Bush's record of no achievement. Except what he's done for his rich corporate pals.
# "When it comes to crafting consumer-friendly energy policies, George Bush has been an abject failure. But when it comes to crafting a policy that lines the pockets of big oil companies, he's been a smashing success. The fact is that while gas prices skyrocket and consumers get pinched, oil companies are raking in record profits. Meanwhile everyday Americans are struggling to deal with these record gas prices on top of their other family expenses. When is George Bush going to come up with a plan that helps these Americans cope with this crisis? America is waiting." (Kerry Spokesman Phil Singer)
# The retail price of gas went over $2 a gallon today for the first time ever, setting a new record on the same day as the three year anniversary of George Bush's failed energy plan.
# Bush's plan did nothing to end US reliance on foreign oil or lower the high gas prices that have plagued US drivers throughout his term.
# When George Bush came to the White House in 2001, gas cost about $1.51 per gallon. It now costs $2.02, an increase of about $.51 per gallon over the last year.
# The steep increase in gas prices since Bush took office forces the average household to pay $593 more for gas this year alone.
# BUSH'S PLAN FOR DEALING WITH HIGH GAS PRICES: "... the best way to make sure that people are able to deal with high energy prices is to cut taxes, is to give people more of their own money so they can meet the bills, so they can meet the high energy prices." [Bush Press Conference, 5/11/01]
# BUSH'S FAILURE TO REIN IN SKYROCKETING GAS PRICES HAS COST DRIVERS $42 BILLION THIS YEAR ALONE: Economists use a rule of thumb that a penny increase in a gallon of gas costs consumers $1 billion more a year. The 42 cent rise in gas prices in less than five months translates into a $42 billion tax on Americans this year alone. [WSJ, 3/24/04; EIA, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/ftparea/wogirs/xls/pswrgvwall.xls]
# THREE YEARS AGO TODAY, BUSH UNVEILED AN ENERGY PLAN HE SAID WOULD REDUCE PUMP PRICES: Q: Mr. President, how will your plan lead to lower prices at the gas pump now? THE PRESIDENT: Pardon me? Q: How will it lead to lower prices at the gas pump now? THE PRESIDENT: Because we recognize that we need more supply. And when you read the report, you'll see that we've laid out constructive ways to make sure that there are more supply available. [Remarks by the President on National Energy Policy, 5/16/01]
# BUSH'S EIA FOUND THAT BUSH'S PLAN WOULDN'T IMPACT PRICES: Bush's own Energy Information Administration found that the effect of the proposal would be "negligible" with respect to production, consumption, imports, and energy prices. Just last week, the EIA reported that imported gasoline hit an all time high of 1.3 million barrels per day the week of April 16. [EIA, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip.asp]
# THE PUBLIC'S GAS PAINS ARE PROFITS FOR BUSH'S OIL BUDDIES: US consumers might be getting pinched every time they fill up their cars, but George Bush's friends in the oil industry are raking in record profits. The top oil companies posted up to a 38% gain in profits, with Conoco Phillips making a record $1.62 billion in profit during the first three months of the year. [WSJ, 4/30/04; Reuters, 4/28/04; CNN Money, http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/14/markets/oil/index.htm, 5/14/04]
___________________________________________________________________________
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Kerry Urging Energy Independence in U.S.
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
BOSTON - With the start of the summer driving season approaching and gasoline prices soaring, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said the United States should strive for energy independence.
"There are two reasons why we cannot be asleep at the wheel during this current energy crisis," Kerry said in the weekly Democratic radio address. "First, soaring energy prices are putting our economy at risk and second, our dependence on Middle East oil is putting our national security at risk. But it doesn't have to be this way."
In the short term, the Massachusetts senator said, the United States should divert oil being used to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and bring it to market. The White House says, though, that would have only a negligible impact on pump prices. Kerry also said the country's leaders should demand that Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations increase supply.
He said his long-term strategy as president would include investments in alternative fuels and new technologies that are more fuel-efficient. He said he would establish tax credits to help make fuel-efficient cars more affordable.
"Our dependence on foreign oil is a problem we must solve together the only way we can — by inventing our way out of it," Kerry said.
The average price per gallon rose to $2.017 this week, the first time the national average has exceeded $2. Kerry and other Democrats blame President Bush (news - web sites) and Republican leaders for allowing prices to rise so high, and his radio address reiterated the case he made earlier this week on the campaign trail.
"We're at war and families are struggling to make ends meet, especially with rising gas prices," Kerry said. "For our security, our economy and our environment, we must make America energy independent."
_________________________________________________________________________
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
BOSTON - With the start of the summer driving season approaching and gasoline prices soaring, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said the United States should strive for energy independence.
"There are two reasons why we cannot be asleep at the wheel during this current energy crisis," Kerry said in the weekly Democratic radio address. "First, soaring energy prices are putting our economy at risk and second, our dependence on Middle East oil is putting our national security at risk. But it doesn't have to be this way."
In the short term, the Massachusetts senator said, the United States should divert oil being used to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and bring it to market. The White House says, though, that would have only a negligible impact on pump prices. Kerry also said the country's leaders should demand that Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations increase supply.
He said his long-term strategy as president would include investments in alternative fuels and new technologies that are more fuel-efficient. He said he would establish tax credits to help make fuel-efficient cars more affordable.
"Our dependence on foreign oil is a problem we must solve together the only way we can — by inventing our way out of it," Kerry said.
The average price per gallon rose to $2.017 this week, the first time the national average has exceeded $2. Kerry and other Democrats blame President Bush (news - web sites) and Republican leaders for allowing prices to rise so high, and his radio address reiterated the case he made earlier this week on the campaign trail.
"We're at war and families are struggling to make ends meet, especially with rising gas prices," Kerry said. "For our security, our economy and our environment, we must make America energy independent."
_________________________________________________________________________
Friday, May 21, 2004
A letter to the editor, as appeared in the Boston Globe. Keep those cards and letters coming!
May 12, 2004
THE BUSH administration seems to have a serious problem with reality. The most recent reality challenge is the policy of torture in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which the administration is frantically redefining as "abuse," "excesses," and "humiliation." We even have Secretary Rumsfeld describing footage of several American soldiers "having sex" with a female Iraqi prisoner. Let's have a little plain English here. "Having sex" with a prisoner is known as "rape." Systematic beatings are called "torture." Excesses that lead to death are called "murder." The hundreds of women and children in mass graves in Fallujah are the product of a "massacre." Taken together, all of these add up to "atrocities."
The dissemination of "incomplete information" from "imperfect intelligence" is called "lies." The billions of dollars that Halliburton and Bechtel have reaped in profits are called "war profiteering." The invasion of Iraq is called "illegal." The destruction of America's international standing is called "permanent." And Texaco/Phillips's high bid for Iraqi oil is called "why we are in Iraq."
ERICA VERRILLO Williamsburg
______________________________________________________________________
May 12, 2004
THE BUSH administration seems to have a serious problem with reality. The most recent reality challenge is the policy of torture in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which the administration is frantically redefining as "abuse," "excesses," and "humiliation." We even have Secretary Rumsfeld describing footage of several American soldiers "having sex" with a female Iraqi prisoner. Let's have a little plain English here. "Having sex" with a prisoner is known as "rape." Systematic beatings are called "torture." Excesses that lead to death are called "murder." The hundreds of women and children in mass graves in Fallujah are the product of a "massacre." Taken together, all of these add up to "atrocities."
The dissemination of "incomplete information" from "imperfect intelligence" is called "lies." The billions of dollars that Halliburton and Bechtel have reaped in profits are called "war profiteering." The invasion of Iraq is called "illegal." The destruction of America's international standing is called "permanent." And Texaco/Phillips's high bid for Iraqi oil is called "why we are in Iraq."
ERICA VERRILLO Williamsburg
______________________________________________________________________
How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light bulb?
The Answer is SEVEN:
One to deny that a light bulb needs to be replaced.
One to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the light bulb.
One to blame the previous administration for the need of a new light bulb.
One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of light bulbs.
One to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Halliburton Industries one million dollars for a light bulb.
One to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the light bulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag.
And finally one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.
_________________________________________________________________
The Answer is SEVEN:
One to deny that a light bulb needs to be replaced.
One to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the light bulb.
One to blame the previous administration for the need of a new light bulb.
One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of light bulbs.
One to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Halliburton Industries one million dollars for a light bulb.
One to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the light bulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag.
And finally one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.
_________________________________________________________________
And now for something completely different the day after my birthday about why rock and roll still matters.
May 21, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR NY TIMES
Rock of Ages
By NICK HORNBY
LONDON
It's just before Christmas last year, and the Philadelphia rock 'n' roll band Marah is halfway through a typically ferocious, chaotic and inspirational set when the doors to the right of the stage burst open and a young man staggers in, carrying most of a drum kit. My friends and I have the best seats in the house, a couple of feet away from Marah's frontmen, Serge and Dave Bielanko, but when the drummer arrives we have to move our table back to make room for him. He's not Marah's drummer (the band is temporarily without) but he's a drummer, and he owns most of a drum kit, and his appearance allows the band to make an even more glorious and urgent racket than they had managed hitherto. The show ends triumphantly, as Marah shows tend to do, with Serge lying on the floor amid the feet of his public, wailing away on his harmonica.
This gig happens to be taking place in a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, in Kentish Town, north London, but doubtless scenes like it are being played out throughout the world: a bar band, a pickup drummer from an earlier gig, probably even the table-shifting. It's just that three or four months earlier, Bruce Springsteen, a fan of the band, invited the Bielanko brothers to share the stage with him at Giants Stadium for an encore, and Marah will shortly release what would, in a world with ears, be one of 2004's most-loved straight-ahead rock albums, "20,000 Streets Under the Sky." These guys shouldn't be playing in the Fiddler's Elbow with a pickup drummer. And they shouldn't be passing a hat around at the end of the gig, surely? How many people have passed around the hat in the same year that they appeared at Giants Stadium?
Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Jon Landau published his influential, exciting, career-changing, and subsequently much derided and parodied article about Bruce Springsteen in The Real Paper, an alternative weekly — the article that included the line "I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." I had never read the rest of it until recently, and it remains a lovely piece of writing. It begins, heartbreakingly: "It's four in the morning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listening to my records and remembering that things were different a decade ago." I'm only guessing here, but I can imagine there are a number of you reading this who can remember what it was like to feel old at 27, and how it bears no resemblance to feeling old at 37, or 47. And you probably miss records almost as much as you miss being 27.
It's hard not to think about one's age and how it relates to rock music. I just turned 47, and with each passing year it becomes harder not to wonder whether I should be listening to something that is still thought of as more age appropriate — jazz, folk, classical, opera, funeral marches, the usual suspects. You've heard the arguments a million times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being young, and if you're not young and you still listen to it, then you should be ashamed of yourself. And finally I've worked out my response to all that: I mostly agree with the description, even though it's crude, and makes no effort to address the recent, mainly excellent work of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Mr. Springsteen et al. The conclusion, however, makes no sense to me any more.
Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that — what would we do with it anyway? I'm talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n' roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it's only now and again?
When I say that I have found these feelings harder and harder to detect these last few years, I understand that I run the risk of being seen as yet another nostalgic old codger complaining about the state of contemporary music. And though it's true that I'm an old codger, and that I'm complaining about the state of contemporary music, I hope that I can wriggle out of the hole I'm digging for myself by moaning that, to me, contemporary rock music no longer sounds young — or at least, not young in that kind of joyous, uninhibited way. In some ways, it became way too grown-up and full of itself. You can find plenty that's angry, or weird, or perverse, or melancholy and world-weary; but that loud, sometimes dumb celebration of being alive has got lost somewhere along the way. Of course we want to hear songs about Iraq, and child prostitution, and heroin addiction. And if bands see the need to use electric drills instead of guitars in order to give vent to their rage, well, bring it on. But is there any chance we could have the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin Lupe Lu" — or, better still, a modern-day equivalent — for an encore?
In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of "David Copperfield," the novelist David Gates talks about literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road, leading on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward `Gone With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has experienced its own version. You can either chase the Britney dollar, or choose the high-minded cult-rock route that leads to great reviews and commercial oblivion. I buy that arty stuff all the time, and a lot of it is great. But part of the point of it is that its creators don't want to engage with the mainstream, or no longer think that it's possible to do so, and as a consequence cult status is preordained rather than accidental. In this sense, the squeaks and bleeps scattered all over the lovely songs on the last Wilco album sound less like experimentation, and more like a despairing audio suicide note.
Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, "that high-low fork in the road" is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool — a stranger to all notions of postmodernism — but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well.
Marah may well be headed for commercial oblivion anyway, of course. "20,000 Streets Under the Sky" is their fourth album, and they're by no means famous yet, as the passing of the hat in the Fiddler's Elbow indicates. But what I love about them is that I can hear everything I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows. Indeed, in the shows you can often hear their love for the rock canon uninflected — they play covers of the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," or the Jam's "In the City," and they usually end with a riffed-up version of the O'Jays' "Love Train." They play an original called "The Catfisherman" with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they quote the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Who's "Magic Bus." And they do this not because they're a bar band and people expect cover versions, but because they are unafraid of showing where their music comes from, and unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue — just as Bruce Springsteen (who really did play "Little Latin Lupe Lu" for an encore, sometimes) was unafraid.
It was this kind of celebration that Jon Landau had in mind when he said in his review that "I saw my rock 'n' roll past flash before my eyes." For Mr. Landau, the overbearing self-importance of rock music of the late 60's and early 70's had left him feeling jaded; for me, it's the overbearing self-consciousness of the 90's. The Darkness know that we might laugh at them, so they laugh at themselves first; the White Stripes may be a blues band, but their need to exude cool is every bit as strong as their desire to emit heat, and the calculations have been made accordingly: there's as much artfulness as there is art.
In truth, I don't care whether the music sounds new or old: I just want it to have ambition and exuberance, a lack of self-consciousness, a recognition of the redemptive power of noise, an acknowledgment that emotional intelligence is sometimes best articulated through a great chord change, rather than a furrowed brow. Outkast's brilliant "Hey Ya!," a song that for a few brief months last year united races and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers, had all that and more; you could hear Prince in there, and the Beatles, and yet the song belonged absolutely in and to the here and now, or at least the there and then of 2003.
Both "Hey Ya!" and Marah's new album are roots records, not in the sense that they were made by men with beards who play the fiddle and sing with a finger in an ear, but in the sense that they have recognizable influences — influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but that have been properly digested. In the suffocatingly airless contemporary pop-culture climate, you can usually trace influences back only as far as Radiohead, or Boyz II Men, or the Farrelly Brothers, and regurgitation rather than digestion would be the more accurate gastric metaphor.
The pop music critic of The Guardian recently reviewed a British band that reminded him — pleasantly, I should add — of "the hammering drum machine and guitar of controversial 80's trio Big Black and the murky noise of early Throbbing Gristle." I have no doubt whatsoever that the band he was writing about (a band with a name too confrontational and cutting-edge to be repeated here) will prove to be one of the most significant cultural forces of the decade, nor that it will produce music that forces us to confront the evil and horror that resides within us all.
However, there is still a part of me that persists in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive. I'm not sure that Throbbing Gristle and its descendants will ever pull that off, but the members of Marah do, often. I hope they won't be passing around the hat by the end of this year, but if they are, please give generously.
Nick Hornby is the author, most recently, of "Songbook."
________________________________________________________________________
May 21, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR NY TIMES
Rock of Ages
By NICK HORNBY
LONDON
It's just before Christmas last year, and the Philadelphia rock 'n' roll band Marah is halfway through a typically ferocious, chaotic and inspirational set when the doors to the right of the stage burst open and a young man staggers in, carrying most of a drum kit. My friends and I have the best seats in the house, a couple of feet away from Marah's frontmen, Serge and Dave Bielanko, but when the drummer arrives we have to move our table back to make room for him. He's not Marah's drummer (the band is temporarily without) but he's a drummer, and he owns most of a drum kit, and his appearance allows the band to make an even more glorious and urgent racket than they had managed hitherto. The show ends triumphantly, as Marah shows tend to do, with Serge lying on the floor amid the feet of his public, wailing away on his harmonica.
This gig happens to be taking place in a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, in Kentish Town, north London, but doubtless scenes like it are being played out throughout the world: a bar band, a pickup drummer from an earlier gig, probably even the table-shifting. It's just that three or four months earlier, Bruce Springsteen, a fan of the band, invited the Bielanko brothers to share the stage with him at Giants Stadium for an encore, and Marah will shortly release what would, in a world with ears, be one of 2004's most-loved straight-ahead rock albums, "20,000 Streets Under the Sky." These guys shouldn't be playing in the Fiddler's Elbow with a pickup drummer. And they shouldn't be passing a hat around at the end of the gig, surely? How many people have passed around the hat in the same year that they appeared at Giants Stadium?
Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Jon Landau published his influential, exciting, career-changing, and subsequently much derided and parodied article about Bruce Springsteen in The Real Paper, an alternative weekly — the article that included the line "I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." I had never read the rest of it until recently, and it remains a lovely piece of writing. It begins, heartbreakingly: "It's four in the morning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listening to my records and remembering that things were different a decade ago." I'm only guessing here, but I can imagine there are a number of you reading this who can remember what it was like to feel old at 27, and how it bears no resemblance to feeling old at 37, or 47. And you probably miss records almost as much as you miss being 27.
It's hard not to think about one's age and how it relates to rock music. I just turned 47, and with each passing year it becomes harder not to wonder whether I should be listening to something that is still thought of as more age appropriate — jazz, folk, classical, opera, funeral marches, the usual suspects. You've heard the arguments a million times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being young, and if you're not young and you still listen to it, then you should be ashamed of yourself. And finally I've worked out my response to all that: I mostly agree with the description, even though it's crude, and makes no effort to address the recent, mainly excellent work of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Mr. Springsteen et al. The conclusion, however, makes no sense to me any more.
Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that — what would we do with it anyway? I'm talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n' roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it's only now and again?
When I say that I have found these feelings harder and harder to detect these last few years, I understand that I run the risk of being seen as yet another nostalgic old codger complaining about the state of contemporary music. And though it's true that I'm an old codger, and that I'm complaining about the state of contemporary music, I hope that I can wriggle out of the hole I'm digging for myself by moaning that, to me, contemporary rock music no longer sounds young — or at least, not young in that kind of joyous, uninhibited way. In some ways, it became way too grown-up and full of itself. You can find plenty that's angry, or weird, or perverse, or melancholy and world-weary; but that loud, sometimes dumb celebration of being alive has got lost somewhere along the way. Of course we want to hear songs about Iraq, and child prostitution, and heroin addiction. And if bands see the need to use electric drills instead of guitars in order to give vent to their rage, well, bring it on. But is there any chance we could have the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin Lupe Lu" — or, better still, a modern-day equivalent — for an encore?
In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of "David Copperfield," the novelist David Gates talks about literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road, leading on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward `Gone With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has experienced its own version. You can either chase the Britney dollar, or choose the high-minded cult-rock route that leads to great reviews and commercial oblivion. I buy that arty stuff all the time, and a lot of it is great. But part of the point of it is that its creators don't want to engage with the mainstream, or no longer think that it's possible to do so, and as a consequence cult status is preordained rather than accidental. In this sense, the squeaks and bleeps scattered all over the lovely songs on the last Wilco album sound less like experimentation, and more like a despairing audio suicide note.
Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, "that high-low fork in the road" is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool — a stranger to all notions of postmodernism — but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well.
Marah may well be headed for commercial oblivion anyway, of course. "20,000 Streets Under the Sky" is their fourth album, and they're by no means famous yet, as the passing of the hat in the Fiddler's Elbow indicates. But what I love about them is that I can hear everything I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows. Indeed, in the shows you can often hear their love for the rock canon uninflected — they play covers of the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," or the Jam's "In the City," and they usually end with a riffed-up version of the O'Jays' "Love Train." They play an original called "The Catfisherman" with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they quote the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Who's "Magic Bus." And they do this not because they're a bar band and people expect cover versions, but because they are unafraid of showing where their music comes from, and unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue — just as Bruce Springsteen (who really did play "Little Latin Lupe Lu" for an encore, sometimes) was unafraid.
It was this kind of celebration that Jon Landau had in mind when he said in his review that "I saw my rock 'n' roll past flash before my eyes." For Mr. Landau, the overbearing self-importance of rock music of the late 60's and early 70's had left him feeling jaded; for me, it's the overbearing self-consciousness of the 90's. The Darkness know that we might laugh at them, so they laugh at themselves first; the White Stripes may be a blues band, but their need to exude cool is every bit as strong as their desire to emit heat, and the calculations have been made accordingly: there's as much artfulness as there is art.
In truth, I don't care whether the music sounds new or old: I just want it to have ambition and exuberance, a lack of self-consciousness, a recognition of the redemptive power of noise, an acknowledgment that emotional intelligence is sometimes best articulated through a great chord change, rather than a furrowed brow. Outkast's brilliant "Hey Ya!," a song that for a few brief months last year united races and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers, had all that and more; you could hear Prince in there, and the Beatles, and yet the song belonged absolutely in and to the here and now, or at least the there and then of 2003.
Both "Hey Ya!" and Marah's new album are roots records, not in the sense that they were made by men with beards who play the fiddle and sing with a finger in an ear, but in the sense that they have recognizable influences — influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but that have been properly digested. In the suffocatingly airless contemporary pop-culture climate, you can usually trace influences back only as far as Radiohead, or Boyz II Men, or the Farrelly Brothers, and regurgitation rather than digestion would be the more accurate gastric metaphor.
The pop music critic of The Guardian recently reviewed a British band that reminded him — pleasantly, I should add — of "the hammering drum machine and guitar of controversial 80's trio Big Black and the murky noise of early Throbbing Gristle." I have no doubt whatsoever that the band he was writing about (a band with a name too confrontational and cutting-edge to be repeated here) will prove to be one of the most significant cultural forces of the decade, nor that it will produce music that forces us to confront the evil and horror that resides within us all.
However, there is still a part of me that persists in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive. I'm not sure that Throbbing Gristle and its descendants will ever pull that off, but the members of Marah do, often. I hope they won't be passing around the hat by the end of this year, but if they are, please give generously.
Nick Hornby is the author, most recently, of "Songbook."
________________________________________________________________________
FROM THE LA TIMES LETTERS PAGE
Re "3 Witnesses at Iraq Abuse Hearing Refused to Testify," May 19: I find it incredibly ironic that the same soldiers who used torture tactics on usually innocent Iraqi detainees to get them to "talk" are now cowardly hiding behind our constitutional/military protections to avoid telling what they know.
I wonder if we "softened them up," maybe they would be more willing to give us the information that we need to prosecute everyone responsible.
Laurie C. Fisher
San Diego
_________________________________________________________________________
Re "3 Witnesses at Iraq Abuse Hearing Refused to Testify," May 19: I find it incredibly ironic that the same soldiers who used torture tactics on usually innocent Iraqi detainees to get them to "talk" are now cowardly hiding behind our constitutional/military protections to avoid telling what they know.
I wonder if we "softened them up," maybe they would be more willing to give us the information that we need to prosecute everyone responsible.
Laurie C. Fisher
San Diego
_________________________________________________________________________
What a difference in leadership then and now and in the values America projected in peace and war. Elect John Kerry president and bring back those values.
COMMENTARY LA TIMES
Once, a POW Sent Thanks to His American Captor
May 21, 2004
The following is excerpted from a letter sent by a World War II German prisoner of war to Lt. Frederick Lyon Dalton, an American who oversaw detainees assigned to work in an officer's mess in France. Dalton died in 1987, and his family found the letter Saturday among his military records. The original spellings and grammar have been retained. The POW's signature was illegible.
*
Officers Mess Camp de Satory
Versailles 8 January 1946
Dear sir,
It is my wish to thank you for your fair and sincer position opposite me and all the other boys , I will never forget this. You may imagine that we have an open heart for eVRY kindness we receive during our time as POW, and that former emnemie people which show that position and beheaving you did will be noticed as the only way for the future of a new rebuilding of the common life all over the world. I shall not cease to put in all my influence to my boys and evrybody in realising that point of view, because I know that the peace of the world insist not only on money but also on human feelings. Sometimes it is not easy to do this work over here as a "life body" second class and feel the hate … of the surrounding people, however one can understand realizing that 6 year war with all the consquenzes. But shouldn't the human civilized nature be able to get away at last from the usual conception before and after a war? It is the duty of the defeated people to show its best will, that's why many of the Officers in my Outfit entered voluntary working, proofing by that way that "even an German Officer" is good enough to do evry work without behaving himself as a proud and stiff fellow who can only click the heels…. We all remarked quite well the satification of many of our old guests, as they noticed we were officers who served the food as common waiters, and ones I told the former Lt. Corley why we did that job, and I think you will understand it. We don't care about and let them have their joy of Humiliated German officers.
I don't know when the time will come to go home. Anyway we hope the best…. I am glad your time … came to a finish and you will join shortly the people you like. Let me send you my best wishes for your future.
_____________________________________________________________________
COMMENTARY LA TIMES
Once, a POW Sent Thanks to His American Captor
May 21, 2004
The following is excerpted from a letter sent by a World War II German prisoner of war to Lt. Frederick Lyon Dalton, an American who oversaw detainees assigned to work in an officer's mess in France. Dalton died in 1987, and his family found the letter Saturday among his military records. The original spellings and grammar have been retained. The POW's signature was illegible.
*
Officers Mess Camp de Satory
Versailles 8 January 1946
Dear sir,
It is my wish to thank you for your fair and sincer position opposite me and all the other boys , I will never forget this. You may imagine that we have an open heart for eVRY kindness we receive during our time as POW, and that former emnemie people which show that position and beheaving you did will be noticed as the only way for the future of a new rebuilding of the common life all over the world. I shall not cease to put in all my influence to my boys and evrybody in realising that point of view, because I know that the peace of the world insist not only on money but also on human feelings. Sometimes it is not easy to do this work over here as a "life body" second class and feel the hate … of the surrounding people, however one can understand realizing that 6 year war with all the consquenzes. But shouldn't the human civilized nature be able to get away at last from the usual conception before and after a war? It is the duty of the defeated people to show its best will, that's why many of the Officers in my Outfit entered voluntary working, proofing by that way that "even an German Officer" is good enough to do evry work without behaving himself as a proud and stiff fellow who can only click the heels…. We all remarked quite well the satification of many of our old guests, as they noticed we were officers who served the food as common waiters, and ones I told the former Lt. Corley why we did that job, and I think you will understand it. We don't care about and let them have their joy of Humiliated German officers.
I don't know when the time will come to go home. Anyway we hope the best…. I am glad your time … came to a finish and you will join shortly the people you like. Let me send you my best wishes for your future.
_____________________________________________________________________
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Here's a nice birthday present that I found online.
May 20, 2004 NY TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST
What Prison Scandal?
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Maybe anyone who was once married to Liz Taylor — at a time when she favored tiger-striped pantsuits and Clyde's chicken wings — would not flinch at wrangling with another aging sex symbol and demanding diva: Rummy.
Or maybe, at 77, Senator John Warner is at a stage in life where he can't be intimidated into putting a higher value on Republican re-election prospects than on what he sees as the common good.
In a bracing display of old-fashioned public spiritedness, the courtly Virginian joined up with the crusty Arizonan, John McCain, to brush back Rummy and the partisan whippersnappers in Congress who are yelping that the Senate Armed Services Committee's public hearings into prison abuse by American soldiers are distracting our warriors from taking care of business in Iraq.
"I think the Senate has become mesmerized by cameras, and I think that's sad," said a California Republican, Representative Duncan Hunter.
Then Senator John Cornyn of Texas weighed in, suggesting that Mr. Warner, a Navy officer in World War II, a Marine lieutenant in the Korean War and a Navy secretary under Nixon, and Mr. McCain, who lived in a dirt suite at the Hanoi Hilton for five years, were not patriotic. Their "collective hand-wringing," Mr. Cornyn sniffed, could be "a distraction from fighting and winning the war."
Rummy had a dozen Republican senators over to the Pentagon for breakfast on Tuesday, and Mr. Cornyn said the secretary was exasperated by the "all-consuming nature" of the Congressional hearings.
The man who David Plotz of Slate says is widely "considered one of the dumbest members of Congress" chimed in, dumbly. Following up on his inane rant defending the soldiers accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib and whingeing about "humanitarian do-gooders," Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma wondered whether Mr. Warner was trying to help the Democrats with public hearings.
The most absurd cut was delivered by Speaker Dennis Hastert, who responded to Mr. McCain's contention that Congress should not enact tax cuts during wartime because it prevented a sense of shared sacrifice by barking: "John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There is sacrifice in this country."
It just shows how completely flipped out the Republicans are about how the Iraq occupation is going that they are turning on a war hero and P.O.W., and on a man who enlisted in not one war, but two.
It's hard to believe that even if the generals weren't testifying here, they could do much to stop the spiral into anarchy there, with each day bringing some new horror.
Gen. John Abizaid told the panel that the hearing helped establish an image in the Arab world that Americans face up to their problems and handle them in the open. Certainly, he wasn't echoing the often Panglossian view of Donald Rumsfeld yesterday. He predicted that "the situation will become more violent" after the June 30 transfer of power and that he might then require more than the 135,000 troops now in Iraq.
Senator McCain, who has long advocated more troops, said that the Pentagon and its cheerleaders were silly to think they could throw a blanket over incendiary developments. "It's only a matter of time before the Pentagon's new disc of abuse pictures starts bouncing around the Internet," he said.
When I asked about Mr. Hastert's crack about visiting Walter Reed, the man whose temper used to be so close to the surface just laughed. "My," Mr. McCain murmured, "they certainly are angry. There has been some obvious resentment because of my `independence' for a long time."
He reiterated that he would never run with John Kerry. "I'm a loyal Republican," he said. "A lot of their resentment goes back to campaign finance reform."
I asked whether Mr. Warner, who helped Mr. McCain, as a shattered P.O.W., reorient to America after Vietnam, was a good example of the exemplars he writes about in his new meditation, "Why Courage Matters."
Agreeing that his colleague had shown strength, Mr. McCain concluded: "I believe from my experience that the only way you get one of these things behind you is to get everything out as quickly as possible."
Open and sharing Bushies. Now there's a novel concept.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
May 20, 2004 NY TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST
What Prison Scandal?
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Maybe anyone who was once married to Liz Taylor — at a time when she favored tiger-striped pantsuits and Clyde's chicken wings — would not flinch at wrangling with another aging sex symbol and demanding diva: Rummy.
Or maybe, at 77, Senator John Warner is at a stage in life where he can't be intimidated into putting a higher value on Republican re-election prospects than on what he sees as the common good.
In a bracing display of old-fashioned public spiritedness, the courtly Virginian joined up with the crusty Arizonan, John McCain, to brush back Rummy and the partisan whippersnappers in Congress who are yelping that the Senate Armed Services Committee's public hearings into prison abuse by American soldiers are distracting our warriors from taking care of business in Iraq.
"I think the Senate has become mesmerized by cameras, and I think that's sad," said a California Republican, Representative Duncan Hunter.
Then Senator John Cornyn of Texas weighed in, suggesting that Mr. Warner, a Navy officer in World War II, a Marine lieutenant in the Korean War and a Navy secretary under Nixon, and Mr. McCain, who lived in a dirt suite at the Hanoi Hilton for five years, were not patriotic. Their "collective hand-wringing," Mr. Cornyn sniffed, could be "a distraction from fighting and winning the war."
Rummy had a dozen Republican senators over to the Pentagon for breakfast on Tuesday, and Mr. Cornyn said the secretary was exasperated by the "all-consuming nature" of the Congressional hearings.
The man who David Plotz of Slate says is widely "considered one of the dumbest members of Congress" chimed in, dumbly. Following up on his inane rant defending the soldiers accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib and whingeing about "humanitarian do-gooders," Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma wondered whether Mr. Warner was trying to help the Democrats with public hearings.
The most absurd cut was delivered by Speaker Dennis Hastert, who responded to Mr. McCain's contention that Congress should not enact tax cuts during wartime because it prevented a sense of shared sacrifice by barking: "John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There is sacrifice in this country."
It just shows how completely flipped out the Republicans are about how the Iraq occupation is going that they are turning on a war hero and P.O.W., and on a man who enlisted in not one war, but two.
It's hard to believe that even if the generals weren't testifying here, they could do much to stop the spiral into anarchy there, with each day bringing some new horror.
Gen. John Abizaid told the panel that the hearing helped establish an image in the Arab world that Americans face up to their problems and handle them in the open. Certainly, he wasn't echoing the often Panglossian view of Donald Rumsfeld yesterday. He predicted that "the situation will become more violent" after the June 30 transfer of power and that he might then require more than the 135,000 troops now in Iraq.
Senator McCain, who has long advocated more troops, said that the Pentagon and its cheerleaders were silly to think they could throw a blanket over incendiary developments. "It's only a matter of time before the Pentagon's new disc of abuse pictures starts bouncing around the Internet," he said.
When I asked about Mr. Hastert's crack about visiting Walter Reed, the man whose temper used to be so close to the surface just laughed. "My," Mr. McCain murmured, "they certainly are angry. There has been some obvious resentment because of my `independence' for a long time."
He reiterated that he would never run with John Kerry. "I'm a loyal Republican," he said. "A lot of their resentment goes back to campaign finance reform."
I asked whether Mr. Warner, who helped Mr. McCain, as a shattered P.O.W., reorient to America after Vietnam, was a good example of the exemplars he writes about in his new meditation, "Why Courage Matters."
Agreeing that his colleague had shown strength, Mr. McCain concluded: "I believe from my experience that the only way you get one of these things behind you is to get everything out as quickly as possible."
Open and sharing Bushies. Now there's a novel concept.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
GAO: Bush Medicare Propaganda Illegal
Wed May 19, 5:59 PM ET
To: National Desk
Contact: Toby Chaudhuri of the Institute for America's Future, 202-955-5665; Web: http://www.ourfuture.org
WASHINGTON, May 19 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Promotional materials used by the Bush Administration to sell the new prescription drug law to the public violated laws against using taxpayer money for propaganda, according to a General Accounting Office (news - web sites) report issued today.
"I told you so," said Institute for America's Future Co- director Roger Hickey. "The new Bush Medicare law funnels money into the pockets of big drug companies and HMOs. It doesn't help seniors. The White House is breaking the law and bending the truth to sell this thing."
Tens of thousands of people organized by the Institute for America's Future and TomPaine.com demanded that Congress take back the money the Bush Administration funneled to HMOs in the new prescription drug law. President Bush (news - web sites)'s new Medicare law gives HMOs $46 billion -- 3 times the amount the Bush Administration promised.
____________________________________________________________________________
Wed May 19, 5:59 PM ET
To: National Desk
Contact: Toby Chaudhuri of the Institute for America's Future, 202-955-5665; Web: http://www.ourfuture.org
WASHINGTON, May 19 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Promotional materials used by the Bush Administration to sell the new prescription drug law to the public violated laws against using taxpayer money for propaganda, according to a General Accounting Office (news - web sites) report issued today.
"I told you so," said Institute for America's Future Co- director Roger Hickey. "The new Bush Medicare law funnels money into the pockets of big drug companies and HMOs. It doesn't help seniors. The White House is breaking the law and bending the truth to sell this thing."
Tens of thousands of people organized by the Institute for America's Future and TomPaine.com demanded that Congress take back the money the Bush Administration funneled to HMOs in the new prescription drug law. President Bush (news - web sites)'s new Medicare law gives HMOs $46 billion -- 3 times the amount the Bush Administration promised.
____________________________________________________________________________
Just remember. "Kenny Boy" (Bush's nickname for his good friend Kenneth Lay) was not only Bush's biggest political supporter but he applied insise corporate pressure throughout the Enron empire at the time to cough up dough from employees down the line to put into Bush's campaigns. Bush traveled around the nation and about Texas in an Enron jet when governor of Texas and while campaigning for president. Dick Cheney secretly met with these same Enron board members that are being convicted now to craft a "fair" national energy policy while he was ignoring the terrorists planning to strike at America. That's the slime this White House has been covered in under George W. Bush.
Former Enron Exec Pleads to Inside Trading
By KRISTEN HAYS, AP Business Writer
HOUSTON - The former No. 2 executive in Enron Corp. investor relations pleaded guilty to an insider trading charge Wednesday for cashing out stock options after learning about bad news for Enron's highly touted broadband unit.
Paula Rieker agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s continuing investigation and turn over to the government $499,333 in profits from her illegal stock sales.
She also agreed to return to Enron $130,000 in retention bonuses she received since the energy company went bankrupt in a sea of scandal in 2001.
All employees who received such bonuses had to sign papers saying they haven't illegally traded stock and cannot be identified as defendants in lawsuits related to the company's implosion.
"It was wrong to sell my stock, but I did," Rieker told U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon. "I knew it was wrong at the time."
Rieker also settled a civil complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) that said she provided "substantial assistance to Enron executives and senior managers in the dissemination of false and misleading information to the public about Enron business units in analyst calls and earnings releases."
Prosecutors allege that on July 5, 2001, Rieker exercised options to buy more than 18,000 shares of Enron stock at $15.51 per share, then sold them on the open market at $49.77. She made $629,000 on the transaction, court papers said.
Rieker allegedly acted after learning internally that the company's broadband unit lost more than $95 million in the second quarter 2001. The company had said earlier in the year that the unit would lose about $65 million throughout 2001.
Enron Broadband Services never posted a profit and went bankrupt along with Enron in December 2001.
"Rieker learned that the guidance Enron had provided the financial markets regarding EBS' anticipated losses was flawed and that EBS would likely be required to report greater losses than it had previously reported," court papers said.
Her lawyer, Danny Ashby, said Rieker was "committed to doing the right thing and today's actions are a reflection of that."
Alleged public misrepresentation of EBS' earnings prospects figures into pending criminal cases against former CEO Jeff Skilling and former top Enron accountant Richard Causey, as well as a separate case against seven former EBS executives slated for trial in October.
A trial date for Skilling and Causey has yet to be scheduled.
Rieker also could play a role in the Justice Department's ongoing investigation of Enron founder and former chairman Kenneth Lay, who has not been charged.
As a managing director for investor relations during Skilling's tenure as CEO, she was responsible for preparing press releases about earnings and scripts for quarterly earnings conference calls with analysts.
Rieker replaced Rebecca Carter, then Skilling's girlfriend, as corporate secretary in September 2001, more than a month after he quit after serving as CEO for six months. As corporate secretary Rieker answered directly to Lay and Jim Derrick, then Enron's general counsel. In early 2002, Lay resigned and Derrick retired.
The company's appearance of success began crumbling with its announcement of massive third-quarter losses in mid-October 2001.
Rieker resigned May 5 when her name surfaced as a target in the Justice investigation.
In an unrelated action this week, the Snohomish County Public Utility District north of Seattle filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (news - web sites) 450 pages of transcripts of telephone calls from former Enron traders related to the West Coast energy crisis of 2000 and 2001.
Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the utility, said it is seeking to convince a FERC administrative law judge that Enron should be required to disgorge "all the unjust profits they made," which could be as high as $2 billion, he told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The calls on the transcripts are central to the Justice Department's investigation of Enron's trading practices. John Forney, a former top trader in Enron's Portland, Ore. office, is slated to stand trial on fraud charges in October. Two other former traders, Timothy Belden and Jeffrey Richter, have pleaded guilty to one count each of wire fraud and are helping prosecutors.
For example, in one transcript, one trader talks about a colleague's deal in which "he steals money from California to the tune of about a million."
The trader on the other end of the call asks, "Will you re-phrase that?"
"OK, he, um — he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."
Former Enron Exec Pleads to Inside Trading
By KRISTEN HAYS, AP Business Writer
HOUSTON - The former No. 2 executive in Enron Corp. investor relations pleaded guilty to an insider trading charge Wednesday for cashing out stock options after learning about bad news for Enron's highly touted broadband unit.
Paula Rieker agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s continuing investigation and turn over to the government $499,333 in profits from her illegal stock sales.
She also agreed to return to Enron $130,000 in retention bonuses she received since the energy company went bankrupt in a sea of scandal in 2001.
All employees who received such bonuses had to sign papers saying they haven't illegally traded stock and cannot be identified as defendants in lawsuits related to the company's implosion.
"It was wrong to sell my stock, but I did," Rieker told U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon. "I knew it was wrong at the time."
Rieker also settled a civil complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) that said she provided "substantial assistance to Enron executives and senior managers in the dissemination of false and misleading information to the public about Enron business units in analyst calls and earnings releases."
Prosecutors allege that on July 5, 2001, Rieker exercised options to buy more than 18,000 shares of Enron stock at $15.51 per share, then sold them on the open market at $49.77. She made $629,000 on the transaction, court papers said.
Rieker allegedly acted after learning internally that the company's broadband unit lost more than $95 million in the second quarter 2001. The company had said earlier in the year that the unit would lose about $65 million throughout 2001.
Enron Broadband Services never posted a profit and went bankrupt along with Enron in December 2001.
"Rieker learned that the guidance Enron had provided the financial markets regarding EBS' anticipated losses was flawed and that EBS would likely be required to report greater losses than it had previously reported," court papers said.
Her lawyer, Danny Ashby, said Rieker was "committed to doing the right thing and today's actions are a reflection of that."
Alleged public misrepresentation of EBS' earnings prospects figures into pending criminal cases against former CEO Jeff Skilling and former top Enron accountant Richard Causey, as well as a separate case against seven former EBS executives slated for trial in October.
A trial date for Skilling and Causey has yet to be scheduled.
Rieker also could play a role in the Justice Department's ongoing investigation of Enron founder and former chairman Kenneth Lay, who has not been charged.
As a managing director for investor relations during Skilling's tenure as CEO, she was responsible for preparing press releases about earnings and scripts for quarterly earnings conference calls with analysts.
Rieker replaced Rebecca Carter, then Skilling's girlfriend, as corporate secretary in September 2001, more than a month after he quit after serving as CEO for six months. As corporate secretary Rieker answered directly to Lay and Jim Derrick, then Enron's general counsel. In early 2002, Lay resigned and Derrick retired.
The company's appearance of success began crumbling with its announcement of massive third-quarter losses in mid-October 2001.
Rieker resigned May 5 when her name surfaced as a target in the Justice investigation.
In an unrelated action this week, the Snohomish County Public Utility District north of Seattle filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (news - web sites) 450 pages of transcripts of telephone calls from former Enron traders related to the West Coast energy crisis of 2000 and 2001.
Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the utility, said it is seeking to convince a FERC administrative law judge that Enron should be required to disgorge "all the unjust profits they made," which could be as high as $2 billion, he told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The calls on the transcripts are central to the Justice Department's investigation of Enron's trading practices. John Forney, a former top trader in Enron's Portland, Ore. office, is slated to stand trial on fraud charges in October. Two other former traders, Timothy Belden and Jeffrey Richter, have pleaded guilty to one count each of wire fraud and are helping prosecutors.
For example, in one transcript, one trader talks about a colleague's deal in which "he steals money from California to the tune of about a million."
The trader on the other end of the call asks, "Will you re-phrase that?"
"OK, he, um — he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."
GAO Finds Bush "Video News Releases" Broke Law
The General Accounting Office ruled today that the Bush administration violated federal law when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not identify itself as the sponsor of a series of "video news releases" praising the new Medicare drug benefit.
The GAO said that the government had violated the Anti-deficiency Act's ban against "materials that are self-aggrandizing, purely partisan in nature, or covert as to source," according to the report.
Senator John Kerry released the following statement about the GAO's findings:
“Today’s GAO decision that the Administration inappropriately used the Medicare Trust Fund for political advertisements is another example of how this White House has misrepresented its Medicare plan. From its inception, this bill has been a boondoggle for the drug companies and has been burdened by scandal after scandal. It’s too bad that this Administration spends Medicare funds on convincing seniors that its failed drug card will give them real discounts instead of actually providing our seniors with real relief.
“America’s seniors deserve a president who will ensure access to low-cost, safe prescription drugs – not a president who uses taxpayer dollars to try to pull the wool over their eyes.”
___________________________________________________________________________
The General Accounting Office ruled today that the Bush administration violated federal law when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not identify itself as the sponsor of a series of "video news releases" praising the new Medicare drug benefit.
The GAO said that the government had violated the Anti-deficiency Act's ban against "materials that are self-aggrandizing, purely partisan in nature, or covert as to source," according to the report.
Senator John Kerry released the following statement about the GAO's findings:
“Today’s GAO decision that the Administration inappropriately used the Medicare Trust Fund for political advertisements is another example of how this White House has misrepresented its Medicare plan. From its inception, this bill has been a boondoggle for the drug companies and has been burdened by scandal after scandal. It’s too bad that this Administration spends Medicare funds on convincing seniors that its failed drug card will give them real discounts instead of actually providing our seniors with real relief.
“America’s seniors deserve a president who will ensure access to low-cost, safe prescription drugs – not a president who uses taxpayer dollars to try to pull the wool over their eyes.”
___________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
As I mentioned back during the "CA energy crisis"(in emails to friends before this blog was available), either Bush was the "energy expert" he claimed and knew this sort of gaming was possible and going on and thus criminally, ethically and morally ignored it OR he was not the expert he claimed and knows nothing about the energy business and perhaps business at all (the evidence of his "career" is that he's never created any business, his family's friends have created it for him). The bottom line is his political career was funded by these types of morally bankrupt people and he was, and still is, surrounded by such craven personalities. Finally the energy industry and its knowledge was supposed to be a strong part of Bush's potential to lead the nation. What does that say about his "lesser" skills and abilities in light of the economy's rising inflation or the failure of moral leadership in the Iraq war scandals?
THE NATION LA TIMES
Enron Tapes Hint Chiefs Knew About Power Ploys
By Jonathan Peterson
Times Staff Writer
May 18, 2004
WASHINGTON — Enron Corp. employees spoke of "stealing" up to $2 million a day from California during the 2000-01 energy crisis and suggested that their market-gaming ploys would be presented to top management, possibly including Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, according to documents released Monday.
The evidence of apparent scheming — in one recorded conversation, traders brag about taking money from "Grandma Millie" in California — is in a filing by a utility in Snohomish County, Wash. The municipal power unit north of Seattle wants refunds for alleged overcharges made by Enron during the electricity market meltdown.
The utility obtained transcripts of routinely recorded trader discussions from the Justice Department, which seized them in its Enron investigation.
While it has long been established that Enron engaged in market-gaming tactics — two top traders have pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges for manipulating California's energy market and a third awaits trial — the 450 pages of recorded conversations provide another vivid look into the organization's exploitive subculture.
They also suggest that knowledge of alleged wrongdoing may have reached the level of Skilling, Enron's former chief executive, and Lay, the former chairman.
In a Sept. 14, 2000, conversation, an employee named "Sue" from Enron's governmental affairs operation checks in with a trader named "Bob" for information that could be used in an in-house presentation to corporate executives.
"This is the time of year when government affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," Sue said, according to the transcript.
The Snohomish utility identified Sue as Susan J. Mara, Enron's California director of regulatory affairs until December 2001, when she and thousands of others lost their jobs as the result of Enron's financial collapse.
In talking with Bob, whose identity couldn't immediately be learned, Mara touts Enron's success in delaying a lowering of energy price caps by state officials.
Then, still seeking helpful material for the planned executive presentation, she asks: "Do you know when you started overscheduling load and making buckets of money on that?"
Overscheduling load — a tactic that Enron traders famously dubbed "Fat Boy" — involved purposely overstating how much electricity would be needed in the future, creating the appearance of power shortages and leading to inflated prices.
Mara, who is now an energy consultant, said Monday that the recorded conversation came about as she gathered information for a budget presentation to be made to executives at corporate headquarters in Houston. "We had to show what our accomplishments were for the year," she said.
Mara said she didn't recall what the final presentation contained or which executives heard it. The presentation was not prepared expressly for Skilling and Lay, she said, even though her statement in the recorded conversation implied that they would hear it.
The trading tactics discussed on the recording weren't considered illegal or manipulative by Enron, Mara added.
Asked Monday about the transcripts, Enron spokeswoman Karen Denne declined to comment, save to say: "We have been and we're continuing to cooperate with all investigations."
Skilling's lawyer, Bruce Hiler, declined to comment. Earl J. Silbert, an attorney for Lay, could not immediately be reached.
Federal prosecutors in February brought a range of fraud charges against Skilling for his actions when he was at the helm at Enron, but none was related to trading in the California market. Lay has not been charged.
In a different conversation in the transcripts, Enron's West Coast trading chief, Timothy N. Belden, discusses the profitability of the company's strategies in California, particularly those executed by a trading desk led by Jeffrey S. Richter:
"Well he makes … between one and two [million] a day, which never shows up on any curve shift…. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million — "
At this point the other speaker interrupts, asking Belden to rephrase what he just said.
"OK," Belden says. "He, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."
Asked about the transcript Monday, Belden's lawyer, Chris Arguedas, said that it was not possible to draw conclusions about the meaning of Belden's remarks without a better sense of the whole conversation. "You can't understand words spoken unless you see the context in which they are spoken," she said.
In October 2002, Belden pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and has been cooperating with the government. Richter pleaded guilty to similar charges the following February.
A spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the state was continuing to investigate Enron. "The comments made in these transcripts, if they're accurate, contain the kind of information that could bolster" a case against Enron, said spokesman Tom Dresslar.
Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the Snohomish utility, said the transcripts strongly suggest top Enron executives knew of the trading ploys used in California.
"It was common knowledge at least in the government relations unit, and they reported to upper management in Houston," he said.
*
Times staff writer Nancy Rivera Brooks in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
_______________________________________________________________________
THE NATION LA TIMES
Enron Tapes Hint Chiefs Knew About Power Ploys
By Jonathan Peterson
Times Staff Writer
May 18, 2004
WASHINGTON — Enron Corp. employees spoke of "stealing" up to $2 million a day from California during the 2000-01 energy crisis and suggested that their market-gaming ploys would be presented to top management, possibly including Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, according to documents released Monday.
The evidence of apparent scheming — in one recorded conversation, traders brag about taking money from "Grandma Millie" in California — is in a filing by a utility in Snohomish County, Wash. The municipal power unit north of Seattle wants refunds for alleged overcharges made by Enron during the electricity market meltdown.
The utility obtained transcripts of routinely recorded trader discussions from the Justice Department, which seized them in its Enron investigation.
While it has long been established that Enron engaged in market-gaming tactics — two top traders have pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges for manipulating California's energy market and a third awaits trial — the 450 pages of recorded conversations provide another vivid look into the organization's exploitive subculture.
They also suggest that knowledge of alleged wrongdoing may have reached the level of Skilling, Enron's former chief executive, and Lay, the former chairman.
In a Sept. 14, 2000, conversation, an employee named "Sue" from Enron's governmental affairs operation checks in with a trader named "Bob" for information that could be used in an in-house presentation to corporate executives.
"This is the time of year when government affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," Sue said, according to the transcript.
The Snohomish utility identified Sue as Susan J. Mara, Enron's California director of regulatory affairs until December 2001, when she and thousands of others lost their jobs as the result of Enron's financial collapse.
In talking with Bob, whose identity couldn't immediately be learned, Mara touts Enron's success in delaying a lowering of energy price caps by state officials.
Then, still seeking helpful material for the planned executive presentation, she asks: "Do you know when you started overscheduling load and making buckets of money on that?"
Overscheduling load — a tactic that Enron traders famously dubbed "Fat Boy" — involved purposely overstating how much electricity would be needed in the future, creating the appearance of power shortages and leading to inflated prices.
Mara, who is now an energy consultant, said Monday that the recorded conversation came about as she gathered information for a budget presentation to be made to executives at corporate headquarters in Houston. "We had to show what our accomplishments were for the year," she said.
Mara said she didn't recall what the final presentation contained or which executives heard it. The presentation was not prepared expressly for Skilling and Lay, she said, even though her statement in the recorded conversation implied that they would hear it.
The trading tactics discussed on the recording weren't considered illegal or manipulative by Enron, Mara added.
Asked Monday about the transcripts, Enron spokeswoman Karen Denne declined to comment, save to say: "We have been and we're continuing to cooperate with all investigations."
Skilling's lawyer, Bruce Hiler, declined to comment. Earl J. Silbert, an attorney for Lay, could not immediately be reached.
Federal prosecutors in February brought a range of fraud charges against Skilling for his actions when he was at the helm at Enron, but none was related to trading in the California market. Lay has not been charged.
In a different conversation in the transcripts, Enron's West Coast trading chief, Timothy N. Belden, discusses the profitability of the company's strategies in California, particularly those executed by a trading desk led by Jeffrey S. Richter:
"Well he makes … between one and two [million] a day, which never shows up on any curve shift…. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million — "
At this point the other speaker interrupts, asking Belden to rephrase what he just said.
"OK," Belden says. "He, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."
Asked about the transcript Monday, Belden's lawyer, Chris Arguedas, said that it was not possible to draw conclusions about the meaning of Belden's remarks without a better sense of the whole conversation. "You can't understand words spoken unless you see the context in which they are spoken," she said.
In October 2002, Belden pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and has been cooperating with the government. Richter pleaded guilty to similar charges the following February.
A spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the state was continuing to investigate Enron. "The comments made in these transcripts, if they're accurate, contain the kind of information that could bolster" a case against Enron, said spokesman Tom Dresslar.
Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the Snohomish utility, said the transcripts strongly suggest top Enron executives knew of the trading ploys used in California.
"It was common knowledge at least in the government relations unit, and they reported to upper management in Houston," he said.
*
Times staff writer Nancy Rivera Brooks in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
_______________________________________________________________________
From something I wrote to friends on Sunday:...The reality is that people like us are the only ones who care about politics in America BEFORE the last few months leading up to an election. I think Kerry is playing this just right. If by the convention (just two months away) he hasn't used that huge window to declare some bold ideas, then I'll worry. Until then just having Bush's polls drop so low is what is driving Kerry's campaign so why muck it up by offering ideas that could isolate support among swing voters and Bush's soft outer base? Let people become more disgusted with Bush and solid in their opposition to him and then take THE BIG MOMENT (at the convention) to wow them with something new.
Here's what political soul brother Josh Marshall said yesterday.
Talking Points Memo:
by Joshua Micah Marshall
(May 17, 2004 -- 08:59 PM EDT)
The one point of solace Republicans find today in the polls is this fact: despite how egregiously bad 2004 has thus far gone for President Bush, and regardless of the broad deterioration in the president's poll numbers, John Kerry is still, at best, only a few points ahead of him. And in some cases he's not ahead at all.
This leads to the conclusion -- their conclusion -- that Kerry is a terribly weak candidate, or is running an awful campaign, because he cannot even open up a serious lead against a president whose presidency seems on the verge of collapse on so many fronts.
There's a related line of criticism from Kerry's Democratic partisans. Why is he so silent? With the mix of poor values and incompetent leadership that is at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal, why isn't he out there affirmatively making the case against the president?
I've been listening to these criticisms for some time. Indeed, in a pretty prominent venue last month, I made an argument that was at least partly along these lines.
But I've begun to think that all of this is misguided, that whether by design or accident -- and I'm not at all sure which it is -- Kerry is doing more or less exactly what he should.
There are a number of ideas I want to air along these lines. But for now let me start with just a few.
First, what to make of the head-to-head numbers, which show the two candidates close to neck-n-neck down in the mid-to-low 40s? Nothing bad for Kerry, I'd say. Presidents who can't even get near 50% approval going into an election end up losing. It's that simple. In fact, presidents who are a lot closer to 40% than 50% end up getting crushed.
Bush's low numbers are almost infinitely more significant than Kerry's in that regard. Kerry hasn't even been officially nominated yet. He doesn't have a running mate. And the intensity of the news cycle makes it hard for him to get too much face time with the American people.
Now, here's the point I'd like to discuss in a bit more detail: the fact that Kerry can't get a lot of attention to himself right now or that he's not seizing the opportunity to make the case against Bush. I don't think this is a bad thing at all. At least not for now.
Let's think of this battle as a prize fight, with both men in the ring. If you're up on points and the seconds are ticking down on the final round, what do you do?
Simple: stay out of his way.
Trying to land punches when he's desperate and going down gives him the opportunity to hit back. And in such a dire moment that may be all he has. Why give him the opportunity?
With all we're seeing in Iraq right now, does anyone really need to 'make the case'? I'd say the case is making itself. For anyone who can't see it, the case probably can't be made.
The boxing analogy doesn't work perfectly. But let me explain what I'm getting at and get this back to concrete points.
The most salient fact about the contemporary American political landscape is its profound political polarization. And that is almost the last thing the president has going for him. There are forty-plus percent of the electorate on both sides that will stick with their candidate, and fight for him, simply because he opposes the other side. I think that that's one of the few things keeping the president's approval ratings as high as they are.
Further injecting partisan political sensibilities into this current moment will, I think, steady the president and perhaps even help him in his current state.
Of course, that moment can't be avoided. By the late summer and into the fall, the political climate will become intensely polarized as the two campaigns and all their official and unofficial surrogate organizations start pouring money into paid advertising, after the conventions run, and then eventually when the debates are held.
But for now it's salutary for the Democrats to have President Bush the focus -- near exclusively -- of attention. There is, I think, a coalescing sense that President Bush is a failed president -- that key and grave decisions he has made have been the wrong ones and that his leadership and management have been deeply flawed on many fronts. The public mind -- though in a sense a fiction to describe the individial cogitation of three hundred million individuals -- is a powerful reality. And if we look into the 'internals' in these recent polls I think we can see it turning against the president.
Take the president's declining numbers on terrorism.
For more than two years this has been the president's strongest number -- one that stayed strong even after support for his policies on Iraq or the economy declined. I've long thought that this number -- more than any other -- was a measure of public confidence in the president's strength and fortitude.
I say this because, what is confidence in his ability to fight terror a measure of? To judge the president in this regard, all we can really go on is the fact that no other major terrorist incident has occurred within the US.
The other signs are in most cases hidden from the public eye -- or if not hidden, not easily seen. Policy wonks may get into studies about money put into security at America's major seaports or what the president is doing to get the FBI into shape to combat terror. But that's deep in the weeds where few non-policy wonks venture.
In the case of Iraq, the public has something to look at: Iraq. The president's numbers were once very strong on Iraq. But they've fallen dramatically as visible reality has overwhelmed whatever people's assumptions about the president's leadership may have been. Same with the economy.
But, again, on terrorism there's much less concrete for the public to look at. So I think that measure is much more an intuitive sense, a general gut sense of the man himself. And that number -- so long so high -- is now falling and falling fast.
The new CNN/Time poll has Bush leading Kerry on this question by a mere 7 points -- his highest spread on any question.
Why is it falling? There hasn't been a terrorist attack. There were the Clarke revelations, yes. But I don't think these account for the change, at least not in themselves. I think they're falling because Iraq and other failures are eroding the public's belief that the president knows what he's doing and making people believe that his 'toughness', if it exists, is not directed in any productive or beneficial direction.
Now, as I say, the partisan polarization will intensify in the coming months. And that will help the president in many ways, getting some of the attention off him and on to Kerry. But a judgment about the president like the one I've described above, once made, can be hard to unmake. And for the moment, with so many of the president's actions delivering abysmal dividends to the nation he's led, that judgment is being made against the president. So, for the moment, I'm not sure having Kerry give Bush center stage is such a bad thing.
-- Josh Marshall
________________________________________________________________________
Here's what political soul brother Josh Marshall said yesterday.
Talking Points Memo:
by Joshua Micah Marshall
(May 17, 2004 -- 08:59 PM EDT)
The one point of solace Republicans find today in the polls is this fact: despite how egregiously bad 2004 has thus far gone for President Bush, and regardless of the broad deterioration in the president's poll numbers, John Kerry is still, at best, only a few points ahead of him. And in some cases he's not ahead at all.
This leads to the conclusion -- their conclusion -- that Kerry is a terribly weak candidate, or is running an awful campaign, because he cannot even open up a serious lead against a president whose presidency seems on the verge of collapse on so many fronts.
There's a related line of criticism from Kerry's Democratic partisans. Why is he so silent? With the mix of poor values and incompetent leadership that is at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal, why isn't he out there affirmatively making the case against the president?
I've been listening to these criticisms for some time. Indeed, in a pretty prominent venue last month, I made an argument that was at least partly along these lines.
But I've begun to think that all of this is misguided, that whether by design or accident -- and I'm not at all sure which it is -- Kerry is doing more or less exactly what he should.
There are a number of ideas I want to air along these lines. But for now let me start with just a few.
First, what to make of the head-to-head numbers, which show the two candidates close to neck-n-neck down in the mid-to-low 40s? Nothing bad for Kerry, I'd say. Presidents who can't even get near 50% approval going into an election end up losing. It's that simple. In fact, presidents who are a lot closer to 40% than 50% end up getting crushed.
Bush's low numbers are almost infinitely more significant than Kerry's in that regard. Kerry hasn't even been officially nominated yet. He doesn't have a running mate. And the intensity of the news cycle makes it hard for him to get too much face time with the American people.
Now, here's the point I'd like to discuss in a bit more detail: the fact that Kerry can't get a lot of attention to himself right now or that he's not seizing the opportunity to make the case against Bush. I don't think this is a bad thing at all. At least not for now.
Let's think of this battle as a prize fight, with both men in the ring. If you're up on points and the seconds are ticking down on the final round, what do you do?
Simple: stay out of his way.
Trying to land punches when he's desperate and going down gives him the opportunity to hit back. And in such a dire moment that may be all he has. Why give him the opportunity?
With all we're seeing in Iraq right now, does anyone really need to 'make the case'? I'd say the case is making itself. For anyone who can't see it, the case probably can't be made.
The boxing analogy doesn't work perfectly. But let me explain what I'm getting at and get this back to concrete points.
The most salient fact about the contemporary American political landscape is its profound political polarization. And that is almost the last thing the president has going for him. There are forty-plus percent of the electorate on both sides that will stick with their candidate, and fight for him, simply because he opposes the other side. I think that that's one of the few things keeping the president's approval ratings as high as they are.
Further injecting partisan political sensibilities into this current moment will, I think, steady the president and perhaps even help him in his current state.
Of course, that moment can't be avoided. By the late summer and into the fall, the political climate will become intensely polarized as the two campaigns and all their official and unofficial surrogate organizations start pouring money into paid advertising, after the conventions run, and then eventually when the debates are held.
But for now it's salutary for the Democrats to have President Bush the focus -- near exclusively -- of attention. There is, I think, a coalescing sense that President Bush is a failed president -- that key and grave decisions he has made have been the wrong ones and that his leadership and management have been deeply flawed on many fronts. The public mind -- though in a sense a fiction to describe the individial cogitation of three hundred million individuals -- is a powerful reality. And if we look into the 'internals' in these recent polls I think we can see it turning against the president.
Take the president's declining numbers on terrorism.
For more than two years this has been the president's strongest number -- one that stayed strong even after support for his policies on Iraq or the economy declined. I've long thought that this number -- more than any other -- was a measure of public confidence in the president's strength and fortitude.
I say this because, what is confidence in his ability to fight terror a measure of? To judge the president in this regard, all we can really go on is the fact that no other major terrorist incident has occurred within the US.
The other signs are in most cases hidden from the public eye -- or if not hidden, not easily seen. Policy wonks may get into studies about money put into security at America's major seaports or what the president is doing to get the FBI into shape to combat terror. But that's deep in the weeds where few non-policy wonks venture.
In the case of Iraq, the public has something to look at: Iraq. The president's numbers were once very strong on Iraq. But they've fallen dramatically as visible reality has overwhelmed whatever people's assumptions about the president's leadership may have been. Same with the economy.
But, again, on terrorism there's much less concrete for the public to look at. So I think that measure is much more an intuitive sense, a general gut sense of the man himself. And that number -- so long so high -- is now falling and falling fast.
The new CNN/Time poll has Bush leading Kerry on this question by a mere 7 points -- his highest spread on any question.
Why is it falling? There hasn't been a terrorist attack. There were the Clarke revelations, yes. But I don't think these account for the change, at least not in themselves. I think they're falling because Iraq and other failures are eroding the public's belief that the president knows what he's doing and making people believe that his 'toughness', if it exists, is not directed in any productive or beneficial direction.
Now, as I say, the partisan polarization will intensify in the coming months. And that will help the president in many ways, getting some of the attention off him and on to Kerry. But a judgment about the president like the one I've described above, once made, can be hard to unmake. And for the moment, with so many of the president's actions delivering abysmal dividends to the nation he's led, that judgment is being made against the president. So, for the moment, I'm not sure having Kerry give Bush center stage is such a bad thing.
-- Josh Marshall
________________________________________________________________________
You have to understand that when Bush ran for president he declared that as an oil man he was an ENERGY EXPERT, an oil BUSINESSMAN that understood the finer details of the energy industry. Then the CA energy "crisis" hit early in his term and he proclaimed it was a market problem and that he wouldn't allow FERC to place caps on the exploding prices for electricity in the state. So then later we find out it wasn't a market problem but a secret industry plan to rig the system for billions of illegal dollars stolen from California's citizens. What's the conclusion? Either Bush IS an expert and knew the energy industry was stealing billions of dollars OR he's not an expert and lied about everything he said he knew or was concerning the energy industry. Either way he's a low-down bastard. Oh, and now it looks like his top campaign contributor at that time, ol' Kenny Boy, may have been in on the CA energy rip-off. Read on to find out.
THE NATION LA TIMES
Enron Tapes Hint Chiefs Knew About Power Ploys
By Jonathan Peterson
May 18, 2004
WASHINGTON — Enron Corp. employees spoke of "stealing" up to $2 million a day from California during the 2000-01 energy crisis and suggested that their market-gaming ploys would be presented to top management, possibly including Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, according to documents released Monday.
The evidence of apparent scheming — in one recorded conversation, traders brag about taking money from "Grandma Millie" in California — is in a filing by a utility in Snohomish County, Wash. The municipal power unit north of Seattle wants refunds for alleged overcharges made by Enron during the electricity market meltdown.
The utility obtained transcripts of routinely recorded trader discussions from the Justice Department, which seized them in its Enron investigation.
While it has long been established that Enron engaged in market-gaming tactics — two top traders have pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges for manipulating California's energy market and a third awaits trial — the 450 pages of recorded conversations provide another vivid look into the organization's exploitive subculture.
They also suggest that knowledge of alleged wrongdoing may have reached the level of Skilling, Enron's former chief executive, and Lay, the former chairman.
In a Sept. 14, 2000, conversation, an employee named "Sue" from Enron's governmental affairs operation checks in with a trader named "Bob" for information that could be used in an in-house presentation to corporate executives.
"This is the time of year when government affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," Sue said, according to the transcript.
The Snohomish utility identified Sue as Susan J. Mara, Enron's California director of regulatory affairs until December 2001, when she and thousands of others lost their jobs as the result of Enron's financial collapse.
In talking with Bob, whose identity couldn't immediately be learned, Mara touts Enron's success in delaying a lowering of energy price caps by state officials.
Then, still seeking helpful material for the planned executive presentation, she asks: "Do you know when you started overscheduling load and making buckets of money on that?"
Overscheduling load — a tactic that Enron traders famously dubbed "Fat Boy" — involved purposely overstating how much electricity would be needed in the future, creating the appearance of power shortages and leading to inflated prices.
Mara, who is now an energy consultant, said Monday that the recorded conversation came about as she gathered information for a budget presentation to be made to executives at corporate headquarters in Houston. "We had to show what our accomplishments were for the year," she said.
Mara said she didn't recall what the final presentation contained or which executives heard it. The presentation was not prepared expressly for Skilling and Lay, she said, even though her statement in the recorded conversation implied that they would hear it.
The trading tactics discussed on the recording weren't considered illegal or manipulative by Enron, Mara added.
Asked Monday about the transcripts, Enron spokeswoman Karen Denne declined to comment, save to say: "We have been and we're continuing to cooperate with all investigations."
Skilling's lawyer, Bruce Hiler, declined to comment. Earl J. Silbert, an attorney for Lay, could not immediately be reached.
Federal prosecutors in February brought a range of fraud charges against Skilling for his actions when he was at the helm at Enron, but none was related to trading in the California market. Lay has not been charged.
In a different conversation in the transcripts, Enron's West Coast trading chief, Timothy N. Belden, discusses the profitability of the company's strategies in California, particularly those executed by a trading desk led by Jeffrey S. Richter:
"Well he makes … between one and two [million] a day, which never shows up on any curve shift…. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million — "
At this point the other speaker interrupts, asking Belden to rephrase what he just said.
"OK," Belden says. "He, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."
Asked about the transcript Monday, Belden's lawyer, Chris Arguedas, said that it was not possible to draw conclusions about the meaning of Belden's remarks without a better sense of the whole conversation. "You can't understand words spoken unless you see the context in which they are spoken," she said.
In October 2002, Belden pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and has been cooperating with the government. Richter pleaded guilty to similar charges the following February.
A spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the state was continuing to investigate Enron. "The comments made in these transcripts, if they're accurate, contain the kind of information that could bolster" a case against Enron, said spokesman Tom Dresslar.
Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the Snohomish utility, said the transcripts strongly suggest top Enron executives knew of the trading ploys used in California.
"It was common knowledge at least in the government relations unit, and they reported to upper management in Houston," he said.
______________________________________________________________________
THE NATION LA TIMES
Enron Tapes Hint Chiefs Knew About Power Ploys
By Jonathan Peterson
May 18, 2004
WASHINGTON — Enron Corp. employees spoke of "stealing" up to $2 million a day from California during the 2000-01 energy crisis and suggested that their market-gaming ploys would be presented to top management, possibly including Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, according to documents released Monday.
The evidence of apparent scheming — in one recorded conversation, traders brag about taking money from "Grandma Millie" in California — is in a filing by a utility in Snohomish County, Wash. The municipal power unit north of Seattle wants refunds for alleged overcharges made by Enron during the electricity market meltdown.
The utility obtained transcripts of routinely recorded trader discussions from the Justice Department, which seized them in its Enron investigation.
While it has long been established that Enron engaged in market-gaming tactics — two top traders have pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges for manipulating California's energy market and a third awaits trial — the 450 pages of recorded conversations provide another vivid look into the organization's exploitive subculture.
They also suggest that knowledge of alleged wrongdoing may have reached the level of Skilling, Enron's former chief executive, and Lay, the former chairman.
In a Sept. 14, 2000, conversation, an employee named "Sue" from Enron's governmental affairs operation checks in with a trader named "Bob" for information that could be used in an in-house presentation to corporate executives.
"This is the time of year when government affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," Sue said, according to the transcript.
The Snohomish utility identified Sue as Susan J. Mara, Enron's California director of regulatory affairs until December 2001, when she and thousands of others lost their jobs as the result of Enron's financial collapse.
In talking with Bob, whose identity couldn't immediately be learned, Mara touts Enron's success in delaying a lowering of energy price caps by state officials.
Then, still seeking helpful material for the planned executive presentation, she asks: "Do you know when you started overscheduling load and making buckets of money on that?"
Overscheduling load — a tactic that Enron traders famously dubbed "Fat Boy" — involved purposely overstating how much electricity would be needed in the future, creating the appearance of power shortages and leading to inflated prices.
Mara, who is now an energy consultant, said Monday that the recorded conversation came about as she gathered information for a budget presentation to be made to executives at corporate headquarters in Houston. "We had to show what our accomplishments were for the year," she said.
Mara said she didn't recall what the final presentation contained or which executives heard it. The presentation was not prepared expressly for Skilling and Lay, she said, even though her statement in the recorded conversation implied that they would hear it.
The trading tactics discussed on the recording weren't considered illegal or manipulative by Enron, Mara added.
Asked Monday about the transcripts, Enron spokeswoman Karen Denne declined to comment, save to say: "We have been and we're continuing to cooperate with all investigations."
Skilling's lawyer, Bruce Hiler, declined to comment. Earl J. Silbert, an attorney for Lay, could not immediately be reached.
Federal prosecutors in February brought a range of fraud charges against Skilling for his actions when he was at the helm at Enron, but none was related to trading in the California market. Lay has not been charged.
In a different conversation in the transcripts, Enron's West Coast trading chief, Timothy N. Belden, discusses the profitability of the company's strategies in California, particularly those executed by a trading desk led by Jeffrey S. Richter:
"Well he makes … between one and two [million] a day, which never shows up on any curve shift…. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million — "
At this point the other speaker interrupts, asking Belden to rephrase what he just said.
"OK," Belden says. "He, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."
Asked about the transcript Monday, Belden's lawyer, Chris Arguedas, said that it was not possible to draw conclusions about the meaning of Belden's remarks without a better sense of the whole conversation. "You can't understand words spoken unless you see the context in which they are spoken," she said.
In October 2002, Belden pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and has been cooperating with the government. Richter pleaded guilty to similar charges the following February.
A spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the state was continuing to investigate Enron. "The comments made in these transcripts, if they're accurate, contain the kind of information that could bolster" a case against Enron, said spokesman Tom Dresslar.
Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the Snohomish utility, said the transcripts strongly suggest top Enron executives knew of the trading ploys used in California.
"It was common knowledge at least in the government relations unit, and they reported to upper management in Houston," he said.
______________________________________________________________________
Monday, May 17, 2004
Gee, the ONLY conclusion is that someone in the White House (cough, Cheney) cooked the intellegence to go to war.
CIA Wrong on Iraq 'Mobile Labs,' Powell Says
Sun May 16, 4:31 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was wrong about Iraq's purported pre-war mobile biological weapons laboratories, a key part of the case about suspected weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said on Sunday.
"I'm very concerned," he said in reply to a question on the NBC program "Meet the Press" about having used claims in a U.N. Security Council speech now known to have been "inaccurate and discredited."
"When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me," he said.
Last month, Powell described the assertions he made about the purported labs as "the most dramatic" element of his Feb. 5, 2003, speech. He acknowledged on April 2 the information was suspect but stopped short of drawing any public conclusions.
In his comments on NBC, Powell went further.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed, and I regret it," he said.
As recently as January, Vice President Dick Cheney cited the discovery of two trucks as "conclusive" evidence of the mobile labs described by Powell. But CIA Director George Tenet later told Congress he had warned Cheney not to be so categorical about the discovery.
A CIA spokesman declined comment.
______________________________________________________________________
CIA Wrong on Iraq 'Mobile Labs,' Powell Says
Sun May 16, 4:31 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was wrong about Iraq's purported pre-war mobile biological weapons laboratories, a key part of the case about suspected weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said on Sunday.
"I'm very concerned," he said in reply to a question on the NBC program "Meet the Press" about having used claims in a U.N. Security Council speech now known to have been "inaccurate and discredited."
"When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me," he said.
Last month, Powell described the assertions he made about the purported labs as "the most dramatic" element of his Feb. 5, 2003, speech. He acknowledged on April 2 the information was suspect but stopped short of drawing any public conclusions.
In his comments on NBC, Powell went further.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed, and I regret it," he said.
As recently as January, Vice President Dick Cheney cited the discovery of two trucks as "conclusive" evidence of the mobile labs described by Powell. But CIA Director George Tenet later told Congress he had warned Cheney not to be so categorical about the discovery.
A CIA spokesman declined comment.
______________________________________________________________________
Center for American Progress
UNDER THE RADAR
IRAQ
Another Body Blow
In a massive blow to the stabilization effort, the head of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated in a bombing near a U.S. checkpoint in Baghdad today. "Abdel-Zahraa Othman, also known as Izzadine Saleem, was the second and highest-ranking member of the U.S.-appointed council to be assassinated. He was among four Iraqis killed in the blast." This is the latest development in a war hobbled by setbacks, a lack of strategy and rampant mismanagement. The death signifies that one year after the end of "major combat operations," the country is still beset by violence and instability.
RUMSFELD'S SECRET SYSTEM: New reports in The New Yorker and Newsweek allege the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison wasn't triggered by a handful of errant reservists; it was the direct result of decisions made all the way at the top, by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Newsweek reports, President "Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door" to the abuse. "It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war." Specifically, Seymour Hersh writes, Rumsfeld, as part of his "long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA," approved a plan in Iraq which encouraged the "physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence."
A STATE OF DENIAL: The Pentagon has been quick to disavow the charges made by The New Yorker and Newsweek as part of a larger attempt to limit blame to low-level soldiers. But the denials are actually a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Hill Columnist Joshua Marshall points out, if you read the official denial statement by Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita, "This is not a denial of anything. It's a classic non-denial denial -- a bunch of aggressive phrases strung together to sound like a denial without actually denying anything."
STILL DON'T KNOW WHO'S IN CHARGE: The latest case in point: the NYT reports, "About 100 high-ranking Iraqi prisoners held for months at a time in spartan conditions on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport are being detained under a special chain of command, under conditions not subject to approval by the top American commander in Iraq." In this situation, so-called "high value detainees" have been held in strict solitary confinement "in small concrete cells without sunlight, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross." The conditions have been described by the ICRC as "a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that the Bush administration has said it regards as 'fully applicable' to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq." According to the rules, American commander Ricardo S. Sanchez must give his approval to all prisoners held in solitary for more than 30 days. However, "on Sunday, a senior military officer said that statement did not apply to the prisoners being held at the airport, because 'we were not the authority' for the high-value detainees." The military was unable to say who was in charge, and the U.S. has taken no steps to call a halt to the procedure.
LOSING FALLUJAH: Coalition forces are locked in battle with radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's militia in southern Iraq. The WP reports, the fierce fighting is "presenting U.S. officials with a more serious political challenge than the insurgency's still potent strongholds farther north." The ongoing battle "reflects the U.S. strategy of squeezing Sadr militarily while allowing a group of local Shiite leaders to broker a deal, much as Sunni Muslim leaders did this month in the western city of Fallujah." The U.S., however, may want to use a different model of success; the LAT reports this morning that, in fact, the deal that ostensibly brought stability to Fallujah actually handed power over to the guerrillas. Instead of a coalition victory, "Fallujah is for all intents and purposes a rebel town" which serves as "an inspirational ground zero for anti-Western militants in the Middle East, the place that beat back the Marines."
POWELL ADMITS MISTAKE: For the very first time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a major claim in his presentation to the United Nations, was faulty. Powell said, "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading...and for that, I am disappointed and I regret it." The NYT reports, "Taken with past admissions of error by the administration or its intelligence agencies, Mr. Powell's statement on Sunday leaves little room for the administration to argue that Mr. Hussein's stockpiles of unconventional weapons posed any real and imminent threat." (A State Department press aide tried to block the Powell from answering the question; Powell chastised her sharply and continued.) Powell's admission that his assertions were inaccurate provides "a sharp contrast to comments four months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the administration still believed that the trailers were part of a program of unconventional weapons, and added that he 'would deem that conclusive evidence' that Mr. Hussein in fact had such programs."
SENATORS SPEAK OUT: Two senators this weekend charged that the White House had made serious errors in the war in Iraq, resulting in a nation grappling with grave security issues. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on Meet the Press, "One [mistake] was the lack of sufficient troops there which allowed the looting to take place, which established kind of a lawless environment," as well as the fact that the U.S. didn't "make sufficient plans to turn over the government as quickly as possible." Sen. Biden concurred, saying, "As [McCain] pointed out, too few troops, looting, 850,000 tons of weapons left open, not able to guard them and then we went with too little legitimacy." An additional problem, said Biden, was the White House's inability to admit and fix existing problems: "They seem to be unwilling to acknowledge the mistakes made and trying to correct them."
GUANTANAMO BAY
Show Us the Videotape
There are new allegations that the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq also occurred at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Tarek Dergoul, a British prisoner freed from Guantanamo Bay last month, said that Camp Delta's punishment squad, called the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF), "pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed." Dergoul's description of his treatment was similar to three other British detainees – Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iabal and Ruhal Ahmed – released in March. The three alleged that, at Guantanamo, to be "ERFed" meant "being slammed against the floor wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and beaten up by five armed men." But there is no reason for speculation and allegation to continue. Dergoul also revealed that "every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened." The Guantanamo spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, confirmed that "all ERF actions were filmed" and "are kept in an archive there." Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said he "would demand that Rumsfeld must produce the videos this week."
GOVERNMENT ADAMANTLY DENIES ABUSE OCCURRED AT GUANTANAMO: According to government officials, the rules for prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay "forbid the kind of torture coming to light in Iraq." Officials do acknowledge that techniques at Guantanamo are designed to cause "disorientation, fatigue and stress" and put pressure on the "pride and ego" of the detainees. But Army Col. David McWilliams, spokesperson for the military command that runs Guantanamo, said the facility permits "no physical contact at all...our procedures prohibit us from disrobing for any reason at all." The only way to confirm McWilliams' claim: Release the videotape.
ABUSE AT GUANTANAMO ALREADY DOCUMENTED: There have already been confirmed cases of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. Two guards "received administrative punishments for hitting a detainee with a radio and spraying a detainee with a hose." It has been confirmed that "eight soldiers had been punished by being demoted or given less serious administrative punishment for offenses ranging from humiliating detainees to physical assault." But according to Navy Inspector General Thomas Church, who briefly visited Guantanamo to review the treatment of detainees, "there's more than eight." Army spokesman McWilliams claims the cases were not part of an interrogation strategy but "the misapplication of force...by a guard to a detainee's action." American Progress has called for the formation of an independent commission to investigate the charges of abuse at Guantanamo and other locations where the United States holds detainees.
RED CROSS CRITICIZES CONDITIONS AT GUANTANAMO AGAIN: Last week the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) "delivered the latest in a series of critical reports on treatment of prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay." According to a State Department official who read the report, it is "'critical' of living conditions and interrogation techniques used on detainees at the base." Last October the ICRC said that conditions at the prison resulted in the "deterioration in the psychological health of a large number" of prisoners – a contributing factor to the 32 suicide attempts that have occurred at the based. In January, their concerns about Guantanamo were so acute that ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger met privately with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice. According to Wolfowitz, "there are some serious issues between us and the Red Cross about Guantanamo...[but] they have nothing to do with the kinds of abuses that we've been hearing about in Iraq." The only way to confirm Wolfowitz's claim: Release the videotape.
GUANTANAMO CHOSEN BECAUSE NO RULES APPLY: According to Newsweek, "The appeal of Gitmo from the start was, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone – or 'the legal equivalent of outer space.'" A memo written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" and "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." The administration has been adamant that prisoners at Guantanamo are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
BANKING
The Bush-Riggs Connection
The decision last week by federal regulators to fine Riggs Bank $25 million for a "willful, systemic" violation of anti-money-laundering laws is raising new questions about whether the Bush administration's ties to powerful moneyed interests is unduly influencing U.S. foreign and national security policy. Riggs Bank is headed by longtime Bush family friend Joe Allbritton, employs President Bush's uncle Jonathan as a top executive, and other executives have been financial donors to the Bush campaign. The bank is at the center of a controversy, according to the Wall Street Journal, for failing to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian and Equatorial Guinean embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) "said members of the bank's board of directors should be held to account for failing to exercise their watchdog role over Riggs's operations" and said refusal to follow money laundering laws "allows terrorists to funnel their blood money through the system."
CONNECTION – JONATHAN BUSH AND RIGGS: Jonathan Bush, President Bush's uncle, was appointed CEO of Riggs Bank's investment arm in May of 2000, just months after his nephew secured the nomination for the presidency. At the time of the appointment, Jonathan Bush had already become a major financial backer of his nephew, rising to "Bush Pioneer" status by raising more than $100,000 for his nephew in 2000. The move solidified the relationship between Jonathan Bush and Riggs, which was originally initiated in 1997 when, according to American Banker newsletter, Riggs paid Bush $5.5 million for his smaller investment firm. That transaction, according to the NYT, "deepened [Riggs's] links to the Bushes." While Riggs denies any connection between Bush and the accounts being investigated in the money laundering probe, Riggs President Timothy Lex told the Washington Times in 1997 that "there's a blurring of distinctions between banks, mutual-fund families, broker dealers and everything else across the board."
CONNECTION - ALLBRITTON-BUSH LINK: Allbritton, who said during the federal probe that he was stepping down from Riggs's board, also was close to the Bush family. As the NYT reported, he (along with Riggs client Saudi Prince Bandar) was a financial backer of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, with National Journal noting he contributed between $100,000 - $250,000 to the project. And there also appears to be a personal bond with the current President Bush: As the 2/15/01 WP noted, "When President Bush climbed out of his limousine on Inauguration Day at the corner of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted Allbritton, waved and said, 'Hey Joe, how are you doing?'" That might have something to do with the fact that, according to the 11/7/2000 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Allbritton-owned TV station KATV in Little Rock broke 39 years of precedent and publicly endorsed Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The station, which is the biggest in the state, proceeded to air its endorsement 10 times throughout Arkansas, and refused to give equal time to Democrats "who asked for the time to present an alternative to the station's endorsement."
ACTION – LOOSENING BANKING REGS THAT COULD AFFECT RIGGS: According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's "Age of Sacred Terror," upon taking office the Bush administration tried to halt efforts to tighten international banking laws – some of which may have affected Riggs. As he notes, the new Bush Treasury Department "disapproved of the Clinton administration's approach to money laundering issues, which had been an important part of the drive to cut off the money flow to bin Laden." Specifically, the Bush administration opposed Clinton administration-backed efforts by the G-7 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that targeted countries with "loose banking regulations" being abused by terrorist financiers. Meanwhile, the Bush administration provided "no funding for the new National Terrorist Asset Tracking Center."
ACTION - HIDING INFORMATION THAT COULD BE DAMAGING TO RIGGS: Newsweek reported that checks to "two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers" may have come "from an account at Washington's Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan." This, and other details, were reportedly part of the bipartisan House-Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the Saudi money flow after 9/11. Yet, instead of allowing the committee's final report to be published in full, "Bush administration officials, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, have adamantly refused to declassify the evidence" surrounding the transactions.
ACTION – RESUMING RELATIONS WITH SORDID RIGGS CLIENT: Riggs's fines were also in relation to its business with Equatorial Guinea – the oil-rich West African country headed by brutal dictator Gen. Teodoro Obiang. As the LA Times notes, though the country's offshore oil fields "generate hundreds of millions of dollars, there are few signs of the petroleum boom" there, and the Guinean ambassador admits "the country's oil funds are held in an account at Riggs Bank" controlled by the dictator. But while the IMF and other international institutions have refused to do business with the regime until it accounts for its country's financial resources, the Bush administration "initiated a political thaw with the Obiang regime" in late 2001, "authorizing the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, which had been closed six years earlier, in large part due to the country's horrific human rights record." The move came even though "there's been little, if any, improvement" on human rights.
EDUCATION – BROWN V. BOARD ANNIVERSARY: The NYT reports that today, the anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools, the primary issue of educational equality "is often money." In Topeka, Kansas, where the Supreme Court case originated, the focus is often on cases involving "dozens of states embroiled in other lawsuits, accusing them of skimping on education spending." And President Bush's serious underfunding of Title I aid to disadvantaged school districts is adding to the problem. In Kansas' 2nd Congressional District, where Topeka is, the president's budget leaves more than 8,000 students without Title I aid because it refuses to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act.
SCIENCE – THANKS, NANCY: Under pressure from former first lady Nancy Reagan, the White House took its first step towards reversing its ban on using federal funds for stem-cell research. The NYT reports that "the Bush administration has acknowledged that additional lines, or colonies, of embryonic stem cells could speed scientific research." While the announcement denied the President would "sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos," advocates for patients "say it could mark the first step toward easing limits" on research outlined by President Bush in 2001.
AIDS – A REVERSAL OF POLICY: The Bush administration "announced a significant shift in its AIDS policy on Sunday, expediting the approval process for generic and combination antiretroviral drugs so they can be purchased at lower prices and provided more efficiently and safely to millions of infected people in Africa and the Caribbean." This is a large – and welcome – policy change; the Bush administration, bowing to pressure from the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, was previously trying to delay the "approval of less costly generic copies of AIDS drugs to promote the sale of the more expensive, patented originals." The change comes as the White House was facing heavy international criticism on its AIDS policy at a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva, which starts today.
SPECIAL INTERESTS – MONEY (IN) LAUNDERING: In the second part of its series on "The Bush Money Machine" the WP looks at Richard T. Farmer, a Bush "pioneer" (having raised at least $100,000 for the 2000 campaign) and "one of America's richest men." Farmer's family controls Cintas Corp., "a $2.7 billion company that rents and launders uniforms and industrial shop towels." Farmer's industry has traditionally found itself "at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency over increased regulation of shop towels." But never fear, a sizeable contribution to the Bush 2000 campaign seems to have bought Farmer and his towel industry a much more harmonious relationship with the EPA: "Last November, the EPA changed its position, adopting a more lenient proposal for the woven towels. Farmer and his industry were overjoyed, because the change promised to save them millions and preserve their advantage over the competition -- paper towels. 'It would have been a big problem,' Farmer said." For more, see Public Campaign's expose on this Bush Pioneer.
ENVIRO – GOING AFTER GREENPEACE: The Justice Department is suing Greenpeace over two activists who peacefully protested the Bush administration's logging policies. The two activists, who climbed aboard a ship involved in illegal logging in April 2002 intending to hang a sign, were arrested by federal authorities, spent a weekend in jail, pled guilty, and were sentenced to time already served. "But in July 2003, the Justice Department decided it wanted more," and indicted Greenpeace "under an obscure 'sailor-mongering' law enacted in the 19th Century to prevent touts from luring arriving sailors to their establishments with offers of liquor and prostitutes." Besides being "the first reported indictment under the sailor-mongering law in more than 100 years," the Government's attack on Greenpeace constitutes "the first time in U.S. history that the Government has prosecuted an organization for the speech-related activities of its supporters." Click here for more information on the trial beginning today.
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UNDER THE RADAR
IRAQ
Another Body Blow
In a massive blow to the stabilization effort, the head of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated in a bombing near a U.S. checkpoint in Baghdad today. "Abdel-Zahraa Othman, also known as Izzadine Saleem, was the second and highest-ranking member of the U.S.-appointed council to be assassinated. He was among four Iraqis killed in the blast." This is the latest development in a war hobbled by setbacks, a lack of strategy and rampant mismanagement. The death signifies that one year after the end of "major combat operations," the country is still beset by violence and instability.
RUMSFELD'S SECRET SYSTEM: New reports in The New Yorker and Newsweek allege the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison wasn't triggered by a handful of errant reservists; it was the direct result of decisions made all the way at the top, by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Newsweek reports, President "Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door" to the abuse. "It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war." Specifically, Seymour Hersh writes, Rumsfeld, as part of his "long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA," approved a plan in Iraq which encouraged the "physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence."
A STATE OF DENIAL: The Pentagon has been quick to disavow the charges made by The New Yorker and Newsweek as part of a larger attempt to limit blame to low-level soldiers. But the denials are actually a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Hill Columnist Joshua Marshall points out, if you read the official denial statement by Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita, "This is not a denial of anything. It's a classic non-denial denial -- a bunch of aggressive phrases strung together to sound like a denial without actually denying anything."
STILL DON'T KNOW WHO'S IN CHARGE: The latest case in point: the NYT reports, "About 100 high-ranking Iraqi prisoners held for months at a time in spartan conditions on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport are being detained under a special chain of command, under conditions not subject to approval by the top American commander in Iraq." In this situation, so-called "high value detainees" have been held in strict solitary confinement "in small concrete cells without sunlight, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross." The conditions have been described by the ICRC as "a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that the Bush administration has said it regards as 'fully applicable' to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq." According to the rules, American commander Ricardo S. Sanchez must give his approval to all prisoners held in solitary for more than 30 days. However, "on Sunday, a senior military officer said that statement did not apply to the prisoners being held at the airport, because 'we were not the authority' for the high-value detainees." The military was unable to say who was in charge, and the U.S. has taken no steps to call a halt to the procedure.
LOSING FALLUJAH: Coalition forces are locked in battle with radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's militia in southern Iraq. The WP reports, the fierce fighting is "presenting U.S. officials with a more serious political challenge than the insurgency's still potent strongholds farther north." The ongoing battle "reflects the U.S. strategy of squeezing Sadr militarily while allowing a group of local Shiite leaders to broker a deal, much as Sunni Muslim leaders did this month in the western city of Fallujah." The U.S., however, may want to use a different model of success; the LAT reports this morning that, in fact, the deal that ostensibly brought stability to Fallujah actually handed power over to the guerrillas. Instead of a coalition victory, "Fallujah is for all intents and purposes a rebel town" which serves as "an inspirational ground zero for anti-Western militants in the Middle East, the place that beat back the Marines."
POWELL ADMITS MISTAKE: For the very first time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a major claim in his presentation to the United Nations, was faulty. Powell said, "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading...and for that, I am disappointed and I regret it." The NYT reports, "Taken with past admissions of error by the administration or its intelligence agencies, Mr. Powell's statement on Sunday leaves little room for the administration to argue that Mr. Hussein's stockpiles of unconventional weapons posed any real and imminent threat." (A State Department press aide tried to block the Powell from answering the question; Powell chastised her sharply and continued.) Powell's admission that his assertions were inaccurate provides "a sharp contrast to comments four months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the administration still believed that the trailers were part of a program of unconventional weapons, and added that he 'would deem that conclusive evidence' that Mr. Hussein in fact had such programs."
SENATORS SPEAK OUT: Two senators this weekend charged that the White House had made serious errors in the war in Iraq, resulting in a nation grappling with grave security issues. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on Meet the Press, "One [mistake] was the lack of sufficient troops there which allowed the looting to take place, which established kind of a lawless environment," as well as the fact that the U.S. didn't "make sufficient plans to turn over the government as quickly as possible." Sen. Biden concurred, saying, "As [McCain] pointed out, too few troops, looting, 850,000 tons of weapons left open, not able to guard them and then we went with too little legitimacy." An additional problem, said Biden, was the White House's inability to admit and fix existing problems: "They seem to be unwilling to acknowledge the mistakes made and trying to correct them."
GUANTANAMO BAY
Show Us the Videotape
There are new allegations that the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq also occurred at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Tarek Dergoul, a British prisoner freed from Guantanamo Bay last month, said that Camp Delta's punishment squad, called the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF), "pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed." Dergoul's description of his treatment was similar to three other British detainees – Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iabal and Ruhal Ahmed – released in March. The three alleged that, at Guantanamo, to be "ERFed" meant "being slammed against the floor wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and beaten up by five armed men." But there is no reason for speculation and allegation to continue. Dergoul also revealed that "every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened." The Guantanamo spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, confirmed that "all ERF actions were filmed" and "are kept in an archive there." Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said he "would demand that Rumsfeld must produce the videos this week."
GOVERNMENT ADAMANTLY DENIES ABUSE OCCURRED AT GUANTANAMO: According to government officials, the rules for prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay "forbid the kind of torture coming to light in Iraq." Officials do acknowledge that techniques at Guantanamo are designed to cause "disorientation, fatigue and stress" and put pressure on the "pride and ego" of the detainees. But Army Col. David McWilliams, spokesperson for the military command that runs Guantanamo, said the facility permits "no physical contact at all...our procedures prohibit us from disrobing for any reason at all." The only way to confirm McWilliams' claim: Release the videotape.
ABUSE AT GUANTANAMO ALREADY DOCUMENTED: There have already been confirmed cases of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. Two guards "received administrative punishments for hitting a detainee with a radio and spraying a detainee with a hose." It has been confirmed that "eight soldiers had been punished by being demoted or given less serious administrative punishment for offenses ranging from humiliating detainees to physical assault." But according to Navy Inspector General Thomas Church, who briefly visited Guantanamo to review the treatment of detainees, "there's more than eight." Army spokesman McWilliams claims the cases were not part of an interrogation strategy but "the misapplication of force...by a guard to a detainee's action." American Progress has called for the formation of an independent commission to investigate the charges of abuse at Guantanamo and other locations where the United States holds detainees.
RED CROSS CRITICIZES CONDITIONS AT GUANTANAMO AGAIN: Last week the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) "delivered the latest in a series of critical reports on treatment of prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay." According to a State Department official who read the report, it is "'critical' of living conditions and interrogation techniques used on detainees at the base." Last October the ICRC said that conditions at the prison resulted in the "deterioration in the psychological health of a large number" of prisoners – a contributing factor to the 32 suicide attempts that have occurred at the based. In January, their concerns about Guantanamo were so acute that ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger met privately with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice. According to Wolfowitz, "there are some serious issues between us and the Red Cross about Guantanamo...[but] they have nothing to do with the kinds of abuses that we've been hearing about in Iraq." The only way to confirm Wolfowitz's claim: Release the videotape.
GUANTANAMO CHOSEN BECAUSE NO RULES APPLY: According to Newsweek, "The appeal of Gitmo from the start was, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone – or 'the legal equivalent of outer space.'" A memo written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" and "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." The administration has been adamant that prisoners at Guantanamo are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
BANKING
The Bush-Riggs Connection
The decision last week by federal regulators to fine Riggs Bank $25 million for a "willful, systemic" violation of anti-money-laundering laws is raising new questions about whether the Bush administration's ties to powerful moneyed interests is unduly influencing U.S. foreign and national security policy. Riggs Bank is headed by longtime Bush family friend Joe Allbritton, employs President Bush's uncle Jonathan as a top executive, and other executives have been financial donors to the Bush campaign. The bank is at the center of a controversy, according to the Wall Street Journal, for failing to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian and Equatorial Guinean embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) "said members of the bank's board of directors should be held to account for failing to exercise their watchdog role over Riggs's operations" and said refusal to follow money laundering laws "allows terrorists to funnel their blood money through the system."
CONNECTION – JONATHAN BUSH AND RIGGS: Jonathan Bush, President Bush's uncle, was appointed CEO of Riggs Bank's investment arm in May of 2000, just months after his nephew secured the nomination for the presidency. At the time of the appointment, Jonathan Bush had already become a major financial backer of his nephew, rising to "Bush Pioneer" status by raising more than $100,000 for his nephew in 2000. The move solidified the relationship between Jonathan Bush and Riggs, which was originally initiated in 1997 when, according to American Banker newsletter, Riggs paid Bush $5.5 million for his smaller investment firm. That transaction, according to the NYT, "deepened [Riggs's] links to the Bushes." While Riggs denies any connection between Bush and the accounts being investigated in the money laundering probe, Riggs President Timothy Lex told the Washington Times in 1997 that "there's a blurring of distinctions between banks, mutual-fund families, broker dealers and everything else across the board."
CONNECTION - ALLBRITTON-BUSH LINK: Allbritton, who said during the federal probe that he was stepping down from Riggs's board, also was close to the Bush family. As the NYT reported, he (along with Riggs client Saudi Prince Bandar) was a financial backer of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, with National Journal noting he contributed between $100,000 - $250,000 to the project. And there also appears to be a personal bond with the current President Bush: As the 2/15/01 WP noted, "When President Bush climbed out of his limousine on Inauguration Day at the corner of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted Allbritton, waved and said, 'Hey Joe, how are you doing?'" That might have something to do with the fact that, according to the 11/7/2000 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Allbritton-owned TV station KATV in Little Rock broke 39 years of precedent and publicly endorsed Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The station, which is the biggest in the state, proceeded to air its endorsement 10 times throughout Arkansas, and refused to give equal time to Democrats "who asked for the time to present an alternative to the station's endorsement."
ACTION – LOOSENING BANKING REGS THAT COULD AFFECT RIGGS: According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's "Age of Sacred Terror," upon taking office the Bush administration tried to halt efforts to tighten international banking laws – some of which may have affected Riggs. As he notes, the new Bush Treasury Department "disapproved of the Clinton administration's approach to money laundering issues, which had been an important part of the drive to cut off the money flow to bin Laden." Specifically, the Bush administration opposed Clinton administration-backed efforts by the G-7 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that targeted countries with "loose banking regulations" being abused by terrorist financiers. Meanwhile, the Bush administration provided "no funding for the new National Terrorist Asset Tracking Center."
ACTION - HIDING INFORMATION THAT COULD BE DAMAGING TO RIGGS: Newsweek reported that checks to "two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers" may have come "from an account at Washington's Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan." This, and other details, were reportedly part of the bipartisan House-Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the Saudi money flow after 9/11. Yet, instead of allowing the committee's final report to be published in full, "Bush administration officials, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, have adamantly refused to declassify the evidence" surrounding the transactions.
ACTION – RESUMING RELATIONS WITH SORDID RIGGS CLIENT: Riggs's fines were also in relation to its business with Equatorial Guinea – the oil-rich West African country headed by brutal dictator Gen. Teodoro Obiang. As the LA Times notes, though the country's offshore oil fields "generate hundreds of millions of dollars, there are few signs of the petroleum boom" there, and the Guinean ambassador admits "the country's oil funds are held in an account at Riggs Bank" controlled by the dictator. But while the IMF and other international institutions have refused to do business with the regime until it accounts for its country's financial resources, the Bush administration "initiated a political thaw with the Obiang regime" in late 2001, "authorizing the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, which had been closed six years earlier, in large part due to the country's horrific human rights record." The move came even though "there's been little, if any, improvement" on human rights.
EDUCATION – BROWN V. BOARD ANNIVERSARY: The NYT reports that today, the anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools, the primary issue of educational equality "is often money." In Topeka, Kansas, where the Supreme Court case originated, the focus is often on cases involving "dozens of states embroiled in other lawsuits, accusing them of skimping on education spending." And President Bush's serious underfunding of Title I aid to disadvantaged school districts is adding to the problem. In Kansas' 2nd Congressional District, where Topeka is, the president's budget leaves more than 8,000 students without Title I aid because it refuses to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act.
SCIENCE – THANKS, NANCY: Under pressure from former first lady Nancy Reagan, the White House took its first step towards reversing its ban on using federal funds for stem-cell research. The NYT reports that "the Bush administration has acknowledged that additional lines, or colonies, of embryonic stem cells could speed scientific research." While the announcement denied the President would "sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos," advocates for patients "say it could mark the first step toward easing limits" on research outlined by President Bush in 2001.
AIDS – A REVERSAL OF POLICY: The Bush administration "announced a significant shift in its AIDS policy on Sunday, expediting the approval process for generic and combination antiretroviral drugs so they can be purchased at lower prices and provided more efficiently and safely to millions of infected people in Africa and the Caribbean." This is a large – and welcome – policy change; the Bush administration, bowing to pressure from the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, was previously trying to delay the "approval of less costly generic copies of AIDS drugs to promote the sale of the more expensive, patented originals." The change comes as the White House was facing heavy international criticism on its AIDS policy at a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva, which starts today.
SPECIAL INTERESTS – MONEY (IN) LAUNDERING: In the second part of its series on "The Bush Money Machine" the WP looks at Richard T. Farmer, a Bush "pioneer" (having raised at least $100,000 for the 2000 campaign) and "one of America's richest men." Farmer's family controls Cintas Corp., "a $2.7 billion company that rents and launders uniforms and industrial shop towels." Farmer's industry has traditionally found itself "at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency over increased regulation of shop towels." But never fear, a sizeable contribution to the Bush 2000 campaign seems to have bought Farmer and his towel industry a much more harmonious relationship with the EPA: "Last November, the EPA changed its position, adopting a more lenient proposal for the woven towels. Farmer and his industry were overjoyed, because the change promised to save them millions and preserve their advantage over the competition -- paper towels. 'It would have been a big problem,' Farmer said." For more, see Public Campaign's expose on this Bush Pioneer.
ENVIRO – GOING AFTER GREENPEACE: The Justice Department is suing Greenpeace over two activists who peacefully protested the Bush administration's logging policies. The two activists, who climbed aboard a ship involved in illegal logging in April 2002 intending to hang a sign, were arrested by federal authorities, spent a weekend in jail, pled guilty, and were sentenced to time already served. "But in July 2003, the Justice Department decided it wanted more," and indicted Greenpeace "under an obscure 'sailor-mongering' law enacted in the 19th Century to prevent touts from luring arriving sailors to their establishments with offers of liquor and prostitutes." Besides being "the first reported indictment under the sailor-mongering law in more than 100 years," the Government's attack on Greenpeace constitutes "the first time in U.S. history that the Government has prosecuted an organization for the speech-related activities of its supporters." Click here for more information on the trial beginning today.
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This reporter on this article gives too much credit to the average American's knowledge of the Bush family's connections to the Saudis. Just like a majority of Americans believe Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks! Moore's film will spell it all out for them.
May 17, 2004 NY TIMES
A Film to Polarize Along Party Lines
By JIM RUTENBERG
The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer.
A reporter for The New York Times was invited to a screening of the film last week. "Fahrenheit 9/11" focuses on longstanding ties between the Bush family, its associates and prominent Saudis and on whether those ties clouded the president's judgment in recognizing warning signs before the Sept. 11 attacks and hampered his response afterward.
Mr. Moore extends his critique of the president to his conduct of the war in Iraq, arguing that the war is victimizing not only Iraqis but also the lower-income enlisted Americans who are fighting in it. In addition he attempts to make a case that the government's terrorism alerts at home are being used to repeal some civil liberties.
These are the subjects that have made "Fahrenheit 9/11" such a political hot potato. Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's company and the original primary investor in the film, backed out last spring, and Miramax Films, a Disney division run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, stepped in.
Although Disney executives said they made clear last May that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, it was only recently that the Weinsteins became convinced they would not be able to budge their corporate masters. Two weeks ago Mr. Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine," went public to protest Disney's actions. "Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show," he said at the time. (Last week, Disney agreed to sell the movie to the Weinsteins, who can arrange for its distribution in North America, though not under the Miramax name.)
But Republicans predict many viewers will discount the film as an anti-Bush screed, and that it will ultimately have no effect on the election. Democrats say they hope it will feed growing discontent in the United States with Mr. Bush's Iraq policy and help the campaign of Senator John Kerry, his presumptive Democratic challenger.
Mr. Moore is confident it will sway votes against Mr. Bush, though he notes the film, into which he also has tried to inject a good dose of humor, is likewise critical of Democrats for not posing any significant opposition to Mr. Bush after Sept. 11. Mr. Moore said he was considering making at least one sequence from the film available to the news media today after he presents it at the Cannes film festival: that of American soldiers laughing and taking pictures as they place hoods over Iraqi detainees, with one of them touching a prisoner's genitals through a blanket.
Mr. Moore and his production team said they also believed the film would get attention for showing that a name excised from one of Mr. Bush's National Guard records was that of an investment counselor for one of Osama bin Laden's brothers, Salem.
In a copy of the record released by the National Guard in 2000, the man in question, James R. Bath, was listed as being suspended from flying for the National Guard in 1972 for failing to take a medical exam next to a similar listing for Mr. Bush. It has been widely reported that the two were friends and that Mr. Bath invested in Mr. Bush's first major business venture, Arbusto Energy, in the late 1970's after Mr. Bath began working for Salem bin Laden.
Mr. Bath and the White House have said that the money he invested in Mr. Bush's company was his, not that of Mr. bin Laden. The White House said Friday that Mr. Bath's name was expunged from the record it released in February only to protect his privacy and should have been in 2000, as well.
That is one of several connections Mr. Moore highlights in the film between Mr. Bush, his family and associates and Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden. As White House officials noted last week, however, many of these connections have been made elsewhere, most recently in "House of Bush, House of Saud," by Craig Unger (Scribner, 2004).
But writ large on the big screen with Mr. Moore's narration and set to music, the connections could still prove revelatory to those who have not paid close attention to reports about Saudi Arabia's connections to Mr. Bush and his associates. At the screening last week audience members — including people featured in the film like the mother of a serviceman killed in Iraq and a soldier unwilling to return — exclaimed loudly when Mr. Moore's narration spelled them out.
In one connection the film notes that Mr. Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, worked as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private investment company with various ties to Saudi Arabia and even, for some years, to the family of Osama bin Laden.
"My point is first of all that the Bushes were so close to the Saudis that they essentially had turned a blind eye to what was really going on before 9/11," Mr. Moore said in an interview. "And after 9/11 they were in denial."
More specifically the movie implies that the Saudi connections explain why the United States facilitated the departure of dozens of Saudi nationals from the country — including relatives of Osama bin Laden — shortly after the attacks, and charges they were not properly questioned. But like other points in the film, critics will certainly argue with that assertion, and may not have to go far to seek ammunition. The independent panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks recently reported that it believed that the evacuation was handled properly. And the family of Osama bin Laden disowned him in the 1990's and says that it has no relationship with him anymore.
Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, said that any ties between Mr. Bush and his associates and prominent Saudi Arabians should not be considered odd. "Look at any Texas family that's involved in the oil or oil services, and you will find they have a lot of connections to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf," he said, referring to assertions that the connections add up to anything more than that as nonsense.
After hearing a description of the some of the connections made in the film, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said, "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment."
Mr. Bartlett also said he had no comment on the sections of the film that address the war in Iraq, which include gruesome images of violence, like a man angrily holding up an infant's charred corpse after an American attack and the exposed bone of a shrapnel-infused leg.
Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he believed there was no need to prepare a public challenge to the film's validity upon its release. "People are smart enough to know that this is someone who is very angry, who has for some time had a clearly partisan agenda," he said.
Just the same, Democratic operatives said they believed viewers' opinions of Mr. Moore would not matter if his film raised new or even old questions about Mr. Bush.
________________________________________________________________________
May 17, 2004 NY TIMES
A Film to Polarize Along Party Lines
By JIM RUTENBERG
The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer.
A reporter for The New York Times was invited to a screening of the film last week. "Fahrenheit 9/11" focuses on longstanding ties between the Bush family, its associates and prominent Saudis and on whether those ties clouded the president's judgment in recognizing warning signs before the Sept. 11 attacks and hampered his response afterward.
Mr. Moore extends his critique of the president to his conduct of the war in Iraq, arguing that the war is victimizing not only Iraqis but also the lower-income enlisted Americans who are fighting in it. In addition he attempts to make a case that the government's terrorism alerts at home are being used to repeal some civil liberties.
These are the subjects that have made "Fahrenheit 9/11" such a political hot potato. Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's company and the original primary investor in the film, backed out last spring, and Miramax Films, a Disney division run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, stepped in.
Although Disney executives said they made clear last May that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, it was only recently that the Weinsteins became convinced they would not be able to budge their corporate masters. Two weeks ago Mr. Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine," went public to protest Disney's actions. "Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show," he said at the time. (Last week, Disney agreed to sell the movie to the Weinsteins, who can arrange for its distribution in North America, though not under the Miramax name.)
But Republicans predict many viewers will discount the film as an anti-Bush screed, and that it will ultimately have no effect on the election. Democrats say they hope it will feed growing discontent in the United States with Mr. Bush's Iraq policy and help the campaign of Senator John Kerry, his presumptive Democratic challenger.
Mr. Moore is confident it will sway votes against Mr. Bush, though he notes the film, into which he also has tried to inject a good dose of humor, is likewise critical of Democrats for not posing any significant opposition to Mr. Bush after Sept. 11. Mr. Moore said he was considering making at least one sequence from the film available to the news media today after he presents it at the Cannes film festival: that of American soldiers laughing and taking pictures as they place hoods over Iraqi detainees, with one of them touching a prisoner's genitals through a blanket.
Mr. Moore and his production team said they also believed the film would get attention for showing that a name excised from one of Mr. Bush's National Guard records was that of an investment counselor for one of Osama bin Laden's brothers, Salem.
In a copy of the record released by the National Guard in 2000, the man in question, James R. Bath, was listed as being suspended from flying for the National Guard in 1972 for failing to take a medical exam next to a similar listing for Mr. Bush. It has been widely reported that the two were friends and that Mr. Bath invested in Mr. Bush's first major business venture, Arbusto Energy, in the late 1970's after Mr. Bath began working for Salem bin Laden.
Mr. Bath and the White House have said that the money he invested in Mr. Bush's company was his, not that of Mr. bin Laden. The White House said Friday that Mr. Bath's name was expunged from the record it released in February only to protect his privacy and should have been in 2000, as well.
That is one of several connections Mr. Moore highlights in the film between Mr. Bush, his family and associates and Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden. As White House officials noted last week, however, many of these connections have been made elsewhere, most recently in "House of Bush, House of Saud," by Craig Unger (Scribner, 2004).
But writ large on the big screen with Mr. Moore's narration and set to music, the connections could still prove revelatory to those who have not paid close attention to reports about Saudi Arabia's connections to Mr. Bush and his associates. At the screening last week audience members — including people featured in the film like the mother of a serviceman killed in Iraq and a soldier unwilling to return — exclaimed loudly when Mr. Moore's narration spelled them out.
In one connection the film notes that Mr. Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, worked as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private investment company with various ties to Saudi Arabia and even, for some years, to the family of Osama bin Laden.
"My point is first of all that the Bushes were so close to the Saudis that they essentially had turned a blind eye to what was really going on before 9/11," Mr. Moore said in an interview. "And after 9/11 they were in denial."
More specifically the movie implies that the Saudi connections explain why the United States facilitated the departure of dozens of Saudi nationals from the country — including relatives of Osama bin Laden — shortly after the attacks, and charges they were not properly questioned. But like other points in the film, critics will certainly argue with that assertion, and may not have to go far to seek ammunition. The independent panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks recently reported that it believed that the evacuation was handled properly. And the family of Osama bin Laden disowned him in the 1990's and says that it has no relationship with him anymore.
Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, said that any ties between Mr. Bush and his associates and prominent Saudi Arabians should not be considered odd. "Look at any Texas family that's involved in the oil or oil services, and you will find they have a lot of connections to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf," he said, referring to assertions that the connections add up to anything more than that as nonsense.
After hearing a description of the some of the connections made in the film, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said, "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment."
Mr. Bartlett also said he had no comment on the sections of the film that address the war in Iraq, which include gruesome images of violence, like a man angrily holding up an infant's charred corpse after an American attack and the exposed bone of a shrapnel-infused leg.
Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he believed there was no need to prepare a public challenge to the film's validity upon its release. "People are smart enough to know that this is someone who is very angry, who has for some time had a clearly partisan agenda," he said.
Just the same, Democratic operatives said they believed viewers' opinions of Mr. Moore would not matter if his film raised new or even old questions about Mr. Bush.
________________________________________________________________________
Sunday, May 16, 2004
May 16, 2004 NY TIMES
The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
By JOHN TIERNEY
WASHINGTON — Not long ago, the word "triumphalist" was being applied to the neoconservatives and other intellectuals who championed the war in Iraq. Now the buzzwords are "depressed," "angst-ridden" and "going wobbly."
After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there's a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.
Most blame the administration for botching the mission, and some are also questioning their own judgment. How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East? To these self-doubting hawks, the conservatives now blaming American officials for Iraq's problems are reminiscent of the leftists who kept blaming incompetents in the Kremlin for the failure of Communism.
Some hawks are staying the course. Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, is still defended by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists like Charles Krauthammer, of The Washington Post, and William Safire, of The New York Times, who has dismissed the idea of speeding the transition as "cut and walk fast." Rush Limbaugh has accused liberal journalists of overreacting to the prison scandal.
When asked on Friday about the criticism from his fellow neoconservatives, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz acknowledged difficulties but seemed unfazed. "Saddam's murderers and torturers who abused the Iraqi people for 35 years have proven to be a tough as well as ruthless enemy," he said. "But no one should have expected a cakewalk and that's no reason to go wobbly now. I spend most of my time with officers and soldiers, and they're not defeatists - not even the ones who suffered terrible wounds in Iraq."
But many hawks across the political spectrum are having public second thoughts. The National Review has dismissed the Wilsonian ideal of implanting democracy in Iraq, and has recommended settling for an orderly society with a non-dictatorial government. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, wrote that America entered Iraq with a "childish fantasy" and is now "a shellshocked hegemon." Journalists like Robert Novak, Max Boot and Thomas Friedman have encouraged Mr. Rumsfeld to resign.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, two influential hawks at the neoconservative Weekly Standard, warned in last week's issue of the widespread bipartisan view that the war "is already lost or on the verge of being lost." They called for moving up the election in Iraq to Sept. 30 to hasten the transition and distract attention from American mistakes.
"There's a fair amount of conservative despair, which I respect," Mr. Kristol, the magazine's editor, said in an interview. "My sentiments are closer to anger than to angst. My anger is at the administration for having made many more mistakes than it needed to have made. But we still have to win and we still can win."
Andrew Sullivan, the conservative blogger, has questioned whether it was foolish to trust the Bush administration to wage the war competently. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Mr. Sullivan posted such pained thoughts questioning the moral justification for the war that he was inundated with e-mail messages telling him to buck up.
"Now I'm being bashed for going wobbly," Mr. Sullivan said. "I'm still in favor of this war and still desperately want it to succeed, but when the case we made for war is undermined by events, we have to acknowledge that and explain why the case for war still stands. Sometimes politicians have to stick to scripts regardless of the facts, but a writer has an obligation to be more honest."
These second thoughts seem a bit late to some non-conservative hawks like Kenneth M. Pollack and Fareed Zakaria. Although Mr. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution, wrote an influential book urging war against Iraq, he called the administration's plan ill-conceived before the war began. Mr. Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, turned on the administration shortly after the occupation began.
"All the big mistakes were made in the first three or four months, when the administration didn't send in enough troops and spurned international cooperation," Mr. Zakaria said. "But the neoconservatives were cheering them on. Now that it's going south, they're simply blowing with the wind. In retrospect, the critics I have a lot of respect for are the realist conservatives who said long before the war that you're opening up a hornet's nest and the costs will outweigh the benefits."
The columnist George Will suggested the administration get a dose of conservatism without the "neo" prefix, and Tucker Carlson, of CNN's "Crossfire," said he, too, had gained respect for old-fashioned conservatism.
"I supported the war and now I feel foolish," Mr. Carlson said. "I'm just struck by how many people like me who were instinctively distrustful of government forgot to be humble in our expectations. The idea that the federal government can quickly transform the Middle East seems odd to me for a conservative. A basic tenet of conservatism is that it's much easier to destroy things than to create them - much easier, and more fun, too."
Mr. Wolfowitz disputed the notion that American officials had unrealistic expectations. "The purpose of this war wasn't to remake Iraq any more than the purpose of World War II was to remake Germany and Japan," he said. " But having removed Saddam Hussein, we have to put something better in his place. Do they think it would have been realistic to continue with another 12 years of containment after Sept. 11?"
Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard professor who famously predicted that the cold war's end would be followed not by the global spread of Western capitalism and democracy but by a "clash of civilizations," said he agreed with the need to combat foreign enemies with pre-emptive action in some cases. But he did not consider Iraq one of those imminent threats and opposed the invasion.
"We just didn't realize how totally different the culture is in Middle Eastern countries," he said. "Before the Iraq war, I predicted that we would quickly defeat Saddam Hussein and then find ourselves in a second war against the Iraqi people that we could never win." A similar prediction was issued last fall by Owen Harries, the former editor of The National Interest. In an essay in "The American Conservative," Mr. Harries quoted Edmund Burke's classic essays on the dangers of remaking society at home or abroad.
"We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power," Burke wrote of the British empire in the 1770's. "But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin."
It would be hyperbolic to say that Burke's heirs quite share his sense of doom. But they're not sounding much cheerier these days.
__________________________________________________________________________
The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
By JOHN TIERNEY
WASHINGTON — Not long ago, the word "triumphalist" was being applied to the neoconservatives and other intellectuals who championed the war in Iraq. Now the buzzwords are "depressed," "angst-ridden" and "going wobbly."
After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there's a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.
Most blame the administration for botching the mission, and some are also questioning their own judgment. How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East? To these self-doubting hawks, the conservatives now blaming American officials for Iraq's problems are reminiscent of the leftists who kept blaming incompetents in the Kremlin for the failure of Communism.
Some hawks are staying the course. Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, is still defended by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists like Charles Krauthammer, of The Washington Post, and William Safire, of The New York Times, who has dismissed the idea of speeding the transition as "cut and walk fast." Rush Limbaugh has accused liberal journalists of overreacting to the prison scandal.
When asked on Friday about the criticism from his fellow neoconservatives, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz acknowledged difficulties but seemed unfazed. "Saddam's murderers and torturers who abused the Iraqi people for 35 years have proven to be a tough as well as ruthless enemy," he said. "But no one should have expected a cakewalk and that's no reason to go wobbly now. I spend most of my time with officers and soldiers, and they're not defeatists - not even the ones who suffered terrible wounds in Iraq."
But many hawks across the political spectrum are having public second thoughts. The National Review has dismissed the Wilsonian ideal of implanting democracy in Iraq, and has recommended settling for an orderly society with a non-dictatorial government. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, wrote that America entered Iraq with a "childish fantasy" and is now "a shellshocked hegemon." Journalists like Robert Novak, Max Boot and Thomas Friedman have encouraged Mr. Rumsfeld to resign.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, two influential hawks at the neoconservative Weekly Standard, warned in last week's issue of the widespread bipartisan view that the war "is already lost or on the verge of being lost." They called for moving up the election in Iraq to Sept. 30 to hasten the transition and distract attention from American mistakes.
"There's a fair amount of conservative despair, which I respect," Mr. Kristol, the magazine's editor, said in an interview. "My sentiments are closer to anger than to angst. My anger is at the administration for having made many more mistakes than it needed to have made. But we still have to win and we still can win."
Andrew Sullivan, the conservative blogger, has questioned whether it was foolish to trust the Bush administration to wage the war competently. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Mr. Sullivan posted such pained thoughts questioning the moral justification for the war that he was inundated with e-mail messages telling him to buck up.
"Now I'm being bashed for going wobbly," Mr. Sullivan said. "I'm still in favor of this war and still desperately want it to succeed, but when the case we made for war is undermined by events, we have to acknowledge that and explain why the case for war still stands. Sometimes politicians have to stick to scripts regardless of the facts, but a writer has an obligation to be more honest."
These second thoughts seem a bit late to some non-conservative hawks like Kenneth M. Pollack and Fareed Zakaria. Although Mr. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution, wrote an influential book urging war against Iraq, he called the administration's plan ill-conceived before the war began. Mr. Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, turned on the administration shortly after the occupation began.
"All the big mistakes were made in the first three or four months, when the administration didn't send in enough troops and spurned international cooperation," Mr. Zakaria said. "But the neoconservatives were cheering them on. Now that it's going south, they're simply blowing with the wind. In retrospect, the critics I have a lot of respect for are the realist conservatives who said long before the war that you're opening up a hornet's nest and the costs will outweigh the benefits."
The columnist George Will suggested the administration get a dose of conservatism without the "neo" prefix, and Tucker Carlson, of CNN's "Crossfire," said he, too, had gained respect for old-fashioned conservatism.
"I supported the war and now I feel foolish," Mr. Carlson said. "I'm just struck by how many people like me who were instinctively distrustful of government forgot to be humble in our expectations. The idea that the federal government can quickly transform the Middle East seems odd to me for a conservative. A basic tenet of conservatism is that it's much easier to destroy things than to create them - much easier, and more fun, too."
Mr. Wolfowitz disputed the notion that American officials had unrealistic expectations. "The purpose of this war wasn't to remake Iraq any more than the purpose of World War II was to remake Germany and Japan," he said. " But having removed Saddam Hussein, we have to put something better in his place. Do they think it would have been realistic to continue with another 12 years of containment after Sept. 11?"
Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard professor who famously predicted that the cold war's end would be followed not by the global spread of Western capitalism and democracy but by a "clash of civilizations," said he agreed with the need to combat foreign enemies with pre-emptive action in some cases. But he did not consider Iraq one of those imminent threats and opposed the invasion.
"We just didn't realize how totally different the culture is in Middle Eastern countries," he said. "Before the Iraq war, I predicted that we would quickly defeat Saddam Hussein and then find ourselves in a second war against the Iraqi people that we could never win." A similar prediction was issued last fall by Owen Harries, the former editor of The National Interest. In an essay in "The American Conservative," Mr. Harries quoted Edmund Burke's classic essays on the dangers of remaking society at home or abroad.
"We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power," Burke wrote of the British empire in the 1770's. "But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin."
It would be hyperbolic to say that Burke's heirs quite share his sense of doom. But they're not sounding much cheerier these days.
__________________________________________________________________________
THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap —subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been sap s, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seal s, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. “It was an active program,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States—and do so without visibility.” Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.
By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.
In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist “dead-enders,” criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime—reproduced on playing cards—had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “the dead-enders are still with us.” He went on, “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.” Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who “fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.” A few weeks later—and five months after the fall of Baghdad—the Defense Secretary declared,“It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.”
Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”
The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents’“strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” According to the study:
Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-called Green Zone.
The study concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”
By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.” In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”
By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: “Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.” The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”
Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap , bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap ’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap ’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”
The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”
Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap , and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”
The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”
Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.
“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with sap s told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”
In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s ( jag ) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.
The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”
In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the “flow of intelligence back to the commands” was “efficient and effective.” He added that Miller’s goal was “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.”
It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:
If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.
Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”
If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”
One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap . “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”
The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap , generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”
This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”
The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.
Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”
The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”
The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”
“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”
“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jag s hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
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by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap —subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been sap s, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seal s, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. “It was an active program,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States—and do so without visibility.” Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.
By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.
In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist “dead-enders,” criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime—reproduced on playing cards—had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “the dead-enders are still with us.” He went on, “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.” Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who “fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.” A few weeks later—and five months after the fall of Baghdad—the Defense Secretary declared,“It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.”
Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”
The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents’“strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” According to the study:
Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-called Green Zone.
The study concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”
By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.” In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”
By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: “Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.” The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”
Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap , bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap ’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap ’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”
The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”
Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap , and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”
The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”
Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.
“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with sap s told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”
In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s ( jag ) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.
The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”
In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the “flow of intelligence back to the commands” was “efficient and effective.” He added that Miller’s goal was “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.”
It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:
If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.
Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”
If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”
One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap . “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”
The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap , generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”
This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”
The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.
Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”
The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”
The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”
“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”
“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jag s hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
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