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 2004
Week One
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- September: US ambassador Bill Taylor is named the head of the US's new reconstruction agency, the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.
Iraq war and occupation
The IRMO will oversee USAID, the Project and Contracting Office, and other government agencies involved in reconstruction and rebuilding. The Iraq Defense Minister, Ziad Cattan, a US appointee, will sign the first weapons and equipment contracts worth nearly $3.1 billion, to be paid in Iraqi funds. Iraqis later accuse Cattan of massive corruption in connection with the contracts. (T. Christian Miller)
Supreme Court repudiates Bush policy of indefinite detention of prisoners without charge
- September: The Supreme Court rules that the government's three-year detention of American citizen Yasser Esam Hamdi is baseless and illegal.
Terrorism detainees and "enemy combatants"
- Hamdi, who had lived in Saudi Arabia since childhood and had been captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 while carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, and charged with aiding and abetting terrorism by his supposed membership in the Taliban, had been one of hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees until his American citizenship was discovered. He then was transferred to military custody in Virginia. His father filed a habeas corpus petition against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of his son, who had no access to legal representation. A federal judge appointed a lawyer for Hamdi, Frank Dunham, who began working on behalf of his client even though the military would not allow Dunham to meet with Hamdi. Dunham demanded an explanation as to why his client was being held without charge or legal access, in violation of the Constitution; the reply came from a memo written by "the special advisor to the undersecretary of defense for foreign policy," Michael Mobbs, who claimed that evidence showed Hamdi had been fighting with the Taliban when he was captured. Mobbs refused to produce the evidence on "national security" grounds, and his affidavit showed that the evidence he claimed to have was based on nothing more than hearsay from unidentified sources. Dunham claimed that Hamdi had never been part of the Taliban, and demanded of the Justice Department lawyer, "so the Constitution doesn't apply to Mr. Hamdi?" The Fourth Circuit court, the most conservative in the nation, refused to grant Hamdi's appeal, claiming to be convinced of Hamdi's guilt by Mobbs's affidavit without further examination; Attorney General John Ashcroft praised the court's "ask-no-questions" ruling that accepted whatever the government claimed without question, but Dunham appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. By this time other cases, including that of fellow American Jose Padilla and other Guantanamo detainees, had wound their way into the Court dockets.
- The government's lawyers argued before the Court that Hamdi's detention was legal because, as commander-in-chief, Bush has the power to detain anyone he pleases as an "enemy combatant." The argument goes further, claiming Congressional approval via the September 2001 authorization to use military force against anyone found to be involved in the 9/11 attacks. They also argued that, in Padilla's case, his lawyer had erred in filing his petition against Rumsfeld, in the District of Columbia, rather than filing suit against the warden of the Charleston naval brig in South Carolina. And, the lawyers argued, none of the cases could be brought into federal court, because the Guantanamo naval facility was not, strictly speaking, under the rule of US law. Lawyers for all the defendants fought the claims. They assert that the Constitution's absolute right of habeas corpus gives the defendants the right to due process in the judicial system regardless of what the president says and regardless of Congressional legislation, they point out that Guantanamo is a US naval base under US military jurisdiction, not a "lawless" territory, and that Padilla was right to file against Rumsfeld because he was the one who determined where Padilla would be held.
- Three months later, in June, the Court issued a 100+-page ruling, led by swing voter Sandra Day O'Connor. She wrote for a scant majority that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens," repudiating the argument that the president can detain anyone he likes without Constitutional oversight. Hamdi and the others are entitled to legal representation and due process under the law, the Court ruled. O'Connor, joined by Justices William Rehnquist, Steven Breyer, and Anthony Kennedy, argued that such detention is legal "in the narrow circumstances considered here," but more liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and David Souter disagree, referencing the World War II detention of Japanese-American citizens as a "cautionary example." Surprisingly, they are joined by the most liberal justice, John Paul Stevens, and its most conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, in their dissent; Scalia writes a scathing dissent that maintains no American citizen can be detained without due process any longer than it takes the government to file charges against him, no matter what the circumstances. Scalia told the government that it either needed to charge Hamdi with a crime or release him. He cited the Civil War decision, Ex parte Milligan, in noting that the Constitution had not been suspended and that the courts of the nation were still functioning, and, most importantly, Bush has no "inherent power" to detain citizens without charge or access to legal counsel. The ninth justice, Clarence Thomas, joined the majority in a concurrance, writing that, in essence, the president can do as he pleases without being "subjected to judicial second-guessing." But the Court's ruling enjoined the government to begin proper legal proceedings against Hamdi.
- In September, the US military releases Hamdi from custody in the naval brig where he had languished for three years. He agreed in return to renounce his US citizenship and to return to Saudi Arabia. "He has always thought of himself as a Saudi citizen," says Dunham, "and he wasn't willing to spend another day in jail over it." For himself, Hamdi merely says, "I am an innocent person." Rather than allow the courts to determine Hamdi's supposed crimes, for which he served three years in prison without charge, the Bush administration simply released him. In the Hamdi case, as well as the Padilla case and others, the Supreme Court has issued stunning reversals of the Bush policy of indefinite and unconstitutional detention for terror suspects, though the Court is much less protective of the rights of foreign nationals than of Americans. (Peter Irons)
al-Qaeda documents illuminate 9/11 and other plans
- September: In December 2001, while covering the US military offensive in Afghanistan, Atlantic Monthly journalist Alan Cullison purchases two computers, a 40 GB IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop, that once belonged to senior al-Qaeda members.
9/11 attacks
Cullison managed to copy the files from the desktop before being forced to turn them over to the CIA (the CIA later returned the laptop, and told Cullison that its hard drive was nearly empty, a story Cullison isn't sure whether to believe). For years Cullison and his colleagues, including contacts in the Islamic jihadist movements, struggled to decipher the files, thousands of text documents dating back to 1997, written in Arabic, French, English, Farsi, and Malay, encrypted, and usually written in code. Recently Cullison and colleague Andrew Higgins of the Wall Street Journal were successful in translating most of the documents. Cullison writes that the documents shed a fascinating and troubling light on the inner workings of al-Qaeda, including background on the 9/11 attacks. - The documents were largely created by al-Qaeda senior official Ayman al-Zawahiri's brother Muhammad, who was, until his 2000 arrest in Dubai and subsequent extradition to Egypt, was al-Qaeda's systems manager and computer specialist in Kabul. The documents included budgets, training manuals for recruits, and scouting reports for international attacks, and they shed light on everything from personnel matters and petty bureaucratic sniping to theological discussions and debates about the merits of suicide operations. There were also video files, photographs, scanned documents, and Web pages, many of which, it became clear, were part of the group's increasingly sophisticated efforts to conduct a global Internet-based publicity and recruitment effort. Cullison writes, "The files not only provided critical active intelligence about the group's plans and methods at the time (including the first leads about the shoe bomber Richard Reid, who had yet to attempt his attack) but also, in a fragmentary way, revealed a road map of al-Qaeda's progress toward 9/11. Considered as a whole, the trove of material on the computer represents what is surely the fullest sociological profile of al-Qaeda ever to be made public."
- He continues, "Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda's strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government; amid the group's penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad. Al-Qaeda's leaders worried about a military response from the United States, but in such a response they spied opportunity: they had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and they fondly remembered that war as a galvanizing experience, an event that roused the indifferent of the Arab world to fight and win against a technologically superior Western infidel. The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent. Afghanistan would again become a slowly filling graveyard for the imperial ambitions of a superpower. Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer."
- Al-Qaeda and its associated organizations began decamping wholesale to Afghanistan in 1996, welcomed unofficially by Afghanistan's Taliban government. Al-Zawahiri, the leader of the independent Islamic Jihad, is not alone in complaining about Afghanistan's unsuitability for the center of the growing Islamic terrorist movement -- the country is a technological backwater, the roads and native foods are bad, and the native Afghanis are, in their description, uneducated, venal, and untrustworthy. According to the documents, Taliban leaders are increasingly annoyed with Osama bin Laden's focus on public relations and media control, to the point where al-Qaeda leaders fear Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar will expel them from the country. But relations between the two, though strained, remained strong, and al-Qaeda's leaders showed an increasing interest in implementing suicide bomber attacks on US and Western targets. On August 7, 1998, after the group strikes at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (killing 220 and wounding thousands), the leaders were so concerned with a possible backlash in Arab public opinion over the deadly attacks that they actively sought religious and legal opinions from Islamic scholars around the world who could help to justify the killing of innocents.
- The al-Qaeda leadership also proved very concerned with secrecy and anonymity. E-mails and telephone conversations were discouraged in favor of faxes and messages hand-delivered by trusted couriers. Cullison writes, "Messages were usually encrypted and often couched in language mimicking that of a multinational corporation; thus Osama bin Laden was sometimes 'the contractor,' acts of terrorism became 'trade,' Mullah Omar and the Taliban became 'the Omar Brothers Company,' the security services of the United States and Great Britain became 'foreign competitors,' and so on. Especially sensitive messages were encoded with a simple but reliable cryptographic system that had been used by both Allied and Axis powers during World War II -- a 'one-time pad' system that paired individual letters with randomly assigned numbers and letters and produced messages readable only by those who knew the pairings. The computer's files reveal that in 1998 and 1999, when a number of Islamists connected to al-Qaeda were arrested or compromised abroad, the jihadis in Afghanistan relied heavily on the one-time-pad system. They also devised new code names for people and places."
- The documents show al-Qaeda's increasing interest, and an eventual decision to rely on, chemical weapons at one time. They hired Medhat Mursi al-Sayed, an expert to whom they referred as Abu Khabab, to assist them. They also drew up rudimentary architectural plans for their laboratory and devised a scheme to create a charitable foundation to serve as a front for the operation. According to other sources, Abu Khabab gassed some stray dogs at a testing field in eastern Afghanistan, but there is no indication that al-Qaeda ever developed a chemical weapon it could deploy.
- Some documents show an all-too-common tendency towards what those in the US might term "office politics" -- gripes about bosses, complaints about money, and bickering and gossiping worthy of any business office. These show that, far from being a grim, monolithic enterprise with every official and operative unrelentingly fixed on a single goal, the members of al-Qaeda conducted their business of terrorist destruction with the same divisiveness and backbiting seen in any insurance office or sales floor.
- 1998's US missile strikes on Khost, Afghanistan enraged Omar, and resulted in him deciding to put aside his problems with al-Qaeda's Arab leadership and make common cause with them against the US. Bin Laden cemented that relationship by unrestrained flattery, hailing Omar as Islam's new caliph (a term not used since the days of the Ottoman Empire) and talked of Afghanistan as the kernel of what would become a sprawling and pure Islamic state that would embrace Central Asia and beyond. He gained the confidence of Omar, and began advising him in his dealings with the outside world. It was bin Laden who advised Omar to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas in April 2001. Meanwhile, al-Zawahiri was having success in recruiting new members to his Islamic Jihad, a group affiliated with, but independent of, al-Qaeda. Many members who were suspicious of bin Laden because of their perception of him as a "publicity hound" were more receptive to the scholarly, intense Islamic Jihad leader. But al-Zawahiri would pay a price for his success; in the summer of 1999, a group of Egyptian jihadists ousted al-Zawahiri as the leader of Islamic Jihad and replaced him with one of their own, Tharwat Shehata, who wanted to limit the relationship with bin Laden and concentrate the group's fight against Egypt, not America. But the morale of the group plummeted, and al-Zawahiri was able to retake the leadership soon after. He soon facilitated an integration of his group with al-Qaeda, overriding a storm of protests from the membership and cementing the integration by the spring of 2001. In June they issued a kind of press release that warned the "Zionist and Christian coalition" that "they will soon roast in the same flame they now play with." Another such message proclaimed "martyrdom operations" as the key to the battle against the West. According to the documents, American militant Richard Reid, the notorious "shoe bomber," was sent out at the behest of al-Zawahiri, though with little expectation of success.
- The 9/11 attacks were code-named "The Big Job," and celebrated by a promotional video made up of a montage of television footage of the attacks and their chaotic aftermath, all set to rousing victory music. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the senior Yemeni operative who coordinated with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in masterminding the attacks, used the computer to work on a hasty and unfinished ideological justification for the operation, which he titled "The Truth About the New Crusade: A Ruling on the Killing of Women and Children of the Non-Believers." The computer also contains a defiant missive by bin Laden to the American people, justifying the attacks and spelling out the goals of al-Qaeda, writing in part on October 3, 2001, "Our current battle is against the Jews. Our faith tells us we shall defeat them, God willing. However, Muslims find that the Americans stand as a protective shield and strong supporter, both financially and morally. The desert storm that blew over New York and Washington should, in our view, have blown over Tel Aviv. The American position obliged Muslims to force the Americans out of the arena first to enable them to focus on their Jewish enemy. Why are the Americans fighting a battle on behalf of the Jews? Why do they sacrifice their sons and interests for them?"
- On the same day, he wrote a missive to Omar, containing the following (reformatted for this citation): "Nothing harms America more than receiving your strong response to its positions and statements. Thus it is very important that the Emirate respond to every threat or demand from America...with demands that America put an end to its support of Israel, and that US forces withdraw from Saudi Arabia. Such responses nullify the effect of the American media on people's morale. ...Their threat to invade Afghanistan should be countered by a threat on your part that America will not be able to dream of security until Muslims experience it as reality in Palestine and Afghanistan. Keep in mind that America is currently facing two contradictory problems: If it refrains from responding to jihad operations, its prestige will collapse, thus forcing it to withdraw its troops abroad and restrict itself to US internal affairs. This will transform it from a major power to a third-rate power, similar to Russia. On the other hand, a campaign against Afghanistan will impose great long-term economic burdens, leading to further economic collapse, which will force America, God willing, to resort to the former Soviet Union's only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.
- "Thus our plan in the face of this campaign should focus on the following: Serving a blow to the American economy, which will lead to: Further weakening of the American economy; Shaking the confidence in the American economy. This will lead investors to refrain from investing in America or participating in American companies, thus accelerating the fall of the American economy.... Conduct a media campaign to fight the enemy's publicity. The campaign should focus on the following important points: Attempt to cause a rift between the American people and their government, by demonstrating the following to the Americans: That the US government will lead them into further losses of money and lives. That the government is sacrificing the people to serve the interests of the rich, particularly the Jews. That the government is leading them to the war front to protect Israel and its security. America should withdraw from the current battle between Muslims and Jews. This plan aims to create pressure from the American people on their government to stop its campaign against Afghanistan, on the grounds that the campaign will cause major losses to the American people. Imply that the campaign against Afghanistan will be responded to with revenge blows against America. I believe that we can issue, with your permission, a number of speeches that we expect will have the greatest impact, God willing, on the American, Pakistani, Arab, and Muslim people." (Atlantic Monthly)
Defense Science Board report on why Muslims hate America is quashed before election
- September: The Defense Science Board produces a report requested by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in May.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
The chairman of the board is William Schneider, a colleague from the Project for a New American Century; his task is to produce a report detailing how the US can improve its strategic communication in the global war on terror. The report is so damning that, though it is unclassified, the Defense Department refuses to release it until after the November elections. It notes that "a year and a half after going to war in Iraq, Arab/Muslim anger has intensified. Data from Zogby International in July 2004, for example, show that the US is viewed unfavorably by overwhelming majorities in Egypt (98%), Saudi Arabia (94%), Morocco (88%), and Jordan (78%)." - More importantly, the report delineates just how wrongly the Bush administration's entire rationale for why so many Muslims hate and fear America has been. The report reads, "American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.
- Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
- Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that 'freedom is the future of the Middle East' is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World -- but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
- Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim selfdetermination.
- Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack -- to broad public support.
- What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of 'terrorist' groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam.
- Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic -- namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is -- for Americans -- really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they are really just talking to themselves.
- It is not difficult to see why the administration does not want this report released before the election. (Defense Department, Al Franken)
- Early September: With the number of August attacks in Iraq spiking to over 3000, according to classified reports,
Iraq war and occupation
White House communications director Dan Bartlett calls a meeting of experts from the various departments to discuss how to improve the message on Iraq -- to craft the spin on the increasing chaos. Several of the participants suggest that Bush carefully acknowledge some mistakes in Iraq, perhaps arguing that it is human and powerful to admit to even limited mistakes. Bartlett cuts that line of discussion off; Bush is absolutely not going to talk about mistakes, he says. "Do you want to inspire or inform?" a general asks. Bush would like to do both, Bartlett replies. He probably can't have it both ways, the general says. Informing people is often boring, the general continues, and the information from Iraq is anything but good news. He cites the example of Ronald Reagan, who eschewed facts to give uplifting and inspiring speeches. - Bartlett knows Bush doesn't have to refashion his message just yet. He can continue to hide in the fog surrounding his presidential election opponent, John Kerry, currently floundering in a morass of unwarranted accusations about his Vietnam war record and his "flip-flopping" on important issues. Kerry's campaign is handling the accusations badly, Bartlett knows, and Kerry is not explaining how he would use the power of the presidency. Bush has made it clear that he had used his power to go to war, and he isn't backing down. Let Kerry keep floundering, Bartlett believes. (Bob Woodward)
- Early September: During the Republican National Convention, Bush tells the delegates, and the TV audience, that his Department of Labor is changing overtime rules to give workers "comp time" instead of overtime pay.
Bush's economic policies
The rationalization is that workers will be able to spend more time with their families. What Bush doesn't mention is that in August, the Labor Department already implemented half of his "proposal," eliminating overtime pay for nearly 3 million workers but failing to put in a single word about comp time. These workers lost their right to overtime pay for working over 40 hours, a practice in place since FDR's New Deal. And, prompted by the Labor Department, millions more workers will lose their overtime privileges after their bosses reclassify their jobs as "management." (Greg Palast)
- September 1: At least 5,500 US Army soldiers have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.
Iraq war and occupation
One is Jeremy Hinzman, who has applied for refugee status in Canada. Hinzman says, "This is a criminal war and any act of violence in an unjustified conflict is an atrocity. I signed a contract for four years, and I was totally willing to fulfill it. Just not in combat arms jobs." Hinzman says he realized that he had made the "wrong career choice" as he marched with his platoon of recruits all chanting, "Train to kill, kill we will." He says, "At that point a light went off in my head. I was told in basic training that if I'm given an illegal or immoral order, it is my duty to disobey it. I feel that invading and occupying Iraq is an illegal and immoral thing to do.'" Another Canadian refugee, Brandon Hughey, says that he had volunteed for the Army because it offered to pay for his college. He began training soon after the invasion of Iraq but became disillusioned when no weapons of mass destruction were found. "I had been willing to die to make America safe," he says. I found out, basically, that they found no weapons of mass destruction and the claim that they made about ties to al-Qaeda was coming up short. It made me angry. I felt our lives as soldiers were being thrown away." Hughey used an "underground railroad" operation to make his way to Canada. The Pentagon is pressuring Canadian officials to extradite all American deserters: "The men in Canada have an obligation to fulfil their military contracts and do their duty," says a spokesman. "If and when they return to this country, they will be prosecuted." In order to stay in Canada, deserters must convince an immigration board that they would face not just prosecution but also "persecution" if they returned to America. (Daily Telegraph) - September 1: Conservative Democratic senator Zell Miller, an aging segregationist who is retiring after his term ends this year, gives an inflammatory keynote speech to the Republican National Convention, spending virtually his entire time on stage denigrating his former friend and colleague John Kerry.
2004 presidential elections
"[F]or more than twenty years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak, and more wobbly than any other national figure," Miller shouts, a charge that would be quite damning if Miller's evidence wasn't so false and manipulated. - Interestingly enough, three years before, on March 1, 2001, Miller couldn't praise Kerry enough at Georgia's annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, when Miller introduced Kerry thusly: "My job tonight is an easy one: to present to you one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders -- and a good friend." Miller told that audience that Kerry "has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy, and protect the environment." Apparently Miller, who still carries the transcript of that speech on his website, has changed his mind significantly.
- Miller continues to promulgate the Republican lies about Kerry "tried his best to shut down," saying that the list "sounds like an auctioneer selling off our national security -- but Americans need to know the facts." Without exhaustively recording Miller's lies and refuting them, a quick summation shows that Kerry voted to fund a $160 million upgrade to the B-1 bomber in 2002, and Kerry authorized over $16 billion in spending for the B-2. The F-15, F-14D, and Apache programs were all opposed by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1990, a fact that Miller dodges during his post-speech appearance on CNN. All three systems are referenced in a single "no" vote cast by Kerry in October 1990, against a defense appropriations bill so laden with pork that five Republicans also voted against it. Another vote, to defund the Apache helicopter program, was part of a similar 1996 bill in which John McCain also voted against the bill, which he called "obscene[ly]...loaded down with pork." (Interestingly, McCain's interviewer, Sean Hannity, agreed with McCain. Kerry is obviously being held to a different standard.) In toto, Kerry has voted for $4.4 trillion in defense spending, prompting Miller to screech from the podium, "This is the man who wants to be the commander in chief of our US Armed Forces? US armed forces armed with what? Spitballs?" He also tells the crowd, "senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations." These are Kerry's words from his acceptance speech during the Democratic convention: "I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security." Hard to equate those two statements.
- In 1992, Miller delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, telling that crowd, "For twelve dark years the Republicans have dealt in cynicism and skepticism. They've mastered the art of division and diversion, and they have robbed us of our hope." Tonight he twists the criticisms onto his own party, saying, "What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in? Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter. But not today. Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. ...In their warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy."
- After Miller's speech, the speech by Dick Cheney came off as almost mild-mannered. Cheney does manage to work some of Miller's turf in his own gruff, quietly snarling presentation, saying, "[Kerry] declared at the Democratic convention that he will forcefully defend America -- after we have been attacked. My fellow Americans, we have already been attacked. We are faced with an enemy who seeks the deadliest of weapons to use against us, and we cannot wait for the next attack." Kerry actually said, "Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and a certain response." Like Miller, Cheney is very good at twisting and distorting Kerry's words.
- Democratic National Committee spokesman Jano Cabrera says after the speech that Miller sounds like an "angry, rabid elephant." Cabrera adds, "His speech was nothing more than a series of irrational and inconsistent political attacks cobbled together by his Republican handlers. And though three years ago, he called John Kerry a friend, one of the greatest leaders of our time and an authentic hero, tonight, for political and personal gain, he adopted the smear tactic refrains of the Bush administration." Former Clinton advisor Sid Blumenthal traces Miller's rightward spin back to 1994, when he almost lost the Georgia governorship after advocating the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. After his term ended in 1998, he abandoned the Democratic party in all but name, becoming a lobbyist for tobacco giant Philip Morris; in 2000, he was awarded (and later elected to) the Senate seat belonging to Paul Coverdell after Coverdell's untimely death. As a senator, Miller routinely voted with the Republican majority and blasted his fellow Democrats over both foreign and domestic issues. The GOP's portrayal of Miller as a mainstream Democrat who left his party over his fundamental disgust with the Democrats' so-called "leftist" policies is anything but accurate. After the speech, John McCain expresses his astonishment and disappointment in Miller, telling the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, "I think it backfires. It makes [Pat] Buchanan's speech in Houston look like milquetoast." McCain is referring to Buchanan's "culture wars" speech, widely thought to have damaged the first President Bush at the 1992 Republican convention.
- Publicly, Republicans are reacting with caution to Miller's speech, privately they are ecstatic, though some acknowledge that Miller may not have gone over well with more moderate viewers. "Everyone read the speech in advance and approved it," says one prominent GOP lobbyist working closely with the Bush-Cheney campaign on the staging and message for the convention. The problem, he adds, was that handlers did not account for the shouting voice or glowering stare with which Miller delivered his speech, or the irascible manner he displayed in interviews once the veracity of his charges began being challenged minutes after he left the podium. Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine, which monitors popular culture with an emphasis on talk radio, says, "It got a lot of attention from all angles because it was refreshingly unexpected and refreshingly out of control." Unfortunately for Republicans, he adds, it seems as though their keynote speaker was "drunk or on drugs." Democrats in Miller's home state likewise suggested that their one-time hero has become mentally unstable. Georgia AFL-CIO President Richard Ray says, "Why do I want to be polite here? He's lost his damn mind." Chuck Byrd, a lawyer and conservative Democrat from rural middle Georgia, says, "I know of no reasonable explanation for it other than people who have known Zell Miller for a long time are concerned about him now."
- Shortly after the speech, Miller engages in a battle of words with MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews. Matthews, known for his rapid-fire questioning, presses Miller to explain some of his more extreme verbiage, prompting Miller to snap, "Are you going to shut up after you ask me? Or are you going to give me a chance to answer it?" and saying shortly thereafter, "I wish I was over there, where I could get a little closer up into your face. ...I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel." The next morning, a somewhat calmer Miller tells MSNBC's Don Imus that a man his age should not be "coming to New York and getting involved in all this stuff. He ought to stay down in Young Harris" -- the north Georgia town where he lives -- "with his two yellow labs, Gus and Woodrow, and let the world go by."
- Apparently some of Miller's ire is calculated to help sell his book, A National Party No More, appearing the next day at a book signing along with conservative MSNBC pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who is hawking his own book, Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day. "This man gave a fantastic speech and it's funny that the Democrats try to portray it as mean," says book-buyer Stewart Larra, a convention volunteer from New York, of Miller. But not only Democrats are attacking Miller for savaging Kerry; John McCain tells NBC's Tom Brokaw that he doesn't agree with "the assertion that the Democrats are unpatriotic," and conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan says Miller's speech "added whole universes to the word crude." On the whole, the speech raises the level of partisan dissension, angering Democrats, invigorating conservatives, and surprising (and sometimes shocking) less involved voters who are widely taken aback by Miller's snarling, screaming presentation.
- Days later, former president and fellow Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter sends Miller a letter, which reads in part: "You seem to have forgotten that loyal Democrats elected you as mayor and as state senator. Loyal Democrats, including members of my family and me, elected you as lieutenant governor and as governor. It was a loyal Democrat, Lester Maddox, who assigned you to high positions in the state government when you were out of office. It was a loyal Democrat, Roy Barnes, who appointed you as U.S. Senator when you were out of office. By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.
- "Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.
- "Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a 'Democrat,' and it's quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends. Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign's personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you described previously as 'one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders -- and a good friend.')
- "I, myself, never claimed to have been a war hero, but I served in the navy from 1942 to 1953, and, as president, greatly strengthened our military forces and protected our nation and its interests in every way. I don't believe this warrants your referring to me as a pacificist.
- "Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited." Any response by Miller has not been made public. (CNN [transcript of Miller's speech], CBS, Washington Post, CNN, Salon, Talking Points Memo, Washington Post, Al Franken)
- September 1: Dick Cheney's own speech to the delegates goes almost unremarked after the performance Zell Miller gives, but there is plenty in Cheney's speech to please supporters and rile opponents.
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Staying with the theme of attacking John Kerry and touting the administration's own "successes" in the war on terrorism, Cheney says of Kerry, "He talks about leading a more sensitive war on terror, as though al-Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side. He declared at the Democratic Convention that he will forcefully defend America -- after we have been attacked. My fellow Americans, we have already been attacked, and faced with an enemy who seeks the deadliest of weapons to use against us, we cannot wait for the next attack. We must do everything we can to prevent it -- and that includes the use of military force." Of Kerry's call for building alliances to assist the US in fighting terrorism, Cheney twists Kerry's words: "George W. Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the American people," repeating the lie that Kerry would give the United Nations or other nations the deciding call of whether or not the US should use force against its enemies. Of the economy, Cheney repeats the old GOP mantra of blaming Bill Clinton, putting the blame for four years of economic misery on the Clinton economic policies while touting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and the proposed privatization of Social Security. Of Cheney's and Miller's speeches, vice presidential candidate John Edwards says, "There was a lot of hate coming from that podium tonight. What John Kerry and I offer to the American people is hope." (New York Times) - September 1: Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal notes that during the entirety of the first night's speeches at the convention, not one mention was made of a domestic issue. Blumenthal sums up the message nicely:
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"It was a moment crystallising enduring national unity, that saw the emergence of a president whose strategy against terrorism required an invasion of Iraq. Anyone who believed other than the patriotic consensus wrought by the moral clarity of the president was being misled by the documentary filmmaker and prankster Michael Moore." He also notes that while moderate Republicans -- a dying breed -- dominate the speaker's platform during the convention, in an attempt to woo moderate voters, the party has adopted a hard-right platform, and moderates from the Bush administration -- Colin Powell, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O'Neill -- are nowhere to be seen. (Guardian) - September 1: Delegates to the Republican National Convention are sporting purple Band-Aids in mockery of John Kerry's three Purple Hearts, a bit of sarcasm that many veterans are taking as a slam on their own service.
2004 presidential elections
Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate who never served in the military, has been handing out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who've worn them on their chins, cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places, and spout the line, "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it." Blackwell is president of the Leadership Institute, a conservative educational foundation he founded in 1979, a former director of the secretive and powerful Council for National Policy, and a political mentor of Karl Rove; it is very likely that the entire idea originated with, or is at least approved by, Rove. "Probably a lot of people are handing them out because they are very symbolic," one delegate, Donna Cain of Oregon, says of Kerry, who, she says, "has made the war that he served in far more important than his recent records of the last 18 to 20 years." - The Kerry campaign fires back, accusing the convention delegates of "mocking our troops." "The smear continues on the floor of Madison Square Garden," campaign spokesmen say. Cain responds, "It is not in any way defaming of them, because I know people who have received Purple Hearts and I know that they're not boasting about their war record. They're proud of their serving their country. And, I mean, I just met a woman who lost her husband yesterday in Iraq. And there's a whole entirely different mood." Former Republican senator Bob Dole says he is sure there is no connection between the purple heart bandages and the Bush campaign; after the bandages become an issue for the media -- and the Vietnam Veterans of America terms the bandages a "mockery of service" that "demeans all veterans and the patriots who honor them" in an "outrageous, disrespectful, and infantile" fashion -- RNC chairman Ed Gillespie asks delegates to stop wearing them. A GOP staffer later tells Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift that the Swift Boat/purple bandage strategy "came straight from the West Wing," specifically from Rove. "Nobody should be confused." The GOP staffer calls those who have done this "political terrorists," adding, "They know what to do -- it's like sleeper cells that get activated."
- Blackwell also attempts to smear filmmaker Michael Moore to the media, a smear which, for some reason, doesn't take and is not widely reported. According to Blackwell, Moore, who is covering the convention for USA Today, "In this hallway here [just outside the convention arena] roughly a half-hour before [McCain referred to Moore as a 'disingenuous filmmaker'], a conservative lady from a Midwestern state, whom I happen to know, went up to him [Moore] as he was walking and said something like 'May God save you' -- in essence, in a very nice Christian way, calling on him to mend his ways. Moore's response was 'F*ck you.' These were people who were guarding him [who accompanied him out of Madison Square Garden]. They were afraid that somehow these Republican ladies and gentlemen would become a menace too him, which was rather preposterous." Naturally, the incident never happened; Moore was not accompanied by bodyguards, and did not insult or curse anyone at the convention in that fashion. When Moore was roundly screamed at, booed, and cursed from the crowd during the McCain speech, his reaction was to smile and wave at the crowd of angry delegates who themselves were spewing epithets. (CNN, Working for Change, Vietnam Veterans of America, Truthout/Bellaciao)
- September 1: Representatives from most major US drug companies are busily wooing Republican politicians at the convention, trying to gain support for their opposition to the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada.
2004 presidential elections
AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals has an afternoon tea scheduled with New York State's first lady Libby Pataki, a nomination celebration scheduled for key members of the Bush campaign by Bristol-Myers Squibb, and a breast cancer awareness seminar by Novartis. Pfizer is holding a dinner for the Colorado delegation at the tony restaurant Tavern on the Green and an evening reception at the Rainbow Room in honor of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Pfizer also hosted a breakfast meeting for the members of the Oregon delegation, whose Democratic governor has recently asked the federal government for permission to begin importing Canadian pharmaceuticals. "It is important that we decisively convey our side of the story. We need to emphasize that there are real safety risks associated with importation," says Jeff Trewhitt, a spokesman for the industry's biggest lobby, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America. The pharmaceutical industry is the biggest donor among health care interests, spending $85 million lobbying the Bush administration and Congress last year, and donating $11.5 million to a variety of political campaigns. Two-thirds of its donations go to Republicans. The industry has donated $850,000 to the Bush campaign, almost three times the amount it has donated to the Kerry campaign. (AP/La Leva di Archimede) - September 1: John Kerry challenges Bush's flip-flop on the "winnability" of the war on terror, saying that it can, indeed, be won if Bush administration mismanagement and floundering is replaced by stronger leadership from a Kerry presidency.
2004 presidential elections
"[E]xtremism has gained momentum" as a result of administration missteps in Iraq, Kerry says, but vows that the war on terror is a winnable one with the right policies. "When it comes to Iraq, it's not that I would have done one thing differently, I would have done almost everything differently" than Bush, Kerry tells the national convention of the American Legion. "With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win," Kerry says. "In the end, the terrorists will lose and we will win because the future does not belong to fear, it belongs to freedom." To a largely conservative crowd who is silent during much of his speech, Kerry says, "[T]oday's terrorists have secured havens in Iraq that were not there before. And we have been forced to reach accommodation with those who have repeatedly attacked our troops. Violence has spread in Iraq. Iran has expanded its influence, and extremism has gained momentum. ...I would never have diverted resources so quickly from Afghanistan," where the Taliban has been forced from power but Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda remain free. "I wouldn't have ignored my senior military advisers. I would have made sure that every soldier put in harm's way had the equipment and body armor they needed. I would have built a strong, broad coalition of our allies around the world. And if there's one thing I learned from my service, I would never have gone to war without a plan to win the peace." The Kerry campaign plans a television ad covering many of the same points as he addresses today. (New York Times/Neil Rogers) - September 1: Arizona representative John Shadegg
2004 presidential elections
receives a standing ovation from Arizona's Republican delegation when he announces that, partly due to their complaints, USA Today has rescinded filmmaker Michael Moore's brief to cover the Republican convention for that newspaper. When a top executive from the paper asked Shadegg why he was angry, Shadegg tells the delegation that he responded: "You're just nuts if you think we're going to buy your paper, when you credentialed kind of the anti-Christ." Shadegg also says that Kerry voters "have mental health problems," adding: "I'll probably get in trouble for that." (Arizona Daily Star) - September 1: Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore writes his second (and last) column for USA Today from the Republican convention
2004 presidential elections
(see the August 30 item for a note on his previous column; see the item immediately above for information about Moore's removal from the convention). He riffs on the Bush twins' disconcerting speech but praises the twins for being "funny, sassy and free spirits," and commends the Bushes as parents: "[the twins] love their parents and, when you see that happen, you know the Bushes did something right in their home. For that, they should be commended." But in prime Moore fashion, he uses the carefree, excessively privileged Bush daughters as a basis for a very serious comparison: "Other fathers and mothers who loved their daughters and sons across America can no longer celebrate with them. That's because their children are dead on the streets and roads of Iraq, sent there by Mr. Bush to 'defend' America." Moore continues, "I would love to hear Bush apologize tonight to the parents and loved ones of those who have died in Iraq. I would like to hear him say he knows what it means to love your children and that he, in good conscience, cannot send any more children to their deaths. I would like to hear him say tonight, 'I'm sorry. There never were weapons of mass destruction and there never was a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. There was no imminent threat, our lives were not in danger, no missiles were going to hit Cleveland. Because of our desire to get our hands on the second largest supply of oil in the world, we sacrificed a thousand of your sons and daughters. For this, we are greatly sorry.' I guess a boy can dream. - "The other thing I would like to hear tonight is: Why haven't you caught Osama bin Laden? You've had three years to find him. The man killed nearly 3,000 people here on our soil. Maybe Bush has no worse explanation than he just hasn't been able to do it. Well, if your town's dogcatcher couldn't catch a wild dog that has been on the loose biting people for three years, what would be the dogcatcher's chances for re-election? Not good. And so it should be for Bush. Unless he has the answers tonight. Perhaps he has a reason or can accept responsibility for his actions and promise to send no one else's child off to die for a cause that has nothing to do with the defense of this country. If he takes a moment to look into his daughters' eyes tonight, he will know the answer and give the greatest speech of his life." (USA Today)
- September 1: A large group of Fox News staffers at the Republican National Convention
2004 presidential elections
are heard to join in the crowd's chants of "Four more years! Four more years!" "It stopped me dead in my tracks," says the source, who told the New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove. "It was outrageous -- but not surprising." Fox News staffers admit to the chanting, but claim it was nothing more than a humorous toast to a retiring technical staffer. (New York Daily News) - September 1: Bob Anderson, a Vietnam veteran who served on swift boats during the war, is livid about the inclusion of his name on a letter released by the SBVT smearing John Kerry.
Conservative smear campaigns
"It's kind of like stealing my identity," he says. "After reading the letter, it kind of got under my skin. I had never come across a situation where someone used my name without my support or approval. It's not a very comforting feeling. Had they asked me to use my name, I wouldn't have allowed them to." Anderson, who never served with Kerry and never met him until a veterans' reunion in 2003, says he is quite nonpolitical but disagrees with the content of the letter. He supports Kerry's right to state his opinion. "We say we're protecting democracy," he says. "That's why we go to war. As Americans, we can have our opinions, right?" Fellow swift boat veteran Bob Wedge, who served with Anderson and lost a leg during combat, says he is sick of the SBVT's attempts to recruit his support. His name is also on the letter as a putative signee. "This is the fourth or fifth time someone has called me or e-mailed me in regard to signing this damn letter," he wrote in an e-mail to Anderson. "I don't agree with it and want no part of it and especially don't want my name on it." The SBVT have refused to honor both veterans' repeated requests to take their names off the letter and off of their website. Anderson says of the dozen or so veterans he knows of whose names are on the letter, three more have not given their permission for their names to be used. "That leads me to believe that as many as 25 percent of the names are fictitious supporters of that group," he says. Anderson describes himself as an independent, saying he has voted both sides of the ticket when it comes to presidential races. Neither he nor Wedge, a registered Democrat, say they know who they will vote for this election. "I don't know enough about Kerry to say whether I will vote for him," Anderson says. "I know enough about Bush that I won't vote for him." Regardless of political loyalty, Anderson said he has a message he'd like to pass along. "Don't believe everything you read. All it tells me is there is some politics going on there." (Billings Gazette) - September 1: Publishing company Hollinger International releases an internal report that accuses former officials Conrad Black and David Radler of running a "corporate kleptocracy" that was set up to divert to themselves almost all of the company's $400 million in profits over the past seven years.
Republican corruption
Hollinger is suing Black to recover $1.25 billion from Black. Former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, a current Hollinger board member, is also criticized heavily in the report, which calls on Perle to return $5.4 million in pay after "putting his own interests above those of Hollinger's shareholders." The report, prepared by a special committee and advised by former SEC chairman Richard Breeden, says that "Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments as self-described 'proprietors,' Black and Radler made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise." The connections between Black and Radler to Republican powerbrokers goes far beyond Perle. Black charged the company $28,480 for three dinners with Henry Kissinger (a former board member) and his wife Nancy. Black also charged the company for hobnobbing with members of America's media elite; among other things, charging the company $24,950 for "summer drinks" with Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose, and Peter Jennings at a tony Manhattan restaurant. Black and Radler both resigned from the company last fall when the company charged them and other officials with receiving $32 million in unauthorized payments. - Hollinger owns, among other media outlets, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. "At Hollinger," the report says, "Black as both CEO and controlling shareholder, together with his associates, created an entity in which ethical corruption was a defining characteristic of the leadership team." Black and Radler devised a number of ways to milk the corporation of its profits, including selling the Hollinger-owned Mammoth Times of Mammoth Lakes, California, to a company controlled by Black for $1. Black and Radler, according to the report, lived lavish, jet-set lifestyles at company expense for years, with Black owning a "collection of homes" in, among other places, New York, Palm Beach, London, and Toronto. The company bought both men luxurious private jets for their use, along with automobiles including a Bentley, a Rolls-Royce, and a Mercedes. Most of Hollinger's purported donations to charity, totaling at least $6.5 million, went instead to Black and Radley. Hollinger donated large sums of money to Republican causes as well, including $1.475 million to the foreign policy journal National Interest, whose own board includes Black, Kissinger, and Perle. Black's wife had a $1.1 million job with Hollinger that required her to do nothing; Radler's daughter, a fledgling journalist, became one of the highest-paid reporters at the Jerusalem Times. And the audit committee, larded with Republican policymakers and powerbrokers, including former Illinois governor James Thompson and former US ambassador to Germany Richard Burt, is described as "ineffective and careless."
- Perle is singled out for particularly scathing criticism. Perle, who still sits on Hollinger's board of directors and formerly headed subsidiary unit Hollinger Digital, was particularly enthusiastic about rubber-stamping business deals that would profit Black and himself. Perle admitted to the review committee that he didn't bother reading most of the documents or bother to familiarize himself with the nature of the transactions he was agreeing to. Perle "earned" a bonus of $3.1 million from Hollinger Digital even though the investments of that company lost $49 million. "He should have resigned from the executive committee or the board should have replaced him," the report says. Perle resigned last year as chairman of the Defense Policy Fund, which advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after his link to Global Crossing Ltd., as an unpaid adviser, came to light. (New York Times/Truthout)
- September 1: Jewish groups are angered by the representation of a Christian cross on the podium of the Republican National Convention.
2004 presidential elections
The decorative panels of the podium form a cross, easily visible from the audience and from television cameras; another cross can be seen in the gavel panel behind the podium. "It is the very height of insensitivity for the Republican Party to feature a cross at the center of the podium of this convention," says Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "This wooden cross must be at least three feet tall, and it sends a signal of exclusivity loudly and clearly." Karl Rove denied that the podium was designed to represent a cross, saying, "My God, where do they come up with this stuff?" (Reuters/Free Republic)
The design of a cross in both the podium and the gavel stand can clearly be seen in this photo
taken during John McCain's speech
- September 1: Though she isn't a featured speaker at the convention,
2004 presidential elections
conservative activist Phyllis Schafly continues to help shape the Republicans' opposition to same-sex marriage and social acceptance of homosexuality, assisted by her eldest son John, who is openly gay. "It's no problem," Schlafly says. "He supports me in everything I do." Christian leader Ralph Reed, the Bush campaign's coordinator for the Southeast region, says Schlafly has been a behind-the-scenes player on GOP platform issues since she began attending as a delegate in the 1950s. "Given her leadership on the pro-life plank on the platform, she's highly respected and well-regarded and influential," he says. "she's prominent at every convention." Fellow conservative Gary Bauer says Schlafly's role reflects her stature as a member of the anti-abortion movement, which he said is ardently opposed to gay marriage. "The whole pro-life movement feels very strongly about that issue, as does the president," he says. "I bet if you asked the delegates to vote, it would be 99%" against same-sex marriage. John Schafly, a lawyer who runs an Eagle Forum office in Illinois, says of same-sex marriage, "I think the traditional definition of marriage has served our society well, and it shouldn't be changed. That was the law in every state, and still is except for certain court decisions. I don't see why there's anything wrong with it." John, who doesn't discuss his sexual orientation, was outed in September 1992 by the New York gay magazine QW, just after the Republican convention in Houston at which Pat Buchanan declared "America's culture war" and where his mother debated a gay Republican. "There is no way to control your adult children," Phyllis Schlafly said in response. "They have their own lives to live. I still love them.... He's an adult. What am I supposed to do? I can't control what he says or his behavior." She also said at the time that she supported the plank in her party's platform that opposed extending civil rights to gays or allowing them in the armed forces. She said, "I don't believe in sex outside of marriage," and since homosexuals couldn't marry, she disapproved of the homosexual sex act. She refuses to discuss the effects her proposals will have on her son and his life. (Los Angeles Times/Aegis) - September 1: An anonymous columnist challenges Bush's claims to be a military veteran and a member of the American Legion.
George W. Bush
The writer, a Legionnaire, cites statements Bush made in 2000 and 2003 claiming to be a member of Legion Post 77 of Houston. In 2000, he introduced himself to a Legion audience by taking the podium and saying, "George Bush, Post 77, reporting for duty." In August 2003, the Houston Chronicle described him as a member of Post 77 in an article about Bush's war on Iraq. And the September 2004 issue of the Legion magazine describes Bush as a member of Post 77. The writer points out that three criteria need to be met for a person to be a true member of the American Legion: at least one day of active military duty, on specific dates, and was either honorably discharged or still serving honorably. Military training is not a substitute. Bush has never given proof that he served a moment on active duty, nor that he was honorably discharged from an active-duty assignment. Service in a unit of the Texas Air National Guard does not meet the Legion's criteria. Neither Bush nor the American Legion have yet produced evidence that Bush's Legion membership is legitimate. (Buzzflash)
