September 2006: Week Four: Page Three: This Far and No Further

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September 26: Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, in a CNN interview, says he stands by his statements that the war on Iraq has made the world less safe from terror, and has helped to destabilize the Middle East, statements he made in his just-published book In the Line of Fire. Musharraf says his country was bullied and intimidated into supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US; he also confirms that his intelligence director told him that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage did actually threaten to "bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" if that country refused to cooperate with the US in finding and eliminating al-Qaeda cells in its region. "The intelligence director told me that Mr Armitage said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age'," he says. "I think it was a very rude remark." Musharraf is highly critical of Afghani president Hamid Karzai, who he says is "turning a blind eye like an ostrich" to the situational realities in his country and pointing the finger at Pakistan. "...I think, at the moment, there is total misunderstanding of the environment by Afghanistan and Karzai," he says. "I know Karzai knows the environment, but he is denying the realities." Musharraf denies working out any deal with tribal leaders along the Afghan-Pakistan border that offered amnesty to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as critics have claimed. On October 3, several Pakistani officials contradict Musharraf's claim that Armitage threated his country with such catastrophic bombing as Musharraf has claimed. At least one source says that ISI director Mahmood Ahmed "did not say that." (CNN, BBC, ABC News)
September 26: Four-star general Dan McNeil is named to take over command of the NATO International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, replacing British Lieutenant General David Richards. "It speaks volumes to the attention that Afghanistan will continue to receive," says ISAF spokesman Major Luke Knittig, a US Army officer. The appointment of McNeil addresses a number of questions about the status of the US and NATO forces and goals in Afghanistan, with many terming Afghanistan "the forgotten war" by Bush officials and others disappointed that the prospect of early withdrawal and subsequent turnover of Afghanistan's security to indigeneous forces is now dimmed. McNeil's placement now gives the US a four-star general in charge of Iraq (General George Casey) and in charge of US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia (General John Abizaid). The move is apparently a message from the administration to highlight Afghanistan's importance to Bush and Defense Department officials. Many in Afghanistan, including Taliban insurgents, believe that Washington displayed signs of weakness by handing its toughest counterinsurgency battles to Canadian, British and Dutch troops, says Antonio Giustozzi, a military researcher in Kabul with the London School of Economics. "They thought it looked like the Bush administration was paving the way for a withdrawal," he says. "Maybe sending a four-star general is a way to show the commitment is still there. It's also cheaper than sending more troops." (International Herald-Tribune)
September 26: An array of current and former CIA officials, State Department officials, military and Defense Department officials, and a former hostage rescue team member from the FBI join to send a letter to Senators Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy. The letter asks that Specter and Leahy join to help defeat the proposals in Congress, particularly the bill under consideration by the Senate to expand the president's ability to authorize torture, restrict rights such as habeas corpus, and wiretap Americans. The letter reads, in part, "We write as experienced intelligence and military officers who have served in the frontlines in waging war against communism and Islamic extremism. We fully support the need for proactive operations to identify and disrupt those individuals and organizations who wish to harm our country or its people. We also recognize that intelligence operations, unlike law enforcement initiatives, enjoy more flexibility and less scrutiny, but at the same time must continue to be guided by applicable US law. We are very concerned that the proposals now before the Congress, concerning how to handle detainees suspected of terrorist activities, run the risk of squandering the greatest resource our country enjoys in fighting the dictators and extremists who want to destroy us-our commitment as a nation to the rule of law and the protection of divinely granted human rights." It continues, "Our nation was created in response to the abuses visited on our ancestors by the King of England, who claimed the right to enter their homes, to levy taxes at whim, and to jail those perceived as a threat without allowing them to be confronted by their accusers. Now, 230 years later, we find our own President claiming the right to put people in detention centers without legal recourse and to employ interrogation methods that, by any reasonable legal standard, are categorized as torture. We ask that the Senate lead the way in upholding the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and affirmed in the Geneva Conventions regarding the rights of individuals and the obligations of governing authorities towards those in their power. We believe it is important to combat the hatred and vitriol espoused by Islamic extremists, but not at the expense of being viewed as a nation who justifies or excuses torture and incarceration without recourse to a judicial procedure. ...In fighting our enemies we must wage this battle in harmony with the traditional values of our society that were enshrined in the opening clause of the Declaration of Independence, 'we hold these truths to be self-evident.'" (Fighting Dems News Service)
September 26: Saying the National Intelligence Estimate produced by his own administration does not indicate that the war in Iraq has worsened, Bush declassifies and releases part of the NIE to prove his point. "some people have guessed what's in the report and concluded that going in to Iraq was a mistake. I strongly disagree," he says. The portion of the NIE released to the public is small and heavily redacted. According to the Washington Post, the report says the global jihadist movement "is growing and being fueled by the war in Iraq even as it becomes more decentralized, making it harder to identify potential terrorists and prevent future attacks. The war in Iraq has become a 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and drawing new adherents to the movement...." Democrats are insisting that the report be released in its entirety instead of small, cherrypicked sections. The New York Times concludes on the report, "The excerpts from the intelligence report pointed to a spread of terrorist activity globally for at least the next five years and said terrorists were adapting to the tactics used against them. 'If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide,' they said. 'Jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion,' said the excerpted document." In one detail, it states that terrorists now with experience constructing roadside bombs and other deadly devices in Iraq "are a potential source" of leadership for attacks elsewhere. "With such a devastating and authoritative analysis of the Bush Administration's failures in Iraq, the President and the Republican-controlled Congress now have a choice to make," says Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. "Will they stubbornly follow a failed stay the course strategy that America's intelligence community has concluded makes America less safe, or will they finally admit their mistakes and change course?" Progressive columnist Rob Kall, publisher of OpEd News, writes, "shall we trust Bush and Negroponte to declassify all the information in the document? That's for each of us to decide. My guess is this new chess move will embarass Democrats and help Republicans. One must wonder whether this two step process -- the leak, then the de-classification was a two step gambit strategized by Karl Rove. I guess we should add this to my growing collection of 'call me paranoid' conspiracy theory articles. ...Me, I don't trust Bush's generals or his appointees. I think they lie for him. Even Colin Powell compromised his integrity for Bush. Somehow, the Dems need to get the American public to view any report from Bush's government with distrust." (AP/Guardian, Editor and Publisher, OpEd News)
September 26: A portion of the NIE declassified by Bush states that Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamist jihadists around the world, and is breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better. Even the redacted portions of the NIE released to the public flatly contradict almost everything the Bush administration has said about Iraq since before the invasion. The AP reports, "Bush and his top advisers have said the formerly classified assessment of global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer because of the war. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations." "If this trend continues," reads one section of the report, "threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide. The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups." The document also says:
- The increased role of Iraqis in opposing al-Qaeda in Iraq might lead the terror group's veteran foreign fighters to refocus their efforts outside that country.
- While Iran and Syria are the most active state sponsors of terror, many other countries will be unable to prevent their resources from being exploited by terrorists.
- The underlying factors that are fueling the spread of the extremist Muslim movement outweigh its vulnerabilities. These factors are entrenched grievances and a slow pace of reform in home countries, rising anti-US sentiment and the Iraq war.
- Groups "of all stripes" will increasingly use the Internet to communicate, train, recruit and obtain support.
White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend disagrees with one of the report's most damning conclusions: that the number of jihadists has increased. "I don't think there's any question that there's an increase in rhetoric," she says. But "I think it's difficult to count the number of true jihadists that are willing to commit murder or kill themselves in the process." The intelligence assessment also lays out weaknesses of the movement that analysts say must be exploited if its spread is to be slowed. For instance, they note that extremists want to see the establishment of strict Islamic governments in the Arab world -- a development they say would be unpopular with most Muslims. The report also argues that the loss of key al-Qaeda leaders -- Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- in "rapid succession" would probably cause the group to fracture, a speculation disputed by other experts, including former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer. Al-Zarqawi was killed in June, but the top two al-Qaeda leaders remain uncaptured and active. Democrats are still calling for the release of the entire document, not just cherrypicked sections, and seek Congressional review of the document. (AP/Yahoo! News, Editor and Publisher, CNN [the full text of the declassified sections of the NIE], Michael Scheuer)
September 26: 16 Democratic House members hold a meeting to hear statements from Lieutenant General William Odom and Dr. Paul Pillar, a meeting that is widely ignored by the mainstream media. Both Pillar and Odom agree with the statements made the day before by the three retired military officers in hearings held by Senate Democrats, that Iraq is an ever-growing disaster that cannot be managed by the US military or anyone else. "Most of what we are seeing," Pillar says, "and in particular the communal violence, is an almost inevitable result of having ousted the dictator Saddam Hussein." Pillar was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 through 2005. Odom, the second speaker, is blunt and to the point. Odom is the former director of the National Security Agency under Reagan, and the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer, and has advocated for a year that the US should withdraw from Iraq. Odom insists that until we decide whose interests the occupation of Iraq actually serve, no progress will ever be made. The occupation serves no US interests, says Odom, but serves the interests of al-Qaeda and Iran. Recruiting for al-Qaeda declined in 2002, Odom says, but it rose after the US invaded Iraq in 2003 and has risen ever since, in Asia as well as in the Middle East. Iraq is a fine training ground for terrorists now. Worse, Iraq is driving a wedge between the US and its European allies. "Osama understands that; we seem not to" he says. The invasion of Iraq probably saved al-Qaeda from ceasing to exist, Odom believes. "Iran's clerics," he adds, "must have been equally surprised and delighted." Terrorists can now train in Iraq and engage in violence in Israel. The longer the war goes on, Odom stresses, the more it benefits al-Qaeda and Iran.
Odom says that US troops need to do a better job of training Iraqi troops, but if we do that, it is virtually inevitable that the military will take over and install a dictatorship. The problem is not one of soldiers' skills, but of political loyalties. "It takes a very high level of ignorance to believe America can leave behind in Iraq any government that will not be anti-American," he says. No matter what happens, Odom says, the Iraq occupation will go down as the greatest strategic defeat in American history. The thing to remember now is that the longer the US stays in Iraq, the worse the entire situation will be. The sooner the US leaves, the sooner the US's standing among the other nations of the world will begin to recover.
Representative Steven Rothman says he did not realize, when he voted for the Iraq war, that Bush and Rumsfeld had lied so thoroughly to Congress and to the American people. He says that he sees the same thing underway regarding Iran, and believes the entire "war fever" strategy is bent on influencing the November elections. "Beating the war drums on Iran," Odom says, "is a disaster that will make this one look small." Talking to Iran is paramount, says Odom. Iran will become a nuclear power very soon, and "there's nothing we can do about that." The US must work with Iran to curb Hezbollah and rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Odom does not save his criticism for Republicans alone. He says Democrats scattered in fear when John Murtha proposed a bill to begin planning a withdrawal. Representative John Conyers says that one of his biggest problems is getting the rest of the House Democrats to understand that withdrawing from Iraq is an absolute necessity, and this can only be done by getting more constituents to press for their representatives to advocate withdrawal. At the end, representative Maurice Hinchey asks Odom, "How do we get out?" Odom replies bluntly, "Well, the Constitution gives the House the right to impeach." (After Downing Street, Democracy Now)
September 26: Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is demanding the release of a second, previously unreported classified report specifically on Iraq. This secret document was prepared by the National Intelligence Council, the same overarching entity of 16 intelligence agencies that produced the NIE just revealed to the public. Though no one in Congress has been allowed to read the report, sources familiar with the report say it is "grim." Dr. Lawrence Korb, a former senior Defense Department official now with the Center for American Progress, hasn't seen the report but has discussed it with those who have. "It's a very bleak picture of what's going on in Iraq," he says. Harman wants the White House to share the entire document with Congress, and declassify portions of the report for the public, well before the November elections. Democrats say that the report has been deliberately kept "under wraps" and away from lawmakers precisely because it is so pessimistic about the Iraqi occupation. In late July, Democratic lawmakers requested the intelligence community to write a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, noting that such a report had not been done in over two years. The Democratic sources say this NIE was prepared separate from that effort. The NIE Harman is asking for "sounds a hell of a lot more complete" than the report being worked on at Congress' request, says one. (TPM Muckraker)
September 26: Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend acknowledges that a second National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, exists, but will not be released until sometime around January of 2007. Townsend tells a reporter, "[W]e should be clear that the DNI [Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte] agreed to begin preparing an updated NIE on Iraq. If I recall correctly, I believe that was back in August. Obviously, most NIEs are substantial research and writing projects that can take as much as a year. He agreed to try and have this thing done in -- somewhere in -- something, four to six months, or so, because it requires grasping and coordination throughout the intelligence community. My understanding is the planned release date, given the work that must be done to have it be comprehensive and complete, is January of '07. But I will tell you, that's still quicker than most NIEs get done. The timing has got nothing to do with the election." Apparently Townsend is doling out misinformation. Negroponte agreed to produce the report on August 4, 2006, after Democrats succeeded in slipping a provision into a bill in July requiring the report. Information on the status of the NIE is contradictory, with Harman saying that she believes it exists in draft form now, and investigative reporter Justin Rood saying his sources indicate it is still in "a nascent stage." Where Townsend is being deceptive is in the time frame. Based on other NIEs, they can take anywhere from two weeks to two months to produce. Bush should be able to have this NIE on his desk by early October. Rood writes, "What's more, most US intelligence agencies have been grappling with Iraq almost full-time since the invasion, many providing direct warfighter support. This is hardly an obscure intellectual issue for them, nor one that is particularly fuzzy. This may be one of the few reports whose conclusions are widely known before a word is put to paper. In prognosticating what the upcoming Iraq NIE would say, Newsweek's Mark Hosenball reported two weeks ago that Defense officials briefing lawmakers were "paint[ing] a scenario in which Iraq could dissolve into civil war if Iraqi security forces don't soon get their act together." So the possibility of Negroponte and the Bush administration deliberately delaying the completion of this NIE becomes quite feasible. Why? As Rood writes, "seeing those conclusions leaked to the media -- that's an October surprise the White House would likely hope to avoid."
The next day, White House press secretary Tony Snow expands on the disinformation. When asked why the White House is holding up the Iraq NIE until after the elections, he replies, "They're just flat wrong. What happened is, about a month ago Director Negroponte informed the committees that he was, in fact, going to do an exhaustive review on Iraq. That's a month ago. [Note: Snow's math is faulty. As of September 29, it will have been eight weeks.] These reviews take about a year to do, so the idea that it is in 'draft' form -- they're just beginning to do their work on it. And Intelligence Committee members if they don't know it, should. But there is not a waiting Iraq document that reflects a national intelligence estimate that's sitting around gathering dust, waiting until after the election." Like Townsend, Snow is either being misleading or just plain lying. "According to the Council on Foreign Relations, "NIE drafting guidelines included in the July 9 Senate report describe three rough timeframes: a 'fast track' of two to three weeks, a 'normal track' of four to eight weeks, and a 'long track' of two months or more." Snow's assertion that NIEs' take "about a year to do" is completely and deliberately false. Snow continues the spin the next day, telling reporters, "[Y]ou don't pull an all-nighter. It's not like a college term paper that you slap together."
On September 27, Democratic representative Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and the person who first alerted the nation to the existence of this NIE (see item above), writes Negroponte to inform him that she finds the delay in releasing the NIE "unacceptable." She writes, "This timetable is unacceptable. Sectarian violence, which has reached record levels and continues to grow, is putting our troops -- not to mention millions of Iraqis -- at grave risk. Furthermore, the proven ineffectiveness of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, an absence of effective infrastructure reconstruction, and political crises that threaten the fragile new polity have made it clear that we need a new strategy in Iraq. NIEs have been produced in as little as several weeks, as in the case of the 2002 report on Iraqi WMD. While I understand the desire to be thorough, events in Iraq make it urgent that the Intelligence Community produce this NIE immediately. If your intention is to delay this report until after the November elections, I do not think that is appropriate given that U.S. troops are at risk at this moment." Harman is joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in publicly saying that the administration is deliberately holding back the Iraq NIE until after the election. (TPM Muckraker, TPM Muckraker, TPM Muckraker, AP/KUTV. Talking Points Memo, TPM Muckraker)
September 26: Robert Dreyfuss, a liberal author who specializes in national security affairs, reminds his readers to take any NIE issued by the government with a grain of salt. Dreyfuss writes of the current NIE that has had selected portions of it released to the public, "It's important to remember that the NIE, begun in 2004, took two years before it was published, in its current classified version. It went through several iterations, pushed and pulled by Bush administration politicos. The [New York] Times, in breaking the story, reported that 'some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document.' According to my sources, those unhappy with the document were mostly at the Pentagon, and centered around the neoconservatives, who undoubtedly used their influence with the White House, Vice President Cheney, and intelligence czar John Negroponte -- who approved the final version of the NIE -- to make changes they wanted. It's not as if an NIE is a pristine, values-free report. Instead (remember the bogus NIE on Iraq's WMD in 2002) it is often a highly politicized document, especially in the Bush administration. Dreyfuss reminds the reader that while the NIE confirms that anti-Americanism is on the rise throughout the globe, "It's a mistake, and a dangerous one, to confuse anti-Americanism with terrorism. Even states that militantly oppose US policy in the Middle East, such as Iran and Syria, haven't used terrorist proxies against us. Violent insurgencies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas -- along with Islamist insurgencies in Pakistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Algeria and the Philippines -- haven't attacked us, either. So, why is it that we want to reduce all of our enemies, opponents and adversaries to the single category of terrorist? Why is it so convenient to demonize our opponents in that manner? The use of the word 'terrorist' instantly dehumanizes the other side, making it into something devilish, or insane, or maniacal. The Bush administration has perfected this technique to a fine art. Rather than joining in, the Democrats need to stop talking about terrorism at every turn and refuse to join the Republicans in their facile use of the demon-word, terrorism. It's time to change the subject." (TomPaine)
September 26: Halliburton "invested" $4.6 million since 2000 buying influence in Washington through campaign donations and lobbying, and in return, has received over a 600% value increase in federal contracts, mostly in or related to Iraq. Almost all of their donations have gone to the Bush administration, the Bush campaign, or other Republicans. In 2000, Halliburton was the 20th largest federal contractor, receiving $763 million in federal contracts. By 2005, Halliburton had grown to become the 6th largest federal contractor, receiving nearly $6 billion in federal contracts during that year. Between March 2003 and June 30, 2006, Halliburton received $18.5 billion in revenue from the federal government for the war in Iraq. The company has seen its profits in government contracting almost quadruple to $330 million in 2005 compared to $84 million in 2004. During one quarter in 2005, Halliburton's war profits skyrocketed by 284%. War contracts, intensified violence in the Middle East and record oil prices helped quadruple the stock price between the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and March 2006. As a result, the board of directors together saw the value of their stock holdings in the company increase by over $100 million. (Halliburton Watch)
September 26: While the media and the oil industry is busily telling Americans that gasoline prices are plummeting due to natural causes -- the lack of Atlantic hurricanes so far, the recovery of BP from recent problems with its Alaskan pipeline, even a measure of stability in the large oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria -- many American consumers believe differently. "I think the big important reason is Republicans want to get elected," says retired farmer Jim Mohr of Illinois. "They think getting the prices down is going to help get some more incumbents re-elected." According to a new Gallup poll, 42% of respondents agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." Two-thirds of that number are registered Democrats. White House press secretary Tony Snow says he is "amused" by the idea, and says Bush would have to have a "the kind of magisterial clout unknown to any other human being." As of this writing, the retail price of gasoline has dropped 50 cents, or 17%, in the past month, for a national average of $2.38 per gallon. Antoine Halff, an oil analyst for Fimat USA, says oil prices are dropping because of surpluses in oil inventories, slowing economic growth, and a lessening of tensions between Iran and the US. Seasonal changes will see an increase in prices as winter approaches, says Halff. But regular citizens such as lawyer Amnon Siegel think differently. "I'm sure there's some sort of string-pulling going on," he says.
World security studies professor Michael Klare reminds his readers that at no time in history has an American government been so riddled with oil industry executives, from Bush and Cheney (whose secret energy task force produced a national energy policy crafted almost entirely by oil industry executives and lobbyists) to Condoleezza Rice, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad (the former Unocal executive whom Klare calls Iraq's "viceroy") and a plethora of second- and third-tier White House and departmental officials. It is also established fact that oil companies made unprecedented profits during the steep rise in prices over the last year or more, and those companies' executives gave themselves lavish compensation packages in return. While proof of a Republican-oil industry conspiracy is lacking, says Klare, it is more than understandable why many are suspicious.
An angrily sarcastic editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune snarls, "Am I suggesting that a person of Karl Rove's unquestionable integrity would remind the president's big oil buddies that it might be in their best interest to help their blue-eyed boy maintain a Republican majority in Congress for the next two years by placating the masses with cheaper gasoline? That would represent an enormous campaign contribution! Naaah. Still if I were an intrepid reporter, I think I would look for a correlation between the cost of a gallon of gas by congressional district, particularly those with Republican incumbents -- preferably before November 7." (AP/USA Today, TomDispatch, Salt Lake Tribune)
September 26: Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, the shadowy Iran-Contra figure who facilitated the sale of TOW missiles to Iran by Reagan officials, has apparently managed to secure for himself and his business associate "backchannel" access to the US government. A response to an inquiry about Ghorbanifar from reporter Laura Rozen to the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, did not include a denial. Ghorbanifar is one of many rich Iranian exiles who live in luxury in Europe (Ghorbanifar lives in France), but desire to return to power in their own country. Ghorbanifar has tried to get on US intelligence payrolls before now; in December 2001, he met with Pentagon officials in Rome, and in 2004, he and his associate tried to get back on the payroll through the offices of Republican senator Curt Weldon, who received patently false information from the associate that asserted he and Ghorbanifar had absolute proof that a terrorist attack would be launched just before the November 2004 elections. The CIA has long branded Ghorbanifar as unreliable, and is the subject of two separate "burn notices" warning CIA agents to have nothing to do with him.
The associate, whom Rozen has as an anonymous source, confirms that Ghorbanifar and himself are both phoned on a regular basis by Bush officials, mostly for information in several areas concerning Iranian politics and terrorism. The source confirms that he speaks on occasion with his longtime contact Michael Ledeen, but says he has "better, much better" contacts in Washington now. If that is true, then he is feeding American intelligence, or whoever he is speaking with, information that is suspect at best. The associate gets all of his information from Ghorbanifar, having no access to anyone of importance in the current Iranian government, and in fact has not visited Iran since the fall of the Shah.
The response from Negroponte's office is interesting. The response is fairly standard boilerplate: "We decline to comment on any individual or specific activity. However, we can speak to your wider questions on overall analysis. The Intelligence Community does not make judgments based on a single source. If there are two or three real contending points of view, we want policymakers to know about that. As a result, policymakers are getting to see a lot more than they used to." Rozen callsa former intelligence official, who, after hearing the response, says, "They're saying 'yes,'" he says, they are taking Ghorbanifar's associate's information. "The system is so...corrupt," he continues. "The problem is when you introduce data into the analytic stream that is based on no foundation, it's going to lead you to false conclusions. Garbage in, garbage out." According to US intelligence sources, Ghorbanifar's associate is most likely in contact with someone at the Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the agencies thoroughly hoodwinked by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi defectors. Unfortunately, many of Chalabi's INC supporters in Washington are now influencing the Bush administration's policies on Iran, including three veterans of the now-discredited Office of Special Plans: Abram Shulsky, DIA analyst John Trijilio, and Iran specialist Ladan Archin.
As for Ghorbanifar's associate, "He has nobody inside Iran," according to former Paris CIA station chief Bill Murray. "He doesn't call anybody. Nobody comes to see him. Whatever he does, he gets from Ghorbanifar." Murray says Ghorbanifar and his associate cobble together "intelligence" using translations from regional newspapers and the newsletters put out by the cultish, formerly Saddam Hussein-backed Iranian terrorist group, the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), which has a large outpost outside Paris; and "then they create stuff." French and German intelligence services have also rejected Ghorbanifar and his associate's intelligence, according to Murray. "The plain and simple fact is that no intelligence service uses as a source someone who had been proven to provide false information, or information which he cannot source," Murray says. "This man has consistently done both." But for now, the wildly unreliable Ghorbanifar seems to have an ear within the Bush administration war planners for Iran. (American Prospect)
September 26: House Democrats lambast Bush's systematic lies on Iraq; John Aravosis's AmericaBlog links to two videos of statements by representatives Tim Ryan and Hilda Solis, available at the link immediately following. (AmericaBlog)
September 26: Veteran foreign affairs journalist and commentator Robert Scheer rips apart the administration's response to the revelations surrounding the NIE on Iraq and terrorism. "You would think that a consensus report from all 16 US intelligence services concluding that he has blown the war on terror would be a really big deal to the president," he writes. "But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence. Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush's branded 'what me worry' countenance." He labels the administration's responses as "the same old historically ignorant claptrap that leaves US policies completely out of the equation," reminding readers of the US's support for the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s that led to the creation of so many Islamic jihadist groups that now wreak havoc in the Middle East and plot to destroy further US and Western targets. Instead, he writes, the administration is responding with the same old rhetoric and marketing strategies that in the past have won votes and the support of media pundits, but have totally failed to address either what is essentially a civil war in Iraq or the issue of global Islamic terrorism. "In the name of defending our security, the Bush administration has suppressed any intelligence information it could, ignoring the public's right to know, as much as is feasible, what is being done in its name," Scheer writes. "We must never forget that our system of government is based on the utility of freedom that truth will expose error -- and just such an accounting is long overdue." (Truthdig)
September 26: Bush's Commerce Department is blocking the release of a report by weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that says global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes. The report's blocking is reported by the scientific journal Nature. The belief that global warming is causing storms to become stronger has picked up more coverage in the media since the Hurricane Katrina debacle. According to Nature, NOAA weather experts set up a seven-member panel in February to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes. A draft of that panel's report says that global warming may be contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes. But in May, when the report was due to be released, panel chair Ants Leetmaa, the head of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, received an e-mail from a Commerce official saying the report needed to be made less technical and was not to be released. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department. , Nature reported. According to NOAA administrator Conrad Lautenbacher, the report is merely an internal document and could not be released because the agency could not take an official position on the issue. The report prompts Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg to charge that "the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda...the Bush administration continues to censor scientists who have documented the current impacts of global warming." A series of studies over the past year or so have shown an increase in the power of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a strengthening that many storm experts say is tied to rising sea-surface temperatures. Two weeks ago, researchers said that most of the increase in ocean temperature that feeds more intense hurricanes is a result of human-induced global warming, a study one researcher said "closes the loop" between climate change and powerful storms like Katrina. The possibility of global warming affecting hurricanes is politically sensitive because the administration has resisted proposals to restrict release of gases that can cause warming conditions. In February, a NASA political appointee who worked in the space agency's public relations department resigned after reportedly trying to restrict access to Jim Hansen, a NASA climate scientist who has been active in global warming research.
Hansen himself is not in good odor with the administration. In 2004, Hansen angered the White House by saying of the administration, to an audience at the University of Iowa, "I find a willingness to listen only to those portions of scientific research that fit predetermined inflexible positions. This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster." After Hansen's pronoucement, he and his colleagues at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies received an e-mail notifying them of a "new review process" that told them the White House would be "reviewing all climate-related press releases." In fact, that censorship extended to all communications with the press by NASA scientists. In every public appearance since then, Hansen has been shadowed by a NASA communications representative. "In my more than three decades in the government, I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," he says. (AP/Yahoo! News, Air America Playbook)
September 26: The Lincoln Group, a public relations company recently criticized for planting false stories favorable to US and coalition forces in Iraqi newspapers, has been awarded another multimillion dollar media contract with American forces in Iraq. Lincoln Group has been given a two-year, $12 million-plus contract to monitor a number of English and Arabic media outlets and produce public relations-type products such as talking points or speeches for US forces in Iraq. Lincoln Group's task is to "build support," or market, US goals in Iraq to Iraqi, Arabic, international and US audiences. The list of media outlets to be watched includes the New York Times, Fox Television and the satellite channel, Al-Arabiya. Last year it was revealed that Lincoln Group, a PR firm created in 2003 to work specifically in Iraq and other "challenging environments," was part of a US military operation that paid Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories about coalition activities. Democrat Robert Andrews of the House of Representatives says he wants an explanation from the Department of Defense over how this "controversial" vendor was chosen, saying the choice of the Lincoln Group "concerns me greatly." But, Andrews says he's more concerned about the fact that the contract was awarded at all, not just to the Lincoln Group. "I wish that our problem in Iraq was that the military wasn't getting good PR," he says. "The problem seems to be that the country is sliding into civil war." And Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, says she worries about whether the military would be creating its own news through its own newspapers or Web sites. "If they're trying to influence Iraqi opinion of Americans, I almost find that to be unconscionable because that would say that they do not value a free and independent press in Iraq," she says. Lincoln will take over its duties from the Rendon Group, a PR firm with long-standing connections to Republican lawmakers, which won notoriety in 1990 for marketing "Desert Storm" to Americans by, among other things, planting false stories about Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies, and staging photo-ops of Kuwaitis "welcoming" US soldiers into their country. Both Rendon and Lincoln are contracting with Multi-National Forces-Iraq, a quasi-governmental, quasi-private entity that oversees coalition operations in Iraq. (Editor and Publisher)
September 26: House Democrats fail to push through a vote for a closed session to discuss the classified National Intelligence Estimate that essentially proves every assertion made by the Bush administration regarding Iraq and the war on terror is false. A closed House session is extremely unusual; only five have ever been held in US history, with the last one in July 1983, to discuss the US's secret support of the Nicaraguan Contras. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that the secret session is needed to allow members to better understand the intelligence community's most recent assessment on global terrorism, some of which leaked to the news media over the weekend. Pelosi says from what she can glean about the NIE from media reports, it "is the administration's worst nightmare. It is not a corroboration of what the president is saying. It is a contradiction of what the president is saying." Bush has already announced that selected portions of the NIE will be declassified, but Pelosi and other Democrats are calling for the entire document to be declassified. She says she isn't trying to use the closed session for political purposes, but instead to discuss a serious assessment that is relevant to Iraq and US national security. She wants to see the administration declassify the document without using a selective lens. "Quite frankly, my view is that any responsible declassification will change the course of this debate on Iraq," she says. (AP/Yahoo! News)
September 26: The House, on a largely party-line vote, passes the Public Expression of Religion Act, ensuring that it will be debated in the Senate. Officially, the bill is "[t]o amend the Revised Statutes of the United States to prevent the use of the legal system in a manner that extorts money from State and local governments, and the Federal Government, and inhibits such governments' constitutional actions under the first, tenth, and fourteenth amendments." In reality, the bill undermines enforcement of the First Amendment's separation of church and state, according to Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor of public policy at Duke University. The legislation provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. "The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion," Chemerinsky writes. According to federal law, lawyers who successfully challenge the government, or a government entity such as a police force or government employer, on behalf of a plaintiff whose civil liberties have been violated are entitled to attorney's fees from the defendant. That law encourages lawyers to represent plaintiffs who cannot afford the staggering legal fees that are entailed in these kinds of cases. The bill has worked well for 30 years, says Chemerinsky, ensuring that only lawyers who win in court get paid, thus discouraging "frivolous" lawsuits and forcing government entities to adhere to the Constitution. Under this law, if passed, lawyers who sue on behalf of a plaintiff whose religious rights have been violated -- say, a plaintiff whose children were forced to pray in school against their particular beliefs -- could not receive attorney's fees even if they win the case.
Chemerinsky writes, "Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional. Since they cannot change the law of the Establishment Clause by statute, they have turned their attention to trying to prevent its enforcement by eliminating the possibility for recovery of attorneys' fees. Those who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees. Few people can afford to do so. Without the possibility of attorneys' fees, individuals who suffer unconstitutional religious persecution often will be unable to sue. The bill applies even to cases involving illegal religious coercion of public school children or blatant discrimination against particular religions. The passage of this bill by the House is a disturbing achievement by those who seek to undermine our nation's commitment to fundamental freedoms laid out in the Constitution. ...The religious right is looking for a way to get away with violating the Establishment Clause and is now one step closer to this goal. The Establishment Clause is no less important than any other part of the Bill of Rights and suits to enforce it should be treated no differently than any other litigation to enforce civil liberties and civil rights." (GovTrack, Washington Post)
September 26: Republican senator Trent Lott says he intends to punish Senate Democrats if they make what he calls "unauthorized use" of an Appropriations Committee room for an unofficial hearing on Iraq oversight if it happens again. "They better stop this," he says. "This will be the last one or there will be retribution." The Democrats, who used the room on September 25 to host unofficial hearings featuring three retired military officers who called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld (see item above), secured the room through the auspices of Lott's fellow Mississippi Republican, Thad Cochran. Democrats intend to hold further hearings outside of Washington, though they insist they will not hold any hearings in so-called "battleground" states for fear of being seen as attempting to politicize the debate. (The Hill)
September 26: Republican Peter Roskam, battling Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth for the Congressional seat being vacated by venerable GOP representative Henry Hyde, accuses Duckworth of wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq. This charge, which has quickly become a boilerplate accusations for Republicans, has even less merit than usual -- Duckworth is a veteran of Iraq, a helicopter pilot who lost both legs during the war. In contrast, Roskam is a trial lawyer and state senator with no military experience. Duckworth's campaign manager responds, "Tammy lost her legs fighting in Iraq and to accuse her of wanting to 'cut and run' is simply crude. [Duckworth] has never 'cut and run' from anything, especially a fight." Chosen to give the Democrats' weekly radio address on October 1, Duckworth says that Bush has no real strategy for securing Iraq, merely political talk designed to appeal to voters. "Instead of a plan or a strategy, we get shallow slogans like 'mission accomplished' and 'stay the course,'" she says. "Those slogans are calculated to win an election. But they won't help us accomplish our mission in Iraq." Duckworth, who copiloted a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed while under a rocket grenade attack almost two years ago, also criticizes Bush and others in his administration for accusing anyone who challenges the president's policies of "cutting and running." She says, "Well, I didn't cut and run, Mr. President. Like so many others, I proudly fought and sacrificed. My helicopter was shot down long after you proclaimed 'mission accomplished.'" Duckworth also blasts the Republican Congress for refusing to do its job of holding the Bush administration accountable for its flawed Iraq policy. "We need a Congress that will ask the tough questions and work together for solutions rather than attacking the patriotism of those who disagree," she says. "It is time to encourage Iraqi leaders to take control of their own county and make the tough choices that will stop the civil war and stabilize the country." (TPM Cafe, AP/Yahoo! News)
September 26: Following on the heels of his racial slur against an opponent's campaign aide, Virginia senatorial candidate George Allen is now defending himself against an allegation from an eminent political scientist and former classmate who says Allen sometimes used racial epithets to refer to blacks in the early 1970s. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, refused to give details of Allen's racial slurs; as he told MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "I'm simply going to stay with what I know is the case and the fact is he did use the n-word, whether he's denying it or not." Two other former teammates of Allen's have come forward to confirm that they, too, remember Allen using racial slurs and displaying racist attitudes, as have two other acquaintances of Allen's. His campaign calls all of the witnesses to Allen's overt racism liars who are making "false allegations." Sabato and the others join Dr. Ken Shelton, a radiologist who played football with Allen at the University of Virginia, has already said that Allen not only used the term "n*gger" regularly, but once stuffed a severed deer head into a black family's mailbox, a recollection confirmed by a second teammate. Allen's campaign calls the allegations "ludicrously false" and has released statements from four other ex-teammates defending Allen and rejecting Shelton's claims.
Allen has been plagued with questions about his possible racism for weeks, since he called a volunteer from the Jim Webb campaign "macaca" during an Allen campaign rally. In many European and African cultures, the term is considered a racial slur. After changing his story several times, Allen now says he simply made up the word. (Allen's mother is from North Africa, where the term is a common one; presumably both she and her son would know the word and its connotations.) Allen is now denying he ever used racial slurs towards anyone. Shelton says Allen was careful to use the racial epithet only around white teammates. Shelton says he has personal knowledge of Allen stuffing the severed deer head into a black family's mailbox, and witnessed Allen not only asking a third teammate where black families live in the area, but witnessed Allen stuffing the deer head into the mailbox. "George insisted on taking the severed head, and I was a little shocked by that," says Shelton. "This was just after the movie The Godfather came out with the severed horse's head in the bed." (The deer-head incident is further bolstered by the statement of George Beam, another former teammate of Allen's who is now the manager of a nuclear engineering company. Bean says he remembers being told by their mutual friend Billy Lanahan, now deceased, telling him about the incident. "We were sitting around drinking beer," Beam recalls. "Billy said, 'George and Kenny and I went hunting, and we decided at some time to cut off this deer head and stick it in a mailbox.'" Beam says he is speaking out because he finds the Allen campaign's attacks on Shelton reprehensible. Interestingly, Beam also recalls Allen as anything but a traditional "good ol' boy:" "He was a transplant from California. I remember him appearing to act more Southern than people who had grown up in the South.") Shelton says he stepped forward because of Allen's potential presidential prospects and the "macaca" incident. "When I saw the look in his eye in that camera and using the word 'macaca,' it just brought back the bullying way I knew from George back then," he says. Shelton, who describes himself as a political independent who has voted for both Republican and Democratic candidates, says he regrets not having spoken out against Allen in the early 1980s, when he first entered politics. Shelton says he began writing down his recollections as Allen's career "ascended to heights I never could have imagined."
Allen recently found himself defending himself against the revelation that he has Jewish ancestry. Though he later acknowledged that his maternal grandparents were Jews, and his grandfather had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, he originally refused to acknowledge his Jewish ancestry when a reporter asked him about it, and after initially acknowledging his parentage, made a point to brag about his consumption of ham and sausage. He now says he only found out about his grandparents' Jewish heritage a month ago, from his mother, who swore him to secrecy about it. Many find that story as hard to believe as his justification for the "macaca" slur; a family friend, Elaine Schwartzbach, says that even casual acquaintances knew that Etty Allen was Jewish; another former family friend who knew the Allens in the 1970s has verified Schwartzbach's claim. Allen has always admitted that he once had a Confederate flag and a noose in his business offices, but says that he was merely honoring his Confederate heritage. And early in his political career, he proudly came out in opposition to Virginia designating a holiday in memory of Martin Luther King.
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher asks what may be the most pertinent question surrounding the entire Allen-as-racist controversy: "Where, I want to know, is that unflappable, likable, confident George Allen I had come to enjoy over the years? Why has he permitted these potentially tangential issues to take over his campaign? Here's my bottom line question: If that affable, amiable guy is the real George Allen, then why, in this testing time, have we instead seen a guy who is flitting from story to story, a man who is snappish, smart-alecky, and utterly insensitive? Have we somehow stumbled to the core and found a man with no center?" (AP/Yahoo! News, Washington Post, Salon)
September 26: Political commentator Nat Parry writes that Bush, his administration, and his Republican colleagues can have only two possible reasons for escalating their rhetoric regarding Iraq in the face of years' worth of contradictory facts and analysis: they are "either woefully ignorant of how to combat terrorism or [find] the terrorist threat a useful tool for managing the American public." Parry believes that both are correct. In February 2003, Parry wrote, "The war's devastation and the US occupation also could play into the hands of [Osama bin Laden, who] spelled out in a recent message that he plans to gain a propaganda advantage from any US invasion and occupation of Iraq, by presenting himself as the defender of the Arab people." Like so many others not involved in Bush's escalations, Parry was right and the Bush supporters were lethally wrong.
But instead of dealing with reality and disagreeing with their critics with respect, Bush and his allies have consistently responded with contempt and bullying. Americans -- Democrats and others -- who raised questions before the war were sneered at as "cowards," "dupes" and "traitors." After initial reports refuted the Bush predictions of US troops being welcomed into Iraq with open arms and bundles of flowers, instead of acknowledging the mistaken predictions, Bush officials continued the verbal assault, accusing critics of "defeatism" and insisting that "staying the course" was the only appropriate option. Now critics of the occupation are mocked as "cut-and-runners," while Bush calls the occupation the "central front" in the "war on terror," which, in turn, he says is "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st Century." But, Parry writes, "the downward spiral of the Iraq War and the worsening worldwide terrorism threat are negatives only if one assumes that creating a more peaceful and secure world was the original goal. If the goal included changing the character of the United States as a free and open society -- and consolidating one-party Republican control over the federal budget -- then the administration's policies would seem to be working like a charm. In the United States, which Bush calls part of the 'battlefield' in the 'global war on terror,' fear has prompted millions of Americans to surrender constitutional rights willingly and accept government intrusions that would have been unthinkable before 9/11."
The hateful rhetoric has escalated with every new defeat and roadblock suffered by the Bush administration. It chose to charge "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla with crimes unrelated to the original allegations which landed him in indefinite, illegal detention for three years as a so-called "enemy combatant" rather that allow the Supreme Court to curtail Bush's illegally assumed executive powers, a defeat for Bush's agenda that was doubled when a federal judge threw out one of the main charges against Padilla, ruling that the administration violated Constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy. Parry writes of the Padilla ruling that it "also showed how readily the Bush administration cast aside constitutional guarantees of a speedy trial in which the government must present its evidence in public, one of the most fundamental rights dating back to English common law." Another case, the much-touted "Miami Seven" alleged plot to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower, seems to be imploding, with the seven defendants apparently guilty of nothing more than shooting off their mouths. The case looks like entrapment by federal agents more than anything else, with government informants providing the defendants money, a meeting place, video cameras for surveillance, and even advising them that their first target should be a Miami FBI office. Lawyers for the defendants say that their clients were lured into the scheme and had no contact with real al-Qaeda members.
But the cases have had one "positive" effect for the Bush agenda: they have generated enough of a "buzz," and created enough fear among American citizens, to enable the administration to construct a new FBI database, the "Investigative Data Warehouse," containing more than 659 million records on Americans. The new database is interconnected with the National Security Agency's warrantless, and so far illegal, domestic surveillance program. The National Counterterrorism Center's terrorist watch list includes at least 325,000 people, and according to an NCTC official, the database includes names of suspected terrorists provided by all intelligence organizations, including the NSA. The eavesdropping is being conducted without court oversight in apparent violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Security Act, passed in response to the COINTELPRO scandal of the 1970s. "[N]o American would have any privacy left," then-Senator Frank Church warned during the investigation -- "there would be no place left to hide." All US intelligence agencies are now overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, a post currently filled by former Central American death squad overseer John Negroponte, and a post that is specifically political in nature, with the DNI serving "at the pleasure of the president," as Bush said in 2004. Creating the post of DNI also required a revamping of the 1947 National Security Act, which is ready to be amended to grant the DNI more power and authority than the law previously allowed. (The House has passed that legislation; the Senate is still debating the issue.) The legislation provides the DNI new authority to "have access to all national intelligence...concerning the human intelligence operations of any element of the intelligence community," and authorizes personnel designated by the DNI "to make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel." The Secret Service was granted the same broad, extraconstitutional powers in the 2005 reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act.
The focus has been on the expansion of powers within the Executive Branch at the expense of the rights of Americans. The infamous "free speech zones," which shields Bush and his officials from any contact with dissenters at campaign rallies and speeches, are demonstrably illegal, but have never been successfully challenged in any real sense. This restraint, which has been blatantly political and partisan in its enforcement, will be dramatically expanded with the new powers granted to the Secret Service by the Patriot Act reauthorization of 2006.
And Congress is also moving to grant more authority over the National Guard to the president. Governors across the nation are complaining about a bill that has passed the House of Representatives that would expand Bush's authority to take over National Guard troops in case of a natural disaster or a "homeland security threat." Even Republican Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, has criticized the legislation as symptomatic of a wider federal effort to make states no more than "satellites of the national government." Huckabee says the legislation would end the historic link between the states and their Guard units and "violates 200 years of American history." Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, points out that for "230-plus years governors have had control of their National Guard and have done a good job," but "all of a sudden, there are one or two lines in a bill that no one has debated and no one has discussed to take that authority away." Parry writes, "While the governors express frustration over the usurpation of authority that has traditionally belonged to the states, there is a larger concern. That is the trend toward centralized authoritarianism that will be accelerated by granting Bush total control over the National Guard."
And Congress is moving to grant the administration effective amnesty over violations of the Geneva Conventions, and give the president the authority to unilaterally interpret Common Article 3, which sets standards for treatment of prisoners of war. The Republican-sponsored legislation, which passed the Senate after Parry wrote his article (see other items on this page), provides the Executive Branch legal cover for authorizing interrogation techniques that are widely considered violations of domestic and international law.
Parry believes that Bush may be laying the groundwork for an unprecedented executive-powered move against Iran. In a report for the Century Foundation, retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner recently asserted that "the summer of diplomacy is over," and wrote that "the diplomatic activity of the past several months was just a pretext for the military option." A major "strike group" of ships to sail to the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast, has already been deployed, and will arrive around October 21 -- two weeks before the November midterm elections. Though the attacks make no military sense, will cause tremendous dissension and opposition among US allies and oil producers (possibly sending the price of a single barrel of oil to soar over $200), cause the Iranian activation of possible Hezbollah sleeper cells in the US, and dramatically increase the threat of terrorist attacks against US targets, as Gardiner writes, not making sense won't limit what the Bush administration does. "The 'making sense' filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran," he writes. Parry adds, "It also could be that 'making sense' means something different for the Bush administration than it does for average Americans. Although the Iraq War has cost about 2,700 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury, the war has created great business opportunities for well-connected corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel, which have registered substantial profits from the occupation and 'rebuilding' of Iraq. Also, although US intelligence agencies now agree that the terrorist threat has ballooned due to the Iraq War, the Bush administration has found the conflict useful in simultaneously expanding its powers, abrogating constitutional rights and justifying more government secrecy. Those trends seem likely to continue -- and even accelerate -- as the 'war on terror' remains a powerful excuse for transforming the United States from a historically free and open society to a frightened nation where citizens eagerly trade their constitutional rights for government promises of more security." (Consortium News)
September 26: Instead of providing factual, thoughtful coverage of the Clinton interview on Fox News Sunday, MSNBC runs an entire segment on...Clinton's "short" pants leg and his occasional display of an inch or so of "white leg" when he crossed his leg. The MSNBC host calls it "a travesty." (MSNBC/Think Progress)

September 27: Bush refuses to release the rest of the secret National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, that has caused a furor among lawmakers and voters since its existence and some of its contents were revealed on September 23. The NIE reports on a growing terrorist threat around the world, and says that the invasion and occupation of Iraq greatly exacerbates the threat, particularly to America; Bush released a selected "executive summary" from the report on September 26. Press secretary Tony Snow says that to release the entire report would place in jeopardy the lives of the agents who gathered some of the information in the report, would hinder the nation's ability to work with foreign governments and keep secret its intelligence-gathering methods, and "compromise the independence of people doing intelligence analysis." Snow dismisses the NIE as "a snapshot" that draws no conclusions or judgments about the success or failure of Bush's war on terror and occupation of Iraq.
Snow also continues his brazen efforts to spin the report into supporting Bush's policy in Iraq, saying that Iraq has become a bulwark against terrorists: "Iraq has become, for them, the battleground. If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit." Other Republicans are echoing Snow's talking points, saying that the report bolsters claims that Iraq is central to the war on terror and must not be abandoned to the jihadists. Unfortunately, if the assessments of the report are indeed true, then the report says quite the opposite -- the longer the US stays in Iraq, the more of a terrorist threat it creates.
Democrats are attempting to broadcast the conclusions of the report to Americans, partially in hopes of securing more votes during the November 2006 election and partially because of many Democrats' long opposition to the occupation. Among other Democrats, Senator Edward Kennedy is demanding the full release of the report: "The American people deserve the full story, not those parts of it that the Bush administration selects," he says. Republican Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, counters by claiming that whatever information is in the report may benefit al-Qaeda by its release. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that the cherrypicked portion of the NIE released by the White House is enough to allow people to "see the truth and precisely what that document says." Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says, "There is no question that many of our policies have inflamed our enemies' hatred toward the US and allowed violence to flourish. But it is the mistakes we made in Iraq -- the lack of planning, the mismanagement and the complete incompetence of our leadership -- that has done the most damage to our security."
A Washington Post analysis of the released material from the NIE indicates that Bush is misrepresenting the facts presented in the report when he says, "because of our successes against the leadership of al-Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent." Instead, while it notes that counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged and disrupted al-Qaeda's leadership, it describes the spreading "global jihadist movement" as fueled largely by forces that al-Qaeda exploits but is not actively directing. They include Iraq, tyrannical governments in Muslim-majority countries, and "pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims." The report predicts a worldwide Islamist jihadist movement that will grow faster than the West's ability to counter it. It does note that the capture or death of al-Qaeda leaders such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri will work to fragment the organization, at least for a time, and that the vast majority of the world's Muslims do not believe in Islamic jihad as advocated by al-Qaeda and other groups. But "the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate," the report notes. An intelligence official says the time frame is until early 2011.
Interestingly, the initial claims that the NIE had not been released to Congressional members are less clear than they were; the document was apparently released to members of both houses shortly after its issuance in April 2006, but many members have not yet seen it. Hoekstra claims that a "massive computer failure on our classified side" caused "a bit of a snafu" which resulted in no House member being able to see the document until late last week. Paul Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 through 2005, says there is little new in the NIE. "This is very much mainstream stuff," he says. "There are no surprises."
OpEd News contributor Jayne Lyn Stahl calls Bush's decision to release only part of the NIE "selective deception" and asks, "[W]hy this sudden concern about protecting the lives and 'independence' of intelligence analysts from an administration that has been complicit in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame? Is it this government's job to assess, and select which investigators, and investigations are to be concealed, which revealed, and whose lives are worth protecting? Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's politics of selective deception, which is egregiously demonstrated by the politically timed, and executed declassification of an 'abridged' version of the findings of more than a dozen national intelligence agencies corrolates, and fits nicely with their ongoing pattern of seduction by secrecy." (AP/KUTV, Forbes, Washington Post, OpEd News)
September 27: The multi-ethnic northern Iraqi province of Mosul is in chaos. Once predicted to be a center of Kurdish-led democracy in Iraq, now over 70,000 Kurds have fled the province, many after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a note telling them to get out in 72 hours. Others became refugees because they feared that a war between Arabs and Kurds for control of the region is not far off. "There is no solution except the division of the province," says Khasro Goran, the Kurdish deputy governor of Mosul. He believes that all the Kurds in the province want to join the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which under the federal constitution is almost an independent state. While Mosul is not in a full-blown civil war like Baghdad or Diyala province, says Goran, still 40-50 residents are being killed every week. Large, well-orchestrated bombing attacks on residents and buildings are everyday occurrences. Reporter Patrick Cockburn writes, "The fate of Mosul, the largest city in Iraq in which Sunni Arabs are in the majority, may determine how far Iraq survives as a single country. The proportion of Arabs to Kurds in the province and city is much disputed." Arabs make up a slender majority in the area, but hotly dispute that Kurds make up a third of the 2.7 million population. The central city of Mosul is under no one's control. Two divisions of the Iraqi army, both at least 50% Kurdish, are based in or near the city, but US commanders have forbidden the brigades to patrol too aggressively for fear of a violent reaction from the Sunni Arabs. The Arabs, in turn, own the provincial police force. Cockburn writes, "A final explosion may not be far away. Under article 140 of the new Iraqi constitution, there must be a vote by the end of 2007 to decide which regions will join the KRG. Mr Goran says that such a poll could see all of Mosul province east of the Tigris and the districts of Sinjar and Talafar to the west of the river joining the KRG. 'As we get closer to the implementation of article 140, the problems will get worse,' he says." (Counterpunch)
September 27: David Obey, a House Democrat, charges that, in spite of Republican allegations to the contrary, it is the Republican leadership of the House, and not the Democrats, who are blocking the passage of major pieces of legislation before the September 30 recess. Obey is the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. Only two appropriations bills, Defense and Homeland Security, are expected to be passed when Congress leaves this week. "That means the entire domestic portion of the budget, plus the bills to finance foreign operations and State Department operations will be delayed until after the election, well into the fiscal year," Obey says. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is blaming the "obstructive tactics" of the Democratic minority for the inaction, but Obey says that Democrats have not delayed consideration for a single appropriations bill, and in fact tried to accelerate votes on at least 16 occasions. Obey says that the votes to pass the two appropriations bills are being conducted on the sly, by Republicans meeting in secret before presenting final versions of the bills to the entire House without giving members any time to review the bills. Worse, says Obey, the appropriations are designed to mask the full amount of taxpayer dollars going into funding the two budgets. "I would much prefer that we be paying for the entire year, rather than continuing to see these wars continue to be financed on the installment plan," Obey says. "I think it would be helpful to the American people if they could see the full cost each year rather than having it dribbed and drabbed out, month by month, in order to hide the full impact of the cost." The Homeland Security bill is facing secret unilateral tinkering without any Democratic input at all. After a bipartisan conference committee reconciled differences between the versions approved in the House and Senate, Republicans specifically promised they would not alter the bill as they have done in the past. Though the legislation is now ready to file for voting, Obey says Republican leaders are now sitting on the bill as they work on ideas about which additional bills they could tack on. "What is this, the Soviet Parliament?" Obey asks. "The leadership will make decisions behind closed doors, regardless of the rules? They're playing games." (Buzzflash)
September 27: A New Jersey congressman says it should have taken the FBI days, not years, to determine the anthrax used in 2001 that killed five people was much less sophisticated than believed. As a result of that recent conclusion, Democrat Rush Holt is asking FBI director Robert Mueller for a classified briefing about the status of the bureau's investigation into who carried out the attacks. The FBI recently acknowledged that, contrary to its statements of nearly five years, the anthrax used in the attacks was not weapons-grade biotoxins, but commonly available, less sophisticated anthrax. In his letter to Mueller, Holt writes the FBI's failure to determine what kind of anthrax was used meant that "resources were diverted and countless agents wasted their time investigating a small pool of suspects, instead of the broader search we now know was needed." The FBI has conducted 9,100 interviews and issued 6,000 subpoenas, but has not yet determined who carried out the attacks. The anthrax attacks, carried out in the days after the 9/11 attacks, killed five people across the country and sickened 17. There were five confirmed anthrax infections and two suspected cases in New Jersey but no fatalities. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
September 27: Larry Johnson, a former CIA official and former deputy director of the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism, writes of the unfairness of right-wing outlets such as Fox News in attempting to scapegoat Bill Clinton for the failures surrounding 9/11, and gives sober, dispassionate analysis and examples. Johnson writes from the viewpoint of a veteran of America's counter-terrorism efforts, and as a person who believes that Clinton did not do enough to fight terrorism during his tenure. Johnson specifies some of his criticisms of the Clinton battle against terror: "For example, he left the position of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism vacant for several months during his presidency. He could have done more." Johnson gives credit where credit is due: "However, it was also true that the number of terrorist attacks steadily declined during Clinton's tenure. To Clinton's credit he did allow Richard Clarke to become the de facto terrorism czar at the National Security Council. That was due principally to Clarke's skill as a bureaucratic infighter. He made himself indispensable. In that position, he was viewed by many as an aggressive and abrasive coordinator. Several of my friends in various parts of the intelligence and policy community complained at the time that Clarke was a 'chicken little' and a 'pain in the *ss.' Those same friends, however, came to lament his absence because he brought a focus and energy and could get the president's ear."
Johnson confirms that, for all of his failings, Clinton did far more to fight terrorism than Bush did before 9/11. "It is also is true that counter terrorism fell off the table as a policy priority in the Bush administration," Johnson writes. "The Clinton years appeared by comparison an era of relative intense activity. Someone on the Bush team -- I don't know if it was the president or Condi Rice -- made the decision to downgrade Clarke and shunt him aside. The NSC did not hold an interagency deputies-level review of our nation's terrorism policy until September 10, 2001."
Johnson gives several examples that illustrates how both Clinton and Bush failed to respond aggressively enough to a situation, in many cases due to foot-dragging by the military. "For instance," he writes, "several US citizens were kidnapped in the Philippines by groups with ties to Osama bin Laden, but neither the Clinton nor Bush Administrations responded effectively because the military -- specifically Admiral Dennis Blair's CINCPACOM -- opposed efforts to deploy special operations forces to the region to oversee search and rescue efforts. The case of Gracia and Martin Burnham, two US missionaries that were kidnapped by an al-Qaeda affiliated group in May 2001, illustrates the problem. State Department and some elements of the US military special operations community wanted to intervene directly in looking for the two Americans. The effort was blocked by Admiral Blair and Donald Rumsfeld, who was more preoccupied after 9/11 with Afghanistan and Iraq. The rescue was left in the hands of the Philippine army, which botched the attempt, killing Martin and wounding Gracia. In February of 2001, the US embassy in Quito, Ecuador proposed that an inter-agency US government team and a US special-operations element be deployed to assist with the search and rescue of four US oil workers held hostage by Colombian insurgents. Richard Clarke chaired a meeting at the National Security Council to consider the request. Everyone but the Department of Defense, specifically the Deputy J-3, supported the recommendation. The military vetoed action because, they said, 'it is too dangerous.' The truth of the matter is that bureaucracies -- DOD, CIA, FBI, and State -- failed at various times and on several occasions to give presidents viable options. And it is also true that presidents have not acted forcefully and aggressively to deal with the threat of terrorism."
Johnson writes that while both administrations have come in for some undue criticism of their handling of the terrorist threat, "in terms of what is going on right now, there is mounting evidence that the Bush administration, despite tough talk and posturing, is doing little to fix the problem of how we combat terrorism. Since 9/11, for example, the bureaucratic infighting and confusion has worsened. Just last week, the new CIA director, General Michael Hayden, 'discovered' that CIA analysts and field operators did not get along and should work together more closely. As Homer Simpson is wont to say, 'doh!' What is so appalling about this so-called discovery is that the Counter Terrorism Center (CTC), which was set up in 1986, brought analysts and field operators together for the express purpose of overcoming these obstacles. However, the CTC is in disarray and on the verge of extinction because of the creation of the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC). When the NCTC was established most of the terrorism analysts were removed from the CTC and sent to NCTC Headquarters.... The operators have remained at CIA and they are leaving CTC and returning to work in the traditional regional bureaus. It is no surprise that the unit responsible for hunting bin Laden was disbanded last year and has not been reconstituted. The current chaos in the bureaucracies will be the grist for the next round of the 'blame game,' which will come some day, hopefully not too soon, in the aftermath of another terrorist attack here in the homeland. The next blow will be laid at Bush's feet and he will deserve a large share of the blame. But the failure to effectively combat terrorism is not just the fault of a president." (Fighting Dems News Service)
September 27: Republican senator George Allen, battling for re-election against an array of charges and allegations about his racist attitudes and pronouncements, recently addressed the 2006 "Value Voters Summit," a gathering of 1,700 rightist Christian devotees of Dr. James Dobson. Allen was embarrassed by a barrage of questions about his recent "discovery" of his Jewish heritage, and, after admitting that he had "a lot to learn" about Judaism, was hustled away to a waiting car by his self-described "A-Team" of aides. (Allen's "A-Team" wasn't wearing the lighting-bolt lapel pins they wore when Allen was governor, a universal symbol of white supremacy inspired by the insignia of the Nazi SS.) He treated the crowd to a stump speech peppered with football metaphors and religious symbolism (calling Focus on the Family's Dobson, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Americans United to Preserve Marriage president Gary Bauer and the American Family Association's Don Wildmon, "The Four Horsemen")
But Allen's association with Dobson's group only calls more attention to Dobson's and Perkins's own anti-Semitism. Dobson's Focus on the Family, for example, published an article in its Citizen magazine last February attacking the parents of federal judge Stephen Reinhardt (whose step-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor) for telling their son "tales of horrific violence" about the Holocaust "that lacked the redemptive power of Christ's atonement." The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly condemned Wildmon for his conspiratorial diatribes against "secular Jews." And Perkins, for his part, paid $82,500 to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke for his phone-bank list and then spoke at a 2001 fundraiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, America's largest white supremacist organization. (Perkins denies any links between his organization and the CCC.)
The issue of abortion as it affects African-Americans also came up at the summit. One of the few blacks at the meeting, right-wing pastor Ken Hutcherson, told Allen, "Too many black babies in the last few years have been aborted. So you wonder why we have a slow population growth." Allen replied with supposed astonishment, "So what you're saying is it's [the black abortion rate] twice as high as other races?" Hutcherson nodded, and added, "Jesse Jackson and others were against these things early on, but because of where they get their money from, they're for it now." (Hutcherson is dead wrong both about abortion rates among African-Americans and about Jesse Jackson's supposed embrace of pro-choicers and their money.) Allen's fellow speaker, William Bennett, did not repeat his statement from 2005 saying that aborting every black child in America would make the crime rate go down. Instead, he restricted himself to the topics of national security and terrorism, and said in reference to the murder of four American mercenaries in Fallujah in 2004, "When four Americans are hanged...you take out Fallujah. You flatten the city! You have to teach them that American life is not cheap."
The summit was a cavalcade of conservative Republican presidential hopefuls, including Allen, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and Kansas senator Sam Brownback. Arizona senator John McCain, despised despite his recent prostration before Jerry Falwell, and Rudy Giuliani, the pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, cross-dressing former mayor of New York City, were pointedly uninvited. Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, was the only participant who called for moderation of right-wing evangelicals' message; his exhortation was greeted with stony silence. The others threw rhetorical red meat. Romney made savage fun of his home state, Massachusetts, and declared that gay marriage is the "number one threat facing America." Romney was followed by the Bishop Wellington Boone, who drew cheers and hosannas from the crowd by saying, "Back in the days when I was a kid, and we see guys that don't stand strong on principle, we call them f*ggots.'" Nation reporter Max Blumenthal writes, "The spectacle of the Republican presidential prospects competing for Dobson's affection underscored the surprising remarks that the former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey made to journalist Ryan Sager a year ago in the wake of the Terri Schiavo affair. Asked for his assessment of the 109th Republican Congress, Armey singled out the special bill legislators had introduced to preserve the brain-dead Schiavo. "That was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson," Armey said. "Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was, Will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election?" Armey added, "Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies."
As for Dobson, he bragged to the audience about participating in a "canned hunt" (where the animals are enclosed in a fence and herded by assistants into a killing zone; there is nothing sportsmanlike about such slaughter). Perkins, Dobson's protege, interjected, "It was a liberal bear." "It's a dead one now," Dobson cracked, to hoots of approval. He soon regained his topic, pronouncing that the alternatives to Republican control of the US government " were downright frightening." Perkins took Dobson's rhetoric down another notch, comparing liberals to Islamic terrorists and warning, "we are facing threats from within and from without." Anti-abortion extremist Gary Bauer described how the passengers of United Flight 93 heroically ran toward the cockpit on 9/11, and reminded the audience, "All you have to do is run to the voting booth."
Dobson's nemesis, the Reverend Barry Lynn from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, was in attendance. "This conference has all the feel of a Republican convention," he said. "It's so bewildering to hear someone say, 'I'm nonpartisan, but if the GOP doesn't hold the House or Senate, there will be a disaster.'"
One interesting aspect of the convention, and the "Stand For the Family" rally that preceded it, was the instruction given to participants about how to use fake polls to influence churchgoers to vote "pro-family," i.e. Republican. The session, entitled "Getting Church Voters to the Polls," featured veteran Christian-right operative Connie Marshner and an 18-page pamphlet originally prepared for Rick Santorum's 2000 senatorial campaign. The pamphlet advises church members to use their church directory to organize calls to fellow parishioners from a phony company called "ABC Polls" in order to create a data bank of "pro-family" voters. Only those voters should be reminded to vote on election day, Marshner said. She added, "Even if you have a pastor like that who doesn't want to do politics, you can use this plan." Blumenthal writes, "Marshner's plan is an essential element of the Republican ground game for November. It might be deceptive, sleazy and possibly illegal. But that doesn't matter to the 'value voters.' As White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, who officially blessed the gathering, said in his speech, 'What matters most are the victories we forge together.'" (The Nation)
September 27: Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson reminds us of Bush's systematic attempts to link Iraq to his "war on terror" as far back as September 2003, just before the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Bush said then, "Two years ago, I told Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front." Even then, military and intelligence officials worried that the rhetoric was not only misleading, but counterproductive towards actually combating the terror threat. A secret National Intelligence Estimate warned in October 2003 that the unrelenting violence in Iraq after the US invasion was over local conditions and the presence of US forces. It was not inspired by foreign terrorism, as the White House kept saying. The existece of the 2003 NIE was not revealed until this year. "Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," said Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005. Bush continues to this day to label the Iraq occupation the "central front" in the struggle against Islamic terrorism, telling an audience at a Tampa fundraiser last week, "Iraq is a central front in this war on terror, and we've got a plan to defeat the enemy." Jackson writes, "This rhetoric is a central affront to the American people. His plan is multiplying the enemy." The April 2006 NIE on global terrorism states that, in the words of a US intelligence official, "The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse." Another intelligence insider says, "Things like the Iraq war have given the terrorists recruiting tools and places to ply their trade and a training ground." And a Washington Post story says the invasion and occupation of Iraq is now the "leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda." That April 2006 NIE warns that terror networks are spreading like cancer around the planet. And Bush's efforts against terrorism in general, and Iraq in particular, have elevated the status of Osama bin Laden even higher: the NIE says that bin Laden's "his status as the ideological leader of a global movement that appeals to disaffected Muslims has vastly increased." Hutchings says that for the US to have any chance against terrorism, US leaders have to drop the stark war terminology. "We can't kill enough people to keep us safe. It's not a matter of being tough or soft on terrorism. It's a matter of being smart." He says a smart policy would be one that delegitimizes jihads by de-linking them from legitimate regional economic and political grievances. "Right now we throw everything into the war on terror," he says. (Boston Globe)
September 27: Network coverage of the NIE release has been typically one-sided and driven by Republican talking points, reports the media watchdog group MediaMatters. ABC and NBC's nightly news programs "uncritically aired President Bush's nonsensical non-responses to questions about the NIE, while NBC and the CBS Evening News presented misleading reports on the NIE's conclusions, both asserting that the declassified portion of the report at least in part backs up Bush," the site reports. Bush's spin that the NIE says the exact opposite of what it actually says was reported without criticism or opposing views on both ABC and NBC. MediaMatters gives the specifics at the link below. (MediaMatters)
September 27: MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann, who has sternly attacked the policies and lies of Bush officials in past months on his nightly commentary show Countdown, receives a death threat in the mail that spurs a savage response from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post. (Murdoch is the owner of Fox News, a favorite Olbermann target.) Olbermann received a letter postmarked from California at his New York City home on the evening of September 26, only to have the contents, a white powdery substance, spill out. A threatening note inside said that the white substance was the writer's revenge for Olbermann's outspoken detergent. Worrying that the white powder might be laden with anthrax, the same substance that killed a number of journalists in late 2001 through "biological mail bombs," and caused the evacuation of Congressional offices when two Democratic senators received anthrax-laden mail, Olbermann called 911 right after midnight. Preliminary tests indicated that the substance was nothing more than laundry detergent, but Olbermann insisted on being taken to the hospital and having tests run to make sure.
The Post responds with a savagely "humorous" take on the incident that attempts to slander Olbermann's courage, his manhood, and his political stance. The source of this item, Past Deadline as linked below, contains a reprint of the entire Post article, which is headlined "Powder Puff Spooks Keith." (It isn't hard to see where the Post is going from that headline.) The article describes Olbermann as "terrified," "panick[y]," "frantic," and sneers about his hospital visit, "Whether they gave him a lollipop on the way out isn't known." It also identifies Olbermann as "a frequent critic of President Bush's policies," an identification that sparks writer Ray Richmond to ask, "Because he is, the presumption is that he of course deserved it, right? And that he's a girly-man wuss to boot?" Richmond snarls, "Page Six [the Post's gossip section] ought to be completely ashamed to publish a mocking dismissal of what is in fact a serious news story and try to pass it off as journalistic, not to mention putting its contempt for the left above its humanity. But then, it has a long and illustrious track record of being both shameless and inhuman, so this is perfectly in keeping with its style." Richmond also reprints a satire of the Post report as it might have appeared had conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly been the target, which is worth clicking on to read for yourself.
Of the Post story, Olbermann says, "The FBI guys had said, and they were fantastic in this, but they said, 'We know you're a reporter.... We know now we've got a guy who's sending letters to a lot of people and nobody knows about him. We will give you any detail you want about this story once we get this guy. But if you don't report this right now, he doesn't know you got it, and that gives us much more time.' And the Post not only wrote a mocking article but by doing so they were interfering in a terrorism investigation. They were on the side of the terrorists. And I called them on it that night, because I'd just come home and that's what I had to read the next morning. You know, for a newspaper that actually had anthrax in its offices, they certainly showed a very callous attitude toward the subject of terrorism in this country. Maybe Homeland Security should visit them and see what they know about this. The Post never called anyone to get any of this verified; they just went with their story, which was full of factual mistakes. And if they had called the FBI, the FBI would have said, 'Please, if you run this you are providing a terrorist with a return receipt.' They went ahead with it anyway. Basically it's drunk driving with a newspaper. I've seen them do it a thousand times before, and they'll do it again. And I think this is one where they really looked like the idiots that they are." (Past Deadline, Radar Online)

Right of habeas corpus set to be outlawed by Congress; torture approved

September 28: The Senate votes for Bush's plan to prosecute and interrogate terror suspects, ensuring that the bill, already passed by the House yesterday, will be on the president's desk for his signature by the weekend. The bill, known as the Military Commissions Act, passed the Senate by a vote of 65-34; Democrats who oppose the bill spoke eloquently against its unconstitutional nature, but acknowledged that they lacked the votes even to filibuster the bill, much less vote it down. 53 Republicans and 12 Democrats, including embattled "Democrat" Joseph Lieberman, voted for the bill. 32 Democrats and independent Jim Jeffords, who often votes with the Democrats, voted against the bill. "Moderate" Republican Olympia Snowe ensured she would be absent during the roll call. Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to pass a horrifically unconstitutional bill for partisan political purposes, in order to give them more ammunition with which to bash Democrats during the run-up to the November elections. "There is no question that the rush to pass this bill which is the product of secret negotiations with the White House is about serving a political agenda," says Democrat Edward Kennedy. Before the vote, Senate Republicans managed to ram through a measure that limited debate on the bill, a frequent tactic of Congressional Republicans when they are attempting to pass an unpopular, controversial, or unconstitutional piece of legislation. The legislation creates a new structure of military tribunals to try so-called "enemy detainees" accused of an array of terror-related offenses. These detainees, under the new law, will lose many of the rights guaranteed them under Constitutional and statutory law, including a restriction and, in the case of legal residents who are not citizens, a virtual loss of the fundamental principle of habeus corpus. The legislation also allows a wide range of "interrogation activities," some which violate the restrictions against torture as lain down in the Geneva Conventions. Three Republican senators, John McCain (himself a torture victim at the hands of the North Vietnamese), Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, mounted a brief "rebellion" against the administration's attempt to include language that would remove virtually all restrictions against torture from US interrogators of detainees, but after a few speeches and media appearances, gave in on almost all fronts to the White House's demands after Bush informed the press that if their proposals became law, he would simply stop allowing the interrogation of any terror suspects whatsoever.
After debate on the bill was limited, the White House sent down a number of last-minute changes to the bill that were added virtually without discussion, including a drastic broadening of the government's right to detain non-citizens indefinitely without charge, broadens the definition of the term "enemy combatant" to include anyone who gives material support to enemies of the United States and its allies, prevents detainees who have been released from US custody from suing the US government for torture or mistreatment, and declares, in direct violation of the US Constitution, that "no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination." Human rights advocates and civil libertarians are horrified. "This would purport to allow the president, after some incident, to round up scores of people -- people who are lawfully here -- and hold them in military prisons with no access to the legal system, whatsoever, indefinitely," says the Open Society Policy Center's Joe Onek. "What if they had this after Sept. 11, when they picked up all kinds of folks on immigration charges and material-witness charges and tried them in secret immigration proceedings?" asks Amnesty International lawyer Jumana Musa. "Those people were deported. Now, they could be detained indefinitely as enemy combatants." Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, adds, "What it means is that certain categories of people are going to be second-raters in our legal system. You can't sneeze at the fact that citizenship has got to mean something. But if I were a green-card holder, thinking about the other pressures that are being brought to bear on green-card holders, it could make me pretty nervous."
Republican senators attack the patriotism and loyalty of Democrats who oppose the bill, with more the moderate Christopher Bond telling the assembled lawmakers that Democrats "want to tie the hands of our terror fighters. They want to take away the tools we use to fight terror, to handcuff us, to hamper us in our fight to protect our families." Democrat Carl Levin retorted, "The habeas corpus language in this bill is as legally abusive of rights guaranteed in the Constitution as the actions at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and secret prisons that were physically abusive of detainees." Minority Leader Harry Reid says, "The Framers of our Constitution understood the need for checks and balances, but this bill discards them. Many of the worst provisions were not in the Committee-reported bill, and were not in the compromise announced last Friday. They were added over the weekend after backroom meetings with White House lawyers. We have tried to improve this legislation. Senator Levin proposed to substitute the bipartisan bill that was reported by the Armed Services Committee. That amendment was rejected. Senators Specter and Leahy offered an amendment to restore the right to judicial review -- that amendment was rejected. Senator Rockefeller offered an amendment to improve congressional oversight of CIA programs -- that amendment was rejected. Senator Kennedy offered an amendment to clarify that inhumane interrogation tactics prohibited by the Army Field manual could not be used on Americans or on others -- that amendment was rejected. And Senator Byrd offered an amendment to sunset military commissions so that Congress would simply be required to reconsider this far-reaching authority after five years of experience. Even that amendment was rejected. I strongly believe this legislation is unconstitutional. It will almost certainly be struck down by the Supreme Court. And when that happens, we'll be back here several years from now debating how to bring terrorists to justice. ...The national security policies of this administration and Republican Congress may have been tough, but they haven't been smart. The American people are paying a price for their mistakes. History will judge our actions here today. I am convinced that future generations will view passage of this bill as a grave error. I wish to be recorded as one who voted against taking this step."
On September 27, the House voted almost straight along party lines to approve the legislation; the 253-168 victory was not enough for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who celebrated victory by accusing Democrats who opposed the bill of coddling terrorists. Democrats in return accused Republicans of attempting to terrify Americans into supporting a repressive and unAmerican piece of legislation. The bill is expected to sail through conference between the Senate and the House in time for Bush to sign it into law before the weekend, when he is expected to use the new legislation as a centerpiece for his campaign efforts on behalf of Congressional Republicans. Hastert said about the House Democrats, all but 35 whom voted against the measure, that they "voted today in favor of more rights for terrorists. ...So the same terrorists who plan to harm innocent Americans and their freedom worldwide would be coddled, if we followed the Democrat plan." In response, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the Republicans' bill would endanger US soldiers by encouraging other countries to limit the rights of captured American troops. She said the bill would be vulnerable to being overturned by the Supreme Court. "speaker Hastert's false and inflammatory rhetoric is yet another desperate attempt to mislead the American people and provoke fear. ...[Democrats] have an unshakable commitment to catching, convicting and punishing terrorists who attack Americans." House Majority John Boehner, a Republican, virtually dared Democrats to vote against the bill, saying, "Will my Democrat friends work with Republicans to give the president the tools he needs to continue to stop terrorist attacks before they happen, or will they vote to force him to fight the terrorists with one arm tied behind his back?" Democrats wanted to tone down the powers that the bill gives Bush, along with the limits the bill imposes on terror suspects' abilities to defend themselves. Says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, "This bill is everything we don't believe in." Democrat Jim Moran told the House, "All Americans want to hold terrorists accountable, but if we try to redefine the nature of torture, whisk people into secret detention facilities and use secret evidence to convict them in special courts, our actions do in fact embolden our enemies." And John Murtha, a conservative Democrat with a long-standing commitment to the US military, said flatly, "It gives too much leeway to the president, And I think when you tamper with the Geneva Conventions...you hurt our ability to protect the troops."
Earlier, the Senate voted down an amendment proposed by Republican Arlen Specter to ensure that federal courts can review the legitimacy of an individual's imprisonment on suspicion of involvement in terrorism. "It is a fundamental protection woven into the fabric of our nation," said Democrat Patrick Leahy while arguing for the measure. The proposal was defeated 48-51, largely along party lines. All three "maverick" Republican senators who seemed to be opposing the White House on the issue of detainee treatment and torture, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, voted against the amendment. Other amendments by Democrats to limit the bill to five years, to require frequent reports from the administration on the CIA's interrogations, and to add a list of forbidden interrogation techniques, were all voted down.
The bill is expected to be quickly signed into law by Bush; when it is, the Constitutional provision of habeas corpus will be, in the case of anyone designated as an "enemy combatant" or "enemy detainee" by the White House, vaporized, and provisions to prevent such detainees -- or anyone else, if the law be strictly interpreted -- from being tortured or abused. As legal professor Marty Lederman explains, the law "means that if the president or the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and US law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all.'" Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale, explains it in blunt terms: "The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights." Anyone -- any American citizen, any citizen of any country -- can be imprisoned and interrogated, even tortured, simply by executive fiat. Because no lawyer will be allowed to contact the "detainee" and no court may review the imprisonment, no one, anywhere, is safe from the tyrannical excesses that the president and the Defense Department may, at any time, choose to exercise.
Ackerman writes that the new law "not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops 'during an armed conflict,' it also allows him to seize anybody who has 'purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.' This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison. Not to worry, say the bill's defenders. The president can't detain somebody who has given money innocently, just those who contributed to terrorists on purpose. But other provisions of the bill call even this limitation into question. What is worse, if the federal courts support the president's initial detention decision, ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials." Access to lawyers would be limited, as would access to evidence ("We have evidence showing this detainee's guilt, Your Honor, but we can't show it to the court or to the defendent because of its sensitive nature." "so ordered."). In other words, American citizens who become "detainees" are at the mercy of a single person -- the president -- and a single military tribunal, which can easily be "stacked" and rendered into a "kangaroo court." Legal residents who are not citizens have even less rights, having their access to any form of habeas corpus completely blocked.
Legal residents who aren't citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president's suspicions.
Ackerman reminds the reader of the Jose Padilla case. (Padilla is covered extensively in other pages of this site.) A few months after 9/11, Padilla, an American citizen who lawfully re-entered the country in O'Hare Airport, wearing civilian clothes and bearing no weapons or any contraband, was taken into custody and held for over three years in a military brig without formal charges or, for over two years, access to a lawyer. He has still not been allowed to challenge his detention in a military or civilian court. Lawyers filed a suit on behalf of Padilla demanding that his rights be granted him; a federal appellate court rejected the suit, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, a decision which in Ackerman's words "hand[ed] the administration's lawyers a terrible precedent."
Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, an opponent of the bill, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 25 that the bill's provision to allow the indefinite detention of people without charges and without access to the legal system "is un-American, and it is contrary to American interests." Leahy continued, "[T]he bill departs even more radically from our most fundamental values. It would permit the president to detain indefinitely -- even for life -- any alien, whether in the United States or abroad, whether a foreign resident or a lawful permanent resident, without any meaningful opportunity for the alien to challenge his detention. The administration would not even need to assert, much less prove, that the alien was an enemy combatant; it would suffice that the alien was 'awaiting [a] determination' on that issue. In other words, the bill would tell the millions of legal immigrants living in America, participating in American families, working for American businesses, and paying American taxes, that our government may at any minute pick them up and detain them indefinitely without charge, and without any access to the courts or even to military tribunals, unless and until the government determines that they are not enemy combatants. ...The most important purpose of habeas corpus is to...prevent such abuses[, so much so] that the Constitution prohibits the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus 'unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.' I have no doubt that this bill, which would permanently eliminate the writ of habeas for all aliens within and outside the United States whenever the government says they might be enemy combatants, violates that prohibition. And I have no doubt that the Supreme Court would ultimately conclude that this attempt by the Bush-Cheney administration to abolish basic liberties and evade essential judicial review and accountability is unconstitutional. ...[W]hen the terrorists brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11, they did not bring down the rule of law on which our system of government is founded. They did not supplant our republican form of government with one in which an unaccountable executive can imprison people forever without trial or judicial review. ...If this Congress votes to suspend the writ of habeas corpus first and ask questions later, liberty and accountability will be the victims."
The new bill at the very least gives the president the right to hold legal residents who lack citizenship in mass detention without recourse to the courts. Worse, it upholds the Bush administration's contention that the executive can arbitrarily designate any American citizen as an "enemy combatant" and thus strip that citizen of his or her fundamental rights under the Constitution, without legal recourse. While opponents of the bill hope that the Supreme Court will overturn the bill, the Court, as it is present dominated by conservatives and extreme right-wingers, is by no means sure to protect American freedoms by overturning or limiting the legislation. Ackerman writes, "Though it may not feel that way, we are living at a moment of relative calm. It would be tragic if the Republican leadership rammed through an election-year measure that would haunt all of us on the morning after the next terrorist attack."
A Washington Post analysis shows that the bill goes back to the concept of extra-constitutional military tribunals previously used only four times in US history: during the Revolutionary War, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and World War II. Not only does the bill do away with most, and in some cases all, habeas corpus rights, it allows hearsay evidence -- prohibited in civil and criminal trials -- to be admitted, allows evidence obtained through previously illegal coercion techniques to be admitted (i.e. testimony and admissions of guilt tortured out of detainees can be admitted), rejects the right to a speedy trial (i.e. allowing for virtually infinite detentions), and requires that defendants accept court-appointed military lawyers to represent them instead of being allowed to choose their own lawyers. It also drastically limits the power of a convicted defendant to appeal.
The Post also points out, as few others in the mainstream media have, that the bill gives virtually blanket protection to government officials, from CIA agents and private mercenaries operating under government contracts to senior Washington officials and the president himself, from any prosecution for war crimes or for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees. In essence, this protects the government and its proxies from ever being charged or sued by detainees in the Guantanamo Bay and other extra-legal US detention facilities. The bill even blocks many of the usual procedures for judicial review by federal courts. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch says Bush's motivation is partly to protect his reputation by gaining congressional endorsement of controversial actions already taken. "He's been accused of authorizing criminal torture in a way that has hurt America and could come back to haunt our troops. One of his purposes is to have Congress stand with him in the dock," he says.
Blogger and former First Amendment litigant Glenn Greenwald adds, "This is basically the legalization of the Jose Padilla treatment -- empowering the President to throw people into black holes with little or no recourse, based solely on his say-so." To Greenwald, the bill is "legalizing tyranny in the United States. Period." He blames both the authoritarian Republican majority of Congress and the complicit Democrats, who did little to block passage of the bill. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in 1953, "Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed,outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint." Patrick Henry thundered in 1788: "Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! ...Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel." Those immunities are now jettisoned, those sacred rights abandoned, and the US Executive Branch can reign unchecked by law or legislation.
The liberal news and commentary site Buzzflash writes on September 29, "[I]t is excruciatingly painful to try to come to terms with the pernicious betrayal of our Constitution and liberty that occurred in the Senate on Thursday, September 28. In the past week alone, we have seen factual evidence that belies the need for the power play/pre-election attack on our Constitution. In fact, these developments indicate that giving Bush even more unprecedented power is not only unconscionable; it puts the national security of the United States of America in peril. ...[T]he White House and the Congressional Republicans respond [by giving] the man responsible for this tremendous loss of life, for wasted expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars, for lies upon lies, for fighting an ineffective battle against terrorism that has resulted in an increase in terrorists and a rise in the terrorist threat to America. They respond by giving this man the right to suspend habeas corpus, declare who is an enemy combatant, and the right to torture at will -- and they absolve him of the crimes in violation of American law, the Constitution and the Geneva Convention that he has committed up to now. The man who has endangered America, according to his own restructured intelligence agencies and the facts reported in just one week, is allowed to destroy our Constitution and decide, on his own, who will be tortured. This isn't just a Rubicon that has been crossed that may mean the death of the American Republic, as we know it. This isn't just our Reichstag fire. This is a suicidal act in terms of our national security. It is giving unconstitutional and barbaric powers to a man who has miserably and persistently failed us and lied to this nation at every turn -- as borne out by the facts. It is a thuggish game of forcing an alternative reality upon America, a noxious, deadly one. Today, tears would flow down the olive robe of the Statue of Liberty if she were human. But she is just an inanimate symbol. We are the ones who have to cope with the pain of a democracy destroyed in a political play for power and permanent one-party rule, which is not a Constitutional form of government. That is called a dictatorship. And the one thing in common with dictators through history, whether Communist or fascist, is their state-sanctioned ability to torture people at will. Beyond the overwhelming facts this week that Bush has endangered the national security of the United States of America with his failed and costly fanatic ignorance, we are left with this sad fact. With the law passed on September 28th by Congress, we have become the Republic of torture. We not only have lost our claim to be a civilizing force among nations and abandoned our Constitution, we have appeased the terrorists by doing so. ...We are only beginning to grieve for the great beacon of democracy and justice that we lost yesterday." (AP/ABC News, AP/Yahoo! News, TPM Muckraker, Unclaimed Territory, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Patrick Leahy/TomPaine, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Kos, Buzzflash)

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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 Four

Page Three

Right of habeas corpus set to be outlawed by Congress; torture approved

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