APRIL 15, 2004
A NOT-SO-NEUTRAL CORNER
By Ciro Scotti
Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11
The real issue isn't why the U.S wasn't ready for the attack, but why the Administration used the tragedy to invade Iraq
A funny thing happened on my late-night cab ride in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. I had been reading Against All Enemies, the controversial new book by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, with its riveting account of the Bush Administration's extraordinary performance in the hours after the September 11 attacks. I had watched a somber Clarke on 60 Minutes and saw him grimly but eloquently stand his ground on Meet the Press.
So as the taxi whizzed past the new Time Warner Center, it was somewhat surreal to spot Clarke standing on the corner with another man, laughing heartily. It's good that Richard Clarke can laugh once in a while because he has taken on the most serious of tasks: Calling to account a Presidency that failed in its vigilance but more important -- used the death of innocents to lead the country into a war it had been longing to wage.
TEAR DOWN THE CRITICS. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the Clarke superior whom his book buries with faint praise, tried to make a cogent case before the September 11 commission on Apr. 8 that the newly arrived Bush Administration had done a reasonable job of pulling guard duty for the republic. All she really needed to say in her public testimony was: "We were new. We were inexperienced. We didn't have our eye on the ball. We're sorry." But she never did that, and what she did say was largely irrelevant and already forgotten.
As irrelevant and discardable, in fact, are the scurrilous attacks on Clarke by Administration dobermans such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), whose reputation as a classy politician/physician lies shattered on the Capitol floor. On Mar. 26, Frist said he found the Clarke book to be "an appalling act of profiteering, trading on his insider access to highly classified information and capitalizing on the tragedy that befell this nation on September 11, 2001."
The main aim of the Bush disinformation machine seems to be this: Tear down critics of America's preparedness before the attacks, and, above all, keep the discussions focused on September 11. Because no matter how much or how little you believe in the gospel according to Clarke, most reasonable Americans aren't going to blame the Bushies for failing to foresee and prevent the slaughter of civilians by a band of suicidal zealots.
NUMBINGLY CLEAR. Even the Aug. 6, 2001, report to the President entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." will leave many Americans unconvinced that the Bushies were derelict in their duty. Unlucky, maybe. But not derelict. Because September 11, 2001, might just as easily have happened on September 11, 2000, when a different President had been in office for eight years -- not eight months.
The truly damning part about Against All Enemies, however, is what Clarke reveals about the Administration's mindset on Iraq. What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz really have to answer for is the insidious way in which they used the Twin Tower horror to coax the country into supporting an attack on Iraq.
Put Clarke's book together with The Price of Loyalty by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and The Path to War, a brilliant piece of reporting in the current issue of Vanity Fair by Brian Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, and the picture that emerges is numbingly clear: Bush's neoconservative advisers had Iraq in their sights well before his inauguration.
WHY WAR? Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, and a whole procession of acolytes who worship at the altar of Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis had all urged regime change in Iraq in 1998. Some even earlier. But why?
Why was this Administration so hell-bent on taking out Saddam Hussein that it would turn its back on a world offering sympathy and support after September 11? Why was it so adamant in its adventurism that it would gild the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S. -- and then put our troops in harm's way -- when no clear or present danger existed? Those questions demand answers.
Clarke cites five rationales for the invasion: Finishing the job Bush I started, pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia (where they were a counterweight to Iraq but unwelcome), creating a model Arab democracy, opening a new and friendly oil supply line, and safeguarding Israel by eliminating a military threat.
"THE REAL THREAT"? Philip Zelikow, now the executive director of the September 11 commission, served on the National Security Council, was on the Bush transition team, and was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003. According to the Inter Press Service, he said during a war-on-terror forum at the University of Virginia Law School on Sept. 10, 2002: "I'll tell you what the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dares not speak its name because...the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it's not a popular sell."
So to boil all this down, we went to war, sacrificed thousands of human lives, racked up billions in bills, and flouted the rules of international law for three basic reasons: Israel, oil, and the vengeance of a son whose father didn't finish off Saddam and then was targeted for assassination by the Iraqi Horror Show in 1993? When you think that Bill Clinton was impeached and almost tossed out of office for fooling around with a willing intern and then lying about it, his sins seem like very small potatoes. Very small potatoes indeed.
Scotti, senior editor for government and sports business, offers his views in A Not-So-Neutral Corner, only for BusinessWeek Online
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Saturday, April 17, 2004
Here's two huge differences in John Kerry and George Bush.
(1.) Kerry can do a MEET THE PRESS interview live with Tim Russert while Bush can not.
(2.) Kerry can appear before a congressional panel's interview without someone holding his hand while Bush has to have his Uncle Dick there for the 9/11 Commission interview to carry his water for him.
Kerry Prepares for 'Meet the Press'
Sat Apr 17,12:43 PM ET
MIAMI - John Kerry took Saturday off from campaigning to prepare for a television interview.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Network officials said the show's host, Tim Russert, was going to Miami, where the Massachusetts senator was spending a few days, for the hourlong interview.
Russert went to the White House in February for a similar program with President Bush. That show was taped the day before its broadcast; Kerry's appearance on Sunday will be live.
________________________________________________________________
(1.) Kerry can do a MEET THE PRESS interview live with Tim Russert while Bush can not.
(2.) Kerry can appear before a congressional panel's interview without someone holding his hand while Bush has to have his Uncle Dick there for the 9/11 Commission interview to carry his water for him.
Kerry Prepares for 'Meet the Press'
Sat Apr 17,12:43 PM ET
MIAMI - John Kerry took Saturday off from campaigning to prepare for a television interview.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Network officials said the show's host, Tim Russert, was going to Miami, where the Massachusetts senator was spending a few days, for the hourlong interview.
Russert went to the White House in February for a similar program with President Bush. That show was taped the day before its broadcast; Kerry's appearance on Sunday will be live.
________________________________________________________________
April 17, 2004
Bush Said Iraq Talks Concerned Afghanistan (in other words he LIED)
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bushtold the public that the discussions was about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.
"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals.
A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.
Details of the meeting's focus on Iraq have since emerged in a recent speech by Franks, who now is retired, and in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The book says Franks summarized Afghan operations before turning to planning for war in Iraq — the point of the gathering.
In a Washington speech last month, Franks said he discussed with the president on that day the "growing storm" and the need to revise a long-standing military contingency plan for Iraq.
The meeting occurred while U.S. forces were in the heat of searching through the mountainous region of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had been hiding near Tora Bora.
According to Woodward's book, the meeting of the war cabinet included Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart and, on video screens, Vice President Dick Cheney from Wyoming, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from New Mexico, and, from Washington, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet.
When Bush and Franks spoke to reporters after the meeting, the president began by saying, "Tommy has just come back from the Afghan theater. He gave me a full briefing on what he saw and what he heard. We just got off of a teleconference with the national security team to discuss his trip and to discuss what's taking place in Afghanistan."
Franks said he and his wife recently had had a chance to meet with U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to attend the installation ceremony of an interim government.
"Seeing these great young people and seeing this momentous event just filled me with a desire to be able to brief the president on what's going on over there in the theater, on what our people are doing, how they feel about what they're doing," Franks told reporters.
One reporter reminded Bush that "you've talked about 2002 being a year of war. What can you say to prepare the American people for what that vision is, what they need to be prepared for, as compared to what they've seen in Afghanistan?"
Bush replied: "I hope 2002 is a year of peace, but I'm also realistic. And I know full well that bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm America again; bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm our allies. How do I know that? I receive intelligence reports on a daily basis that indicates that that's his desires."
Bush then mentioned the thwarting of the attempted shoe bomber several days earlier aboard an American Airlines flight.
According to Woodward's book, Franks gave participants in that meeting the first briefing on Iraq war plans. He described options that could allow a war to start with as few as 105,000 U.S. troops, assuming full foreign cooperation with the force growing 230,000 over 60 to 90 days.
The books says Franks presented a list of assumptions that were behind the plan. They included that Iraq would be the main effort of the United States and would get priority on resources, and that the Afghan operation and the global fight against terrorism would provide a noise level under which Iraq operations could proceed. But these efforts would not diminish the Afghan or terrorism efforts.
In the Washington speech a month ago, Franks said he told the president at that Dec. 28 meeting that the existing contingency plan for Iraq had called for sending in a half-million troops, an operation so massive it would require a six-month buildup.
Franks said he told Bush that the long-standing plan needed to be redrawn and if the U.S. military did go in, "We should go all the way to Baghdad."
According to Franks' public account of the Dec. 28 meeting, Bush expressed the hope that "we don't ever have one boot on Iraqi soil except by invitation."
According to Woodward's book, Bush told Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark.
The meeting with Franks on Dec. 28 was apparently the first briefing from him that the president had received since those instructions.
The book says Franks uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon (news - web sites) told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
In his public speech, sponsored by the Nation's Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Franks said the new plan he developed for Iraq refined the objectives to include protecting the infrastructure for Iraq's water supply, its oil supply and guarding against killing large numbers of civilians.
Among the plan's assumptions were that Iraq would launch missiles against Israel and other neighbors, and that allied troops would be hit with weapons of mass destruction, Franks said.
_____________________________________________________________
Bush Said Iraq Talks Concerned Afghanistan (in other words he LIED)
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bushtold the public that the discussions was about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.
"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals.
A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.
Details of the meeting's focus on Iraq have since emerged in a recent speech by Franks, who now is retired, and in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The book says Franks summarized Afghan operations before turning to planning for war in Iraq — the point of the gathering.
In a Washington speech last month, Franks said he discussed with the president on that day the "growing storm" and the need to revise a long-standing military contingency plan for Iraq.
The meeting occurred while U.S. forces were in the heat of searching through the mountainous region of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had been hiding near Tora Bora.
According to Woodward's book, the meeting of the war cabinet included Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart and, on video screens, Vice President Dick Cheney from Wyoming, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from New Mexico, and, from Washington, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet.
When Bush and Franks spoke to reporters after the meeting, the president began by saying, "Tommy has just come back from the Afghan theater. He gave me a full briefing on what he saw and what he heard. We just got off of a teleconference with the national security team to discuss his trip and to discuss what's taking place in Afghanistan."
Franks said he and his wife recently had had a chance to meet with U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to attend the installation ceremony of an interim government.
"Seeing these great young people and seeing this momentous event just filled me with a desire to be able to brief the president on what's going on over there in the theater, on what our people are doing, how they feel about what they're doing," Franks told reporters.
One reporter reminded Bush that "you've talked about 2002 being a year of war. What can you say to prepare the American people for what that vision is, what they need to be prepared for, as compared to what they've seen in Afghanistan?"
Bush replied: "I hope 2002 is a year of peace, but I'm also realistic. And I know full well that bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm America again; bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm our allies. How do I know that? I receive intelligence reports on a daily basis that indicates that that's his desires."
Bush then mentioned the thwarting of the attempted shoe bomber several days earlier aboard an American Airlines flight.
According to Woodward's book, Franks gave participants in that meeting the first briefing on Iraq war plans. He described options that could allow a war to start with as few as 105,000 U.S. troops, assuming full foreign cooperation with the force growing 230,000 over 60 to 90 days.
The books says Franks presented a list of assumptions that were behind the plan. They included that Iraq would be the main effort of the United States and would get priority on resources, and that the Afghan operation and the global fight against terrorism would provide a noise level under which Iraq operations could proceed. But these efforts would not diminish the Afghan or terrorism efforts.
In the Washington speech a month ago, Franks said he told the president at that Dec. 28 meeting that the existing contingency plan for Iraq had called for sending in a half-million troops, an operation so massive it would require a six-month buildup.
Franks said he told Bush that the long-standing plan needed to be redrawn and if the U.S. military did go in, "We should go all the way to Baghdad."
According to Franks' public account of the Dec. 28 meeting, Bush expressed the hope that "we don't ever have one boot on Iraqi soil except by invitation."
According to Woodward's book, Bush told Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark.
The meeting with Franks on Dec. 28 was apparently the first briefing from him that the president had received since those instructions.
The book says Franks uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon (news - web sites) told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
In his public speech, sponsored by the Nation's Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Franks said the new plan he developed for Iraq refined the objectives to include protecting the infrastructure for Iraq's water supply, its oil supply and guarding against killing large numbers of civilians.
Among the plan's assumptions were that Iraq would launch missiles against Israel and other neighbors, and that allied troops would be hit with weapons of mass destruction, Franks said.
_____________________________________________________________
At his press conference George Bush couldn't seem to recall making any mistakes but admits he must have made some. Here's a DNC ad that doesn't try to get into any huge scale lists of mistakes (it would take hours), just the ones with the notes that the GOP had hoped earlier to exploit. The most damaging thing about the press conference was to watch Bush twist under the spotlight and look like a fourth grade child stumped for an answer at the front of the class. Pitiful. It's a national embarrassment that the president of our country is so feeble in a public forum. It's no wonder that he's only had THREE of these press conferences in over three years. Bush just doesn't have the "stuff" to be an effective leader. Hell, all he's good for is hanging out with the Texas Ranger fans at a ballpark and acting like the spoiled son of a president.
But don't take my word for it, view this ad by clicking HERE.
But don't take my word for it, view this ad by clicking HERE.
From my old blogging buddy, Mark. He's as dead on as ever on fighting the lying scum that we face in the White House.
As there are a lot of regulars on the blog tonight, I wanted to make a couple of points about messaging, and about the lies coming out of the Bush camp.
1) Don't let someone goad you into an argument with a faulty premise. Next time you read something savaging Kerry, take a moment to think how the enemy is trying to jerk your chain or frame arguments in ways that are favorable to them.
Case in point: the idea that Kerry's purple hearts were given for 'scratches'. Somehow this gutless line of bull sounds reasonable, but take a minute to consider the context. The very people who are putting out these lies all opted to avoid going anywhere near live fire during Vietnam. Whether Kerry was severely injured or not is immaterail given that the people who injured him WERE TRYING TO KILL HIM.
Also, while these right-wing cowards are trying to imply that Kerry didn't deserve his medals, look what these same political terrorists did to Max Cleland, who had two legs and an arm blown off. They not only compared him to Saddam Hussein in order to drive him out of the senate, but they recently had political war criminal Ann Coulter attempting yet again to diminish his loss in the most despicable way.
Remember: these are not people who are trying to make a valid point. These are the lowest of the yellow, belly-crawling liars in our political system, and they will do or say anything to defeat democracy. They know their candidate is an abject failure, they know he can't run on his record, and they know he started a war we didn't need to fight.
2) Kerry campaigned his way for the past month or so, despite a lot of handwringing that he wasn't fighting back hard enough, and it turns out he was right in what he was doing. Bush hosed 40 million into the toilet and got almost nothing for it, except a hasitly arranged press conference intruding on yet another bass-fishing, brush-clearing, Crawford vacation.
What many of you have learned in the past thirty days is what some of us learned in the last thirty weeks: John Kerry and his closest advisers know how to run a campaign. It may not be incendiary or smashmouth, but they know what they're doing.
The problem now is that the pundits, who always want to be the first to pronounce a winner and a loser, are starting to talk about Kerry winning big. That means people are starting to raise the bar of expectations on Kerry, but only to put it out of reach yet again so they can trash him for not measuring up to their expectations.
Don't let the pundits or Bush's lapdogs in the press fool you. This is going to be a close race, and Bush still holds almost all the cards. He has the bully pulpit, which means he can change the conversation any day of the week. He has more money - still - but more importantly he has major media outlets shilling for him 24/7 for FREE. Bush is also now clearly desperate enough, as witnessed by his mind-blowing flip-flop on American policy toward the Middle-east peace process, to do just about anything to get re-elected. I'm not a conspiracy fan, but you don't need Diebold horror stories to see the possibilites. Loose cannon Dick Cheney and the mercenaries in the VP's office could trigger an incidence in September with Iran or North Korea just to save their own necks, let alone George's.*
You're all very sharp and strong advocates for Kerry. I'm asking you know to become razor sharp. I'm asking you to decide, no matter what, that you're not going to blink in the face of the onslaught of lies and hate that will come spewing from the RNC and Karl Rove's sociopathic mouth. And all the more so should Bush actually be down in the polls going into October.
Don't flinch. Don't give them an inch.
* You think that sounds crazy? I do too. Then again, this White House lied America into a full-blown war and an occupation of a foreign country without so much as planning for the peace. If they'll do that, they'll do anything. Because they already have.
Posted on the official Kerry Blog by Mark from Iowa at April 17, 2004 02:27 AM
______________________________________________________________________________
As there are a lot of regulars on the blog tonight, I wanted to make a couple of points about messaging, and about the lies coming out of the Bush camp.
1) Don't let someone goad you into an argument with a faulty premise. Next time you read something savaging Kerry, take a moment to think how the enemy is trying to jerk your chain or frame arguments in ways that are favorable to them.
Case in point: the idea that Kerry's purple hearts were given for 'scratches'. Somehow this gutless line of bull sounds reasonable, but take a minute to consider the context. The very people who are putting out these lies all opted to avoid going anywhere near live fire during Vietnam. Whether Kerry was severely injured or not is immaterail given that the people who injured him WERE TRYING TO KILL HIM.
Also, while these right-wing cowards are trying to imply that Kerry didn't deserve his medals, look what these same political terrorists did to Max Cleland, who had two legs and an arm blown off. They not only compared him to Saddam Hussein in order to drive him out of the senate, but they recently had political war criminal Ann Coulter attempting yet again to diminish his loss in the most despicable way.
Remember: these are not people who are trying to make a valid point. These are the lowest of the yellow, belly-crawling liars in our political system, and they will do or say anything to defeat democracy. They know their candidate is an abject failure, they know he can't run on his record, and they know he started a war we didn't need to fight.
2) Kerry campaigned his way for the past month or so, despite a lot of handwringing that he wasn't fighting back hard enough, and it turns out he was right in what he was doing. Bush hosed 40 million into the toilet and got almost nothing for it, except a hasitly arranged press conference intruding on yet another bass-fishing, brush-clearing, Crawford vacation.
What many of you have learned in the past thirty days is what some of us learned in the last thirty weeks: John Kerry and his closest advisers know how to run a campaign. It may not be incendiary or smashmouth, but they know what they're doing.
The problem now is that the pundits, who always want to be the first to pronounce a winner and a loser, are starting to talk about Kerry winning big. That means people are starting to raise the bar of expectations on Kerry, but only to put it out of reach yet again so they can trash him for not measuring up to their expectations.
Don't let the pundits or Bush's lapdogs in the press fool you. This is going to be a close race, and Bush still holds almost all the cards. He has the bully pulpit, which means he can change the conversation any day of the week. He has more money - still - but more importantly he has major media outlets shilling for him 24/7 for FREE. Bush is also now clearly desperate enough, as witnessed by his mind-blowing flip-flop on American policy toward the Middle-east peace process, to do just about anything to get re-elected. I'm not a conspiracy fan, but you don't need Diebold horror stories to see the possibilites. Loose cannon Dick Cheney and the mercenaries in the VP's office could trigger an incidence in September with Iran or North Korea just to save their own necks, let alone George's.*
You're all very sharp and strong advocates for Kerry. I'm asking you know to become razor sharp. I'm asking you to decide, no matter what, that you're not going to blink in the face of the onslaught of lies and hate that will come spewing from the RNC and Karl Rove's sociopathic mouth. And all the more so should Bush actually be down in the polls going into October.
Don't flinch. Don't give them an inch.
* You think that sounds crazy? I do too. Then again, this White House lied America into a full-blown war and an occupation of a foreign country without so much as planning for the peace. If they'll do that, they'll do anything. Because they already have.
Posted on the official Kerry Blog by Mark from Iowa at April 17, 2004 02:27 AM
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AP: Book Alleges Secret Iraq War Plan
Sat Apr 17,12:12 AM ET
By CALVIN WOODWARD and SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON - President Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq in November 2001 while overseeing a divided national security team, including a vice president determined to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, says a new book.
Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack," says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Vice President Dick Cheney developed — as Woodward puts it — an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush dismissed such characterizations of Cheney.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be available in bookstores next week and covers the 16 months leading to the March 2003 invasion.
Bush told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark, Woodward said.
In an interview with the author, Bush said he feared that if news had gotten out about the Iraq plan as America was fighting another conflict, that would cause "enormous international angst and domestic speculation."
"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as saying. "It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."
Asked Friday about that Nov. 21, 2001, meeting with Rumsfeld, the president said, "I can't remember dates that far back" but emphasized "it was Afghanistan that was on my mind and I didn't really start focusing on Iraq 'til later on."
The White House later confirmed the discussion with Rumsfeld but said it did not mean Bush was set on a course of attacking Iraq at that point.
Bush and his aides have denied they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al-Qaida terrorist threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. A commission investigating the attacks just concluded several weeks of extraordinary public testimony, during which former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke contended the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.
Woodward's account indicates some members of the administration, particularly Cheney, were focused on Saddam from the outset of Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al-Qaida the top priority.
Without quoting them directly on the subject, Woodward portrays Cheney and Powell as barely on speaking terms — the vice president being the chief advocate for a war that the secretary of state was not sure needed to be fought.
He recounts the vice president and a defense official making remarks to others about Powell bragging about his popularity, and Powell saying Cheney was preoccupied with an Iraq-al-Qaida link.
"Powell thought Cheney had the fever," Woodward writes. "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. ... Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation."
On the war's origins, the book describes Bush pulling Rumsfeld into a cubbyhole office adjacent to the Situation Room for that November 2001 meeting and asking him what shape the Iraq war plan was in. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush ordered a fresh one.
The book says Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about their planning and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.
Even Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.
The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
Woodward, a Washington Post journalist who wrote an earlier book on Bush's anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says the scope and intensity of the war plan grew even as administration officials were saying publicly that they were pursuing a diplomatic solution.
The book describes a CIA briefing for Bush in December 2002 presenting evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Bush was not sure the public would find the information compelling, Woodward said, but when he turned to Tenet, the CIA chief assured him: "It's a slam-dunk case."
That case fell apart after U.S. forces occupied Iraq and failed to find the stockpiles the administration said had been there.
____________________________________________________________________
Sat Apr 17,12:12 AM ET
By CALVIN WOODWARD and SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON - President Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq in November 2001 while overseeing a divided national security team, including a vice president determined to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, says a new book.
Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack," says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Vice President Dick Cheney developed — as Woodward puts it — an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush dismissed such characterizations of Cheney.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be available in bookstores next week and covers the 16 months leading to the March 2003 invasion.
Bush told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark, Woodward said.
In an interview with the author, Bush said he feared that if news had gotten out about the Iraq plan as America was fighting another conflict, that would cause "enormous international angst and domestic speculation."
"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as saying. "It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."
Asked Friday about that Nov. 21, 2001, meeting with Rumsfeld, the president said, "I can't remember dates that far back" but emphasized "it was Afghanistan that was on my mind and I didn't really start focusing on Iraq 'til later on."
The White House later confirmed the discussion with Rumsfeld but said it did not mean Bush was set on a course of attacking Iraq at that point.
Bush and his aides have denied they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al-Qaida terrorist threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. A commission investigating the attacks just concluded several weeks of extraordinary public testimony, during which former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke contended the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.
Woodward's account indicates some members of the administration, particularly Cheney, were focused on Saddam from the outset of Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al-Qaida the top priority.
Without quoting them directly on the subject, Woodward portrays Cheney and Powell as barely on speaking terms — the vice president being the chief advocate for a war that the secretary of state was not sure needed to be fought.
He recounts the vice president and a defense official making remarks to others about Powell bragging about his popularity, and Powell saying Cheney was preoccupied with an Iraq-al-Qaida link.
"Powell thought Cheney had the fever," Woodward writes. "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. ... Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation."
On the war's origins, the book describes Bush pulling Rumsfeld into a cubbyhole office adjacent to the Situation Room for that November 2001 meeting and asking him what shape the Iraq war plan was in. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush ordered a fresh one.
The book says Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about their planning and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.
Even Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.
The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
Woodward, a Washington Post journalist who wrote an earlier book on Bush's anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says the scope and intensity of the war plan grew even as administration officials were saying publicly that they were pursuing a diplomatic solution.
The book describes a CIA briefing for Bush in December 2002 presenting evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Bush was not sure the public would find the information compelling, Woodward said, but when he turned to Tenet, the CIA chief assured him: "It's a slam-dunk case."
That case fell apart after U.S. forces occupied Iraq and failed to find the stockpiles the administration said had been there.
____________________________________________________________________
Friday, April 16, 2004
John Kerry's first Purple Heart
With questions lingering over President Bush's service in the Guard, conservatives hope to diminish Kerry's Vietnam heroics -- but they can't erase his real battle record.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Douglas Brinkley
April 17, 2004 | It was Dec. 2, 1968, and Lt. j.g. John Kerry was on a special nighttime covert mission in Vietnam. He had been ordered into a Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay to disrupt a smuggling operation. His vessel was a Boston Whaler, a boat that could float after taking 1,000 rounds of automatic weapons fire. Much of the evening was spent apprehending fishermen in a curfew zone. At approximately 2 a.m., however, they proceeded up an inlet with wild jungle on both sides of the boat. As they approached a bay, Kerry's whaler fired flares into the air. To their horror, not far from them, were a startled group of Viet Cong smugglers trafficking in contraband.
"We opened fire," Kerry told me in a Jan. 30, 2003, interview. "The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach strafing it. Then it was quiet."
Kerry and crewmates blew up the smugglers' beached sampans and then headed back to Cam Ranh Bay. "I never saw where the piece of shrapnel had come from, and the vision of the men running like gazelles haunted me," Kerry continued. "It seemed stupid. My gunner didn't know where the people were when he first started firing. The M-16 bullets had kicked up the sand way to the right of them as he sprayed the beach, slowly walking the line of fire over to where the men had been leaping for cover. I had been shouting directions and trying to un-jam my gun. The third crewman was locked in a personal struggle with the engine, trying to start it. I just shook my head and said, 'Jesus Christ.' It made me wonder if a year of training was worth anything." Kerry, never trying to inflate the incident, called it a "half-ass action." Nevertheless, the escapade introduced Kerry to the V.C. and earned him his first Purple Heart.
As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any U.S. citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple Hearts increased in 1968 as the United States Navy started sending swift boats up rivers in the Mekong Delta. Sailors -- no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships in the Gulf of Tonkin -- were starting to bleed, a lot. Vice Adm. Elmo Zumwalt himself would pin the medal on John Kerry at An Thoi about six weeks after the doctor at the Cam Ranh base took the shrapnel out of the young officer's right arm. "He called me in New York to tell me he had been wounded," his then girlfriend and later wife, Julia Thorne, remembered. "I was worried sick, scared to death that John or one of my brothers was going to die. He reassured me that he was OK."
Now it is 2004, John Kerry is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and a couple of reporters are bringing into question whether he deserved a Purple Heart for that daring action. The Boston Globe and the New York Post have run hurtful stories quoting Kerry's commanding officer that evening, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, now a retiree in Gulf Breeze, Fla., grouching that Kerry's wound wasn't large enough. Hibbard was not even on the Boston Whaler when the firefight erupted. Nevertheless, the New York Post quotes Hibbard -- a proudly registered Republican -- as griping Kerry's injury "didn't look like much of a wound to me."
In the wake of the controversial Bush National Guard story, reporters today, anxious to break a headline, are combing through Kerry's Vietnam past. The name of the game is to find a conservative ex-Vietnam hand to say something negative about Kerry. It's an automatic newsmaker, guaranteed to get picked up by Newsmax.com, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, the New York Post and other conservative outlets. At issue is an attempt to downgrade Kerry's Vietnam War heroism. The major anti-Kerry Vietnam War Internet complaint, it seems, echoes Hibbard: that his minor wounds weren't big enough to warrant Purple Hearts. Unfortunately neither the Boston Globe nor New York Post takes the time to explain to readers that Purple Hearts are not given out to soldiers/sailors for the size of the wound. Only by the grace of God did the hot shrapnel that pierced Kerry's arm not enter his heart or brain or eye.
For the record, Purple Hearts are given for the following enemy-related injuries:
a) Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action.
b) Injury caused by enemy-placed mine or trap.
c) Injury caused by enemy-released chemical, biological or nuclear agent.
d) Injury caused by vehicle or aircraft accident resulting from enemy fire.
e) Concussion injuries caused as a result of enemy-generated explosions.
Examples of injuries or wounds which clearly do not qualify for award of the Purple Heart are as follows:
a) Frostbite or trench foot injuries.
b) Heat stroke.
c) Food poisoning not caused by enemy agents.
d) Chemical, biological, or nuclear agents not released by the enemy.
e) Battle fatigue.
f) Disease not directly caused by enemy agents.
g) Accidents, to include explosive, aircraft, vehicular and other accidental wounding not related to or caused by enemy action.
Given the hurly-burly circumstance of Dec. 2, 1968, Kerry -- and the other men on the mission -- are not sure whether they were hit by enemy fire or if shrapnel from one of the other men on the Boston Whaler injured Kerry. It could have even been Kerry's own M-16 backfiring that caused the shrapnel wound. It doesn't really matter. The requirement makes it clear that you are awarded a Purple Heart for "Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action." Does anybody dispute that Kerry's wound was created by enemy action? As the stipulation also makes clear, Kerry would have been awarded a Purple Heart even if he never bled, if, for example, he had suffered a concussion from a grenade. So to set the record straight: Kerry deserved his first Purple Heart -- period. To say otherwise is to distort the reality of the medal.
Unfortunately, the Boston Globe and New York Post stories omit fully reporting the bylaws. They present Hibbard at face value, downplaying the fact that he is a Republican criticizing a fellow veteran hoping to cause him public embarrassment. According to the Globe, Hibbard -- in classic blowhard fashion -- said Kerry "had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel." Adding further verbal insult, Hibbard apparently claimed: "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." The straight-faced Globe reporter, in fact, claims that Hibbard told him that Kerry's wound resembled a "scrape from a fingernail." Not included in either newspaper account, however, is Kerry's medical report from the incident. He shared it with me last year when I was writing "Tour of Duty." It reads: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and appl. Bacitracin. Ret. to duty." Is shrapnel removed from an arm really like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or a thorn prick? The answer, of course, as any sensible person can surmise, is no.
Which raises the question: Why the medical record omission? Why the cruel attempt publicly to mock Kerry for his wound? Why the media need to play "gotcha" with something as sensitive as a war injury? This Dec. 3 medical report is proof that Kerry had shrapnel taken from his arm. According to Kerry, who should know, the doctor wrapped a clean white bandage around his arm. After the procedure he rightfully put in for a Purple Heart. Kerry clearly met the requirements -- as listed above -- for deserving one. From the hospital room Kerry returned to duty. That's apparently when he held the shrapnel out in his palm for Hibbard to see.
The Globe, however, let Hibbard off the hook, no serious questions asked. On the one hand he claimed Kerry was holding his shrapnel and then he also claims it was a scratch. Are we to believe that following his surgical procedure Kerry went to Hibbard and ripped off his battle dressing to show him the wound that looked like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or is Hibbard simply surmising it was a thorn prick? Worse still, Hibbard now claims that he was opposed to Kerry being awarded the Purple Heart. Really? Then why didn't he fight against it harder? His superficial answer can be found in the Globe: "I do remember some questions, some correspondence about it. I finally said, 'Ok, if that's what happened ... do whatever you want.' After that I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got it. I don't know how." Does this sound like a reliable source? Is that fuzzy-mindedness worth reporting as serious news? Why wasn't Hibbard asked why he stayed quiet for 35 years?
Let me offer Hibbard an answer to his question. The U.S. Navy chose to award Kerry a Purple Heart because he qualified for it. Only a fool -- or an exceedingly modest man -- wouldn't apply for a Purple Heart that was due him. Kerry was neither. But Kerry did not receive it because, as the Post claims, he had "strong ties to the Kennedy machine in Massachusetts (Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Walinsky wrote Kerry's famous 1971 antiwar Washington speech)." Kerry's only tie to the "Kennedy machine" was that as a college student he slapped a "Ted Kennedy for U.S. Senate" bumper sticker on his VW and campaigned for a summer around Cape Cod. As for Walinsky writing Kerry's famous April 22, 1971, speech/testimony -- it's utter nonsense. Walinsky has consistently denied the rumor. At his Boston home Kerry has a file brimming with his various drafts of the speech/testimony. He, in fact, had delivered parts of the speech months beforehand. Why is it so hard to accept the fact that Kerry -- like thousands of other Vietnam Vets -- was awarded a Purple Heart as a small token of appreciation for risking his life for his country?
Back in 1964 Bob Dylan wrote a lyric for the song "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." At one point in it he asks whether nothing in American life is "really sacred." When retired U.S. naval officers, 35 years after the fact, start whining to the press that a war wound wasn't big enough to warrant a Purple Heart -- and the Boston Globe goes along for the ride -- you realize Dylan's prophecy. Today the tabloids truly are king. Call me naive, or too pro-veteran, but it seems to me we should be thanking every Purple Heart recipient for their duty to country, not demanding of them explanations for why their wounds weren't bigger or fatal. Only somebody craven -- or with a political agenda -- could stoop so low. Ridicule Kerry on his liberal Senate record, or so-called aloofism, or even his outspoken Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests, but leave his old battle scars alone.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Douglas Brinkley is Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. His most recent book is "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War."
_______________________________________________________________
With questions lingering over President Bush's service in the Guard, conservatives hope to diminish Kerry's Vietnam heroics -- but they can't erase his real battle record.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Douglas Brinkley
April 17, 2004 | It was Dec. 2, 1968, and Lt. j.g. John Kerry was on a special nighttime covert mission in Vietnam. He had been ordered into a Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay to disrupt a smuggling operation. His vessel was a Boston Whaler, a boat that could float after taking 1,000 rounds of automatic weapons fire. Much of the evening was spent apprehending fishermen in a curfew zone. At approximately 2 a.m., however, they proceeded up an inlet with wild jungle on both sides of the boat. As they approached a bay, Kerry's whaler fired flares into the air. To their horror, not far from them, were a startled group of Viet Cong smugglers trafficking in contraband.
"We opened fire," Kerry told me in a Jan. 30, 2003, interview. "The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach strafing it. Then it was quiet."
Kerry and crewmates blew up the smugglers' beached sampans and then headed back to Cam Ranh Bay. "I never saw where the piece of shrapnel had come from, and the vision of the men running like gazelles haunted me," Kerry continued. "It seemed stupid. My gunner didn't know where the people were when he first started firing. The M-16 bullets had kicked up the sand way to the right of them as he sprayed the beach, slowly walking the line of fire over to where the men had been leaping for cover. I had been shouting directions and trying to un-jam my gun. The third crewman was locked in a personal struggle with the engine, trying to start it. I just shook my head and said, 'Jesus Christ.' It made me wonder if a year of training was worth anything." Kerry, never trying to inflate the incident, called it a "half-ass action." Nevertheless, the escapade introduced Kerry to the V.C. and earned him his first Purple Heart.
As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any U.S. citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple Hearts increased in 1968 as the United States Navy started sending swift boats up rivers in the Mekong Delta. Sailors -- no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships in the Gulf of Tonkin -- were starting to bleed, a lot. Vice Adm. Elmo Zumwalt himself would pin the medal on John Kerry at An Thoi about six weeks after the doctor at the Cam Ranh base took the shrapnel out of the young officer's right arm. "He called me in New York to tell me he had been wounded," his then girlfriend and later wife, Julia Thorne, remembered. "I was worried sick, scared to death that John or one of my brothers was going to die. He reassured me that he was OK."
Now it is 2004, John Kerry is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and a couple of reporters are bringing into question whether he deserved a Purple Heart for that daring action. The Boston Globe and the New York Post have run hurtful stories quoting Kerry's commanding officer that evening, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, now a retiree in Gulf Breeze, Fla., grouching that Kerry's wound wasn't large enough. Hibbard was not even on the Boston Whaler when the firefight erupted. Nevertheless, the New York Post quotes Hibbard -- a proudly registered Republican -- as griping Kerry's injury "didn't look like much of a wound to me."
In the wake of the controversial Bush National Guard story, reporters today, anxious to break a headline, are combing through Kerry's Vietnam past. The name of the game is to find a conservative ex-Vietnam hand to say something negative about Kerry. It's an automatic newsmaker, guaranteed to get picked up by Newsmax.com, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, the New York Post and other conservative outlets. At issue is an attempt to downgrade Kerry's Vietnam War heroism. The major anti-Kerry Vietnam War Internet complaint, it seems, echoes Hibbard: that his minor wounds weren't big enough to warrant Purple Hearts. Unfortunately neither the Boston Globe nor New York Post takes the time to explain to readers that Purple Hearts are not given out to soldiers/sailors for the size of the wound. Only by the grace of God did the hot shrapnel that pierced Kerry's arm not enter his heart or brain or eye.
For the record, Purple Hearts are given for the following enemy-related injuries:
a) Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action.
b) Injury caused by enemy-placed mine or trap.
c) Injury caused by enemy-released chemical, biological or nuclear agent.
d) Injury caused by vehicle or aircraft accident resulting from enemy fire.
e) Concussion injuries caused as a result of enemy-generated explosions.
Examples of injuries or wounds which clearly do not qualify for award of the Purple Heart are as follows:
a) Frostbite or trench foot injuries.
b) Heat stroke.
c) Food poisoning not caused by enemy agents.
d) Chemical, biological, or nuclear agents not released by the enemy.
e) Battle fatigue.
f) Disease not directly caused by enemy agents.
g) Accidents, to include explosive, aircraft, vehicular and other accidental wounding not related to or caused by enemy action.
Given the hurly-burly circumstance of Dec. 2, 1968, Kerry -- and the other men on the mission -- are not sure whether they were hit by enemy fire or if shrapnel from one of the other men on the Boston Whaler injured Kerry. It could have even been Kerry's own M-16 backfiring that caused the shrapnel wound. It doesn't really matter. The requirement makes it clear that you are awarded a Purple Heart for "Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action." Does anybody dispute that Kerry's wound was created by enemy action? As the stipulation also makes clear, Kerry would have been awarded a Purple Heart even if he never bled, if, for example, he had suffered a concussion from a grenade. So to set the record straight: Kerry deserved his first Purple Heart -- period. To say otherwise is to distort the reality of the medal.
Unfortunately, the Boston Globe and New York Post stories omit fully reporting the bylaws. They present Hibbard at face value, downplaying the fact that he is a Republican criticizing a fellow veteran hoping to cause him public embarrassment. According to the Globe, Hibbard -- in classic blowhard fashion -- said Kerry "had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel." Adding further verbal insult, Hibbard apparently claimed: "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." The straight-faced Globe reporter, in fact, claims that Hibbard told him that Kerry's wound resembled a "scrape from a fingernail." Not included in either newspaper account, however, is Kerry's medical report from the incident. He shared it with me last year when I was writing "Tour of Duty." It reads: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and appl. Bacitracin. Ret. to duty." Is shrapnel removed from an arm really like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or a thorn prick? The answer, of course, as any sensible person can surmise, is no.
Which raises the question: Why the medical record omission? Why the cruel attempt publicly to mock Kerry for his wound? Why the media need to play "gotcha" with something as sensitive as a war injury? This Dec. 3 medical report is proof that Kerry had shrapnel taken from his arm. According to Kerry, who should know, the doctor wrapped a clean white bandage around his arm. After the procedure he rightfully put in for a Purple Heart. Kerry clearly met the requirements -- as listed above -- for deserving one. From the hospital room Kerry returned to duty. That's apparently when he held the shrapnel out in his palm for Hibbard to see.
The Globe, however, let Hibbard off the hook, no serious questions asked. On the one hand he claimed Kerry was holding his shrapnel and then he also claims it was a scratch. Are we to believe that following his surgical procedure Kerry went to Hibbard and ripped off his battle dressing to show him the wound that looked like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or is Hibbard simply surmising it was a thorn prick? Worse still, Hibbard now claims that he was opposed to Kerry being awarded the Purple Heart. Really? Then why didn't he fight against it harder? His superficial answer can be found in the Globe: "I do remember some questions, some correspondence about it. I finally said, 'Ok, if that's what happened ... do whatever you want.' After that I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got it. I don't know how." Does this sound like a reliable source? Is that fuzzy-mindedness worth reporting as serious news? Why wasn't Hibbard asked why he stayed quiet for 35 years?
Let me offer Hibbard an answer to his question. The U.S. Navy chose to award Kerry a Purple Heart because he qualified for it. Only a fool -- or an exceedingly modest man -- wouldn't apply for a Purple Heart that was due him. Kerry was neither. But Kerry did not receive it because, as the Post claims, he had "strong ties to the Kennedy machine in Massachusetts (Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Walinsky wrote Kerry's famous 1971 antiwar Washington speech)." Kerry's only tie to the "Kennedy machine" was that as a college student he slapped a "Ted Kennedy for U.S. Senate" bumper sticker on his VW and campaigned for a summer around Cape Cod. As for Walinsky writing Kerry's famous April 22, 1971, speech/testimony -- it's utter nonsense. Walinsky has consistently denied the rumor. At his Boston home Kerry has a file brimming with his various drafts of the speech/testimony. He, in fact, had delivered parts of the speech months beforehand. Why is it so hard to accept the fact that Kerry -- like thousands of other Vietnam Vets -- was awarded a Purple Heart as a small token of appreciation for risking his life for his country?
Back in 1964 Bob Dylan wrote a lyric for the song "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." At one point in it he asks whether nothing in American life is "really sacred." When retired U.S. naval officers, 35 years after the fact, start whining to the press that a war wound wasn't big enough to warrant a Purple Heart -- and the Boston Globe goes along for the ride -- you realize Dylan's prophecy. Today the tabloids truly are king. Call me naive, or too pro-veteran, but it seems to me we should be thanking every Purple Heart recipient for their duty to country, not demanding of them explanations for why their wounds weren't bigger or fatal. Only somebody craven -- or with a political agenda -- could stoop so low. Ridicule Kerry on his liberal Senate record, or so-called aloofism, or even his outspoken Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests, but leave his old battle scars alone.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Douglas Brinkley is Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. His most recent book is "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War."
_______________________________________________________________
Here's what the first President Bush wrote about invading Iraq 1991 in his memoirs:
Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.?
To bad his son can't read!
________________________________________________________________
Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.?
To bad his son can't read!
________________________________________________________________
The Out-of-Towner
SLATE: War Stories
While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 4:54 PM PT
In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen.
The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.
Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."
And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.
Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.
And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn't with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice—as she has testified—wasn't with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.
A USA Today story, written right before Bush took off, reported that the vacation—scheduled to last from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3—would tie one of Richard Nixon's as the longest that any president had ever taken. A week before he left, Bush made a videotaped message for the Boy Scouts of America. On the tape, he said, "I'll be going to my ranch in Crawford, where I'll work and take a little time off. I think it is so important for the president to spend some time away from Washington, in the heartland of America."
Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post recently wrote a story recalling those halcyon days in Crawford. On Aug. 7, 2001, the day after the fateful PDB, Bush, they wrote, "was in an expansive mood … when he ran into reporters while playing golf." The president's aides emphasized that he was working, now and then, on a few issues—education, immigration, Social Security, and his impending decision on stem-cell research. On Aug. 29, less than a week after Tenet found out about Moussaoui, Bush gave a speech before the American Legion. The White House press office headlined the text of the address, "President Discusses Defense Priorities." Those priorities: boosting soldiers' pay and abandoning the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty. Nothing about terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, hijackings. Nothing that reflected the PDB or Moussaoui.
Anyone who has ever spent time in Washington knows that the whole town takes off the month of August. Despite the "threat spike," August 2001, it seems, was no different.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)
Bush got back after Labor Day. That first day, Sept. 4, was when the "Principals Committee"—consisting of his Cabinet heads—met in the White House to discuss terrorism. As Dick Clarke has since complained, and Condi Rice and others have acknowledged, it was the first time Bush's principals held a meeting on the subject.
This morning, Roemer asked Tenet if he brought up the Moussaoui briefing at that meeting. No, Tenet replied. "It wasn't the appropriate place." Roemer didn't follow up and ask, "Why not? Where was the appropriate place?" Perhaps he was too stunned. He sure looked it.
The official story about the PDB is that the CIA prepared it at the president's request. Bush had heard all Tenet's briefings about a possible al-Qaida attack overseas, the tale goes, and he wanted to know if Bin Laden might strike here. This story is almost certainly untrue. On March 19 of this year, Tenet told the 9/11 commission that the PDB had been prepared, as usual, at a CIA analyst's initiative. He later retracted that testimony, saying the president had asked for the briefing. Tenet embellished his new narrative, saying that the CIA officer who gave the briefing to Bush and Condi Rice started by reminding the president that he had requested it. But as Rice has since testified, she was not present during the briefing; she wasn't in Texas. Someone should ask: Was that the only part of the tale that Tenet made up? Or did he invent the whole thing—and, if so, on whose orders?
The distinction is important. If Bush asked for the briefing, it suggests that he at least cared about the subject; then the puzzle becomes why he didn't follow up on its conclusions. If he didn't ask for the briefing, then he comes off as simply aloof. (It's a toss-up which conclusion is more disturbing.)
Then again, it's easy to forget that before the terrorists struck, Bush was widely regarded as an unusually aloof president. Joe Conason has calculated that up until Sept. 11, 2001, Bush had spent 54 days at the ranch, 38 days at Camp David, and four days at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport—a total of 96 days, or about 40 percent of his presidency, outside of Washington.
Yet by that inference, Bush has remained a remarkably out-of-touch—or at least out-of-town—leader, even in the two and a half years since 9/11. Dana Milbank counts that through his entire term to date, Bush has spent 500 days—again, about 40 percent of his time in office—at the ranch, the retreat, or the compound.
The 9/11 commission has unveiled many critical problems in the FBI and the CIA. But the most critical problem may have been that the president was off duty.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
--------------
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. -Albert
Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
___________________________________________________________________
SLATE: War Stories
While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 4:54 PM PT
In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen.
The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.
Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."
And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.
Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.
And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn't with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice—as she has testified—wasn't with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.
A USA Today story, written right before Bush took off, reported that the vacation—scheduled to last from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3—would tie one of Richard Nixon's as the longest that any president had ever taken. A week before he left, Bush made a videotaped message for the Boy Scouts of America. On the tape, he said, "I'll be going to my ranch in Crawford, where I'll work and take a little time off. I think it is so important for the president to spend some time away from Washington, in the heartland of America."
Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post recently wrote a story recalling those halcyon days in Crawford. On Aug. 7, 2001, the day after the fateful PDB, Bush, they wrote, "was in an expansive mood … when he ran into reporters while playing golf." The president's aides emphasized that he was working, now and then, on a few issues—education, immigration, Social Security, and his impending decision on stem-cell research. On Aug. 29, less than a week after Tenet found out about Moussaoui, Bush gave a speech before the American Legion. The White House press office headlined the text of the address, "President Discusses Defense Priorities." Those priorities: boosting soldiers' pay and abandoning the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty. Nothing about terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, hijackings. Nothing that reflected the PDB or Moussaoui.
Anyone who has ever spent time in Washington knows that the whole town takes off the month of August. Despite the "threat spike," August 2001, it seems, was no different.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)
Bush got back after Labor Day. That first day, Sept. 4, was when the "Principals Committee"—consisting of his Cabinet heads—met in the White House to discuss terrorism. As Dick Clarke has since complained, and Condi Rice and others have acknowledged, it was the first time Bush's principals held a meeting on the subject.
This morning, Roemer asked Tenet if he brought up the Moussaoui briefing at that meeting. No, Tenet replied. "It wasn't the appropriate place." Roemer didn't follow up and ask, "Why not? Where was the appropriate place?" Perhaps he was too stunned. He sure looked it.
The official story about the PDB is that the CIA prepared it at the president's request. Bush had heard all Tenet's briefings about a possible al-Qaida attack overseas, the tale goes, and he wanted to know if Bin Laden might strike here. This story is almost certainly untrue. On March 19 of this year, Tenet told the 9/11 commission that the PDB had been prepared, as usual, at a CIA analyst's initiative. He later retracted that testimony, saying the president had asked for the briefing. Tenet embellished his new narrative, saying that the CIA officer who gave the briefing to Bush and Condi Rice started by reminding the president that he had requested it. But as Rice has since testified, she was not present during the briefing; she wasn't in Texas. Someone should ask: Was that the only part of the tale that Tenet made up? Or did he invent the whole thing—and, if so, on whose orders?
The distinction is important. If Bush asked for the briefing, it suggests that he at least cared about the subject; then the puzzle becomes why he didn't follow up on its conclusions. If he didn't ask for the briefing, then he comes off as simply aloof. (It's a toss-up which conclusion is more disturbing.)
Then again, it's easy to forget that before the terrorists struck, Bush was widely regarded as an unusually aloof president. Joe Conason has calculated that up until Sept. 11, 2001, Bush had spent 54 days at the ranch, 38 days at Camp David, and four days at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport—a total of 96 days, or about 40 percent of his presidency, outside of Washington.
Yet by that inference, Bush has remained a remarkably out-of-touch—or at least out-of-town—leader, even in the two and a half years since 9/11. Dana Milbank counts that through his entire term to date, Bush has spent 500 days—again, about 40 percent of his time in office—at the ranch, the retreat, or the compound.
The 9/11 commission has unveiled many critical problems in the FBI and the CIA. But the most critical problem may have been that the president was off duty.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
--------------
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. -Albert
Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
___________________________________________________________________
Roberts contradicts Frist on Clarke
By Alexander Bolton
4/14/04
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s testimony before a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not contradict his later testimony before a presidentially appointed commission.
Roberts’s comments to The Hill contradict a stinging condemnation of Clarke by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on the Senate floor after Clarke accused President Bush of failing to take Osama bin Laden seriously before Sept. 11.
Roberts said Frist did not consult him before making his floor speech, which has been criticized by Democrats. Roberts’s words make perjury charges against Clarke highly unlikely.
Democratic attack ads have used Clarke’s assertions that Bush did not adequately heed warnings about bin Laden and have been roundly rejected by the administration and its allies, particularly Clarke’s former boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Frist.
Frist has seemed to back off his earlier position, declining to repeat the charge that Clarke contradicted himself. But the majority leader continues to say it is suspicious that Clarke, who resigned at the beginning of 2003, has waited until now, in the midst of the presidential campaign season, to level his criticisms.
Speaking of Clarke’s private testimony in 2002 before a joint House-Senate panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, compared to more recent public testimony, Roberts said, “It’s not that he said one thing in one place and said another in another place. It’s just that the subject never came up during the investigation by the House and Senate.
“The prime topic was basically, Did the intelligence community have the authority to take advantage of opportunities in regard to Osama bin Laden.
“But I don’t recall any questions in regard to whether the Bush administration was responding well … I don’t think the words ever came up.”
When asked if Clarke contradicted himself, Roberts said he did not.
Roberts said Clarke’s 2002 testimony was on small-bore process issues related to the intelligence community while the later testimony took a big-picture view of policymakers’ handling of evidence of a pending attack.
He wished that Frist had consulted with him before making his floor statement.
After Clarke testified publicly before the Sept. 11 commission chaired by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, Frist urged on the Senate floor for Clarke’s 2002 testimony before the Congressional joint inquiry to be declassified.
Frist said Clarke had earlier been “effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush Administration. It is my hope that we will be able to get that testimony declassified.”
Frist went on to say “Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath. In July 2002, in front of the congressional joint inquiry on the Sept.11 attacks, Mr. Clarke testified under oath that the administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al Qaeda during its first seven months in office.
“It is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media. But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress it is a far more serious matter.”
Bob Stevenson, Frist’s spokesman, told The Washington Post that on March 24, while Clarke testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “a number of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee familiar with Clarke’s 2002 joint intelligence committee testimony contacted the senator’s staff and said ‘the tone’ was ‘quite different from 2002.’”
Roberts said Republican staffers on the intelligence panel “will be in trouble” if he finds out they took the initiative to relate Clarke’s closed-door testimony to Frist’s staff.
Roberts said the appropriate handling of the matter would have been for Senate intelligence staff to brief him and for Roberts to brief Frist directly.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the intelligence panel, said that it would have been inappropriate for Intelligence Committee staffers to contact staff in the leader’s office to relate the contents of Clarke’s 2002 testimony.
Durbin added that Frist’s condemnation of Clarke was excessive and out of character for the leader. “It’s like he was handed a script from the White House,” Durbin said.
Frist told The Hill he was not contacted by officials at the White House, officials from the intelligence community or members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
When asked if he based his floor criticisms on a transcript of Clarke’s 2002 closed-door testimony and drew his own conclusions from that transcript, Frist said that he had.
____________________________________________________________________
By Alexander Bolton
4/14/04
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s testimony before a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not contradict his later testimony before a presidentially appointed commission.
Roberts’s comments to The Hill contradict a stinging condemnation of Clarke by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on the Senate floor after Clarke accused President Bush of failing to take Osama bin Laden seriously before Sept. 11.
Roberts said Frist did not consult him before making his floor speech, which has been criticized by Democrats. Roberts’s words make perjury charges against Clarke highly unlikely.
Democratic attack ads have used Clarke’s assertions that Bush did not adequately heed warnings about bin Laden and have been roundly rejected by the administration and its allies, particularly Clarke’s former boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Frist.
Frist has seemed to back off his earlier position, declining to repeat the charge that Clarke contradicted himself. But the majority leader continues to say it is suspicious that Clarke, who resigned at the beginning of 2003, has waited until now, in the midst of the presidential campaign season, to level his criticisms.
Speaking of Clarke’s private testimony in 2002 before a joint House-Senate panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, compared to more recent public testimony, Roberts said, “It’s not that he said one thing in one place and said another in another place. It’s just that the subject never came up during the investigation by the House and Senate.
“The prime topic was basically, Did the intelligence community have the authority to take advantage of opportunities in regard to Osama bin Laden.
“But I don’t recall any questions in regard to whether the Bush administration was responding well … I don’t think the words ever came up.”
When asked if Clarke contradicted himself, Roberts said he did not.
Roberts said Clarke’s 2002 testimony was on small-bore process issues related to the intelligence community while the later testimony took a big-picture view of policymakers’ handling of evidence of a pending attack.
He wished that Frist had consulted with him before making his floor statement.
After Clarke testified publicly before the Sept. 11 commission chaired by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, Frist urged on the Senate floor for Clarke’s 2002 testimony before the Congressional joint inquiry to be declassified.
Frist said Clarke had earlier been “effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush Administration. It is my hope that we will be able to get that testimony declassified.”
Frist went on to say “Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath. In July 2002, in front of the congressional joint inquiry on the Sept.11 attacks, Mr. Clarke testified under oath that the administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al Qaeda during its first seven months in office.
“It is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media. But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress it is a far more serious matter.”
Bob Stevenson, Frist’s spokesman, told The Washington Post that on March 24, while Clarke testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “a number of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee familiar with Clarke’s 2002 joint intelligence committee testimony contacted the senator’s staff and said ‘the tone’ was ‘quite different from 2002.’”
Roberts said Republican staffers on the intelligence panel “will be in trouble” if he finds out they took the initiative to relate Clarke’s closed-door testimony to Frist’s staff.
Roberts said the appropriate handling of the matter would have been for Senate intelligence staff to brief him and for Roberts to brief Frist directly.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the intelligence panel, said that it would have been inappropriate for Intelligence Committee staffers to contact staff in the leader’s office to relate the contents of Clarke’s 2002 testimony.
Durbin added that Frist’s condemnation of Clarke was excessive and out of character for the leader. “It’s like he was handed a script from the White House,” Durbin said.
Frist told The Hill he was not contacted by officials at the White House, officials from the intelligence community or members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
When asked if he based his floor criticisms on a transcript of Clarke’s 2002 closed-door testimony and drew his own conclusions from that transcript, Frist said that he had.
____________________________________________________________________
Republican Pork the size of an Elephant! My conservative friends all cry about the government spending money foolishly but they refuse to acknowledge since gaining control of congress how irresponsible their Republican representatives have been with spending ALL our money.
April 16, 2004
Pork, Sweet and Sour
The Congressional practice of dipping into the public trough to finance projects that benefit only a single legislator is so firmly established that most people yawn when they see the words "pork-barrel spending." Yet every so often a project comes along with such a grotesquely negative cost-benefit ratio that even the most cynical citizen snaps awake.
So it is with Representative Don Young of Alaska and his two bridges to nowhere. Both bridges are included in the national highway bill recently approved by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which is led by Mr. Young. One would connect the depressed town of Ketchikan in southeastern Alaska with an island one mile away. The island has 50 residents and a small airport. The other bridge, two miles long, would connect Anchorage with a small port that has one regular tenant.
The total cost of the two bridges is estimated at $2.2 billion. On their face, they make no sense in transportation terms — the Ketchikan ferry, for example, does just fine. And while the projects will create hundreds of temporary construction jobs, it is hard to imagine any enduring economic benefits. It might be cheaper just to pay everybody several years' salary.
This kind of madness also gives pork an unnecessarily bad name. Many of the personal "earmarks" that legislators stuff into the annual spending bills are perfectly worthy items that simply haven't made it up to the top of any priorities list. Constituents expect their representatives to push them forward. But that is no excuse for the stinkers that would make any taxpayer weep. If individual legislators cannot exercise discipline, the public has a right to expect Congress to impose it.
Some pork fails the most elementary smell test. January's catchall appropriations bill, for instance, included a $500,000 grant for a program at the University of Akron called, with unintended humor, Exercises in Hard Choices, which examines how Congress makes budget decisions. Besides Mr. Young's bridges, the highway bill includes other items with only the faintest relationship to the nation's transportation needs, including $3.5 million for horse trails in Virginia and $1.5 million for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
The energy bill is no better. Particularly offensive is a "green bonds" program offering subsidized loans to any project that can demonstrate even the flimsiest connection to the country's energy needs. Among these is a $150 million riverfront development in Shreveport, La., that will offer shops, clubs and a Hooters restaurant but provide no obvious contribution to dealing with the country's energy problems beyond the fact that it will have lots of shade trees.
Some bad ideas simply refuse to die. The Senate booted Charles Grassley's proposal for a $50 million indoor rain forest in Iowa from the energy bill, despite his claims that it would produce $120 million in tourist dollars. Mr. Grassley then found a home for it in the omnibus appropriations bill.
Somewhere between the good things and the outrageous waste lie the impressive-sounding projects involving experimental technologies that may or may not pan out. The energy bill authorizes not one but three speculative projects aimed at turning plant matter into fuel, but the biggest bet may be the $800 million coal gasification plant awarded to Norm Coleman, a Minnesota senator whose vote was much needed during last year's debate on the bill. This plant could unlock the secret of how to burn coal in ways that do not harm the atmosphere. Or it could turn out to be another in a shamefully long line of "clean coal" boondoggles, which benefit nobody but the coal industry.
Even without asking legislators to give up lobbying for hometown projects, one can hope for more restraint, particularly in a Congress supposedly dominated by fiscal conservatives. As it stands, the current appropriations process is looking like one very expensive bridge to nowhere.
_______________________________________________________________
April 16, 2004
Pork, Sweet and Sour
The Congressional practice of dipping into the public trough to finance projects that benefit only a single legislator is so firmly established that most people yawn when they see the words "pork-barrel spending." Yet every so often a project comes along with such a grotesquely negative cost-benefit ratio that even the most cynical citizen snaps awake.
So it is with Representative Don Young of Alaska and his two bridges to nowhere. Both bridges are included in the national highway bill recently approved by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which is led by Mr. Young. One would connect the depressed town of Ketchikan in southeastern Alaska with an island one mile away. The island has 50 residents and a small airport. The other bridge, two miles long, would connect Anchorage with a small port that has one regular tenant.
The total cost of the two bridges is estimated at $2.2 billion. On their face, they make no sense in transportation terms — the Ketchikan ferry, for example, does just fine. And while the projects will create hundreds of temporary construction jobs, it is hard to imagine any enduring economic benefits. It might be cheaper just to pay everybody several years' salary.
This kind of madness also gives pork an unnecessarily bad name. Many of the personal "earmarks" that legislators stuff into the annual spending bills are perfectly worthy items that simply haven't made it up to the top of any priorities list. Constituents expect their representatives to push them forward. But that is no excuse for the stinkers that would make any taxpayer weep. If individual legislators cannot exercise discipline, the public has a right to expect Congress to impose it.
Some pork fails the most elementary smell test. January's catchall appropriations bill, for instance, included a $500,000 grant for a program at the University of Akron called, with unintended humor, Exercises in Hard Choices, which examines how Congress makes budget decisions. Besides Mr. Young's bridges, the highway bill includes other items with only the faintest relationship to the nation's transportation needs, including $3.5 million for horse trails in Virginia and $1.5 million for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
The energy bill is no better. Particularly offensive is a "green bonds" program offering subsidized loans to any project that can demonstrate even the flimsiest connection to the country's energy needs. Among these is a $150 million riverfront development in Shreveport, La., that will offer shops, clubs and a Hooters restaurant but provide no obvious contribution to dealing with the country's energy problems beyond the fact that it will have lots of shade trees.
Some bad ideas simply refuse to die. The Senate booted Charles Grassley's proposal for a $50 million indoor rain forest in Iowa from the energy bill, despite his claims that it would produce $120 million in tourist dollars. Mr. Grassley then found a home for it in the omnibus appropriations bill.
Somewhere between the good things and the outrageous waste lie the impressive-sounding projects involving experimental technologies that may or may not pan out. The energy bill authorizes not one but three speculative projects aimed at turning plant matter into fuel, but the biggest bet may be the $800 million coal gasification plant awarded to Norm Coleman, a Minnesota senator whose vote was much needed during last year's debate on the bill. This plant could unlock the secret of how to burn coal in ways that do not harm the atmosphere. Or it could turn out to be another in a shamefully long line of "clean coal" boondoggles, which benefit nobody but the coal industry.
Even without asking legislators to give up lobbying for hometown projects, one can hope for more restraint, particularly in a Congress supposedly dominated by fiscal conservatives. As it stands, the current appropriations process is looking like one very expensive bridge to nowhere.
_______________________________________________________________
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Bush and Ashcroft are in office NOW and they failed America greatly by their inept leadership against terrorism (there was none before 9/11). Time to kick them out and elect John Kerrry president so that he can PROPERLY sweep out the F.B.I. and C.I.A. and lead not react to the world.
April 14, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
The Failed F.B.I.
The 9/11 investigation commission has provided a chilling, and sadly believable, account of two presidents' failures to come to grips with the catastrophic intelligence problems that preceded the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Clinton and Bush administrations failed in different ways, but they shared one central flaw: an inability to manage the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The myriad endemic shortcomings of the agency are at the center of what went wrong with American intelligence. The critical challenge for the commission, and the Bush administration, is to figure out what to do about it.
Under Bill Clinton, the F.B.I. became politically untouchable, and the president was eventually so weakened by scandal that he was incapable of even directing the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh. Mr. Freeh was hostile to the president, but he appeared to be equally hostile to efficient computerization — a vital step to update an agency in which none of the parts appeared to communicate with one another.
After President Bush came into office, the commission staff found, Attorney General John Ashcroft lowered the priority of the entire counterterrorism issue in his strategic planning. Mr. Ashcroft, who came before the panel defensive and ready for a fight, did not concede the slightest failing on the part of the Bush administration. But the acting F.B.I. director in 2001, Thomas Pickard, testified that he had never seen the famous presidential briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, which talked about a domestic threat from Al Qaeda and dozens of F.B.I. investigations of potential domestic terrorists that were reported to be under way. Communication on the subject seemed nonexistent. In that summer of sky-high terrorist threats, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did not even consult the F.B.I. to determine whether Osama bin Laden wanted to attack the United States.
The attorney general argued that a "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence gathering had kept officials at the F.B.I. from communicating with one another, and with the C.I.A., and had led to both agencies' missing the 9/11 plot. Mr. Ashcroft was eager to blame the previous administration for those failures, and he offered up a newly declassified 1995 Justice Department memo that he said made the wall even larger and more impenetrable. After months in which the administration has refused to make other documents and testimony available, Mr. Ashcroft's eagerness to put this one bit of classified material on the record seemed more than a little self-serving — especially since Mr. Ashcroft affirmed that policy in August 2001.
Mr. Ashcroft was also intent on claiming credit for moving the policy on Osama bin Laden to "kill" instead of "capture," until some of the commissioners suggested that papers held by the White House until just recently contradicted that account.
The "wall," which reaches back to concerns over domestic spying in the Nixon administration, had indeed become a problem before 9/11, in part because F.B.I. agents were eager to use it as an excuse not to pursue cases. It was certainly not the culprit when the F.B.I.'s own offices failed to share information about terrorism suspects going to flight schools. Information about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minneapolis never made it up the F.B.I.'s degraded reporting chain to Washington — although somehow the head of the C.I.A. knew about it.
Something must be done about the F.B.I. The chairman of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean, has already suggested that the government take away its responsibility for counterterrorism investigations. The F.B.I. has been politically out of control, poorly organized and ineffective for a long time, and some critics may ask whether, with all the mounting evidence of its incapacity, it should be allowed to continue in its present form at all.
The ragged history of the Department of Homeland Security is a clear caution about moving huge chunks of the government from the supervision of one set of bureaucrats to another. Reform certainly needs to proceed cautiously, but it's distressing to realize that two and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, no real work has been done on getting to the core of the agency's problems. The most that President Bush could say about it at his press conference last night was that he was "open for suggestions."
____________________________________________________________________
April 14, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
The Failed F.B.I.
The 9/11 investigation commission has provided a chilling, and sadly believable, account of two presidents' failures to come to grips with the catastrophic intelligence problems that preceded the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Clinton and Bush administrations failed in different ways, but they shared one central flaw: an inability to manage the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The myriad endemic shortcomings of the agency are at the center of what went wrong with American intelligence. The critical challenge for the commission, and the Bush administration, is to figure out what to do about it.
Under Bill Clinton, the F.B.I. became politically untouchable, and the president was eventually so weakened by scandal that he was incapable of even directing the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh. Mr. Freeh was hostile to the president, but he appeared to be equally hostile to efficient computerization — a vital step to update an agency in which none of the parts appeared to communicate with one another.
After President Bush came into office, the commission staff found, Attorney General John Ashcroft lowered the priority of the entire counterterrorism issue in his strategic planning. Mr. Ashcroft, who came before the panel defensive and ready for a fight, did not concede the slightest failing on the part of the Bush administration. But the acting F.B.I. director in 2001, Thomas Pickard, testified that he had never seen the famous presidential briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, which talked about a domestic threat from Al Qaeda and dozens of F.B.I. investigations of potential domestic terrorists that were reported to be under way. Communication on the subject seemed nonexistent. In that summer of sky-high terrorist threats, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did not even consult the F.B.I. to determine whether Osama bin Laden wanted to attack the United States.
The attorney general argued that a "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence gathering had kept officials at the F.B.I. from communicating with one another, and with the C.I.A., and had led to both agencies' missing the 9/11 plot. Mr. Ashcroft was eager to blame the previous administration for those failures, and he offered up a newly declassified 1995 Justice Department memo that he said made the wall even larger and more impenetrable. After months in which the administration has refused to make other documents and testimony available, Mr. Ashcroft's eagerness to put this one bit of classified material on the record seemed more than a little self-serving — especially since Mr. Ashcroft affirmed that policy in August 2001.
Mr. Ashcroft was also intent on claiming credit for moving the policy on Osama bin Laden to "kill" instead of "capture," until some of the commissioners suggested that papers held by the White House until just recently contradicted that account.
The "wall," which reaches back to concerns over domestic spying in the Nixon administration, had indeed become a problem before 9/11, in part because F.B.I. agents were eager to use it as an excuse not to pursue cases. It was certainly not the culprit when the F.B.I.'s own offices failed to share information about terrorism suspects going to flight schools. Information about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minneapolis never made it up the F.B.I.'s degraded reporting chain to Washington — although somehow the head of the C.I.A. knew about it.
Something must be done about the F.B.I. The chairman of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean, has already suggested that the government take away its responsibility for counterterrorism investigations. The F.B.I. has been politically out of control, poorly organized and ineffective for a long time, and some critics may ask whether, with all the mounting evidence of its incapacity, it should be allowed to continue in its present form at all.
The ragged history of the Department of Homeland Security is a clear caution about moving huge chunks of the government from the supervision of one set of bureaucrats to another. Reform certainly needs to proceed cautiously, but it's distressing to realize that two and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, no real work has been done on getting to the core of the agency's problems. The most that President Bush could say about it at his press conference last night was that he was "open for suggestions."
____________________________________________________________________
April 14, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Mr. Bush's Press Conference
Happily, President Bush finally held a prime-time news conference last night. Unhappily, he failed to address either of the questions uppermost in Americans' minds: how to move Iraq from its current chaos, and what he has learned from the 9/11 investigations.
Mr. Bush was grave and impressive while reading his opening remarks, which focused on the horrors of terrorism and the great good that could come from establishing a free and democratic Iraq. No one in the country could disagree with either thought. But his responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused. He promised that Iraq would move from the violence and disarray of today to full democracy by the end of 2005, but the description of how to get there was mainly a list of dates when good things are supposed to happen.
There was still no clear description of exactly who will accept the sovereignty of Iraq from the coalition on June 30. "We'll find out that soon," the president said, adding that U.N. officials are "figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over" to. In Mr. Bush's mind, whatever happens next now appears to be the responsibility of the United Nations. That must have come as a surprise to the U.N. negotiators and their bosses, who have not agreed to accept that responsibility and do not believe that they have been given the authority to make those decisions.
Mr. Bush did concede that the Iraqi security forces had not performed well during the violence and that more American troops would probably be needed. But his rhetoric, including the repetition of the phrase "stay the course," did not seem to indicate any fresh or clear thinking about Iraq, despite the many disturbing events of recent weeks.
The second issue that has overwhelmed the nation in recent days is the 9/11 investigating commission. While repeatedly expressing his grief over the deaths related to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Mr. Bush seemed to entertain no doubts about the rightness of his own behavior, no questions about whether he should have done something in response to the domestic terrorism report he received on Aug. 6, 2001.
The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.
___________________________________________________________________
Mr. Bush's Press Conference
Happily, President Bush finally held a prime-time news conference last night. Unhappily, he failed to address either of the questions uppermost in Americans' minds: how to move Iraq from its current chaos, and what he has learned from the 9/11 investigations.
Mr. Bush was grave and impressive while reading his opening remarks, which focused on the horrors of terrorism and the great good that could come from establishing a free and democratic Iraq. No one in the country could disagree with either thought. But his responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused. He promised that Iraq would move from the violence and disarray of today to full democracy by the end of 2005, but the description of how to get there was mainly a list of dates when good things are supposed to happen.
There was still no clear description of exactly who will accept the sovereignty of Iraq from the coalition on June 30. "We'll find out that soon," the president said, adding that U.N. officials are "figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over" to. In Mr. Bush's mind, whatever happens next now appears to be the responsibility of the United Nations. That must have come as a surprise to the U.N. negotiators and their bosses, who have not agreed to accept that responsibility and do not believe that they have been given the authority to make those decisions.
Mr. Bush did concede that the Iraqi security forces had not performed well during the violence and that more American troops would probably be needed. But his rhetoric, including the repetition of the phrase "stay the course," did not seem to indicate any fresh or clear thinking about Iraq, despite the many disturbing events of recent weeks.
The second issue that has overwhelmed the nation in recent days is the 9/11 investigating commission. While repeatedly expressing his grief over the deaths related to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Mr. Bush seemed to entertain no doubts about the rightness of his own behavior, no questions about whether he should have done something in response to the domestic terrorism report he received on Aug. 6, 2001.
The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.
___________________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
Kerry Was Right
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A25
Don't look now, but is the Bush administration creeping toward John Kerry's position on Iraq?
I am writing this column hours before the president's Tuesday news conference, so I have to allow for the possibility that he will stun us with some radical new departure -- perhaps even articulating a coherent policy. But whatever the president says, the administration has been moving closer to acknowledging the desirability -- and at times, the necessity -- of letting the United Nations do the work of nation-building that George Bush once assumed the United States should undertake.
In fairness, when the president plunged us into this war, he had a plan for converting Iraq into a stable democracy -- a plan so simple that it bore no relation to reality. Dick Cheney argued that we'd be greeted as liberators. The Pentagon war planners said that we could just hand the nation over to Ahmed Chalabi, a businessman with ties to various Beltway neoconservatives, who'd left Iraq as a child in the same year that the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Rumsfeld's minions spirited Chalabi into Iraq right after our troops rolled into Baghdad. The Iraqi people, however, were less than overwhelmed.
In the course of the year-long occupation, we've had several subsequent plans for creating some entity to which we could hand off power. None has come to fruition. Our ability to create a popular, legitimate interim authority to oversee the drafting of a constitution that would win broad support and to negotiate with major population groups that shared a common antipathy to Saddam Hussein was never remotely sufficient. We were an occupying authority that had brought war but had failed to create peace -- not exactly the ideal credentials for nation-building.
And so, our man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, has stood aside and invited U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to put together an Iraqi interim authority with sufficient support to manage the transition until Iraq's first elections. The administration that had proclaimed the United Nations all but irrelevant in its strategy statement of September 2002 now clamors for more U.N. involvement and more NATO troops to do what we cannot do alone: stabilize Iraq.
Bush has, with the greatest reluctance, moved closer to the policy that Kerry has been advocating all along: internationalizing the occupation. In his speech preceding his vote to authorize the war in the fall of 2002, Kerry stipulated that the success of any endeavor to remake Iraq depended on broad international involvement in that effort. Last September Kerry called for Bush to transfer authority in post-Hussein Iraq to the United Nations, as that would "enhance the credibility and legitimacy" of the campaign to create a new Iraqi order in the eyes of Iraq's citizens and the world. And campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday, Kerry suggested that Brahimi should supplant Bremer altogether, because the U.N. envoy would strike Iraqis as a more credible administrator of the occupation than Bremer could be.
Republican strategists have argued that the president would run circles around Kerry on issues of foreign policy -- a challenge to which Kerry's ad nauseam response during the primaries was, "Bring it on!" Now events have indeed brought it on, and it's clear that Kerry's apprehensions about a unilateral war and occupation were well-grounded, even as Bush's cavalier hopes for an all-American nation-building project were the most dangerous of fantasies. It's also clear that Bush has been forced by events to move, kicking and screaming, toward Kerry's vision of the requirements for a successful occupation. On the centerpiece of that vision -- handing over control of the occupation to the United Nations -- Bush has remained, seeking instead to get maximum U.N. involvement without surrendering U.S. control. He hasn't acknowledged that it's precisely the U.S. control that makes the occupation so objectionable to millions of Iraqis. Still, Bush has been compelled to internationalize certain functions that he had assumed the United States would perform, and for the reasons that Kerry predicted.
By the standard of previous presidential candidates running amid wartime quagmires, Kerry has been unusually forthcoming in his critique and prescriptions for Iraq. All Eisenhower pledged while seeking the office during the Korean conflict was, "I will go to Korea." In 1968 Nixon said that he had "a secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Kerry, by contrast, foresaw the perils of unilateralism and has consistently proposed a more workable occupation policy than Bush's. By its growing dependence on Brahimi and its increasingly plaintive calls for more nations to send troops, even the administration tacitly acknowledges that Kerry was right.
_____________________________________________________________
Kerry Was Right
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A25
Don't look now, but is the Bush administration creeping toward John Kerry's position on Iraq?
I am writing this column hours before the president's Tuesday news conference, so I have to allow for the possibility that he will stun us with some radical new departure -- perhaps even articulating a coherent policy. But whatever the president says, the administration has been moving closer to acknowledging the desirability -- and at times, the necessity -- of letting the United Nations do the work of nation-building that George Bush once assumed the United States should undertake.
In fairness, when the president plunged us into this war, he had a plan for converting Iraq into a stable democracy -- a plan so simple that it bore no relation to reality. Dick Cheney argued that we'd be greeted as liberators. The Pentagon war planners said that we could just hand the nation over to Ahmed Chalabi, a businessman with ties to various Beltway neoconservatives, who'd left Iraq as a child in the same year that the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Rumsfeld's minions spirited Chalabi into Iraq right after our troops rolled into Baghdad. The Iraqi people, however, were less than overwhelmed.
In the course of the year-long occupation, we've had several subsequent plans for creating some entity to which we could hand off power. None has come to fruition. Our ability to create a popular, legitimate interim authority to oversee the drafting of a constitution that would win broad support and to negotiate with major population groups that shared a common antipathy to Saddam Hussein was never remotely sufficient. We were an occupying authority that had brought war but had failed to create peace -- not exactly the ideal credentials for nation-building.
And so, our man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, has stood aside and invited U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to put together an Iraqi interim authority with sufficient support to manage the transition until Iraq's first elections. The administration that had proclaimed the United Nations all but irrelevant in its strategy statement of September 2002 now clamors for more U.N. involvement and more NATO troops to do what we cannot do alone: stabilize Iraq.
Bush has, with the greatest reluctance, moved closer to the policy that Kerry has been advocating all along: internationalizing the occupation. In his speech preceding his vote to authorize the war in the fall of 2002, Kerry stipulated that the success of any endeavor to remake Iraq depended on broad international involvement in that effort. Last September Kerry called for Bush to transfer authority in post-Hussein Iraq to the United Nations, as that would "enhance the credibility and legitimacy" of the campaign to create a new Iraqi order in the eyes of Iraq's citizens and the world. And campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday, Kerry suggested that Brahimi should supplant Bremer altogether, because the U.N. envoy would strike Iraqis as a more credible administrator of the occupation than Bremer could be.
Republican strategists have argued that the president would run circles around Kerry on issues of foreign policy -- a challenge to which Kerry's ad nauseam response during the primaries was, "Bring it on!" Now events have indeed brought it on, and it's clear that Kerry's apprehensions about a unilateral war and occupation were well-grounded, even as Bush's cavalier hopes for an all-American nation-building project were the most dangerous of fantasies. It's also clear that Bush has been forced by events to move, kicking and screaming, toward Kerry's vision of the requirements for a successful occupation. On the centerpiece of that vision -- handing over control of the occupation to the United Nations -- Bush has remained, seeking instead to get maximum U.N. involvement without surrendering U.S. control. He hasn't acknowledged that it's precisely the U.S. control that makes the occupation so objectionable to millions of Iraqis. Still, Bush has been compelled to internationalize certain functions that he had assumed the United States would perform, and for the reasons that Kerry predicted.
By the standard of previous presidential candidates running amid wartime quagmires, Kerry has been unusually forthcoming in his critique and prescriptions for Iraq. All Eisenhower pledged while seeking the office during the Korean conflict was, "I will go to Korea." In 1968 Nixon said that he had "a secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Kerry, by contrast, foresaw the perils of unilateralism and has consistently proposed a more workable occupation policy than Bush's. By its growing dependence on Brahimi and its increasingly plaintive calls for more nations to send troops, even the administration tacitly acknowledges that Kerry was right.
_____________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
Kerry Was Right
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A25
Don't look now, but is the Bush administration creeping toward John Kerry's position on Iraq?
I am writing this column hours before the president's Tuesday news conference, so I have to allow for the possibility that he will stun us with some radical new departure -- perhaps even articulating a coherent policy. But whatever the president says, the administration has been moving closer to acknowledging the desirability -- and at times, the necessity -- of letting the United Nations do the work of nation-building that George Bush once assumed the United States should undertake.
In fairness, when the president plunged us into this war, he had a plan for converting Iraq into a stable democracy -- a plan so simple that it bore no relation to reality. Dick Cheney argued that we'd be greeted as liberators. The Pentagon war planners said that we could just hand the nation over to Ahmed Chalabi, a businessman with ties to various Beltway neoconservatives, who'd left Iraq as a child in the same year that the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Rumsfeld's minions spirited Chalabi into Iraq right after our troops rolled into Baghdad. The Iraqi people, however, were less than overwhelmed.
In the course of the year-long occupation, we've had several subsequent plans for creating some entity to which we could hand off power. None has come to fruition. Our ability to create a popular, legitimate interim authority to oversee the drafting of a constitution that would win broad support and to negotiate with major population groups that shared a common antipathy to Saddam Hussein was never remotely sufficient. We were an occupying authority that had brought war but had failed to create peace -- not exactly the ideal credentials for nation-building.
And so, our man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, has stood aside and invited U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to put together an Iraqi interim authority with sufficient support to manage the transition until Iraq's first elections. The administration that had proclaimed the United Nations all but irrelevant in its strategy statement of September 2002 now clamors for more U.N. involvement and more NATO troops to do what we cannot do alone: stabilize Iraq.
Bush has, with the greatest reluctance, moved closer to the policy that Kerry has been advocating all along: internationalizing the occupation. In his speech preceding his vote to authorize the war in the fall of 2002, Kerry stipulated that the success of any endeavor to remake Iraq depended on broad international involvement in that effort. Last September Kerry called for Bush to transfer authority in post-Hussein Iraq to the United Nations, as that would "enhance the credibility and legitimacy" of the campaign to create a new Iraqi order in the eyes of Iraq's citizens and the world. And campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday, Kerry suggested that Brahimi should supplant Bremer altogether, because the U.N. envoy would strike Iraqis as a more credible administrator of the occupation than Bremer could be.
Republican strategists have argued that the president would run circles around Kerry on issues of foreign policy -- a challenge to which Kerry's ad nauseam response during the primaries was, "Bring it on!" Now events have indeed brought it on, and it's clear that Kerry's apprehensions about a unilateral war and occupation were well-grounded, even as Bush's cavalier hopes for an all-American nation-building project were the most dangerous of fantasies. It's also clear that Bush has been forced by events to move, kicking and screaming, toward Kerry's vision of the requirements for a successful occupation. On the centerpiece of that vision -- handing over control of the occupation to the United Nations -- Bush has remained, seeking instead to get maximum U.N. involvement without surrendering U.S. control. He hasn't acknowledged that it's precisely the U.S. control that makes the occupation so objectionable to millions of Iraqis. Still, Bush has been compelled to internationalize certain functions that he had assumed the United States would perform, and for the reasons that Kerry predicted.
By the standard of previous presidential candidates running amid wartime quagmires, Kerry has been unusually forthcoming in his critique and prescriptions for Iraq. All Eisenhower pledged while seeking the office during the Korean conflict was, "I will go to Korea." In 1968 Nixon said that he had "a secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Kerry, by contrast, foresaw the perils of unilateralism and has consistently proposed a more workable occupation policy than Bush's. By its growing dependence on Brahimi and its increasingly plaintive calls for more nations to send troops, even the administration tacitly acknowledges that Kerry was right.
meyersonh@washpost.com
__________________________________________________________________
Kerry Was Right
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A25
Don't look now, but is the Bush administration creeping toward John Kerry's position on Iraq?
I am writing this column hours before the president's Tuesday news conference, so I have to allow for the possibility that he will stun us with some radical new departure -- perhaps even articulating a coherent policy. But whatever the president says, the administration has been moving closer to acknowledging the desirability -- and at times, the necessity -- of letting the United Nations do the work of nation-building that George Bush once assumed the United States should undertake.
In fairness, when the president plunged us into this war, he had a plan for converting Iraq into a stable democracy -- a plan so simple that it bore no relation to reality. Dick Cheney argued that we'd be greeted as liberators. The Pentagon war planners said that we could just hand the nation over to Ahmed Chalabi, a businessman with ties to various Beltway neoconservatives, who'd left Iraq as a child in the same year that the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Rumsfeld's minions spirited Chalabi into Iraq right after our troops rolled into Baghdad. The Iraqi people, however, were less than overwhelmed.
In the course of the year-long occupation, we've had several subsequent plans for creating some entity to which we could hand off power. None has come to fruition. Our ability to create a popular, legitimate interim authority to oversee the drafting of a constitution that would win broad support and to negotiate with major population groups that shared a common antipathy to Saddam Hussein was never remotely sufficient. We were an occupying authority that had brought war but had failed to create peace -- not exactly the ideal credentials for nation-building.
And so, our man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, has stood aside and invited U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to put together an Iraqi interim authority with sufficient support to manage the transition until Iraq's first elections. The administration that had proclaimed the United Nations all but irrelevant in its strategy statement of September 2002 now clamors for more U.N. involvement and more NATO troops to do what we cannot do alone: stabilize Iraq.
Bush has, with the greatest reluctance, moved closer to the policy that Kerry has been advocating all along: internationalizing the occupation. In his speech preceding his vote to authorize the war in the fall of 2002, Kerry stipulated that the success of any endeavor to remake Iraq depended on broad international involvement in that effort. Last September Kerry called for Bush to transfer authority in post-Hussein Iraq to the United Nations, as that would "enhance the credibility and legitimacy" of the campaign to create a new Iraqi order in the eyes of Iraq's citizens and the world. And campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday, Kerry suggested that Brahimi should supplant Bremer altogether, because the U.N. envoy would strike Iraqis as a more credible administrator of the occupation than Bremer could be.
Republican strategists have argued that the president would run circles around Kerry on issues of foreign policy -- a challenge to which Kerry's ad nauseam response during the primaries was, "Bring it on!" Now events have indeed brought it on, and it's clear that Kerry's apprehensions about a unilateral war and occupation were well-grounded, even as Bush's cavalier hopes for an all-American nation-building project were the most dangerous of fantasies. It's also clear that Bush has been forced by events to move, kicking and screaming, toward Kerry's vision of the requirements for a successful occupation. On the centerpiece of that vision -- handing over control of the occupation to the United Nations -- Bush has remained, seeking instead to get maximum U.N. involvement without surrendering U.S. control. He hasn't acknowledged that it's precisely the U.S. control that makes the occupation so objectionable to millions of Iraqis. Still, Bush has been compelled to internationalize certain functions that he had assumed the United States would perform, and for the reasons that Kerry predicted.
By the standard of previous presidential candidates running amid wartime quagmires, Kerry has been unusually forthcoming in his critique and prescriptions for Iraq. All Eisenhower pledged while seeking the office during the Korean conflict was, "I will go to Korea." In 1968 Nixon said that he had "a secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Kerry, by contrast, foresaw the perils of unilateralism and has consistently proposed a more workable occupation policy than Bush's. By its growing dependence on Brahimi and its increasingly plaintive calls for more nations to send troops, even the administration tacitly acknowledges that Kerry was right.
meyersonh@washpost.com
__________________________________________________________________
April 14, 2004
Bush Contradicts Self At His Own Press Conference
During last night's prime time press conference, President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings" 1. But just minutes later at the same press conference the president proved he was not telling the truth.
Specifically, Bush said the reason he supposedly requested intelligence briefings before 9/11 "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings 2.
His statement that "the prior government" had not taken precautions against terrorists using planes as weapons is also contradicted by the facts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that under President Clinton, "the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack" 3after receiving intelligence warnings 4.
At the press conference, Bush also claimed to have no "inkling whatsoever" 5about an attack before 9/11. But the Washington Post today reports that newly-declassified information shows that the president did not just receive one intelligence briefing about an imminent Al Qaeda attack, but "a stream" of repeated warnings 6. In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community titled some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real." The CIA explicitly told the Administration that upcoming attacks would "occur on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil."
Sources:
President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference , 04/13/2004.
"Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit ", Los Angeles Times, 09/27/2001.
Wall Street Journal, 04/01/2004.
"Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings ", CBS News, 05/10/2002.
President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference , 04/13/2004.
"Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings ", Washington Post, 04/14/2004.
______________________________________________________________
Bush Contradicts Self At His Own Press Conference
During last night's prime time press conference, President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings" 1. But just minutes later at the same press conference the president proved he was not telling the truth.
Specifically, Bush said the reason he supposedly requested intelligence briefings before 9/11 "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings 2.
His statement that "the prior government" had not taken precautions against terrorists using planes as weapons is also contradicted by the facts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that under President Clinton, "the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack" 3after receiving intelligence warnings 4.
At the press conference, Bush also claimed to have no "inkling whatsoever" 5about an attack before 9/11. But the Washington Post today reports that newly-declassified information shows that the president did not just receive one intelligence briefing about an imminent Al Qaeda attack, but "a stream" of repeated warnings 6. In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community titled some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real." The CIA explicitly told the Administration that upcoming attacks would "occur on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil."
Sources:
President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference , 04/13/2004.
"Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit ", Los Angeles Times, 09/27/2001.
Wall Street Journal, 04/01/2004.
"Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings ", CBS News, 05/10/2002.
President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference , 04/13/2004.
"Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings ", Washington Post, 04/14/2004.
______________________________________________________________
No Plan, No Apologies
From the Center for American Progress
In a nationally televised press conference last night, President Bush "steadfastly refused to admit mistakes and passed up opportunities to explain what it will take to achieve his goal of a free and stable Iraq." Additionally, while he "acknowledged a good deal of introspection after all the questions about his actions before the Sept. 11 attacks," he offered "not a whiff of contrition" for his Administration's role in the worst national security breakdown in American history. The event was "more theater than substance" in which the President "offered no shocking new policy initiatives" and instead used "the language and zeal of a missionary" to implore Americans to continue on his increasingly chaotic and directionless path in Iraq. But with Bush's approval ratings hitting a new low, the event did nothing to quell the growing questions Americans have about the Administration's national security credentials.
IRAQ – NO PLAN TO GET MORE INTERNATIONAL HELP: The WP notes that it quickly became clear that the President was refusing "to lay out new details of the path forward, suggest any change in direction or acknowledge any rethinking of his decisions in the face of recent setbacks." While Bush claimed that his Administration was getting "more involvement by the United Nations," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday virtually ruled out sending a large U.N. team to Iraq "for the foreseeable future" because of worsening security, while the "Russian Emergency Ministry will start evacuation of Russian specialists from Iraq." Bush tried to reassure the international community about the June 30 transfer of power, saying confidently that U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was working "with Iraqis to determine the exact form of the government that will receive sovereignty on June 30th." But U.N. officials and diplomats say Bush's "expectations are not only inflated, but they are also dangerous."
IRAQ – STILL PUSHING THE WMD MYTH: The President was asked about his Administration's past promises about Iraq, with one reporter noting that the Administration promised "that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers; that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of the reconstruction; and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." But instead of acknowledging his Administration's gross overhyping of intelligence, the President instead clung to a now-discredited assertion. He claimed Iraq "refused to disarm" – an implicit reiteration that Iraq had WMD. But according to Bush's own weapons inspector, David Kay, there remains "no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March." Corroborating assertions by former Administration officials that Bush has always focused on invading Iraq regardless of circumstance, the President added that "even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would've called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein."
IRAQ – DISHONESTY ON RECONSTRUCTION: The President said that oil revenues in Iraq are "bigger than we thought they would be at this point in time" – an effort to further the myth that Americans will not have to continue financing the enormous cost of Iraq reconstruction (already, U.S. taxpayers have spent $166 billion in Iraq). But according to the New York Times, Iraq oil revenues are now only "running at a rate of about $14 billion a year" – far less than the $20 billion to $30 billion a year the Bush Administration promised would allow Iraq to "finance its own reconstruction."
9/11 – PROVING HIS OWN DISHONESTY ON TERROR WARNINGS: President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings." Yet, moments after uttering this, he said one of the reasons he asked for the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001, where he was explicitly warned that Islamic terrorists could be plotting to fly airplanes into buildings. Even his claim about "the prior government" was false: as the WSJ reported, "despite official assertions that the U.S. had little reason to suspect before Sept. 11 that airliners would be used as weapons, the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack." The measures were taken after intelligence reports warned of suicide attacks using planes, and many of them were ordered directly by President Clinton.
9/11 – DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT BUSH KNEW OF AN IMMINENT THREAT: The President once again claimed to have no idea that a terrorist attack was imminent before 9/11, saying "had I had any inkling whatsoever" of an attack, "we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country." But a front-page report by the WP today notes that according to newly-declassified information, "by the time a CIA briefer gave the President the August 6 PDB headlined 'Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,' the president "had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team." The President was specifically told that Bin Laden was "planning multiple operations," that he had designs on hijackings, and that the "Bin Laden threats are real."
9/11
Ashcroft Passes the Buck
Ashcroft appeared before the 9/11 Commission and, like most others in the Bush Administration, refused to acknowledge any personal mistakes during the last three years. Instead, he offered a deceptive, disingenuous and dishonest account of his record prior to 9/11 and a Pollyannaish view of his actions following the attack. Worse, the commissioners largely accepted Ashcroft's testimony at face value and passed on opportunities to aggressively question the attorney general on inconsistencies and inaccuracies his statements. Ashcroft called the criticisms he has received "the price we are privileged to pay for our liberty." But the ability to criticize government officials, of course, is not the price we pay for liberty but liberty itself.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS HIS PRE-9/11 PRIORITIES: A staff report released just prior to Ashcroft's testimony revealed that a May 10, 2001 budget guidance he released "made no mention of counterterrorism." Dale Watson, former head of the FBI counterterrorism department, told the commission that when he saw the omission "he almost fell out of his chair." Ashcroft countered that, testifying before Congress on May 9, 2001, he said "my number one priority was to protect the people of the United States against terrorism." But that isn't what Ashcroft said at the hearing. Ashcroft, appearing before a Senate committee holding a hearing on terrorism, said "It goes without saying that the paramount objective of U.S. counterterrorism policy is the prevention of terrorist acts." In other words, Ashcroft gave Congress a definition of counterterrorism and is now misrepresenting it as standing for the premise that he prioritized counterterrorism over all other activities.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS HIS PRE-9/11 BUDGET: Internal Justice Department documents and an American Progress analysis of the Administration's budget request show that, in he summer of 2001, Ashcroft was cutting counterterrorism funding. Thomas Pickard, testified yesterday that, in the summer of 2001 "the additional funds that we were looking for on counterterrorism were denied" by Ashcroft. Pickard appealed Ashcroft's decision but was denied again the day before 9/11. Yet, Ashcroft claims that "the 2002 budget proposed by President Bush had the largest counterterrorism increase in five years." Ashcroft reached this artificial budget conclusion by counting items in his counterterrorism budget that were not directed specifically at counterterrorism activities. Ashcroft explains: "the label of counterterrorism should not be controlling when assessing whether or not items were important to the development of a defense for national security interests vis-a-vis counterterrorism." Ashcroft went onto explain that, if the department purchases a computer, that should be counted as a counterterrorism expense because that computer could theoretically be used for counterterrorism activities. While computers are certainly important to law enforcement as a whole, they do not substitute for funding more counterterrorism agents – the very priority Ashcroft was shortchanging.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS THE 'WALL': According to Ashcroft the primary reason the Justice Department wasn't able to be more effective prior to 9/11 was "the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents." Ashcroft said that an interpretation of the supposed separation in 1995 created "a system that was destined to fail." But, in his May 9, 2001 testimony before Congress, Ashcroft had an entirely different perspective. Ashcroft described a string of successes in the late-1990s where the FBI prevented terrorist attacks, emphasizing that "had the law enforcement efforts that led to the prevention of these acts not been successful, the cumulative death toll would be substantial." Moreover, Ashcroft did nothing to change the Justice Department's interpretation of the separation prior to 9/11. On August 6, 2001 Ashcroft's deputy distributed a memo reminding agents that "the 1995 procedures remain in effect today." Moreover, as the commission notes, the wall only "prohibited the prosecutors from 'directing or controlling' [an] intelligence investigation." Thus, there was nothing preventing the FBI from sharing critical information like the Phoenix Memo or the activities of Zacarias Moussaui prior to 9/11 with anyone else in the intelligence community.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS HIS INTEREST IN OSAMA: Ashcroft bragged in his opening statement that, shortly after becoming Attorney General, "I recommended that the covert action authorities be clarified and be expanded to allow for decisive, lethal action" against Osama Bin Laden. One problem: that was the government's policy long before the Bush Administration took office. Commissioner Fred Fielding stated that if Ashcroft were to see Memorandum of Notice dating from the Clinton administration, until recently withheld from the commission by the White House, it would "alter [Ashcroft's] evaluation of existing authorities in February of 2001." Ashcroft said that he was "not in a position to remember" if he had seen the MON, received any written material from his staff or attended briefings with any other members of the administration.
HEALTH CARE
Reimportation
The Food and Drug Administration and the Health and Human Services task force, which is looking into the reimportation of drugs from Canada, will hold a meeting today to give the public a chance to air concerns and ask questions. The Administration, under pressure from the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical lobby, has blocked the reimportation of drugs from Canada, even though the price of medication can be cheaper by up to 50%. At the same time, conservatives banned Medicare from using bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices from the powerful drug companies in order to give Americans cheaper drugs here in the United States.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS FOR THE TASK FORCE: Today may be the only time the public has to directly question the FDA and HHS on the reimportation of drugs from Canada. Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has put together the top five questions "the President, the FDA and the HHS Task Force should be forced to answer in order to assure American consumers of the legitimacy of the Task Force." The questions pointedly ask officials to explain questions of safety, cost, integrity, accessibility, and hypocrisy in dealing with the American public when it comes to getting affordable medicine to Americans.
PROPAGANDA IN VIRGINIA: The FDA and HHS are spending government money to spread a disinformation campaign across the state of Virginia. The campaign, "which was unveiled in February in Illinois and has since expanded to Texas, California and Maryland," is called, "Looks Can Be Deceiving." This time, the Administration has had to resort to vague threats. "The FDA stands firm on our long-held position that importing prescription drugs from Canada…is unsafe," said Thomas J. McGinnis of the FDA. "Consumers need to know that importation is unsafe before a serious injury or death occurs due to illegally imported drugs. It's not worth the risks." The Administration, however, "can't name a single American who has been injured or killed by drugs bought from licensed Canadian pharmacies." In fact, when pressed, the FDA's director of pharmacy affairs Tom McGinnis admitted: "I can't think of one thing off the top of my head where somebody died or somebody got put in the hospital because of these medications. I just don't know if there's anything like that."
LOOKS LIKE THEY'RE DECEIVING SENIORS: The propaganda machine is also specifically targeting the elderly. The FDA/HHS press release says, "For elderly consumers who are looking to save money by purchasing unregulated medicines from abroad, pharmacists want to remind them that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will help them save money." Not necessarily. The prescription drug cards in fact do not guarantee a discount for seniors. Each company issuing a card can choose which drugs to discount, or not discount. Benefits can vary according to the whims of individual companies. "That's because private companies issuing the cards--insurance firms, HMOs and others--will be able to raise or lower discounts on a weekly basis. Although the companies can make changes, seniors won't have that privilege: Once they sign up, they'll be required to stick with a single Medicare card for a full year."
GRASSLEY'S BILL: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) last week introduced legislation to legalize the purchase of prescription drugs from Canada. The bill "would immediately open the door for American consumers to buy the cheaper prescription drugs, while requiring the FDA to establish a new system for drug importation." Said the senator, "The FDA has been unresponsive for years, and U.S. consumers have been going around the FDA. Congress needs to take action to make sure that prescription drug imports are both safe and available to U.S. consumers." Other conservatives facing pressure from their constituents are also reversing their opposition to reimportation.
SENIORS TAKING IT TO THE STREETS: Seniors are organizing a boycott of all over-the-counter medications produced by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer "to protest the No. 1 drug maker's efforts to stem the flow of prescription drugs from Canada." The Minnesota Senior Federation is calling for the boycott of the corporation's nonprescription products -- including Rolaids and Sudafed -- to "protest Pfizer's move to cut off sales of prescription drugs to some Canadian wholesalers." At the same time, Minnesota's Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MN-R) "recently sought and won a resolution from the state's Board of Investment, which holds $470 million in Pfizer stock, to protest Pfizer's action." The states of Illinois and Wisconsin are "also considering using their shareholder might to protest drugmaker actions on Canadian drugs." Eli Lilly is also fighting to keep prices of its medicines artificially inflated by cracking down on reimportation.
UNDER THE RADAR
IRAQ – SENIOR STRATEGIST CRITICIZES BUSH CONDUCT ON IRAQ: A senior Army strategist, Army Lt. Col. Antulio J. Echevarria of the U.S. Army War College, "has accused the Bush administration of seeking to win 'quickly and on the cheap' while ignoring the more critical strategic aim of creating a stable, democratic nation." Instead of transforming the easy victory in toppling Saddam Hussein last year into victory in the larger political goal, says Echevarria, the administration "either misunderstood or, worse, wished away" the resulting difficulties, thus squandering that victory. One major problem: The Pentagon's civilian leadership, centered in the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, focused "on achieving rapid military victories" with a force "equipped only to win battles, not wars."
TAXES – BUSH AND CHENEY PROFIT FROM TAX CUTS, BUT AVERAGE AMERICANS DON'T: A new AP poll finds that almost half of all Americans "said their overall tax burden — including federal, state and local taxes — had gone up over the past three years" - almost four times the 13% who said their overall taxes had gone down. That's most likely because while a small handful of wealthy Americans received huge tax breaks, the average middle class family received very little, while their state and local taxes/fees increased. Of course, two people who did receive a massive tax cut were President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. According to AP, in 2002 Vice President Cheney paid 29% of his income – which still includes deferred compensation from defense contractor Halliburton – in taxes. Last year Cheney paid just 20% and his total tax bill was almost $100,000 less than in 2002 on about the same total income. Bush himself saved "nearly $31,000 on his 2003 bill over what he would have paid if there had been no cuts."
9/11 – CLARKE TESTIMONY CONSISTENT WITH PRIOR STATEMENTS: Roll Call reports, "Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's testimony before a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not contradict his later testimony before a presidentially appointed commission." According to Roberts, "Clarke's 2002 testimony was on small-bore process issues related to the intelligence community while the later testimony took a big-picture view of policymakers' handling of evidence of a pending attack." Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) has backed off his previous remark "declining to repeat the charge that Clarke contradicted himself."
ECONOMY – DUDE, HOW DO YOU SAY "DUDE" IN SWAHILI? It's official. The computer giant Dell (based in Texas) disclosed this week it "employs more people abroad than it does in the U.S." Dell recently "established customer and technical support centers in India, China, Morocco, Panama, and Slovakia and has set up design centers in Taiwan and China." In the recent SEC filing, "Dell revealed that 23,800 of its 46,000 employees are currently working outside of U.S. shores. That leaves just 22,200 workers at home." And the company's spokesman says the corporation wants to go even further to outsource jobs to cheaper foreign labor. (You get what you pay for, though - last year, Dell had to stop routing corporate customers to a technical support call center in Bangalore, India "after a flood of complaints.")
HEALTH CARE – QUINTUPLED PRICES:? Today's example of what happens when you don't keep watch over the powerful drug companies: Abbott Laboratories, which quintupled the price of its crucial AIDS drug Norvir. Giving the reimportation debate particular urgency, it was discovered recently that the company jacked the price of the average annual dosage of Norvir from $1,500 to about $7,800 in January. "With total sales of more than $1 billion since its introduction in 1996, Norvir long ago became profitable for Abbott. But with the recent price increase, the thousands of Americans who use Norvir now pay 10 times what the price is in Europe, where drug prices are regulated under national health care plans. An annual Norvir dosage in Belgium, for example, costs less than $720 a year."
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From the Center for American Progress
In a nationally televised press conference last night, President Bush "steadfastly refused to admit mistakes and passed up opportunities to explain what it will take to achieve his goal of a free and stable Iraq." Additionally, while he "acknowledged a good deal of introspection after all the questions about his actions before the Sept. 11 attacks," he offered "not a whiff of contrition" for his Administration's role in the worst national security breakdown in American history. The event was "more theater than substance" in which the President "offered no shocking new policy initiatives" and instead used "the language and zeal of a missionary" to implore Americans to continue on his increasingly chaotic and directionless path in Iraq. But with Bush's approval ratings hitting a new low, the event did nothing to quell the growing questions Americans have about the Administration's national security credentials.
IRAQ – NO PLAN TO GET MORE INTERNATIONAL HELP: The WP notes that it quickly became clear that the President was refusing "to lay out new details of the path forward, suggest any change in direction or acknowledge any rethinking of his decisions in the face of recent setbacks." While Bush claimed that his Administration was getting "more involvement by the United Nations," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday virtually ruled out sending a large U.N. team to Iraq "for the foreseeable future" because of worsening security, while the "Russian Emergency Ministry will start evacuation of Russian specialists from Iraq." Bush tried to reassure the international community about the June 30 transfer of power, saying confidently that U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was working "with Iraqis to determine the exact form of the government that will receive sovereignty on June 30th." But U.N. officials and diplomats say Bush's "expectations are not only inflated, but they are also dangerous."
IRAQ – STILL PUSHING THE WMD MYTH: The President was asked about his Administration's past promises about Iraq, with one reporter noting that the Administration promised "that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers; that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of the reconstruction; and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." But instead of acknowledging his Administration's gross overhyping of intelligence, the President instead clung to a now-discredited assertion. He claimed Iraq "refused to disarm" – an implicit reiteration that Iraq had WMD. But according to Bush's own weapons inspector, David Kay, there remains "no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March." Corroborating assertions by former Administration officials that Bush has always focused on invading Iraq regardless of circumstance, the President added that "even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would've called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein."
IRAQ – DISHONESTY ON RECONSTRUCTION: The President said that oil revenues in Iraq are "bigger than we thought they would be at this point in time" – an effort to further the myth that Americans will not have to continue financing the enormous cost of Iraq reconstruction (already, U.S. taxpayers have spent $166 billion in Iraq). But according to the New York Times, Iraq oil revenues are now only "running at a rate of about $14 billion a year" – far less than the $20 billion to $30 billion a year the Bush Administration promised would allow Iraq to "finance its own reconstruction."
9/11 – PROVING HIS OWN DISHONESTY ON TERROR WARNINGS: President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings." Yet, moments after uttering this, he said one of the reasons he asked for the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001, where he was explicitly warned that Islamic terrorists could be plotting to fly airplanes into buildings. Even his claim about "the prior government" was false: as the WSJ reported, "despite official assertions that the U.S. had little reason to suspect before Sept. 11 that airliners would be used as weapons, the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack." The measures were taken after intelligence reports warned of suicide attacks using planes, and many of them were ordered directly by President Clinton.
9/11 – DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT BUSH KNEW OF AN IMMINENT THREAT: The President once again claimed to have no idea that a terrorist attack was imminent before 9/11, saying "had I had any inkling whatsoever" of an attack, "we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country." But a front-page report by the WP today notes that according to newly-declassified information, "by the time a CIA briefer gave the President the August 6 PDB headlined 'Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,' the president "had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team." The President was specifically told that Bin Laden was "planning multiple operations," that he had designs on hijackings, and that the "Bin Laden threats are real."
9/11
Ashcroft Passes the Buck
Ashcroft appeared before the 9/11 Commission and, like most others in the Bush Administration, refused to acknowledge any personal mistakes during the last three years. Instead, he offered a deceptive, disingenuous and dishonest account of his record prior to 9/11 and a Pollyannaish view of his actions following the attack. Worse, the commissioners largely accepted Ashcroft's testimony at face value and passed on opportunities to aggressively question the attorney general on inconsistencies and inaccuracies his statements. Ashcroft called the criticisms he has received "the price we are privileged to pay for our liberty." But the ability to criticize government officials, of course, is not the price we pay for liberty but liberty itself.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS HIS PRE-9/11 PRIORITIES: A staff report released just prior to Ashcroft's testimony revealed that a May 10, 2001 budget guidance he released "made no mention of counterterrorism." Dale Watson, former head of the FBI counterterrorism department, told the commission that when he saw the omission "he almost fell out of his chair." Ashcroft countered that, testifying before Congress on May 9, 2001, he said "my number one priority was to protect the people of the United States against terrorism." But that isn't what Ashcroft said at the hearing. Ashcroft, appearing before a Senate committee holding a hearing on terrorism, said "It goes without saying that the paramount objective of U.S. counterterrorism policy is the prevention of terrorist acts." In other words, Ashcroft gave Congress a definition of counterterrorism and is now misrepresenting it as standing for the premise that he prioritized counterterrorism over all other activities.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS HIS PRE-9/11 BUDGET: Internal Justice Department documents and an American Progress analysis of the Administration's budget request show that, in he summer of 2001, Ashcroft was cutting counterterrorism funding. Thomas Pickard, testified yesterday that, in the summer of 2001 "the additional funds that we were looking for on counterterrorism were denied" by Ashcroft. Pickard appealed Ashcroft's decision but was denied again the day before 9/11. Yet, Ashcroft claims that "the 2002 budget proposed by President Bush had the largest counterterrorism increase in five years." Ashcroft reached this artificial budget conclusion by counting items in his counterterrorism budget that were not directed specifically at counterterrorism activities. Ashcroft explains: "the label of counterterrorism should not be controlling when assessing whether or not items were important to the development of a defense for national security interests vis-a-vis counterterrorism." Ashcroft went onto explain that, if the department purchases a computer, that should be counted as a counterterrorism expense because that computer could theoretically be used for counterterrorism activities. While computers are certainly important to law enforcement as a whole, they do not substitute for funding more counterterrorism agents – the very priority Ashcroft was shortchanging.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS THE 'WALL': According to Ashcroft the primary reason the Justice Department wasn't able to be more effective prior to 9/11 was "the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents." Ashcroft said that an interpretation of the supposed separation in 1995 created "a system that was destined to fail." But, in his May 9, 2001 testimony before Congress, Ashcroft had an entirely different perspective. Ashcroft described a string of successes in the late-1990s where the FBI prevented terrorist attacks, emphasizing that "had the law enforcement efforts that led to the prevention of these acts not been successful, the cumulative death toll would be substantial." Moreover, Ashcroft did nothing to change the Justice Department's interpretation of the separation prior to 9/11. On August 6, 2001 Ashcroft's deputy distributed a memo reminding agents that "the 1995 procedures remain in effect today." Moreover, as the commission notes, the wall only "prohibited the prosecutors from 'directing or controlling' [an] intelligence investigation." Thus, there was nothing preventing the FBI from sharing critical information like the Phoenix Memo or the activities of Zacarias Moussaui prior to 9/11 with anyone else in the intelligence community.
ASHCROFT DISTORTS HIS INTEREST IN OSAMA: Ashcroft bragged in his opening statement that, shortly after becoming Attorney General, "I recommended that the covert action authorities be clarified and be expanded to allow for decisive, lethal action" against Osama Bin Laden. One problem: that was the government's policy long before the Bush Administration took office. Commissioner Fred Fielding stated that if Ashcroft were to see Memorandum of Notice dating from the Clinton administration, until recently withheld from the commission by the White House, it would "alter [Ashcroft's] evaluation of existing authorities in February of 2001." Ashcroft said that he was "not in a position to remember" if he had seen the MON, received any written material from his staff or attended briefings with any other members of the administration.
HEALTH CARE
Reimportation
The Food and Drug Administration and the Health and Human Services task force, which is looking into the reimportation of drugs from Canada, will hold a meeting today to give the public a chance to air concerns and ask questions. The Administration, under pressure from the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical lobby, has blocked the reimportation of drugs from Canada, even though the price of medication can be cheaper by up to 50%. At the same time, conservatives banned Medicare from using bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices from the powerful drug companies in order to give Americans cheaper drugs here in the United States.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS FOR THE TASK FORCE: Today may be the only time the public has to directly question the FDA and HHS on the reimportation of drugs from Canada. Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has put together the top five questions "the President, the FDA and the HHS Task Force should be forced to answer in order to assure American consumers of the legitimacy of the Task Force." The questions pointedly ask officials to explain questions of safety, cost, integrity, accessibility, and hypocrisy in dealing with the American public when it comes to getting affordable medicine to Americans.
PROPAGANDA IN VIRGINIA: The FDA and HHS are spending government money to spread a disinformation campaign across the state of Virginia. The campaign, "which was unveiled in February in Illinois and has since expanded to Texas, California and Maryland," is called, "Looks Can Be Deceiving." This time, the Administration has had to resort to vague threats. "The FDA stands firm on our long-held position that importing prescription drugs from Canada…is unsafe," said Thomas J. McGinnis of the FDA. "Consumers need to know that importation is unsafe before a serious injury or death occurs due to illegally imported drugs. It's not worth the risks." The Administration, however, "can't name a single American who has been injured or killed by drugs bought from licensed Canadian pharmacies." In fact, when pressed, the FDA's director of pharmacy affairs Tom McGinnis admitted: "I can't think of one thing off the top of my head where somebody died or somebody got put in the hospital because of these medications. I just don't know if there's anything like that."
LOOKS LIKE THEY'RE DECEIVING SENIORS: The propaganda machine is also specifically targeting the elderly. The FDA/HHS press release says, "For elderly consumers who are looking to save money by purchasing unregulated medicines from abroad, pharmacists want to remind them that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will help them save money." Not necessarily. The prescription drug cards in fact do not guarantee a discount for seniors. Each company issuing a card can choose which drugs to discount, or not discount. Benefits can vary according to the whims of individual companies. "That's because private companies issuing the cards--insurance firms, HMOs and others--will be able to raise or lower discounts on a weekly basis. Although the companies can make changes, seniors won't have that privilege: Once they sign up, they'll be required to stick with a single Medicare card for a full year."
GRASSLEY'S BILL: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) last week introduced legislation to legalize the purchase of prescription drugs from Canada. The bill "would immediately open the door for American consumers to buy the cheaper prescription drugs, while requiring the FDA to establish a new system for drug importation." Said the senator, "The FDA has been unresponsive for years, and U.S. consumers have been going around the FDA. Congress needs to take action to make sure that prescription drug imports are both safe and available to U.S. consumers." Other conservatives facing pressure from their constituents are also reversing their opposition to reimportation.
SENIORS TAKING IT TO THE STREETS: Seniors are organizing a boycott of all over-the-counter medications produced by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer "to protest the No. 1 drug maker's efforts to stem the flow of prescription drugs from Canada." The Minnesota Senior Federation is calling for the boycott of the corporation's nonprescription products -- including Rolaids and Sudafed -- to "protest Pfizer's move to cut off sales of prescription drugs to some Canadian wholesalers." At the same time, Minnesota's Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MN-R) "recently sought and won a resolution from the state's Board of Investment, which holds $470 million in Pfizer stock, to protest Pfizer's action." The states of Illinois and Wisconsin are "also considering using their shareholder might to protest drugmaker actions on Canadian drugs." Eli Lilly is also fighting to keep prices of its medicines artificially inflated by cracking down on reimportation.
UNDER THE RADAR
IRAQ – SENIOR STRATEGIST CRITICIZES BUSH CONDUCT ON IRAQ: A senior Army strategist, Army Lt. Col. Antulio J. Echevarria of the U.S. Army War College, "has accused the Bush administration of seeking to win 'quickly and on the cheap' while ignoring the more critical strategic aim of creating a stable, democratic nation." Instead of transforming the easy victory in toppling Saddam Hussein last year into victory in the larger political goal, says Echevarria, the administration "either misunderstood or, worse, wished away" the resulting difficulties, thus squandering that victory. One major problem: The Pentagon's civilian leadership, centered in the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, focused "on achieving rapid military victories" with a force "equipped only to win battles, not wars."
TAXES – BUSH AND CHENEY PROFIT FROM TAX CUTS, BUT AVERAGE AMERICANS DON'T: A new AP poll finds that almost half of all Americans "said their overall tax burden — including federal, state and local taxes — had gone up over the past three years" - almost four times the 13% who said their overall taxes had gone down. That's most likely because while a small handful of wealthy Americans received huge tax breaks, the average middle class family received very little, while their state and local taxes/fees increased. Of course, two people who did receive a massive tax cut were President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. According to AP, in 2002 Vice President Cheney paid 29% of his income – which still includes deferred compensation from defense contractor Halliburton – in taxes. Last year Cheney paid just 20% and his total tax bill was almost $100,000 less than in 2002 on about the same total income. Bush himself saved "nearly $31,000 on his 2003 bill over what he would have paid if there had been no cuts."
9/11 – CLARKE TESTIMONY CONSISTENT WITH PRIOR STATEMENTS: Roll Call reports, "Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's testimony before a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not contradict his later testimony before a presidentially appointed commission." According to Roberts, "Clarke's 2002 testimony was on small-bore process issues related to the intelligence community while the later testimony took a big-picture view of policymakers' handling of evidence of a pending attack." Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) has backed off his previous remark "declining to repeat the charge that Clarke contradicted himself."
ECONOMY – DUDE, HOW DO YOU SAY "DUDE" IN SWAHILI? It's official. The computer giant Dell (based in Texas) disclosed this week it "employs more people abroad than it does in the U.S." Dell recently "established customer and technical support centers in India, China, Morocco, Panama, and Slovakia and has set up design centers in Taiwan and China." In the recent SEC filing, "Dell revealed that 23,800 of its 46,000 employees are currently working outside of U.S. shores. That leaves just 22,200 workers at home." And the company's spokesman says the corporation wants to go even further to outsource jobs to cheaper foreign labor. (You get what you pay for, though - last year, Dell had to stop routing corporate customers to a technical support call center in Bangalore, India "after a flood of complaints.")
HEALTH CARE – QUINTUPLED PRICES:? Today's example of what happens when you don't keep watch over the powerful drug companies: Abbott Laboratories, which quintupled the price of its crucial AIDS drug Norvir. Giving the reimportation debate particular urgency, it was discovered recently that the company jacked the price of the average annual dosage of Norvir from $1,500 to about $7,800 in January. "With total sales of more than $1 billion since its introduction in 1996, Norvir long ago became profitable for Abbott. But with the recent price increase, the thousands of Americans who use Norvir now pay 10 times what the price is in Europe, where drug prices are regulated under national health care plans. An annual Norvir dosage in Belgium, for example, costs less than $720 a year."
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Tuesday, April 13, 2004
PRESS CONFERENCE
Unanswered Questions... Will Bush Answer theses?
Courtesy of The Center for American Progress
President Bush will hold a rare press conference tonight at 8:30 p.m.— only the 12th of his entire presidency, and only his third televised in prime evening viewing hours. (At this point in their first terms, President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush had each done 72 press conferences.) He is expected to lead with a statement on Iraq. During the Iraq War, White House reporters like Elisabeth Bumiller of the NY Times have said the media have became "very deferential" and that reporters are now particularly loathe to challenge the President in a press conference like tonight's because "it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there." Bumiller defended the flaccid nature of the media at these high-profile press conferences, saying, "Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time, live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time." But as Editor & Publisher Magazine makes clear, the "starstruck media" has an obligation at such a serious time to challenge the President to provide substantive answers. Here are just a few questions that still have not been answered:
IRAQ QUESTION – DO YOU AGREE WITH CHENEY'S "IRAQ QUAGMIRE" ASSESSMENT?: Vice President Cheney, in his capacity as Secretary of Defense in 1991, said it would be a mistake to get bogged down in the quagmire of rebuilding Iraq: "Once we'd...gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government?...How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?" None of these questions have been answered in the current war, ostensibly leading us into the very quagmire the Vice President previously tried to avoid.
IRAQ QUESTION – ARE WE EMBROILED IN MAJOR COMBAT OPERATIONS?: Standing under a Mission Accomplished banner, President Bush said on May 1, 2003, "My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." It was dishonest to declare victory so quickly, however. In the past two weeks alone, 70 American troops have been killed, compared to 139 troops killed during the duration of Mr. Bush's defined "major combat." Thousands more have been maimed and injured. A year later, instead of scaling back to 110,000 troops, General Abizaid has asked the Pentagon to add at least 10,000 more troops for a total of 140,000 troops.
IRAQ QUESTION – HOW IS IRAQ DIFFERENT FROM VIETNAM?: Even with some surface differences, there are deeply disturbing parallels between the situation in Iraq and the quagmire of Vietnam which scarred the country thirty years ago. As Newsweek reports, the desert battlefield is just as confusing and deadly as the jungle when the military has no easily distinguished enemy. And "just as in Vietnam, it is not clear that America understands the enemy. The Viet Cong may have been communists, but they were nationalists first—and prepared to fight however long it took to free their country. The Iraqis are Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, age-old enemies, but there are disturbing signs that the Sunnis and Shiites were willing to bury their differences, at least for the moment, in the common cause of burying Americans."
IRAQ QUESTION – DID YOU REACH OUT TO ALLIES WHILE ON YOUR VACATION?: Instead of going the extra mile to assuage the fears of the international community, President Bush did not personally take the time during the crisis/his vacation to call the leaders of the countries whose citizens were held hostage last week. In fact, the President barely took time off from loafing at his Crawford mansion to deal with real problems, choosing to spend his time appearing on fishing television shows rather than addressing a major world crisis. The result is that global support for the U.S. effort in Iraq has further eroded as security deteriorates. Many allies are now finding it "difficult to resist calls to scale back their involvement or even withdraw." This pulling back unfortunately comes at the same time the U.S. is attempting to build a global force to protect the United Nations in Iraq, a proposal "essential to the fragile political transition because the Bush administration is relying on the United Nations to return to Iraq to help organize elections after the occupation ends on June 30." Without allied support, American troops will be left in harm's way to shoulder the burden.
IRAQ QUESTION – DID YOU COOK THE BOOKS ON THE IRAQI SECURITY FORCE NUMBERS?: Top U.S. military commanders in Iraq yesterday "acknowledged serious shortcomings in efforts to establish new Iraqi security forces and said the program is being reassessed in light of the failure over the past week of Iraqi units to join U.S. troops in combating militants." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld praised the Iraqi forces earlier this year and they were to have been the backbone of the transfer of power. Recently, however, "perhaps 20% to 25% of the Iraqi army, civil defense, police and other security forces have quit, changed sides, or otherwise failed to perform their duties." The WP reports, "the rush to create these groups from scratch has proved a mammoth undertaking that has been marked by persistent reports of poor vetting, inadequate training, equipment shortages and command gaps."
IRAQ QUESTION – YOU'RE NOT GOING TO NOMINATE JOHN NEGROPONTE, ARE YOU?: With only 80 days to go until the transition of power, the White House has floated the idea of nominating current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte to replace Coalition Administrator Paul Bremer and become Ambassador to Iraq. Described as "the most challenging diplomatic assignment in the world, and the toughest to fill," the top job in Iraq is crucial. The person in the job will oversee about 3,000 employees, and manage the United States' largest embassy in the world. The Administration should consider the following guidelines: experience in the region, Arabic skills; a non-contentious and swift Senate confirmation, and separation from the Administration's march to war based on faulty intelligence. Negroponte has none of these qualifications.
9/11 QUESTION – WHAT ELSE DID YOU NEED IN ORDER TO REALIZE THERE WAS A THREAT?: President Bush has denied having any idea about the looming terrorist threat before 9/11, saying on 5/17/02: "Had I know that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." He denied that the PDB he was given alerted him to the fact that there was an imminent terrorist attack in the making, saying it "did not contain enough specific threat information" and "was no indication of a terrorist threat" because it supposedly "said nothing about an attack on America." But as the NYT notes, the PDB "spells out the who, hints at the what and points toward the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later." Even before the PDB, the President should have had an inkling that terrorists had designs on using planes as weapons: U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 2001 that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations."
9/11 QUESTION – HOW WAS THE INTEL GOOD ENOUGH FOR WAR, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO PROTECT AMERICA?: In his single-minded push to go to war in Iraq, President Bush defended his lack of definitive proof of a WMD threat by saying, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late." However, he used exactly the opposite rationale to justify why he ignored far more compelling evidence about the terrorist threat leading up to 9/11. Despite explicit warnings that al Qaeda might be planning attacks inside the United States, he said, "There was nothing in [the PDB] that said, you know, there's an imminent attack. There was nothing in this report to me that said, oh, by the way, we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America."
ECONOMY QUESTION – WHY ARE YOU PUSHING POLICIES THAT ARE HURTING THE MIDDLE CLASS?: The President has repeatedly encouraged jobs to move overseas and systematically put the interests of working families behind the interests of its largest corporate contributors. The Bush Administration has "embraced foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years." At the same time, the Bush Commerce Department actively "sponsors" and "participates in conferences and workshops that encourage American companies to put operations and jobs in China." Meanwhile, six out of ten corporations didn't pay a single dollar in taxes last year. When companies dodge taxes, individuals pay more. However, President Bush has yet to support any of bills that close "the Bermuda loophole" which allows companies to move their offices offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. Meanwhile, when Congress passed a bill barring federal contracts from going to such companies, the White House did not support it and the bill died.
9/11
Watering Down the PDB
At a press conference yesterday with Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, President Bush faced more questions about the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) he received on August 6, 2001, that warned him of an al Qaeda attack on the homeland. Not only did the President repeat his denials, but he did not address questions about new revelations that references to Osama bin Laden were stripped out of the version of the PDB sent to federal agencies on August 7, 2001. That more public memo stripped out any mention of "the 70 FBI investigations into possible al Qaeda activity that the president had been told of a day earlier" and "did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of possible attacks with explosives in the United States or that the FBI had concerns about recent activities like the casing of buildings in New York." The secretive move is eerily reminiscent of the decision to strip out key caveats/dissents from WMD intelligence reports it used to make its case for war in Iraq. And the ramifications of these actions had the effect of leaving local law enforcement in the dark. For instance, in Seattle, the FBI field office and local law enforcement said they were never told of the al Qaeda plot on the city that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed the White House knew about before 9/11.
DISHONEST – TRYING TO SPIN WHAT'S IN BLACK AND WHITE: Despite the public now having the PDB, the President continued to make claims that are refuted by the document itself. He said there was nothing in the report that said "we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America." But the report – which has the headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S." – specifically said "[There are] patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York...CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
ONE-DAY REVERSAL – BUSH CONTRADICTS HIMSELF WITHIN 24 HOURS: The President yesterday claimed that "the best way" to describe the PDB he was given "was kind of a history of Osama's intentions...kind of a history of what the agency had known." Yet, just 24 hours earlier, the President was challenged on this assertion by a reporter who said "Wasn't [the PDB] current threat information that wasn't historical, that was ongoing?" The President quickly said "Right" in agreement.
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Unanswered Questions... Will Bush Answer theses?
Courtesy of The Center for American Progress
President Bush will hold a rare press conference tonight at 8:30 p.m.— only the 12th of his entire presidency, and only his third televised in prime evening viewing hours. (At this point in their first terms, President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush had each done 72 press conferences.) He is expected to lead with a statement on Iraq. During the Iraq War, White House reporters like Elisabeth Bumiller of the NY Times have said the media have became "very deferential" and that reporters are now particularly loathe to challenge the President in a press conference like tonight's because "it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there." Bumiller defended the flaccid nature of the media at these high-profile press conferences, saying, "Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time, live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time." But as Editor & Publisher Magazine makes clear, the "starstruck media" has an obligation at such a serious time to challenge the President to provide substantive answers. Here are just a few questions that still have not been answered:
IRAQ QUESTION – DO YOU AGREE WITH CHENEY'S "IRAQ QUAGMIRE" ASSESSMENT?: Vice President Cheney, in his capacity as Secretary of Defense in 1991, said it would be a mistake to get bogged down in the quagmire of rebuilding Iraq: "Once we'd...gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government?...How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?" None of these questions have been answered in the current war, ostensibly leading us into the very quagmire the Vice President previously tried to avoid.
IRAQ QUESTION – ARE WE EMBROILED IN MAJOR COMBAT OPERATIONS?: Standing under a Mission Accomplished banner, President Bush said on May 1, 2003, "My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." It was dishonest to declare victory so quickly, however. In the past two weeks alone, 70 American troops have been killed, compared to 139 troops killed during the duration of Mr. Bush's defined "major combat." Thousands more have been maimed and injured. A year later, instead of scaling back to 110,000 troops, General Abizaid has asked the Pentagon to add at least 10,000 more troops for a total of 140,000 troops.
IRAQ QUESTION – HOW IS IRAQ DIFFERENT FROM VIETNAM?: Even with some surface differences, there are deeply disturbing parallels between the situation in Iraq and the quagmire of Vietnam which scarred the country thirty years ago. As Newsweek reports, the desert battlefield is just as confusing and deadly as the jungle when the military has no easily distinguished enemy. And "just as in Vietnam, it is not clear that America understands the enemy. The Viet Cong may have been communists, but they were nationalists first—and prepared to fight however long it took to free their country. The Iraqis are Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, age-old enemies, but there are disturbing signs that the Sunnis and Shiites were willing to bury their differences, at least for the moment, in the common cause of burying Americans."
IRAQ QUESTION – DID YOU REACH OUT TO ALLIES WHILE ON YOUR VACATION?: Instead of going the extra mile to assuage the fears of the international community, President Bush did not personally take the time during the crisis/his vacation to call the leaders of the countries whose citizens were held hostage last week. In fact, the President barely took time off from loafing at his Crawford mansion to deal with real problems, choosing to spend his time appearing on fishing television shows rather than addressing a major world crisis. The result is that global support for the U.S. effort in Iraq has further eroded as security deteriorates. Many allies are now finding it "difficult to resist calls to scale back their involvement or even withdraw." This pulling back unfortunately comes at the same time the U.S. is attempting to build a global force to protect the United Nations in Iraq, a proposal "essential to the fragile political transition because the Bush administration is relying on the United Nations to return to Iraq to help organize elections after the occupation ends on June 30." Without allied support, American troops will be left in harm's way to shoulder the burden.
IRAQ QUESTION – DID YOU COOK THE BOOKS ON THE IRAQI SECURITY FORCE NUMBERS?: Top U.S. military commanders in Iraq yesterday "acknowledged serious shortcomings in efforts to establish new Iraqi security forces and said the program is being reassessed in light of the failure over the past week of Iraqi units to join U.S. troops in combating militants." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld praised the Iraqi forces earlier this year and they were to have been the backbone of the transfer of power. Recently, however, "perhaps 20% to 25% of the Iraqi army, civil defense, police and other security forces have quit, changed sides, or otherwise failed to perform their duties." The WP reports, "the rush to create these groups from scratch has proved a mammoth undertaking that has been marked by persistent reports of poor vetting, inadequate training, equipment shortages and command gaps."
IRAQ QUESTION – YOU'RE NOT GOING TO NOMINATE JOHN NEGROPONTE, ARE YOU?: With only 80 days to go until the transition of power, the White House has floated the idea of nominating current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte to replace Coalition Administrator Paul Bremer and become Ambassador to Iraq. Described as "the most challenging diplomatic assignment in the world, and the toughest to fill," the top job in Iraq is crucial. The person in the job will oversee about 3,000 employees, and manage the United States' largest embassy in the world. The Administration should consider the following guidelines: experience in the region, Arabic skills; a non-contentious and swift Senate confirmation, and separation from the Administration's march to war based on faulty intelligence. Negroponte has none of these qualifications.
9/11 QUESTION – WHAT ELSE DID YOU NEED IN ORDER TO REALIZE THERE WAS A THREAT?: President Bush has denied having any idea about the looming terrorist threat before 9/11, saying on 5/17/02: "Had I know that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." He denied that the PDB he was given alerted him to the fact that there was an imminent terrorist attack in the making, saying it "did not contain enough specific threat information" and "was no indication of a terrorist threat" because it supposedly "said nothing about an attack on America." But as the NYT notes, the PDB "spells out the who, hints at the what and points toward the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later." Even before the PDB, the President should have had an inkling that terrorists had designs on using planes as weapons: U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 2001 that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations."
9/11 QUESTION – HOW WAS THE INTEL GOOD ENOUGH FOR WAR, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO PROTECT AMERICA?: In his single-minded push to go to war in Iraq, President Bush defended his lack of definitive proof of a WMD threat by saying, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late." However, he used exactly the opposite rationale to justify why he ignored far more compelling evidence about the terrorist threat leading up to 9/11. Despite explicit warnings that al Qaeda might be planning attacks inside the United States, he said, "There was nothing in [the PDB] that said, you know, there's an imminent attack. There was nothing in this report to me that said, oh, by the way, we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America."
ECONOMY QUESTION – WHY ARE YOU PUSHING POLICIES THAT ARE HURTING THE MIDDLE CLASS?: The President has repeatedly encouraged jobs to move overseas and systematically put the interests of working families behind the interests of its largest corporate contributors. The Bush Administration has "embraced foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years." At the same time, the Bush Commerce Department actively "sponsors" and "participates in conferences and workshops that encourage American companies to put operations and jobs in China." Meanwhile, six out of ten corporations didn't pay a single dollar in taxes last year. When companies dodge taxes, individuals pay more. However, President Bush has yet to support any of bills that close "the Bermuda loophole" which allows companies to move their offices offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. Meanwhile, when Congress passed a bill barring federal contracts from going to such companies, the White House did not support it and the bill died.
9/11
Watering Down the PDB
At a press conference yesterday with Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, President Bush faced more questions about the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) he received on August 6, 2001, that warned him of an al Qaeda attack on the homeland. Not only did the President repeat his denials, but he did not address questions about new revelations that references to Osama bin Laden were stripped out of the version of the PDB sent to federal agencies on August 7, 2001. That more public memo stripped out any mention of "the 70 FBI investigations into possible al Qaeda activity that the president had been told of a day earlier" and "did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of possible attacks with explosives in the United States or that the FBI had concerns about recent activities like the casing of buildings in New York." The secretive move is eerily reminiscent of the decision to strip out key caveats/dissents from WMD intelligence reports it used to make its case for war in Iraq. And the ramifications of these actions had the effect of leaving local law enforcement in the dark. For instance, in Seattle, the FBI field office and local law enforcement said they were never told of the al Qaeda plot on the city that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed the White House knew about before 9/11.
DISHONEST – TRYING TO SPIN WHAT'S IN BLACK AND WHITE: Despite the public now having the PDB, the President continued to make claims that are refuted by the document itself. He said there was nothing in the report that said "we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America." But the report – which has the headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S." – specifically said "[There are] patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York...CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
ONE-DAY REVERSAL – BUSH CONTRADICTS HIMSELF WITHIN 24 HOURS: The President yesterday claimed that "the best way" to describe the PDB he was given "was kind of a history of Osama's intentions...kind of a history of what the agency had known." Yet, just 24 hours earlier, the President was challenged on this assertion by a reporter who said "Wasn't [the PDB] current threat information that wasn't historical, that was ongoing?" The President quickly said "Right" in agreement.
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