false. A quote from former CIA head George H.W. Bush is unearthed; he said in 1999 at the dedication of the agency's new headquarters that those who expose the names of intelligence sources are "the most insidious of traitors."
White House senior counsel Alberto Gonzales finally, a full day after the Justice Department announcement, orders White House personnel to review their files and turn over any relevant information to Justice Department investigators, though he tells White House chief of staff Andrew Card about the investigation within minutes, leading some to speculate that Gonzales wants to give White House staffers time to destroy evidence. "It was a very dramatic moment," one staffer recalls of Gonzales's request. Both Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, two of the original leakers, are in the meeting where Gonzales first makes his request; neither bother to turn over material to the DOJ for months, and there is still an array of questions about just what the two did and did not turn over. (Washington Post, Salon, Reuters, Frank Rich [PDF file])
September 29: No Congressional committee has shown any interest in investigating the possibility of a leak from the White House that outed senior CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, even though privately some members say "despicable" crimes may have been committed.
Plame outing
All committees in both the Senate and the House are led by Republicans, who are heeding Bush administration calls to stay out of the issue. Senator Orrin Hatch, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, says, "I don't think that runs [within] our committee's jurisdiction." He says that the Justice Department's investigation should run its course. "I think we have to be very careful not to interfere with it. ...I don't see any reason for substantive hearings at this point." As Republicans band together to resist the Democratic call for a special investigator into the CIA leak, the Internet publication The Left Coaster compiles an interesting group of quotes from senior GOP representatives on the importance of independent counsels and special investigators from 1997 and 1998, when they were calling for an independent investigation into the Clinton administration over Whitewater and campaign finance matters. Orrin Hatch wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno that even if Clinton and Gore were guilty of, at most, "technical violations" of the law that are not usually prosecuted, "Given the obvious conflict of interest, however, it should be an independent counsel, and not you, who exercises such discretion" over the investigation.
Henry Hyde wrote, "At some point questions must be answered, if only to build confidence that a rigorous investigation is underway and that Justice isn't merely circling the wagons to defend the White House." Trent Lott stated, "There is a clear conflict of interest when the attorney general appointed by the president is called upon to investigate possible illegal acts by the vice president or other high-ranking administration officials." Hyde and Hatch wrote in a joint letter to Reno in June 1998, "Our concern has been that you, and the Department of Justice generally, face an inescapable political conflict of interest in investigating campaign fundraising violations that may involve senior Administration officials. As you yourself have recognized in testimony before Congress, such a conflict inevitably arises whenever an Attorney General, appointed and removable by the President, is asked to investigate possible wrongdoing by senior Executive Branch officials." Hatch wrote in an earlier letter to Reno: "An authority higher than me and more independent than the attorney general needs to determine the scope of the various laws implicated by this conduct, and whether any of these laws were violated." (The Left Coaster, The Hill)
September 29: It has taken time, but by now the media is in full scandal mode over what is becoming known as "Plamegate."
Plame outing
Predictably, some conservative pundits are refusing to acknowledge that the White House did anything except play tough politics, and turn their scorn onto the Wilsons. The Republican National Committee's head, Ed Gillespie, dismisses Wilson as a "partisan." Neoconservative William Kristol says that the real story is the use of Plame's "unfortunate" outing by leftist critics of the administration to criticize the Iraq war. The Wall Street Journal goes completely off the deep end, calling Joseph Wilson "an open opponent of the US war on terror," and saying that the public "has a right to know" about Plame's status as a covert CIA agent. But the other side, populated by both Democrats, Republicans, civil libertarians, and Constitutional defenders, are outraged. Larry Johnson, a former CIA classmate of Plame's and a Republican, says, "This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal." Liberal economist Paul Krugman writes, "Someone high in the administration committed a felony. End of story." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
September 29: In yet another attempt to defuse criticism of Bush's assertion in May that "the war in Iraq is over,"
Media manipulation and marketing by GOP
communications director Dan Bartlett now says that the banner hanging photogenically behind the president during his flight-suited speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln was hung there by request of the carrier's captain, who wanted to acknowledge the fact that the carrier's crew had completed the longest-ever carrier tour. It was hung, according to Bartlett, merely to make the troops proud, and had nothing to do with the President's speech. This flies directly in the face of the detailed media coverage of just how minutely every aspect of Bush's speech and the accompanying accessorizing was planned. (US News & World Report/The Agonist)
September 29: A large number of federal judges, government officials, and other members of the legal establishment have joined to combat the Bush administration over the legal underpinnings of the Padilla v. Rumsfeld case.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
They have written a friend-of-the-court brief that challenges the legality of the administration's detention of American citizen Jose Padilla, who has been held since May 8, 2002 for saying what the government terms "loose talk" about detonating a "dirty bomb" of some sort. He has never been charged with a crime, and was originally held as a material witness before being secretly transported, without the knowledge of his family or his lawyer, to a military brig in North Carolina, where he remains, incommunicado. Padilla has been stripped of his Constitutional rights by the sole order and authority of George W. Bush, who has designated him an "enemy combatant." As the friend-of-the-court brief by the former federal judges and other prominent lawyers states: "There is at present no constitutionally-approved definition of who is an 'enemy combatant'; there are no constitutionally-approved procedures governing when and how persons seized in the United States may be imprisoned as 'enemy combatants' or for how long.... In the absence of such standards...the judiciary -- and the historical 'great writ' of habeas corpus -- serves as the sole safeguard against what otherwise would be an unbridled power of the Executive to imprison a citizen based solely on the Executive's hearsay assertions that he or she has become an 'enemy' of the state."
The brief goes on to say, "This case involves an unprecedented detention by the United States of an American citizen, seized on American soil, and held incommunicado for more than a year without any charge being filed against him, without any access to counsel, and without any right to challenge the basis of his detention before a United States judge or magistrate. [We] believe the Executive's position in this case threatens the basic 'rule of law' on which our country is founded, the role of the federal judiciary and the separations in our national government, and fundamental individual liberties enshrined in our Constitution." (While Padilla has a court-appointed lawyer, Donna Newman, representing him, he is not aware of it; he has not been allowed to see or speak to her. She says, "To have the government say to us, 'You have a right to bring a petition [for habeas corpus], [but] you just can't speak to your client.' [That] is absolutely absurd.") The brief sums up its position thusly: "The [president's] constitutional argument [in the case of Jose Padilla] would give every President the unchecked power to detain, without charge and forever, all citizens it chooses to label as 'enemy combatants.'" (Village Voice)

September 30: The New York Times reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency has issued an assessment finding that almost all of the claims about Iraqi WMDs made by Iraqi defectors were false. The defectors were provided in batches by Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi, who was hand-picked by administration neoconservatives to become the leader of Iraq once Saddam Hussein was out of power. (Frank Rich [PDF file])

Bush administration blocks investigation into Plame outing

September 30: The Justice Department announces it has begun a full criminal probe into allegations that Bush administration officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative, leaving open the possibility a special counsel will be appointed when more facts are learned.
Plame outing
The investigation began with the White House, which was directed to preserve all relevant records and files. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, in a memo to White House staff on September 29, said that the Justice Department informed aides to President Bush on Monday evening that it is probing "possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee." (At the request of the White House, the Justice Department delays for 24 hours giving official notification to the administration that all phone logs, e-mails, and documents be preserved in light of the pending investigation, sparking questions that evidence may be undergoing destruction or revision. See the related September 29 item.) Bush says he welcomes the investigation, but press secretary Scott McClellan confirms that no one in the White House is inquiring about the leak, leaving all inquiries to the Justice Department.
The decision to open the investigation was made by career counterespionage section chief John Dion, without the consultation of Attorney General John Ashcroft, as is standard practice. The Justice Department has asked the FBI and the CIA to preserve relevant records; requests were apparently not made of the Pentagon or the State Department. Ashcroft refuses to comment on the investigation, nor will he comment on allegations that there are conflicts involved in his department conducting the investigation. Congressional Republicans killed an attempt by Democratic Senator Charles Schumer to pass a resolution asking for a special investigator, but Schumer says he intends to keep pushing for such an appointment. "This is not just a leak; this is a crime, plain and simple," Schumer asserts.
Right-wing journalist Robert Novak, who published the leaked information in July, says, "I did not receive a planned leak" and calls the information "an offhand revelation." He also claims that an "unofficial source" at the CIA said Plame "has been an analyst, not in covert operations." This contradicts his interview in Newsday of July 22, where he said that White House sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." Plame currently is an analyst at the CIA, but previously served overseas in a clandestine capacity, which means her name is kept classified to protect her previous contacts and operations, and her ability to work again undercover overseas. Schumer says to the Senate, "Our covert agents put their lives at risk for us every day. They are soldiers just like your brave young men and women in Iraq and around the globe. ...In the post-nine/11 world, the world of terrorism...when you reveal the name of an agent, it's like putting a gun to that agent's head. You are jeopardizing their life, in many cases. ...You are jeopardizing the lives of the contacts that they have built up over the decades. You are jeopardizing the security of America." A Buzzflash editorial says, "If true, it's the latest, and most treasonous, mafia tactic that the Bush administration has been using to intimidate patriotic Americans: 'Mess with us and we will have no compunction about betraying the national security. Our first priority is enforcement of loyalty to this administration and George W. Bush, not the nation. We will intimidate and punish anyone who is disloyal, whatever the costs to America's security. We will go as far as we need to go in achieving our objectives. If you think we won't do it because it will hurt national security, we will, if that's what it takes to protect Bush and carry out our objectives.'" (Washington Post, NPR, Washington Post Agence France-Press/AMA TechTel, Buzzflash)
September 30: Journalist Robert Novak continues to backpedal on his outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.
Plame outing
On September 29, he tells CNN: "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. When I called the CIA in July, they confirmed Mrs. Wilson's involvement in a mission for her husband. They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives." Both Plame's husband Joseph Wilson and the CIA dispute Novak's assertions. The CIA confirms that it tried "strenuously" to dissuade Novak from publicly identifying Plame; Wilson confirms that his wife is a senior CIA operative with 30 years' experience and a veteran undercover operative. Two former intelligence officials have also confirmed that Plame is an operations officer in the spy agency's clandestine directorate of operations. Plame "ran intelligence operations overseas," says former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro. He confirms that her specialty in the agency's nonproliferation center was biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and "recruiting agents, sending them to areas where they could access information about proliferation matters, weapons of mass destruction." Cannistraro characterizes her outing as a "dirty trick. ...Her assets may be at risk. I think that's what justified the probe." Novak himself originally wrote that the leak came from "two senior White House sources" who called him to give him the information; he has drastically contradicted himself. His self-contradictions continue with his efforts to say that she is not an Agency operative, the exact words he used in his original article. He claims that he inserted the reference to Plame "almost in passing," an assertion which experienced journalists find astonishing. No journalist with 40 years of experience in political reporting outs a CIA agent "in passing."
Both President Bush and his press secretary Scott McClellan continue to ask journalists to come forward with any information they may have about the leak, though the White House continues to refuse to ask its own officials for the same information. Former CIA operative Larry Johnson is contemptuous of Novak's waffling: "To hear Bob Novak parsing words like a Clinton lawyer defining sex is outrageous. Sure, they didn't call him, he called them but they volunteered the information. They took the initiative to divulge the CIA officer's name. And that is outrageous. ...Let's be very clear about what happened. This is not an alleged abuse. This is a confirmed abuse. I worked with this woman. She started training with me. She has been undercover for three decades, she is not as Bob Novak suggested a CIA analyst. But given that, I was a CIA analyst for four years. I was undercover. I could not divulge to my family outside of my wife that I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency until I left the agency on Sept. 30, 1989. At that point I could admit it. So the fact that she's been undercover for three decades and that has been divulged is outrageous because she was put undercover for certain reasons. One, she works in an area where people she meets with overseas could be compromised. When you start tracing back who she met with, even people who innocently met with her, who are not involved in CIA operations, could be compromised. For these journalists to argue that this is no big deal and if I hear another Republican operative suggesting that well, this was just an analyst fine, let them go undercover. Let's put them overseas and let's out them and then see how they like it. They won't be able to stand the heat."
Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, goes further: "Bob Novak has done a really dangerous and terrible thing. If you are going to get involved in something like this where you're bumping up against breaking the law, as a journalist you have a civil disobedience test you have to meet. What's the public good of this story? What's the -- balanced against what's the danger to the people involved publishing the story. The third part of the test is, is it necessary in telling the story to do this or is there another way to do it, do you need to divulge this person's name, in other words, to convey the information you think is of the public interest. This doesn't meet any one of those three tests. It's not of overriding public interest. Novak may be really just an instrument of Republican revenge here. Whatever the public good is of the story is far overwhelmed by the danger to this woman and her network of operatives. And it's gratuitous. You could have told the story without her name." Johnson concludes, "I say this as a registered Republican. I'm on record giving contributions to the George Bush campaign. This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal, a political smear of an individual with no relevance to the story. Publishing her name in that story added nothing to it. His entire intent was correctly as Ambassador Wilson noted: to intimidate, to suggest that there was some impropriety that somehow his wife was in a decision making position to influence his ability to go over and savage a stupid policy, an erroneous policy and frankly, what was a false policy of suggesting that there were nuclear material in Iraq that required this war. This was about a political attack. To pretend that it's something else and to get into this parsing of words, I tell you, it sickens me to be a Republican to see this." (PBS, New York Daily News, Salon)
September 30: Donald Rumsfeld's civilian advisor, Steve Herbits, makes a dinner appointment with two of the most reliably conservative and influential men he knows: Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich.
Iraq war and occupation
At a private room in a pricy French restaurant, Herbits tells the two that he wants two things discussed: setting a date for turning over the Iraqi government to Iraqis, and recreating an Iraqi army. "The president is losing the peace," Herbits tells the two. "He is not going to get re-elected unless we get this thing straightened out." Herbits picks an arbitrary date of June 30, 2004, for a preliminary time to set a turnover of the government -- in the process, ousting Paul Bremer as the country's US administrator -- and says something must be done to meet the Pentagon's target of raising a 40,000-soldier Iraqi army by 2005, with another 146,000 Iraqis as police, border guards, and other security forces. So far, there are only a thousand would-be soldiers training for the new army. Herbits says he envisions 300,000 soldiers by July 2004. "Gentlemen, discuss," he says.
Gingrich opens by disputing Herbits's premise that the election will hinge on Iraq, saying the election will be about the American economy. No, Herbits counters, the election is a secondary issue. And Bush has limited control of that issue anyway. But Iraq is critically important to Bush's re-election, and the situation there is something that can be improved. "I'm looking at the process," he says. "It's failing." Wolfowitz, a proponent of dissolving the Iraqi army, argues that the army, while officially disbanded by Bremer, had already "melted away," but Herbits says that situation needs to be changed. "Listen, this president is going to get creamed if you don't change this." The discussion between Wolfowitz and Gingrich is lively, salted with references to poetry, history, Greeks, and modern studies. But they end up agreeing that deadlines need to be set and the Iraqi army has to be reformed. Wolfowitz says he will talk to Donald Rumsfeld and Stephen Hadley. Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, is most closely connected in the White House to Dick Cheney. He says he will talk to Cheney and Lewis Libby.
"It was the first captive moment," Gingrich later recalls. "We sat down and compared notes about how bad it was, and the degree to which Bremer was totally outside the chain of command. ...Washington was being systematically misinformed." Gingrich says Bremer's economic model, using private contractors and big multinationals to prop up and rebuild Iraq's economy, is dead wrong. The infighting in the National Security Council is intense and counterproductive, he adds. "The big guys were so tired of fighting each other that they all said, 'I sure hope Bremer solves it.' And when you come in and say this ain't going well, they'd say, 'Well, let's give Bremer time.'" The problem is, says Gingrich, that "Bremer is the largest single disaster in American foreign policy in modern times. The most dangerous thing in the world is a confident, smart person with the wrong model because they have enormous enthusiasm in pursuing the wrong model. Bremer arrives thinking he was MacArthur in Japan and that we should have an American-centric system." The biggest mistake CEOs make, Gingrich says, is not firing people fast enough. Bremer should have been gone by September, Gingrich asserts, but he and Wolfowitz both realized that Bremer couldn't be fired that easily. He had been appointed by Bush, and Jay Garner had already been, in essence, fired. Two in one year would signal overwhelming incompetence.
Gingrich discusses the problem with Karl Rove and Stephen Hadley, and gives them a memo saying, "Bremer may cost you the election." "I'm here to tell you it is that bad," he tells the two. Gingrich wants to engage Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. "They are going to make a thousand decisions," he says. "So it's not just getting a decision made, it's getting them to think differently about what's at stake." The bottom line? "Losing a war is bad." (Bob Woodward)
September 30: New York Times economic analyst Paul Krugman disagrees with the Bush administration's attempt to compare its activities in postwar Iraq with the Marshall Plan enacted by the Allies after World War II.
Iraq war and occupation
Krugman calls what is happening in Iraq nothing more than rank cronyism and profiteering: "The really important thing is that cronyism is warping policy: by treating contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends, administration officials are delaying Iraq's recovery, with potentially catastrophic consequences. ...Although he is now honored for his postwar leadership, [former president Harry] Truman initially rose to prominence as a fierce crusader against war profiteering, which he considered treason. Iraq's reconstruction, by contrast, remains firmly under White House control. And this is an administration of, by and for crony capitalists; to match this White House's blithe lack of concern about conflicts of interest, you have to go back to the Harding administration. That giant, no-bid contract given to Halliburton, the company that made Dick Cheney rich, was just what you'd expect." Krugman gives several examples. One is the attempt by two Iraqi companies to provide cellphone service to Baghdad; instead of being pleased at the offering, which would have somewhat offset Iraq's virtual dearth of phone services, the US administrators under Paul Bremer forcibly shut down the Iraqi companies, instead awarding the cellphone contracts to American company MCI, which at this writing is making a hash of providing phone services to anyone except high-ranking administration officials. And the contract for restoring electricity to Iraq was awarded without bid to Bechtel, which is excluding Iraqi companies and personnel from the restoration efforts. Electricity has still not been restored to 90% of the country. (New York Times)
September 30: The Raleigh News and Observer reports that a new epithet for Middle Eastern citizens, "hajii," is being used by American military and civilian personnel.
Middle East unrest
The epithet, a derogatory use of a term used by Muslims to denote "one who has made the hajj," a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, is widely used in both Iraq and Kuwait. Typical examples include the conversational tidbits, "killing some hajjis" or "mowing down some hajjis." One soldier in Iraq has "Hodgie Killer" written on his footlocker. Iraqis, friend or foe, are called hajjis. Kuwaitis are called hajjis. Even people brought in by civilian contractors to work in mess halls or drive buses are hajjis, despite the fact that they might be from India, the Philippines or Pakistan, and might be Hindu or Christian. "This is another reason that soldiers aren't good at winning the peace," says Samer Shehata of Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. "This doesn't bode well for the reconstruction." So far, the US military has done little, if anything, to stop the term from being used. "This is more of a common-sense thing," says an unidentified spokesperson for the US Central Command. "It's like using any other derogatory word for a racial or ethnic group. Some may use it in a joking way, but it's derogatory, and I'm sure people have tried to stop it." "Hajji," says Shehata, sounds like racist terms that US soldiers used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, such as "towel-head." Dr. John Balaban, who has written about the Vietnam War, compares the term to those used by US forces in that war: "There were several words -- 'gook,' 'slope,' 'dink.' Some of these were meaningless, but they were all working toward the same goal, of trivializing and depersonalizing the enemy. It makes it easier to kill these people and not feel bad about it." (News and Observer)
September 30: Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese, in the midst of a discussion about the Patriot Act with Today's Katie Couric
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
and a representative from the ACLU, is asked about privacy concerns and suddenly explodes: "Librarians are more interested in pushing pornography on kids than fighting terrorism!" The remark sheds a bit of light on the thinking processes and world view of politicians and officials like Meese. (Salon)
Late September: Soon after the invasion is "officially" over, an enterprising cellular phone company from Bahrain called Batelco sets up a cellular network in Iraq that will work with the networks of neighboring countries, providing Iraq with its first cell network in months.
Iraq war and occupation
Instead of rewarding Batelco's enterprising energies, the CPA forces the company to shut down its network and dismantle its cell towers. The reason is that the network did not go through any American companies. A month later, the CPA awards the $40 million cellular phone contract for Iraq to MCI, formerly WorldCom, who is under indictment for the largest accounting fraud in history. (In August 2003, the General Services Administration suspended MCI from competing for new government contracts; this suspension does not apply in Iraq.) MCI soon sets up its own cellular network in Iraq, one that does not work well at all. MCI has no experience setting up cellular systems, but it does have extensive experience setting up data networks, such as the one used by the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, the CPA begins accepting bids from companies to erect cell towers using a wireless technology known as CDMA, a technology developed by Qualcomm of California. Unfortunately, the rest of the Middle East uses a different wireless technology, GSM. Qualcomm's technology is successfully promoted by California Republican Darrell Issa, a member of the House of Representatives, who insists that "any gift of technology to the Iraqis should also benefit the American people and the American economy." In October 2003 the CPA awards mobile phone contracts to American companies whose shareholders include top officials of the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress and a company that includes among its shareholders one Terry Sullivan, an American official who resigned from the CPA in June to prospect for business opportunities in Iraq. As of this writing, millions have been spent on lavish cell phone deals, but Iraq still has no functioning cellular phone network.
Reporter James Risen writes that the National Security Agency had extensive plans to create a front company that would manage cellular service in postwar Iraq, giving the NSA the opportunity to eavesdrop on every cell phone call made in the country, and making it difficult for insurgents to communicate via cell phones. But the NSA delayed its plans for so long that finally CPA administrator Paul Bremer opens cell-phone franchises to bidding by private companies. (Amy and David Goodman, James Risen)

Companies profiteering in Iraq exposed

Late September: Investigative journalist Stephen Pizzo compiles a report on the variety of companies and corporations that are profiteering in Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
Pizzo calls them a "band of brothers" because of their incestuously intertwined business and social interests. Some of the major players are:
- Science Applications International Inc. (SAIC): called by the Asia Times "the most mysterious and feared of the 10 defense giants," SAIC is a cutting-edge defense company that is often involved in the latest defense and intelligence projects. Much of SAIC's work is highly classified. The director of SAIC is General Wayne Downing, who has served as a lobbyist for Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq alongside former Secretary of State George Shultz. Former SAIC president and COO William Owens, a member of Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board along with right-wingers Richard Perle, Dan Quayle, Ken Adelman, and Newt Gingrich, helped steer SAIC towards the Iraqi trough. SAIC contributed $4.7 million in campaign contributions, mostly to GOP political coffers, between 1990 and 2002. While much of SAIC's contractual details are classified, the company has scores of assets in Iraq, many with "secret" classifications. Some of SAIC's work comes from subcontracts with Vinnell Corporation, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman; one of these subcontracts involves providing security to the Saudi royal family. Vinnell has made its fortune in training foreign troops in American military standards and in using American equipment; currently Vinnell is heavily involved in Saudi Arabia (see below). SAIC developed the software currently used by Halliburton and the US Navy for creating collaborative work environments for materials development. (In 1995, SAIC paid the US Defense Department a $2.5 million fine for cheating the Air Force on a contract for fighter jet displays.) August 2003's report from the government's Office of Force Transformation on the lessons learned during the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion was prepared by SAIC. And, after allegations that Diebold's voting machines were being used to hijack election results, SAIC was hired to investigate Diebold, an investigation that produced no results. David Kay, currently supervising a Bush administration attempt to find WMDs in Iraq, was vice-president of SAIC until October 2002. Admiral Bobby Inman, a former SAIC board member, is a former deputy director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA. Christopher "Ryan" Henry was SAIC's vice-president for strategic assessment and development until February 2003, when he joined the Bush administration as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. Currently SAIC holds at least $38 million of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Vinnell Corporation: A subsidiary of defense contractor Northrop Grumman, Vinnell, who has contributed over $6 million to Republican campaign causes since 1990, holds $48 million of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vinnell is a global security firm that provides training to the fledgling Iraqi army and security services. Vinnell has trained the Saudi Arabian National Guard since the 1970s; Jane's Defence Weekly describes Vinnell as "a kind of Praetorian Guard for the House of Saud, the royal family's defense of last resort against internal opposition." The SANG's main job is to protect the monarchy from resistance mounted by its own people. Vinnell has been targeted more than once for terrorist attacks inside Saudi borders. Former Democratic congressman Vic Fazio is on Northrop Grumman's board of directors. Northrop Grumman board member Philip Odeen is a former chair of TRW, and worked in the office of the secretary of defense and on the NSC. Vinnell vice president William Studeman is the former deputy director of the CIA, and a major Bush campaign contributor.
- Baker-Hughes: a Houston-based oil services company. In December 2002, the Council for Foreign Relations collaborated with Bush family friend James Baker III to create a report on the likely state of the Iraqi oil industry. (The report can be viewed at the Baker Institute Web site.) The chairman of the report committee was Edward Djerejian, a director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy; he is also a director of Baker-Hughes. (Another of the report committee members is Frank Wisner, a former member of Enron's board of directors and the prime moving force behind Enron's controversial Dabhol, India power project, a project that was jeopardized when terms of the contract were made public and the Indian citizenry learned that they were going to be horrendously overcharged for energy. India tried to back out of the contract, but was pressured to remain in the contract by threats from both Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice; Enron's subsequent bankruptcy rendered the entire argument moot. Wisner has served in a number of governmental positions, including three ambassadorships, and his father was a well-known CIA operative. Wisner is now the head of insurance giant AIG, which donated millions to the Republican Party and Republican candidates during 2002. AIG has an interest in establishing its own presence in Iraq.) The firm was not among the first corporations to land juicy governmental contracts in Iraq, but it is in line for the " second wave," which promises to be even more lucrative than the first, especially if the Bush administration gets the entire $87 billion it has demanded from Congress. Baker-Hughes is currently under investigation for bribery charges in Nigeria, Angola, and Kazakhstan.
- Fluor International: A Houston-based company now located in California, Fluor is a company deeply involved in military logistics, providing engineering, procurement, construction, environmental, and maintenance services. Currently Fluor's contracts in Iraq exceed $900 million, with the potential to go much, much higher. Fluor contributed over $2 million to GOP political coffers between 1999 and 2002. Fluor gained notoriety with its mismanagement of the heavily polluting Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington; as a result of its firing of whistleblowers, refusing to listen to the concerns of the local citizenry, and defying governmental regulations increasing the amount of pollutants it releases into the biosphere, Fluor has had its contract to manage Hanford extended by the Bush administration through 2006. Fluor has been convicted of multiple instances of defrauding the US government, refusing to implement safety standards, and producing shoddy constructions; the company has already been fined over $20.2 million, with another $25 million hanging over the corporation's head regarding a badly constructed mine site in Chile. $8.5 million of those fines were to the Defense Department over fraudulent defense contracts. In 2003, South Africans filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Fluor, charging that the company exploited black workers under apartheid. Apparently all of this makes Fluor a prime candidate for lucrative Iraqi contracts. Company head Peter Fluor used to be CEO of Texas Crude Energy Inc., an oil and gas exploration company headquartered in Houston. He is also a director of Ocean Energy, whose parent company, Devon Energy, not only has Iraqi contracts of its own, but has signed a contract with Syria to build oil wells along the Iraqi/Syrian border. (Devon Energy CEO Larry Nichols also sits on the board of directors of Baker-Hughes. Devon's COO Larry Hackett sits on the board of directors of Fluor. Both Hackett and Nichols sit on the board of oil company Temple-Inland along with former SAIC chairman Admiral Bobby Inman, also a Fluor board member.) Former CEO Philip Carroll is overseeing the restructuring of Iraq's oil industry; he still receives over $1 million a year in benefits from Fluor, and owns $34 million of Fluor stock. Fluor Corp. was also a partner with Halliburton Oil to provide oil field services to Russia in 1998. After its awarding of Iraqi contracts, its stock prices nearly doubled.
- Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) and DynCorp: DynCorp, a subsidiary of CSC, was awarded a $50 million contract to train Iraqi police and security personnel, though the open-ended contract could end up being worth billions. DynCorp, of Reston, Virginia, is one of the country's largest military contractors, providing security for Afghan president Hamid Karzai as well as operating many aspects of the border patrol in the southwest US and providing security for Air Force One; it is also one of the GOP's most prominent corporate contributors. DynCorp has built an almost lurid reputation for itself in the world of intelligence, espionage, and mercenary soldiers, with charges that the company participated in sexual slavery rings, sex trafficking, and other allegations; DynCorp has either been held guilty or settled out of court for these charges. (The DynCorp employees who exposed the sex-slave ring in Bosnia were fired by the company.) DynCorp is also heavily involved in the US's involvement in controlling Latin American drug smuggling; in Ecuador, a number of farmers who sued DynCorp for spraying toxic chemicals on their villages and farms and killing and injuring dozens were stymied when the US State Department intervened, closing the case in the interest of "national security." CSC, who like DynCorp has been fined millions for repeated instances of defrauding the government, was awarded a 10-year contract by the Bush administration to take over technology services for the National Security Agency, the largest outsourcing arrangement by a federal agency in history. CSC's president, Van Honeycutt, chairs the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a part of the Department of Homeland Security. Ronald Dick, DynCorp's director of information assurance strategic initiatives, was director of the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, part of the agency's counterterrorism division. Howard Fisk, vice-president of DynCorp, has served on advisory panels to the FCC.
- Bechtel: One of the most familiar corporate faces in postwar Iraq, it is not well known that Bechtel and Halliburton engaged in a corporate sparring match over the lion's share of contracts in postwar Iraq, with Dick Cheney's Halliburton winning out. Led by former Reagan administration Secretary of State George Shultz, Bechtel, which contributed over $2 million to Republicans since 1990, was able to land extremely fat contracts after being initially beat out by Halliburton. (Bechtel has little to complain about, having been the recipient of $11.7 billion worth of government contracts since 1990.) Other former Bechtel senior executives include Reagan's Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and Reagan's Deputy Secretary of Energy Kenneth Davis. William Casey, Nixon's head of the SEC and head of the CIA under Reagan, was a Bechtel consultant. Nixon's CIA director Richard Helms was also a Bechtel consultant, as was Nixon's Treasury secretary William Simon. Nixon's general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, Robert Hollingsworth, became director of manpower at Bechtel. Retired General Jack Sheehan, an executive vice president of Bechtel, is a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Bechtel was one of the main suppliers of weaponry to Iraq during the 1980s, in direct contravention of the law. In 1976, the US Justice Department sued Bechtel for participating in a boycott of Israeli businesses led by the Arab League; in the 1990s, Bechtel was a leader in a consortium that took Bolivia's water supply private; the subsequent system was so poor that Bolivians rioted throughout the country, and Bechtel pulled out of the consortium (currently it is suing Bolivia for $25 million in losses incurred).
- The Washington Group II: An engineering and construction firm, WGI is just coming out of bankruptcy. Its initial contract was a $500,000 deal to destroy illicit weapons and weapons infrastructure in Iraq; that contract is expected to balloon to over $100 million. It holds total contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan worth over $500 million. One of WGI's main functions is to destroy stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, as well as cleaning up toxic nuclear sites. In 2000, WGI bought out giant defense contractor Raytheon's engineering and construction unit; the SEC, which had been investigating the unit, promptly closed the investigation, but the expense of buying the unit forced WGI into bankruptcy. By purchasing the unit and terminating the investigation, WGI saved both Raytheon and the Defense Department a potentially embarrassing investigation that would have jeopardized further Raytheon defense contracts. WGI has contributed close to a million dollars to Republican causes since 1990. CFO George Juetten used to be the CFO of Dresser Industries, a subsidiary of Halliburton; senior vice president Steve Johnson joined WGI after working 27 years at Fluor; Gary Baughman, another WGI executive, also spent 17 years at Fluor.
- Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown, & Root: Dick Cheney's former company has a virtual lock on everything coming out of the Pentagon. During the first Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Cheney hired Brown & Root Services, paying them almost $4 million to conduct a study of how the military could best privatize some of its non-combat services. The subsequent report's advice: hire Brown & Root. The company won a contract to provide logistics for the US Army Corps of Engineers around the world. After the Bush administration was turned out of office, Cheney took the position of CEO at Halliburton, driving the company from 73rd among the biggest defense contractors to 18th. During that time, Brown & Root (now Kellogg, Brown, & Root) won an unprecedented open-ended contract with the Pentagon to provide unspecified services whenever called upon. KBR became a subsidiary of Halliburton, and together, the firms became the single biggest defense contractor juggernaut in America. KBR is not only the firm hired to handle oil well fires in Iraq, but the quartermaster for the entire US Army's overseas deployments. KBR also facilitates the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, builds enemy POW camps, and repairs the oil industry infrastructure. The war on terrorism has meant high profits for Halliburton and KBR; KBR signed a $2 million contract to provide security for the US embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; KBR also built the infamous "Camp X-Ray" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. KBR has been convicted twice of defrauding the government, once during the Bosnian intervention and once in the closing of Fort Ord. In total, Halliburton and KBR have profited enormously from the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq -- Halliburton's stock has risen 50% in the last year, it has gone from a 2002 second quarter loss of $498 million to a $26 million profit a year later, and has made at least $2 billion from government contracts so far, with plenty more on the way. Most worthy of note is the fact that the Iraqi conflict, and its contracts, saved Halliburton from probable bankruptcy and ruination over a number of high-dollar lawsuits over asbestos removal and worker safety. Cheney is not the only Republican notable to be on the Halliburton payroll: former Bush secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger was on the Halliburton board of directors until May 2003. (Cheney still receives an income of at least $165,000 a year from Halliburton in deferred payments.)
- WorldCom/MCI: After the fall of the Hussein regime, Bahrain's Batelco moved quickly to secure cell phone service in Iraq, erecting cellular broadcast towers with abandon. Instead of encouraging this example of free enterprise, Batelco was cut off at the knees by the Pentagon, who ordered the company out of the country (but ordered them to leave the towers the company had built). Subsequently the Pentagon awarded cell phone service in Iraq to WorldCom/MCI, perpetrator of the world's single biggest criminal fraud, a firm still under criminal investigation and bankrupt to boot. WorldCom specializes in creating data networks; the firm has never tried to build a cellular phone network before. Perhaps the answer lies with the fact that WorldCom still has large, lucrative contracts with the Pentagon that the Pentagon intends to be fulfilled, at a fat profit for WorldCom.
- Thomas Foley: Foley, a founder of the private investment group NTI and a college friend of George W. Bush, was hired by the Bush administration to tutor Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer in business practices. Foley manages all trade and foreign investments coming into Iraq, advises over 200 state-owned businesses and enterprises, and is in charge of drafting a privatization plan for state-run businesses.
- Squire, Sanders, & Dempsey: This law firm, a heavy donator to the 2000 Bush campaign, was hired by Bush to help Iraq rewrite its body of laws. One of the firm's partners, Robert James, is personnel chief for the Department of Homeland Security; James used to work for both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Other material about these firms can be found throughout this site. (Steven Pizzo/Daily Misleader, Independent, Amy and David Goodman)

Back to September 2003

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

September 2003

Week Four

Bush makes insulting speech to UN

Administration anti-protest policies challenged

Aqila al-Hashimi assassinated

More Bush PR -- "good news" from Iraq

Justice Department begins investigating Plame outing

Bush administration blocks investigation into Plame outing

Companies profiteering in Iraq exposed

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