April 28, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR NY TIMES
A Sterling Record
By WESLEY K. CLARK
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.
When John Kerry released his military records to the public last week, Americans learned a lot about Mr. Kerry's exceptional service in Vietnam. They also learned a lot about the Republican attack machine.
The evaluations were uniformly glowing. One commander wrote that Mr. Kerry ranked among "the top few" in three categories: initiative, cooperation and personal behavior. Another commander wrote, "In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action, Lt. j.g. Kerry was unsurpassed." The citation for Mr. Kerry's Bronze Star praises his "calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire."
In the United States military, there's no ideology — there are no labels, Republican or Democrat — when superiors evaluate a man or woman's service to country. Mr. Kerry's commander for a brief time, Grant Hibbard, now a Republican, gave Mr. Kerry top marks 36 years ago.
Now the standards are those of politics, not the military. Despite his positive evaluations, Mr. Hibbard recently questioned whether Mr. Kerry deserved one of his three Purple Hearts.
In the heat of a political campaign, attacks come from all directions. That's why John Kerry's military records are so compelling; they measure the man before his critics or his supporters saw him through a political lens. These military records show that John Kerry served his country with valor, and that those who served with him and above him held him in high regard. That's honor enough for any veteran.
Yet the Republican attack machine follows a pattern we've seen before, whether the target is Senator John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 or Senator Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002. The latest manifestation of these tactics is the controversy over Mr. Kerry's medals.
John Kerry was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for his service in Vietnam. In April 1971, as part of a protest against the war, he threw some ribbons over the fence of the United States Capitol.
Republicans have tried to use this event to question his patriotism and his truthfulness, claiming he has been inconsistent in saying whether he threw away his medals or ribbons. This is no more than a political smear. After risking his life in Vietnam to save others, John Kerry earned the right to speak out against a war he believed was wrong. Make no mistake: it is that bravery these Republicans are now attacking.
Although President Bush has not engaged personally in such accusations, he has done nothing to stop others from making them. I believe those who didn't serve, or didn't show up for service, should have the decency to respect those who did serve — often under the most dangerous conditions, with bravery and, yes, with undeniable patriotism.
Wesley K. Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate, was commander of NATO forces from 1997 to 2000.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
The cabal of neo-cons private propaganda machine.
April 28, 2004 NY TIMES
How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence
By JAMES RISEN
ASHINGTON, April 27 — Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries.
The men culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the C.I.A. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Michael Maloof, one of the pair. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the C.I.A.'s finished reports."
They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of the year, as the rubble was being cleared from the World Trade Center and United States forces were fighting in Afghanistan, the men had constructed a startling new picture of global terrorism.
Old ethnic, religious and political divides between terrorist groups were breaking down, the two men warned, posing an ominous new threat. They saw alliances among a wide range of Islamic terrorists, and theorized about a convergence of Sunni and Shiite extremist groups and secular Arab governments. Their conclusions, delivered to senior Bush administration officials, connected Iraq and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
In doing so, the team also helped set off a controversy over the shaping of intelligence that continues today.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is investigating whether the unit — named the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group by its creator, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy — exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify the war.
The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies found little evidence to support the Pentagon's view of an increasingly unified terrorist threat or links between Mr. Hussein and Mr. bin Laden, and still largely dismiss those ideas. Foreign Islamic fighters have sought haven in Iraq since the American-led invasion and some Sunnis and Shiites have banded together against the occupiers, but the agencies say that is the result of anger and chaotic conditions, not proof of prewar alliances.
And with criticism mounting in recent weeks as the conflict has become more bloody, President Bush has found himself forced to defend once more how the war on terror led to Baghdad.
Some critics argue that some of the first steps were taken by Mr. Feith's little intelligence shop. Whether its findings influenced the thinking of policy makers or merely provided talking points that buttressed long-held views, the unit played a role in the administration's evolving effort to define the threat of Iraq — and sell it to the public.
Unable to reach a consensus on Iraq's terrorist ties because of the skepticism of the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Bush administration turned its focus to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the central rationale for war. Mr. Feith said his team was not involved in the analysis of those weapons.
But, he said in an interview, terrorism and Iraq's weapons became linked in the minds of top Bush administration officials. After Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks that followed it, he said, the administration "focused on the danger that Iraq could provide the fruits of its W.M.D. programs to terrorists."
The president, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, alluded to connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda in their public statements. Mr. Bush also frequently warned of the risks that Mr. Hussein would share his weapons with terrorists.
"The worst thing that could happen would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction and then team up with a terrorist organization so they can blackmail the world," Mr. Bush said in an interview in April 2002.
The failure to find such weapons in Iraq has prompted a series of investigations into prewar intelligence. The Senate committee plans to complete its review, including its examination of the Feith group, in the next few months. The unit has often been confused with another Feith operation, called the Office of Special Plans, which Pentagon officials say was involved in prewar planning but not intelligence analysis.
Some intelligence experts charge that the unit had a secret agenda to justify a war with Iraq and was staffed with people who were handpicked by conservative Pentagon policy makers to arrive at preordained conclusions about Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"I don't have any problem with them bringing in a couple of people to take another look at the intelligence and challenge the assessments," said Patrick Lang, a former Middle East analyst for the D.I.A. "But the problem is that they brought in people who were not intelligence professionals, people brought in because they thought like them. They knew what answers they were going to get."
Mr. Feith defends his analysts. "I would be happy to have anybody come in and examine the quality of the work, whether it is supported by the data, whether it is logical, whether it is well-reasoned," he said.
He added: "There are real policy issues in this town that are worth fighting and debating. Some of them involve peace and war."
Mr. Feith created his team a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks to study links between terrorist groups and potential state sponsors around the world. Mr. Maloof and his colleague, David Wurmser began work in October 2001 in a 15-by-15-foot space on the third floor of the Pentagon. The pair spent their days reading raw intelligence reports, many from the Central Intelligence Agency, in the Pentagon's classified computer system.
"We began to pull together a mosaic," Mr. Maloof said.
Mr. Feith said his group was not set up as a rival to the C.I.A. "This is what policy people do all the time, they read the existing intelligence," he said. "We were not bypassing, we were not being secretive, we were not cutting the intel community out of this."
Resistance From Within
But the effort immediately aroused suspicions at the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. Mr. Feith and his two analysts were closely linked to Richard N. Perle, then chairman of a Pentagon advisory group and a leading neoconservative who had long advocated toppling Mr. Hussein and was a vocal critic of the C.I.A.
"I think the people working on the Persian Gulf at the C.I.A. are pathetic," Mr. Perle said in an interview. "They have just made too many mistakes. They have a record over 30 years of being wrong." He added that the agency "became wedded to a theory," that did not leave room for the possibility that Iraq was working with Al Qaeda, and that "they went to battle stations every time someone pointed to contrary evidence."
When Mr. Perle was a top defense official in the Reagan administration, Mr. Maloof, a former journalist, worked as his investigator, assembling evidence that the Soviet Union was stealing Western technology. Mr. Wurmser, a Middle East expert who had written a book that attacked the Clinton administration and the C.I.A. for their handling of Iraq in the 1990's, had worked at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where Mr. Perle was a resident scholar. Mr. Feith had been Mr. Perle's deputy at the Pentagon. And while they were all out of government, Mr. Wurmser, Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle had signed a 1996 paper calling for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein to enhance Israel's security.
Despite their access to the Pentagon leadership, Mr. Maloof and Mr. Wurmser faced resistance from the C.I.A. and D.I.A.
They were initially denied access, for example, to the most highly classified documents in the Pentagon computer system. So Mr. Maloof returned regularly to his previous office in the Department of Defense, where he still could get the material. "We scoured what we could get up to the secret level, but we kept getting blocked when we tried to get more sensitive materials," Mr. Maloof said. "I would go back to my office, do a pull and bring it in."
Sometimes, they said, they were met with open hostility. In the Pentagon one day, a senior D.I.A. official told them, "You are not needed and not welcome," Mr. Maloof recalled.
Each week, they would brief Stephen A. Cambone, then Mr. Feith's principal deputy. By November 2001, as the Bush administration began war planning for Iraq, the unit had produced a slide presentation that they were told would be used by Mr. Rumsfeld in a NATO meeting.
The team's conclusions were alarming: old barriers that divided the major Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, were coming down, and these groups were forging ties with one another and with secular Arab governments in an emerging terrorist war against the West.
Their analysis covered plenty of controversial ground. The two men identified members of the Saudi royal family who they said had aided Al Qaeda over the years. They warned that Al Qaeda had operatives in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where they were establishing ties with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. They suspected Abu Nidal, an aging Palestinian terrorist leader living in Baghdad, of being an indirect link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, even though many other analysts believed that he was essentially retired and that his once-fearsome organization had been shattered. Mr. Nidal died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in 2002.
The Pentagon conclusions were at odds with years of C.I.A. analysis. The agency was skeptical that governments as diverse as those in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran could be linked to anything like a cohesive terrorist network. The C.I.A. and the D.I.A. believed that Feith's team had greatly exaggerated the significance of reported contacts among extremist groups and Arab states. The C.I.A. saw little evidence, for example, that the Sunni-dominated Qaeda and the Shiite-dominated Hezbollah had worked together on terrorist attacks.
And there was little proof that Mr. Hussein was working on terror plots with Mr. bin Laden, a religious extremist who viewed the Baghdad regime as a corrupt, secular enemy. "The divides do matter," a senior C.I.A. official said. "But if you work hard enough in this nasty world, you can link just about anybody to anybody else."
Another agency official summed up the Feith team's work by saying, "Leave no dot unconnected."
Mr. Maloof defends their analysis. "We had to justify every single connection we made," he said. "But the intelligence community had preconceived notions, and if the information didn't fit into those notions, then they simply ignored it."
At the end of 2001, Mr. Maloof and Mr. Wurmser briefed top Pentagon officials as well as John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security and a veteran of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Maloof also met with Mr. Perle at his suburban Washington home. As chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group, he had security clearance.
That session was interrupted by a call from Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group. At Mr. Maloof's request, Mr. Perle asked Mr. Chalabi, now a member of the interim government of Iraq, to have his staff provide Mr. Maloof information gleaned from defectors and others. The request was unusual, because Mr. Feith's analysts were supposed to review intelligence, not collect it. And Mr. Chalabi at that time had a lucrative contract to provide information on Iraq exclusively to the State Department, which would send it along to the intelligence agencies.
Mr. Maloof later met with member of the Iraqi National Congress's staff. As it turned out, Mr. Chalabi was a risky source: some of the information his group provided was incorrect or fabricated, intelligence officials now believe.
Sharing Their Findings
A high point for the team was a 45-minute briefing for Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, in November 2001. "Wolfowitz said, `How come I'm not hearing this from anybody else?' " Mr. Maloof said. "We said, because no one else has done the analysis." Mr. Wolfowitz did not respond to several requests for comment.
By early 2002, the team had completed a 150-page briefing and slide presentation for Mr. Feith.
"There was intelligence about contacts among these different players — the organizations, the state sponsors, the nonstate sponsors," Mr. Feith said. "There was intelligence about contacts among them that crossed ideological lines to a greater extent than perhaps some people had appreciated before."
"The connections could be tight or loose," he added. "I don't mean to suggest that all international terrorists are really operating from a single organization. They're not. We use the term `network' advisedly."
Soon after finishing the report, Mr. Wurmser moved to the State Department, and then joined Mr. Cheney's staff. He declined to be interviewed.
Mr. Maloof's Pentagon career was damaged in December 2001, when his security clearances were revoked. He was accused of having unauthorized contact with a foreign national, a woman he had met while traveling in the Republic of Georgia and eventually married. Mr. Maloof said he complied with all requirements to disclose the relationship. Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies. His lawyer, Sam Abady says that Mr. Maloof was a target because of his controversial intelligence work and political ties to conservative Pentagon leaders.
An appeals board reinstated his clearances after Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle wrote letters to the D.I.A. But the intervention angered some intelligence officials, and a second panel reversed course in April 2003. Mr. Maloof is now on paid leave.
Mr. Feith, meanwhile, was eager to continue the work and turned it over to two D.I.A. analysts detailed to him. In the spring and summer of 2002, Christina Shelton, another agency analyst assigned to him, was reviewing old intelligence reports on Al Qaeda when she saw patterns suggesting connections between the Baghdad regime and the group. She became infuriated when one agency official told her that pursuing such leads "would only help Wolfowitz," a Pentagon official recalled.
She began to fight back. That summer, officials say, the C.I.A. issued a classified report entitled "Iraq-Al Qaeda — a murky relationship." After reading it, Ms. Shelton wrote a critical cover memo urging Pentagon policy makers to focus on the underlying intelligence rather than the agency's assessments, according to officials familiar with the incident. With the other analysts on Mr. Feith's staff, she produced a new assessment of Iraq and Al Qaeda suggesting closer ties than the C.I.A. thought existed.
Confronting the C.I.A.
After they briefed Mr. Feith on their work, they were sent to Mr. Rumsfeld, who urged them to talk to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. In August 2002, Mr. Feith led his team to the C.I.A.
Mr. Tenet and other agency officials were skeptical of the Feith team's conclusions, according to one agency official who attended the briefing.
"They did point out some individual facts that we hadn't focused on," the official said, "but I don't think anything they briefed to us fundamentally changed our bottom line on the issue."
The main dispute was over whether the reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda meant that Iraq had been sponsoring the group's terrorist operations.
"We believed in contact, offers of safe haven, but no operational activity," the intelligence official said.
A few weeks later, on Sept. 16, 2002, Feith's team briefed Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, and I. Lewis Libby, a senior aide to Mr. Cheney. By that time, Mr. Cheney was already talking publicly about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In an appearance on "Meet the Press" just before the first anniversary of 9/11, he said that even without evidence of direct involvement by Baghdad in the attacks, the Hussein regime may have supported Al Qaeda.
"New information has come to light," Mr. Cheney said. "And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
Despite Mr. Cheney's assertions and the efforts of Mr. Feith's office, the Bush administration ultimately decided that the terrorism link was not strong enough to use as the central justification for war with Iraq. Instead, the administration focused on Mr. Hussein's illicit weapons, relying on assessments by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies.
But Mr. Feith said that the evidence of Baghdad's terrorist links, when coupled with the threat of Mr. Hussein providing illicit weapons to groups like Al Qaeda, helped support the administration's case.
After 9/11, the administration reviewed the evidence about Iraq in a new light, he said. "One question was: Was Iraq involved in 9/11? We found no hard link. What about Iraq-Al Qaeda links in general? Well, there were some, but that wasn't the essence of the Saddam Hussein threat. The danger of Saddam's providing W.M.D. to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group — there you had a real problem, because his record on W.M.D. was indisputable."
____________________________________________________________________________
April 28, 2004 NY TIMES
How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence
By JAMES RISEN
ASHINGTON, April 27 — Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries.
The men culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the C.I.A. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Michael Maloof, one of the pair. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the C.I.A.'s finished reports."
They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of the year, as the rubble was being cleared from the World Trade Center and United States forces were fighting in Afghanistan, the men had constructed a startling new picture of global terrorism.
Old ethnic, religious and political divides between terrorist groups were breaking down, the two men warned, posing an ominous new threat. They saw alliances among a wide range of Islamic terrorists, and theorized about a convergence of Sunni and Shiite extremist groups and secular Arab governments. Their conclusions, delivered to senior Bush administration officials, connected Iraq and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
In doing so, the team also helped set off a controversy over the shaping of intelligence that continues today.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is investigating whether the unit — named the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group by its creator, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy — exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify the war.
The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies found little evidence to support the Pentagon's view of an increasingly unified terrorist threat or links between Mr. Hussein and Mr. bin Laden, and still largely dismiss those ideas. Foreign Islamic fighters have sought haven in Iraq since the American-led invasion and some Sunnis and Shiites have banded together against the occupiers, but the agencies say that is the result of anger and chaotic conditions, not proof of prewar alliances.
And with criticism mounting in recent weeks as the conflict has become more bloody, President Bush has found himself forced to defend once more how the war on terror led to Baghdad.
Some critics argue that some of the first steps were taken by Mr. Feith's little intelligence shop. Whether its findings influenced the thinking of policy makers or merely provided talking points that buttressed long-held views, the unit played a role in the administration's evolving effort to define the threat of Iraq — and sell it to the public.
Unable to reach a consensus on Iraq's terrorist ties because of the skepticism of the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Bush administration turned its focus to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the central rationale for war. Mr. Feith said his team was not involved in the analysis of those weapons.
But, he said in an interview, terrorism and Iraq's weapons became linked in the minds of top Bush administration officials. After Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks that followed it, he said, the administration "focused on the danger that Iraq could provide the fruits of its W.M.D. programs to terrorists."
The president, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, alluded to connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda in their public statements. Mr. Bush also frequently warned of the risks that Mr. Hussein would share his weapons with terrorists.
"The worst thing that could happen would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction and then team up with a terrorist organization so they can blackmail the world," Mr. Bush said in an interview in April 2002.
The failure to find such weapons in Iraq has prompted a series of investigations into prewar intelligence. The Senate committee plans to complete its review, including its examination of the Feith group, in the next few months. The unit has often been confused with another Feith operation, called the Office of Special Plans, which Pentagon officials say was involved in prewar planning but not intelligence analysis.
Some intelligence experts charge that the unit had a secret agenda to justify a war with Iraq and was staffed with people who were handpicked by conservative Pentagon policy makers to arrive at preordained conclusions about Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"I don't have any problem with them bringing in a couple of people to take another look at the intelligence and challenge the assessments," said Patrick Lang, a former Middle East analyst for the D.I.A. "But the problem is that they brought in people who were not intelligence professionals, people brought in because they thought like them. They knew what answers they were going to get."
Mr. Feith defends his analysts. "I would be happy to have anybody come in and examine the quality of the work, whether it is supported by the data, whether it is logical, whether it is well-reasoned," he said.
He added: "There are real policy issues in this town that are worth fighting and debating. Some of them involve peace and war."
Mr. Feith created his team a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks to study links between terrorist groups and potential state sponsors around the world. Mr. Maloof and his colleague, David Wurmser began work in October 2001 in a 15-by-15-foot space on the third floor of the Pentagon. The pair spent their days reading raw intelligence reports, many from the Central Intelligence Agency, in the Pentagon's classified computer system.
"We began to pull together a mosaic," Mr. Maloof said.
Mr. Feith said his group was not set up as a rival to the C.I.A. "This is what policy people do all the time, they read the existing intelligence," he said. "We were not bypassing, we were not being secretive, we were not cutting the intel community out of this."
Resistance From Within
But the effort immediately aroused suspicions at the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. Mr. Feith and his two analysts were closely linked to Richard N. Perle, then chairman of a Pentagon advisory group and a leading neoconservative who had long advocated toppling Mr. Hussein and was a vocal critic of the C.I.A.
"I think the people working on the Persian Gulf at the C.I.A. are pathetic," Mr. Perle said in an interview. "They have just made too many mistakes. They have a record over 30 years of being wrong." He added that the agency "became wedded to a theory," that did not leave room for the possibility that Iraq was working with Al Qaeda, and that "they went to battle stations every time someone pointed to contrary evidence."
When Mr. Perle was a top defense official in the Reagan administration, Mr. Maloof, a former journalist, worked as his investigator, assembling evidence that the Soviet Union was stealing Western technology. Mr. Wurmser, a Middle East expert who had written a book that attacked the Clinton administration and the C.I.A. for their handling of Iraq in the 1990's, had worked at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where Mr. Perle was a resident scholar. Mr. Feith had been Mr. Perle's deputy at the Pentagon. And while they were all out of government, Mr. Wurmser, Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle had signed a 1996 paper calling for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein to enhance Israel's security.
Despite their access to the Pentagon leadership, Mr. Maloof and Mr. Wurmser faced resistance from the C.I.A. and D.I.A.
They were initially denied access, for example, to the most highly classified documents in the Pentagon computer system. So Mr. Maloof returned regularly to his previous office in the Department of Defense, where he still could get the material. "We scoured what we could get up to the secret level, but we kept getting blocked when we tried to get more sensitive materials," Mr. Maloof said. "I would go back to my office, do a pull and bring it in."
Sometimes, they said, they were met with open hostility. In the Pentagon one day, a senior D.I.A. official told them, "You are not needed and not welcome," Mr. Maloof recalled.
Each week, they would brief Stephen A. Cambone, then Mr. Feith's principal deputy. By November 2001, as the Bush administration began war planning for Iraq, the unit had produced a slide presentation that they were told would be used by Mr. Rumsfeld in a NATO meeting.
The team's conclusions were alarming: old barriers that divided the major Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, were coming down, and these groups were forging ties with one another and with secular Arab governments in an emerging terrorist war against the West.
Their analysis covered plenty of controversial ground. The two men identified members of the Saudi royal family who they said had aided Al Qaeda over the years. They warned that Al Qaeda had operatives in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where they were establishing ties with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. They suspected Abu Nidal, an aging Palestinian terrorist leader living in Baghdad, of being an indirect link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, even though many other analysts believed that he was essentially retired and that his once-fearsome organization had been shattered. Mr. Nidal died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in 2002.
The Pentagon conclusions were at odds with years of C.I.A. analysis. The agency was skeptical that governments as diverse as those in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran could be linked to anything like a cohesive terrorist network. The C.I.A. and the D.I.A. believed that Feith's team had greatly exaggerated the significance of reported contacts among extremist groups and Arab states. The C.I.A. saw little evidence, for example, that the Sunni-dominated Qaeda and the Shiite-dominated Hezbollah had worked together on terrorist attacks.
And there was little proof that Mr. Hussein was working on terror plots with Mr. bin Laden, a religious extremist who viewed the Baghdad regime as a corrupt, secular enemy. "The divides do matter," a senior C.I.A. official said. "But if you work hard enough in this nasty world, you can link just about anybody to anybody else."
Another agency official summed up the Feith team's work by saying, "Leave no dot unconnected."
Mr. Maloof defends their analysis. "We had to justify every single connection we made," he said. "But the intelligence community had preconceived notions, and if the information didn't fit into those notions, then they simply ignored it."
At the end of 2001, Mr. Maloof and Mr. Wurmser briefed top Pentagon officials as well as John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security and a veteran of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Maloof also met with Mr. Perle at his suburban Washington home. As chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group, he had security clearance.
That session was interrupted by a call from Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group. At Mr. Maloof's request, Mr. Perle asked Mr. Chalabi, now a member of the interim government of Iraq, to have his staff provide Mr. Maloof information gleaned from defectors and others. The request was unusual, because Mr. Feith's analysts were supposed to review intelligence, not collect it. And Mr. Chalabi at that time had a lucrative contract to provide information on Iraq exclusively to the State Department, which would send it along to the intelligence agencies.
Mr. Maloof later met with member of the Iraqi National Congress's staff. As it turned out, Mr. Chalabi was a risky source: some of the information his group provided was incorrect or fabricated, intelligence officials now believe.
Sharing Their Findings
A high point for the team was a 45-minute briefing for Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, in November 2001. "Wolfowitz said, `How come I'm not hearing this from anybody else?' " Mr. Maloof said. "We said, because no one else has done the analysis." Mr. Wolfowitz did not respond to several requests for comment.
By early 2002, the team had completed a 150-page briefing and slide presentation for Mr. Feith.
"There was intelligence about contacts among these different players — the organizations, the state sponsors, the nonstate sponsors," Mr. Feith said. "There was intelligence about contacts among them that crossed ideological lines to a greater extent than perhaps some people had appreciated before."
"The connections could be tight or loose," he added. "I don't mean to suggest that all international terrorists are really operating from a single organization. They're not. We use the term `network' advisedly."
Soon after finishing the report, Mr. Wurmser moved to the State Department, and then joined Mr. Cheney's staff. He declined to be interviewed.
Mr. Maloof's Pentagon career was damaged in December 2001, when his security clearances were revoked. He was accused of having unauthorized contact with a foreign national, a woman he had met while traveling in the Republic of Georgia and eventually married. Mr. Maloof said he complied with all requirements to disclose the relationship. Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies. His lawyer, Sam Abady says that Mr. Maloof was a target because of his controversial intelligence work and political ties to conservative Pentagon leaders.
An appeals board reinstated his clearances after Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle wrote letters to the D.I.A. But the intervention angered some intelligence officials, and a second panel reversed course in April 2003. Mr. Maloof is now on paid leave.
Mr. Feith, meanwhile, was eager to continue the work and turned it over to two D.I.A. analysts detailed to him. In the spring and summer of 2002, Christina Shelton, another agency analyst assigned to him, was reviewing old intelligence reports on Al Qaeda when she saw patterns suggesting connections between the Baghdad regime and the group. She became infuriated when one agency official told her that pursuing such leads "would only help Wolfowitz," a Pentagon official recalled.
She began to fight back. That summer, officials say, the C.I.A. issued a classified report entitled "Iraq-Al Qaeda — a murky relationship." After reading it, Ms. Shelton wrote a critical cover memo urging Pentagon policy makers to focus on the underlying intelligence rather than the agency's assessments, according to officials familiar with the incident. With the other analysts on Mr. Feith's staff, she produced a new assessment of Iraq and Al Qaeda suggesting closer ties than the C.I.A. thought existed.
Confronting the C.I.A.
After they briefed Mr. Feith on their work, they were sent to Mr. Rumsfeld, who urged them to talk to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. In August 2002, Mr. Feith led his team to the C.I.A.
Mr. Tenet and other agency officials were skeptical of the Feith team's conclusions, according to one agency official who attended the briefing.
"They did point out some individual facts that we hadn't focused on," the official said, "but I don't think anything they briefed to us fundamentally changed our bottom line on the issue."
The main dispute was over whether the reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda meant that Iraq had been sponsoring the group's terrorist operations.
"We believed in contact, offers of safe haven, but no operational activity," the intelligence official said.
A few weeks later, on Sept. 16, 2002, Feith's team briefed Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, and I. Lewis Libby, a senior aide to Mr. Cheney. By that time, Mr. Cheney was already talking publicly about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In an appearance on "Meet the Press" just before the first anniversary of 9/11, he said that even without evidence of direct involvement by Baghdad in the attacks, the Hussein regime may have supported Al Qaeda.
"New information has come to light," Mr. Cheney said. "And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
Despite Mr. Cheney's assertions and the efforts of Mr. Feith's office, the Bush administration ultimately decided that the terrorism link was not strong enough to use as the central justification for war with Iraq. Instead, the administration focused on Mr. Hussein's illicit weapons, relying on assessments by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies.
But Mr. Feith said that the evidence of Baghdad's terrorist links, when coupled with the threat of Mr. Hussein providing illicit weapons to groups like Al Qaeda, helped support the administration's case.
After 9/11, the administration reviewed the evidence about Iraq in a new light, he said. "One question was: Was Iraq involved in 9/11? We found no hard link. What about Iraq-Al Qaeda links in general? Well, there were some, but that wasn't the essence of the Saddam Hussein threat. The danger of Saddam's providing W.M.D. to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group — there you had a real problem, because his record on W.M.D. was indisputable."
____________________________________________________________________________
So you think Bush is a conservative who reveres the Constitution (along with the 200+ history of our nation) do you? Click here.
From Wayne Williams on Ed Gish, the author of the following piece:
My friend Ed Gish is yet another Republican on my political email list who is out right fed up with the Bush Administration. Here are his comments.
I first want to say, we have seen little from Kerry in the media for just the reasons Ed lays out here, they know which side their bread is buttered on, for now. Being involved in the Kerry effort, I know John Kerry and the campaign will come out fighting big time as the Convention gears up, but for now it's just fine to let BushCo waste millions with little result. We haven't begun to fight yet, 6 months to the election, 3 months to the conventions. You ain't seen nothing yet!
WW
Wayne Williams
Writers for Kerry-CA Leader
Writers for Kerry-Los Angeles Co-Moderator
FROM REPUBLICAN ED GISH
Some of my friends have concluded that I have become a political animal. That is true in one sense, not true in another.
I am not a democrat. I have been a registered Republican for 54 years. That makes me an old time Republican who still believes in higher tariffs, less involvement in other country's affairs, we don't fire unless fired upon and I believe in lower taxes for wage earners.
My religious beliefs are between me and my God and I have nothing but contempt for anyone who uses theirs for gain (popular or material) of any kind.
Unfortunately for me and other real Republicans we haven't had a qualified candidate since most current Republicans were born.
We haven't had an honest candidate in either party who governed in the interest of the people since the advent of television.
When television replaced radio as the people's popular medium, this technological miracle that according to law and the FCC was supposed to operate in the interest of the people became a cash cow that political candidates had to feed huge amounts of money if they were to get any public exposure.
The money had to come from the corporate community who, being business men, do not spend money without expecting something in return.
What they got was the country.
You've all heard the story of how I was practically thrown out of a big Advertising Age convention when I stood up and suggested that just prior to elections, candidates be given free time on broadcast media to state their platform, debate and answer honest questions from real viewers and listeners.
Chet Huntley stood up on the dais in my defense and stated that he would happily commit the seven television stations he owned to that resolve.
I wasn't thrown out, but I was called a communist, socialist and other more colorful names that while possibly true do not bear repeating.
I was just asking that the FCC be allowed by the administration to function according to its charter: Broadcasting in the public interest. What is more in our interest than our government.
I was asked by a cousin of mine if George W. could do anything right in my estimation. I wish he would.
Here is one example that sort of sums everything up for me.
On the one hand we are told how we want to bring freedom and the good life to these poor misled Muslims, how we have their best interests at heart and we certainly are not there for personal power or gain, to reward our cronies or pay back old debts.
Does the name John Negroponte ring a bell?
You may have heard the Bush administration is appointing him our first ambassador to post war Iraq.
You may not remember that Negroponte was one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Why is this important? Well that idiotic plot sold American arms to Iran and used the money to finance an illegal "war" in Nicaragua.
Negroponte speaks no Arabic, has no grounding in middle eastern life and politics and he was responsible for arming Iraq's enemy during the Iran-Iraq war!!!
This is how concerned this administration is about making friends with the Iraqi people.
That is not all. When we hand Iraq over on June 30, standing there in the front row with his hand out will be Ahmed Chalabi, convicted crook, liar and purveyor of the false intelligence that gave his buddy Cheney an excuse to convince Rumsfeld and Bush to start the first pre-emptive war in the history of our country.
At this moment, Chalabi is on the Iraqi Governing Council earning an enviable reputation for corruption.
By the way until we took over Iraq this is the first time Chalabi has been there in 40 odd years. The Iraqi people have no use for him and he is our resident expert who will have an important voice in their new government. Any wonder they have taken up arms to resist that kind of "help?"
There's more. Too much more.
Happily I think the American people are beginning to get it. Even though Kerry has become a wus in his old age and is campaigning like he's running against Gerald Ford and even though Bush has carpet bombed him with over 50 million dollars in corporate donations on television, he is still running a 50-50 race.
We can thank George W. for that. Americans are learning that he is not the sharpest tack on the bulletin board, he is a C- student doesn't really understand the research and real intelligence put out by those he terms intellectual "fancy pants" so he has insulated himself from them and like Hitler he goes by "gut feel" and "instinct" much of the time.
He talks to God a lot and tells us that God is guiding him. Muslims talk to God five times a day and say that He is guiding them.
As I said, I have nothing but contempt for anyone who uses their religious beliefs for popular or material gain.
God gave me a brain, a soul, five senses, a voice, opposable thumbs and said, "Ye shall know them by their works." So, I figure I'm on my own. What I do with all these great gifts is pretty much up to me. He is not going to give me any more guidance than he has. However, he is going to judge me on how I've handled myself and all that he has given me.
I don't believe George W. has a different deal.
I don't believe he is on a mission from God to free all the oppressed peoples of the world and tell them how to live their lives.
I don't think the oppressed peoples of the world believe it either. Last month the Iraqis killed more of our troops than died taking the country in the first place. They believe that God is telling them to take their country back from the infidel invaders. Now, even though this was not our intention, we are in a religious war against Islam.
It is a war we cannot win. Let me see, there was Korea, Vietnam a bunch of brushfire conflicts that changed nothing anywhere...how many of those can we afford? How many can we survive?
We have big problems that need our attention here at home.
We are not educating our youth to handle the new technological jobs that are being outsourced to other countries where the people work cheaper and have the education to handle them.
We are allowing corporate greed and fraud to undermine our way of life and our health.
I'm not political. I'm an American and a Republican, but I'm not the kind of Republican who puts the party right or wrong before my country.
Ed Gish
_____________________________________________________________________________________
My friend Ed Gish is yet another Republican on my political email list who is out right fed up with the Bush Administration. Here are his comments.
I first want to say, we have seen little from Kerry in the media for just the reasons Ed lays out here, they know which side their bread is buttered on, for now. Being involved in the Kerry effort, I know John Kerry and the campaign will come out fighting big time as the Convention gears up, but for now it's just fine to let BushCo waste millions with little result. We haven't begun to fight yet, 6 months to the election, 3 months to the conventions. You ain't seen nothing yet!
WW
Wayne Williams
Writers for Kerry-CA Leader
Writers for Kerry-Los Angeles Co-Moderator
FROM REPUBLICAN ED GISH
Some of my friends have concluded that I have become a political animal. That is true in one sense, not true in another.
I am not a democrat. I have been a registered Republican for 54 years. That makes me an old time Republican who still believes in higher tariffs, less involvement in other country's affairs, we don't fire unless fired upon and I believe in lower taxes for wage earners.
My religious beliefs are between me and my God and I have nothing but contempt for anyone who uses theirs for gain (popular or material) of any kind.
Unfortunately for me and other real Republicans we haven't had a qualified candidate since most current Republicans were born.
We haven't had an honest candidate in either party who governed in the interest of the people since the advent of television.
When television replaced radio as the people's popular medium, this technological miracle that according to law and the FCC was supposed to operate in the interest of the people became a cash cow that political candidates had to feed huge amounts of money if they were to get any public exposure.
The money had to come from the corporate community who, being business men, do not spend money without expecting something in return.
What they got was the country.
You've all heard the story of how I was practically thrown out of a big Advertising Age convention when I stood up and suggested that just prior to elections, candidates be given free time on broadcast media to state their platform, debate and answer honest questions from real viewers and listeners.
Chet Huntley stood up on the dais in my defense and stated that he would happily commit the seven television stations he owned to that resolve.
I wasn't thrown out, but I was called a communist, socialist and other more colorful names that while possibly true do not bear repeating.
I was just asking that the FCC be allowed by the administration to function according to its charter: Broadcasting in the public interest. What is more in our interest than our government.
I was asked by a cousin of mine if George W. could do anything right in my estimation. I wish he would.
Here is one example that sort of sums everything up for me.
On the one hand we are told how we want to bring freedom and the good life to these poor misled Muslims, how we have their best interests at heart and we certainly are not there for personal power or gain, to reward our cronies or pay back old debts.
Does the name John Negroponte ring a bell?
You may have heard the Bush administration is appointing him our first ambassador to post war Iraq.
You may not remember that Negroponte was one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Why is this important? Well that idiotic plot sold American arms to Iran and used the money to finance an illegal "war" in Nicaragua.
Negroponte speaks no Arabic, has no grounding in middle eastern life and politics and he was responsible for arming Iraq's enemy during the Iran-Iraq war!!!
This is how concerned this administration is about making friends with the Iraqi people.
That is not all. When we hand Iraq over on June 30, standing there in the front row with his hand out will be Ahmed Chalabi, convicted crook, liar and purveyor of the false intelligence that gave his buddy Cheney an excuse to convince Rumsfeld and Bush to start the first pre-emptive war in the history of our country.
At this moment, Chalabi is on the Iraqi Governing Council earning an enviable reputation for corruption.
By the way until we took over Iraq this is the first time Chalabi has been there in 40 odd years. The Iraqi people have no use for him and he is our resident expert who will have an important voice in their new government. Any wonder they have taken up arms to resist that kind of "help?"
There's more. Too much more.
Happily I think the American people are beginning to get it. Even though Kerry has become a wus in his old age and is campaigning like he's running against Gerald Ford and even though Bush has carpet bombed him with over 50 million dollars in corporate donations on television, he is still running a 50-50 race.
We can thank George W. for that. Americans are learning that he is not the sharpest tack on the bulletin board, he is a C- student doesn't really understand the research and real intelligence put out by those he terms intellectual "fancy pants" so he has insulated himself from them and like Hitler he goes by "gut feel" and "instinct" much of the time.
He talks to God a lot and tells us that God is guiding him. Muslims talk to God five times a day and say that He is guiding them.
As I said, I have nothing but contempt for anyone who uses their religious beliefs for popular or material gain.
God gave me a brain, a soul, five senses, a voice, opposable thumbs and said, "Ye shall know them by their works." So, I figure I'm on my own. What I do with all these great gifts is pretty much up to me. He is not going to give me any more guidance than he has. However, he is going to judge me on how I've handled myself and all that he has given me.
I don't believe George W. has a different deal.
I don't believe he is on a mission from God to free all the oppressed peoples of the world and tell them how to live their lives.
I don't think the oppressed peoples of the world believe it either. Last month the Iraqis killed more of our troops than died taking the country in the first place. They believe that God is telling them to take their country back from the infidel invaders. Now, even though this was not our intention, we are in a religious war against Islam.
It is a war we cannot win. Let me see, there was Korea, Vietnam a bunch of brushfire conflicts that changed nothing anywhere...how many of those can we afford? How many can we survive?
We have big problems that need our attention here at home.
We are not educating our youth to handle the new technological jobs that are being outsourced to other countries where the people work cheaper and have the education to handle them.
We are allowing corporate greed and fraud to undermine our way of life and our health.
I'm not political. I'm an American and a Republican, but I'm not the kind of Republican who puts the party right or wrong before my country.
Ed Gish
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Bush Misleads Seniors on New Drug Cards
Less than a year ago, President Bush promised Americans that he would "provide seniors with a drug discount card that saves them 10 to 25% off the cost of all drugs, so they'll start seeing savings immediately" on their medications 1. But, as the program launches next week, experts have concluded that the cards don't guarantee seniors any savings at all 2. Additionally, instead of admitting this, the President used millions in taxpayer money to promote the cards through television ads - ads that government regulators later said were misleading.
As the New York Times reports, the White House plan locks seniors into the cards they initially choose, then allows the card sponsors "to change their prices on a weekly basis," thus never guaranteeing any benefit at all 3. Instead of telling the seniors the truth when this reality became apparent, the President used tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to air television ads promising that the drug cards will save seniors money. Some of the ads even used fake reporters in an effort to trick viewers into thinking they were watching objective news 4. The General Accounting Office soon concluded that the ads contained "notable omissions and errors" 5.
One possible reason the President never forced card sponsors to guarantee savings could be Bush's relationship with a longtime Texas crony and drug card industry executive who could profit from bilking seniors. According to the Boston Globe, the President allowed David Halbert, CEO of drug card company AdvancePCS, to "craft the portion of the Medicare bill" that created the card program, even though Halbert had a financial interest in the bill and has had a close relationship with Bush for years 6. For instance, "Bush had been an investor in a Halbert-owned predecessor company to AdvancePCS" and Halbert "contributed to Bush campaigns from his 1994 gubernatorial race through his White House bid in 2000."
Sources:
President Bush Calls for Action on 38th Anniversary of Medicare , 07/30/2003.
"New Drug Card Called Passport To Confusion ", Hartford Courant, 04/25/2004.
"Feds will keep drug discount on the up and up ", Wichita Eagle, 12/11/2003.
"Publicity Campaign Under Scrutiny ", ABC News, 03/15/2004.
"Bush Medicare Reform Bill Become a Nightmare for GOP ", Miami Herald, 03/19/2004.
"Bush ally's firm vies for Medicare cards ", Boston Globe, 12/12/2003.
Please click on the article's headline at the top of the page to find the links to these sources and other stories.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Less than a year ago, President Bush promised Americans that he would "provide seniors with a drug discount card that saves them 10 to 25% off the cost of all drugs, so they'll start seeing savings immediately" on their medications 1. But, as the program launches next week, experts have concluded that the cards don't guarantee seniors any savings at all 2. Additionally, instead of admitting this, the President used millions in taxpayer money to promote the cards through television ads - ads that government regulators later said were misleading.
As the New York Times reports, the White House plan locks seniors into the cards they initially choose, then allows the card sponsors "to change their prices on a weekly basis," thus never guaranteeing any benefit at all 3. Instead of telling the seniors the truth when this reality became apparent, the President used tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to air television ads promising that the drug cards will save seniors money. Some of the ads even used fake reporters in an effort to trick viewers into thinking they were watching objective news 4. The General Accounting Office soon concluded that the ads contained "notable omissions and errors" 5.
One possible reason the President never forced card sponsors to guarantee savings could be Bush's relationship with a longtime Texas crony and drug card industry executive who could profit from bilking seniors. According to the Boston Globe, the President allowed David Halbert, CEO of drug card company AdvancePCS, to "craft the portion of the Medicare bill" that created the card program, even though Halbert had a financial interest in the bill and has had a close relationship with Bush for years 6. For instance, "Bush had been an investor in a Halbert-owned predecessor company to AdvancePCS" and Halbert "contributed to Bush campaigns from his 1994 gubernatorial race through his White House bid in 2000."
Sources:
President Bush Calls for Action on 38th Anniversary of Medicare , 07/30/2003.
"New Drug Card Called Passport To Confusion ", Hartford Courant, 04/25/2004.
"Feds will keep drug discount on the up and up ", Wichita Eagle, 12/11/2003.
"Publicity Campaign Under Scrutiny ", ABC News, 03/15/2004.
"Bush Medicare Reform Bill Become a Nightmare for GOP ", Miami Herald, 03/19/2004.
"Bush ally's firm vies for Medicare cards ", Boston Globe, 12/12/2003.
Please click on the article's headline at the top of the page to find the links to these sources and other stories.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Center for American Progress
IRAQ
The Man With No Plan
Today, Senate confirmation hearings begin for John Negroponte. If confirmed, he would assume control of the American presence in Iraq on June 30 and would inherit a host of occupation responsibilities and challenges from Paul Bremer. As Peter Ogden writes for American Progress, Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras when "the country was the base for President Reagan's covert war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government." While serving in that position, Negroponte was accused of "covering up abuses by the Honduran military to ensure the flow of U.S. aide from an increasingly skeptical Congress." His current tenure as the U.S. representative to the U.N. has only further undermined his credibility in the international community, especially in regards to Iraq, by leading a diplomatic effort that has been increasingly dismissive of the rest of the world. Other problems: Negroponte doesn't speak Arabic, has never been based in the region and has never been involved in post-conflict reconstruction. American Progress Senior Policy Analyst Michael Pan details ten tough scenarios the Senate should ask Negroponte to consider.
BILLIONS IN RECONSTRUCTION MONEY TO CORPORATE CROOKS: Negroponte will inherit a reconstruction effort that has been badly mismanaged. The United States has awarded billions of dollars of contracts to ten companies in Iraq that "have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage" while working on projects around the world. For example, the U.S. "is paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on three federal construction projects and banned from U.S. government work during 2002." The two largest Iraq contractors – Bechtel and Halliburton – have also paid penalties over the last few years. In December 2001, the Bush administration revoked a Clinton-era rule that ensured "repeated violations of federal law would make a company ineligible for new contracts."
VIOLENCE SLOWS RECONSTRUCTION EFFORTS: The reconstruction efforts are further complicated by escalating violence. The Chicago Tribune reports "insurgents and kidnappers have preyed on foreigners – notably contractors, businessmen and journalists – and have seriously disrupted the economic recovery." According to the U.S. military, over the last several weeks "40 foreigners from a dozen nations have been abducted." Overall, the official estimate is "work has been derailed at 10 percent of Iraq's work sites because of fears, threats of attack and a slowdown of supplies from Kuwait, Jordan and the port of Umm Qasr," but officials privately say the true impact has been even more severe. Larry Diamond, a former member of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said "we just bungled this so badly. We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country." See this American Progress "to do" list for the days remaining before turnover.
COALITION OF THE WILLING NOW COALITION OF THE SHRINKING: At the end of May 2,000 troops from Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic will pull out of Iraq. There was hope "that the UK might fill the gap" by sending more troops to ease the burden on the already overstretched U.S. military. But now "U.S. forces are expected to take control." In Britain there was "no great enthusiasm or appetite" to send more troops to Iraq to help patrol Najaf, where "U.S. forces are already in a tense stand-off with the militia loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr." Poland has also scaled back its role by reducing the size of the zone it patrols. Yesterday, as the already weak coalition continued to deteriorate, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) called the U.S. diplomatic effort to date a "failure" and said "everyone" in the administration was at fault.
INSISTING ON MISSILE DEFENSE AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR TROOPS: Members of Congress are proposing diverting some of the $10 billion the President has requested for missile defense "to fund more troops and equipment in Iraq." The move comes in the wake of "a report GAO issued last week criticizing the president's plan to field a missile defense capability this summer." Currently, the White House has refused to immediately plug serious funding gaps for armor, helmets and other protective equipment military commanders say they need to protect troops. And according to Newsweek, a new study circulating in the Army says refusal to protect the troops may have contributed to one out of every four American casualties in Iraq. The diverted funds could be used to plug the holes, or to "boost the Army's strength by 10,000 troops" – forces that are sorely needed to stabilize the security situation in Iraq. But conservatives in Congress are expected to insist the money be used on the discredited missile defense program.
HEALTH CARE
Drug Card Confusion
Enrollment for the new Medicare drug card program is set to begin next month, and already "seasoned counselors are struggling to come up with easy-to-understand answers for Medicare recipients" about whether the cards will actually save people any money. As one expert noted, "companies offering discount cards do not have to stick with the savings they initially advertise, the new Medicare laws does not specify any base price to which the discounts must apply, and card sponsors can change the list of covered drugs even though Medicare beneficiaries will be locked into the card they choose until the end of the year." Earlier this year the White House spent millions of taxpayer dollars on television ads promoting the cards, only to have those ads cited by the General Accounting Office for grossly misleading seniors, citing omissions about new costs to seniors in the new law. Review the entire Medicare issue on this page of American Progress Medicare columns and analysis.
ADMINISTRATION USES FEDS TO INTIMIDATE SENIORS: According to newly released details, last October the Bush administration took the extraordinary step of stopping and searching a bus full of seniors on their way back from purchasing cheaper medicines in Canada. The intimidation move, which FDA officials note is "not consistent" with past practice, came at the very same time the White House and pharmaceutical industry were working to remove provisions from the new Medicare law that would have formally provided seniors access to lower-priced medicines from abroad. Details of the administration's heavy-handed tactics only emerged this month after Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) demanded answers in a letter to the FDA – an agency whose complicity with the drug industry has come into question since the Bush administration took office.
AMERICA'S MAYOR BECOMES AMERICA'S DRUG INDUSTRY SHILL: Sparing no expense in its fear-mongering campaign to scare seniors, the drug industry has hired its longtime crony Rudolph Giuliani to help them fight off efforts to lower the price of medicine. The former mayor of New York, who raked in almost $100,000 from drug industry executives in just the few months he considered running for Senate in 2000, is being bankrolled to use his law enforcement credentials to claim cheaper drugs from Canada are unsafe. Of course, Giuliani has no proof – there has been no substantive data showing Canadian drugs are unsafe, and the FDA itself says it can guarantee a safe reimportation system for just $54 million (a fraction of the billions that could be saved with lower prices). For his part, Giuliani is refusing to "tell reporters how much PhRMA pays his company" for his services.
STILL REFUSING TO PROVIDE CONGRESS WITH DETAILS: During the Medicare debate in Congress, the Bush administration threatened to fire a government actuary if he told lawmakers the true cost of the bill. Now, with the bill costing at least $100 billion more than lawmakers were told, the White House is refusing to make public the actual cost estimates it withheld. In response, House Democrats are now "poised to sue the Bush Administration" in a lawsuit that "could clearly define the long-debated parameters of congressional oversight over the executive branch." Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), senior minority member on the Government Reform Committee, last month invoked the "seven-member rule," whereby administrations traditionally release documents if seven members of the oversight panel request them. He was rejected by the administration.
PFIZER CEO/BUSH FUNDER CONTINUES CUTTING OFF SENIORS: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) last week used his state's pension fund holdings to sponsor a Pfizer stockholder resolution that would force the drug industry giant to only raise prices at the rate of inflation. In response, Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell – a top Bush fundraiser – claimed to "sympathize with financially strapped patients, but vowed to continue efforts to cut off supplies" of drugs to Canadian pharmacies that sell to U.S. customers. Another Pfizer vice president claimed that the drug price problem was not exorbitant prices in the United States, but that "the French and Germans and Canadians are not paying their fair share." What he did not mention was that the drug industry is, by far, the most profitable in America, and that a minor reduction in drug prices here would do little to reduce those profits. As a new Boston University study shows, because lower prices and drug reimportation would allow more people to buy drugs who don't buy them now, industry profits and R&D funding could actually rise.
9/11 – CONGRESSMEN DEMAND FULL ACCOUNTING OF EMERGENCY MONEY: On the heels of reports the president diverted $700 million into Iraq invasion planning without informing Congress, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. David Obey (D-WI) pressed the White House on Monday "for a full accounting of how the Bush administration had spent $40 billion in emergency money that was provided by Congress just days after the Sept. 11 attacks." In a letter to the White House, Byrd and Obey say that "contrary to the requirements of law, there appeared to have been no consultation with Congress on how $20 billion specifically handed over to the president for his allocation had been distributed. They also said the administration had not submitted required quarterly reports on the use of the entire $40 billion for almost a year."
HOMELAND SECURITY – NUCLEAR LABS REMAIN VULNERABLE: Rep. Christopher Shays said yesterday that the nation's nuclear weapons labs "remained vulnerable and that the Energy Department was underestimating the threat it faces." The GAO will release a report today, largely confirming Shays' concerns, that finds "the threat posed by terrorists against the nation's weapons labs is estimated by intelligence agencies to be far more lethal than what the Energy Department has accepted in its most recent planning for security." Mathew Zipoli, a leader of the security police at a nuclear facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab near San Francisco, said that "there were major deficiencies in training, equipment and personnel practices at the lab." Earlier, when Zipoli provided information about security lapses at Livermore to the Energy Department Inspector General, he was fired but later reinstated by court order.
CIVIL LIBERTIES – HOSPITAL STOPS ASHCROFT: Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the National Abortion Federation against Attorney General John Ashcroft, a New York hospital may have turned the tide in the argument over "whether the government should have access to confidential medical records, even in redacted form." Today's NYT reports "In a reversal, Justice Department lawyers defending the new federal law that bans a type of abortion voluntarily withdrew a subpoena for abortion records from a Manhattan hospital yesterday… In defense of the law, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which is being challenged in lawsuits in three states, Bush administration lawyers had argued in pretrial hearings that the medical records were needed to prove that the procedure was never medically necessary."
9/11 COMMISSION – ASHCROFT'S MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN DEBUNKED: As conservatives continue their assault on the 9/11 Commission in general and commissioner Jamie Gorelick in particular, Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies sets the record straight. Martin writes "Contrary to the repeated mischaracterization by the Attorney General and others, ["the wall"] never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities; to the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing." Further, "while the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was interpreted to mean that prosecutors could not direct foreign intelligence wiretaps, as opposed to criminal wiretaps, the 9/11 failures had nothing whatsoever to do with the inability of prosecutors to direct such surveillance."
________________________________________________________________________________
IRAQ
The Man With No Plan
Today, Senate confirmation hearings begin for John Negroponte. If confirmed, he would assume control of the American presence in Iraq on June 30 and would inherit a host of occupation responsibilities and challenges from Paul Bremer. As Peter Ogden writes for American Progress, Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras when "the country was the base for President Reagan's covert war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government." While serving in that position, Negroponte was accused of "covering up abuses by the Honduran military to ensure the flow of U.S. aide from an increasingly skeptical Congress." His current tenure as the U.S. representative to the U.N. has only further undermined his credibility in the international community, especially in regards to Iraq, by leading a diplomatic effort that has been increasingly dismissive of the rest of the world. Other problems: Negroponte doesn't speak Arabic, has never been based in the region and has never been involved in post-conflict reconstruction. American Progress Senior Policy Analyst Michael Pan details ten tough scenarios the Senate should ask Negroponte to consider.
BILLIONS IN RECONSTRUCTION MONEY TO CORPORATE CROOKS: Negroponte will inherit a reconstruction effort that has been badly mismanaged. The United States has awarded billions of dollars of contracts to ten companies in Iraq that "have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage" while working on projects around the world. For example, the U.S. "is paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on three federal construction projects and banned from U.S. government work during 2002." The two largest Iraq contractors – Bechtel and Halliburton – have also paid penalties over the last few years. In December 2001, the Bush administration revoked a Clinton-era rule that ensured "repeated violations of federal law would make a company ineligible for new contracts."
VIOLENCE SLOWS RECONSTRUCTION EFFORTS: The reconstruction efforts are further complicated by escalating violence. The Chicago Tribune reports "insurgents and kidnappers have preyed on foreigners – notably contractors, businessmen and journalists – and have seriously disrupted the economic recovery." According to the U.S. military, over the last several weeks "40 foreigners from a dozen nations have been abducted." Overall, the official estimate is "work has been derailed at 10 percent of Iraq's work sites because of fears, threats of attack and a slowdown of supplies from Kuwait, Jordan and the port of Umm Qasr," but officials privately say the true impact has been even more severe. Larry Diamond, a former member of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said "we just bungled this so badly. We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country." See this American Progress "to do" list for the days remaining before turnover.
COALITION OF THE WILLING NOW COALITION OF THE SHRINKING: At the end of May 2,000 troops from Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic will pull out of Iraq. There was hope "that the UK might fill the gap" by sending more troops to ease the burden on the already overstretched U.S. military. But now "U.S. forces are expected to take control." In Britain there was "no great enthusiasm or appetite" to send more troops to Iraq to help patrol Najaf, where "U.S. forces are already in a tense stand-off with the militia loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr." Poland has also scaled back its role by reducing the size of the zone it patrols. Yesterday, as the already weak coalition continued to deteriorate, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) called the U.S. diplomatic effort to date a "failure" and said "everyone" in the administration was at fault.
INSISTING ON MISSILE DEFENSE AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR TROOPS: Members of Congress are proposing diverting some of the $10 billion the President has requested for missile defense "to fund more troops and equipment in Iraq." The move comes in the wake of "a report GAO issued last week criticizing the president's plan to field a missile defense capability this summer." Currently, the White House has refused to immediately plug serious funding gaps for armor, helmets and other protective equipment military commanders say they need to protect troops. And according to Newsweek, a new study circulating in the Army says refusal to protect the troops may have contributed to one out of every four American casualties in Iraq. The diverted funds could be used to plug the holes, or to "boost the Army's strength by 10,000 troops" – forces that are sorely needed to stabilize the security situation in Iraq. But conservatives in Congress are expected to insist the money be used on the discredited missile defense program.
HEALTH CARE
Drug Card Confusion
Enrollment for the new Medicare drug card program is set to begin next month, and already "seasoned counselors are struggling to come up with easy-to-understand answers for Medicare recipients" about whether the cards will actually save people any money. As one expert noted, "companies offering discount cards do not have to stick with the savings they initially advertise, the new Medicare laws does not specify any base price to which the discounts must apply, and card sponsors can change the list of covered drugs even though Medicare beneficiaries will be locked into the card they choose until the end of the year." Earlier this year the White House spent millions of taxpayer dollars on television ads promoting the cards, only to have those ads cited by the General Accounting Office for grossly misleading seniors, citing omissions about new costs to seniors in the new law. Review the entire Medicare issue on this page of American Progress Medicare columns and analysis.
ADMINISTRATION USES FEDS TO INTIMIDATE SENIORS: According to newly released details, last October the Bush administration took the extraordinary step of stopping and searching a bus full of seniors on their way back from purchasing cheaper medicines in Canada. The intimidation move, which FDA officials note is "not consistent" with past practice, came at the very same time the White House and pharmaceutical industry were working to remove provisions from the new Medicare law that would have formally provided seniors access to lower-priced medicines from abroad. Details of the administration's heavy-handed tactics only emerged this month after Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) demanded answers in a letter to the FDA – an agency whose complicity with the drug industry has come into question since the Bush administration took office.
AMERICA'S MAYOR BECOMES AMERICA'S DRUG INDUSTRY SHILL: Sparing no expense in its fear-mongering campaign to scare seniors, the drug industry has hired its longtime crony Rudolph Giuliani to help them fight off efforts to lower the price of medicine. The former mayor of New York, who raked in almost $100,000 from drug industry executives in just the few months he considered running for Senate in 2000, is being bankrolled to use his law enforcement credentials to claim cheaper drugs from Canada are unsafe. Of course, Giuliani has no proof – there has been no substantive data showing Canadian drugs are unsafe, and the FDA itself says it can guarantee a safe reimportation system for just $54 million (a fraction of the billions that could be saved with lower prices). For his part, Giuliani is refusing to "tell reporters how much PhRMA pays his company" for his services.
STILL REFUSING TO PROVIDE CONGRESS WITH DETAILS: During the Medicare debate in Congress, the Bush administration threatened to fire a government actuary if he told lawmakers the true cost of the bill. Now, with the bill costing at least $100 billion more than lawmakers were told, the White House is refusing to make public the actual cost estimates it withheld. In response, House Democrats are now "poised to sue the Bush Administration" in a lawsuit that "could clearly define the long-debated parameters of congressional oversight over the executive branch." Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), senior minority member on the Government Reform Committee, last month invoked the "seven-member rule," whereby administrations traditionally release documents if seven members of the oversight panel request them. He was rejected by the administration.
PFIZER CEO/BUSH FUNDER CONTINUES CUTTING OFF SENIORS: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) last week used his state's pension fund holdings to sponsor a Pfizer stockholder resolution that would force the drug industry giant to only raise prices at the rate of inflation. In response, Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell – a top Bush fundraiser – claimed to "sympathize with financially strapped patients, but vowed to continue efforts to cut off supplies" of drugs to Canadian pharmacies that sell to U.S. customers. Another Pfizer vice president claimed that the drug price problem was not exorbitant prices in the United States, but that "the French and Germans and Canadians are not paying their fair share." What he did not mention was that the drug industry is, by far, the most profitable in America, and that a minor reduction in drug prices here would do little to reduce those profits. As a new Boston University study shows, because lower prices and drug reimportation would allow more people to buy drugs who don't buy them now, industry profits and R&D funding could actually rise.
9/11 – CONGRESSMEN DEMAND FULL ACCOUNTING OF EMERGENCY MONEY: On the heels of reports the president diverted $700 million into Iraq invasion planning without informing Congress, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. David Obey (D-WI) pressed the White House on Monday "for a full accounting of how the Bush administration had spent $40 billion in emergency money that was provided by Congress just days after the Sept. 11 attacks." In a letter to the White House, Byrd and Obey say that "contrary to the requirements of law, there appeared to have been no consultation with Congress on how $20 billion specifically handed over to the president for his allocation had been distributed. They also said the administration had not submitted required quarterly reports on the use of the entire $40 billion for almost a year."
HOMELAND SECURITY – NUCLEAR LABS REMAIN VULNERABLE: Rep. Christopher Shays said yesterday that the nation's nuclear weapons labs "remained vulnerable and that the Energy Department was underestimating the threat it faces." The GAO will release a report today, largely confirming Shays' concerns, that finds "the threat posed by terrorists against the nation's weapons labs is estimated by intelligence agencies to be far more lethal than what the Energy Department has accepted in its most recent planning for security." Mathew Zipoli, a leader of the security police at a nuclear facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab near San Francisco, said that "there were major deficiencies in training, equipment and personnel practices at the lab." Earlier, when Zipoli provided information about security lapses at Livermore to the Energy Department Inspector General, he was fired but later reinstated by court order.
CIVIL LIBERTIES – HOSPITAL STOPS ASHCROFT: Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the National Abortion Federation against Attorney General John Ashcroft, a New York hospital may have turned the tide in the argument over "whether the government should have access to confidential medical records, even in redacted form." Today's NYT reports "In a reversal, Justice Department lawyers defending the new federal law that bans a type of abortion voluntarily withdrew a subpoena for abortion records from a Manhattan hospital yesterday… In defense of the law, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which is being challenged in lawsuits in three states, Bush administration lawyers had argued in pretrial hearings that the medical records were needed to prove that the procedure was never medically necessary."
9/11 COMMISSION – ASHCROFT'S MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN DEBUNKED: As conservatives continue their assault on the 9/11 Commission in general and commissioner Jamie Gorelick in particular, Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies sets the record straight. Martin writes "Contrary to the repeated mischaracterization by the Attorney General and others, ["the wall"] never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities; to the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing." Further, "while the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was interpreted to mean that prosecutors could not direct foreign intelligence wiretaps, as opposed to criminal wiretaps, the 9/11 failures had nothing whatsoever to do with the inability of prosecutors to direct such surveillance."
________________________________________________________________________________
Monday, April 26, 2004
Bush/Cheney 04 Launches New, Misleading Attack Ad On Kerry's Defense Record
THE FACTS:
THE FACTS ABOUT CHENEY’S CUTS TO KEY MILITARY PROGRAMS
Cheney Proposed Cutting Weapons Programs That Were Important to Success in Iraq. In 1990, Cheney proposed cutting 90 C-17 Air Force cargo transport planes and 14 B-52 bombers. Cheney also sought the retirement of two Navy battleships, two nuclear cruisers, and eight nuclear-powered attack submarines. In 1991, Cheney scrapped the Navy’s A-12 Stealth attack plane, a fighter that was proclaimed to be a key part of the future of navy aviation in advanced stealth technology. [Newday, 2/5/91; NY Times, 1/8/91; Boston Globe, 4/27/90; Boston Globe, 1/30/90]
C-17s and B-52s Vital to Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to Defense Daily, “From January through mid-April C-17s in the Central Command's Middle East theater of operations conducted 2,600 missions, carrying more than 23,000 personnel, and more than 73 million pounds of cargo.” An analysis by Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies showed that the Air Force B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers dropped nearly two-thirds of the total bombs in the war. [Defense Daily, 5/21/03; Copley News Service, 7/3/03]
Cheney Cut Thousands of Active-Duty, Reserve, and Civilian Forces. In January 1990, Cheney banned the hiring of any new civilian personnel in the Defense Department through the end of September, which left more than 65,000 jobs vacant. Under the budget proposed in 1990, the Pentagon would have reduced active military personnel by 38,000; selected reserves would have fallen by 3,000. The budget called for the deactivation of two Army divisions. Long range, the Pentagon planned to reduce its work force by 300,000, including about 200,000 military personnel and 100,000 civilians. In 1991, he called for reduction of 200,000 active and reserve military personnel over two years. In 1992, Cheney called for cutting 500,000 active-duty people, 200,000 reservists, and 200,000 civilians over five years. [Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 2/2/92; Chicago Tribune, 2/20/91; 1990 CQ Almanac, p. 672; Washington Post, 1/13/90; Boston Globe, 1/30/90]
Reserves Being Used at “Unprecedented Rate” in Iraq. National guardsmen and reservists will soon make up 40 percent of the total U.S. force in Iraq. Reservists are being used at “unprecedented rate,” according to Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the Army National Guard. Tasked with homeland security missions and combat rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the part-time soldiers mobilized in the first days after September 11 have yet to be deactivated. An internal Army National Guard survey of 5,000 soldiers in 15 states recently presented a disturbing forecast: The rate at which Army Guard members leave the force after extended deployments could nearly double to 22 percent. [U.S. News & World Report, 2/9/04; Chicago Tribune, 2/9/04]
THE TRUTH ABOUT KERRY AND CHENEY RECORDS
Kerry is a Strong Supporter of America’s Military; Has Supported More Than $4.4 Trillion in Defense Spending & Voted for “Largest Increase in Defense Spending Since the Early 1980’s. He has support 16 of the 19 defense authorization bills since elected to the Senate. John Kerry is a strong supporter of the U.S. Armed Services and has consistently worked to ensure the military has the best equipment and training possible. In 2002, John Kerry voted for a large increase in the defense budget. This increase provided more than $355 billion for the Defense Department for 2003, an increase of $21 billion over 2002. This measure includes $71.5 billion for procurement programs such as $4 billion for the Air Force's F-22 fighter jets, $3.5 billion for the Joint Strike Fighter and $279.3 million for an E-8C Joint Stars (JSTARS) aircraft. Kerry’s vote also funded a 4.1% pay increase for military personnel, $160 million for the B-1 Bomber Defense System Upgrade, $1.5 billion for a new attack submarine, more than $630 million for Army and Navy variants of the Blackhawk helicopter, $3.2 billion for additional C-17 transports, $900 million for R&D of the Comanche helicopter and more than $800 million for Trident Submarine conversion. The current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner (R-VA) stated: “The defense spending increase for FY03 is the largest increase in defense spending since the early 1980's-reflecting the importance of defending the homeland and winning the global war against terrorism” [2002, Senate Roll Call Vote # 239; Websites of U.S. Senators Warner, Daschle, Dodd accessed 7/25/03]
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PROGRAMS JOHN KERRY IS BEING ATTACKED ON
APACHE HELICOPTER: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported $13 billion in defense authorizations for the Apache
THE CHENEY RECORD: Terminate The Apache; According to the RNC, AH-64 Apache Helicopters Were Crucial to Operation Iraqi Freedom.In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, Cheney said, “This is just a list of some of the programs that I've recommended termination: the V-22 Osprey, the F-14D, the Army Helicopter Improvement Program, Phoenix missile, F-15E, the Apache helicopter, the M1 tank, et cetera.” In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Cheney said, “The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64…I forced the Army to make choices…So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out.” [Cheney testimony, Senate Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, 6/12/90; Cheney Testimony, House Armed Services Committee, 7/13/89; Kerry’s Military: As He Would Like It,” 7/18/03]
AEGIS SHIPS: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported at least $53 billion defense authorizations for the Aegis program
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cheney Cut Program, Costing Jobs. Cheney plan cut 9 of original 25 ships planned, putting shipyard in jeopardy [States News Service, 8/14/90; Aviation Week and Space Technology, 9/24/90]
BRADLEY FIGHTING VEHICLES: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported at least $8.5 billion in defense authorizations for the Bradley program
THE CHENEY RECORD: Bush-Cheney Budget Terminated The Bradley. “Major weapons killed include the Army's M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Navy's Trident submarine and F-14 aircraft, and the Air Force's F-16 airplane. Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons.” [Boston Globe, 2/5/91]
BLACKHAWK HELICPTERS: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported at least $13 billion in defense authorizations on versions of the Blackhawk.
THE CHENEY RECORD: Terminate The Black Hawk. The Pentagon’s internal budget deliberations recommended termination of the Black Hawk program under Secretary Cheney.” [Aerospace Daily, 5/15/90]
B-2 BOMBER: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported over $16.7 billion in defense authorizations for the B-2 program
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cheney Proposed Cuts to B-2 Program, According to the RNC, B-2s Were Crucial to Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to the Boston Globe, in 1990, “Defense Secretary Richard Cheney announced a cutback… of nearly 45 percent in the administration's B-2 Stealth bomber program, from 132 airplanes to 75…” [Boston Globe, 4/27/90; From RNC Research Memo, “Kerry’s Military: As He Would Like It,” 7/18/03:
C-17 CARGO JETS: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $34.5 billion in defense authorizations for the C-17
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cutting C-17 Program. In 1990, Cheney proposed cutting 90 C-17 Air Force cargo transport planes [Newsday, 2/5/91; NY Times, 1/8/91; Boston Globe, 4/27/90; Boston Globe, 1/30/90]
F/A-18 FIGHTER JETS : The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $60 billion in defense authorizations for the F/A-18 and F-18
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cutbacks Hit Industry Hard: Workers and the industry were hit hard by Cheney’s decision for “major cuts” in the F/A-18 program and upgrades to the F-18 in the late 1980s [Flight International, 6/27/90; Los Angeles Times, 12/17/89; Aerospace Daily, 5/26/89; Aviation Week and Space Technology, 5/1/89]
F-16 FIGHTER JETS: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $25 billion in defense authorizations for the F-16.
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cheney Proposed Cutting F-16 Aircraft, According to the RNC, F-16s Were Crucial to Operation Iraqi Freedom. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Cheney said, “If you're going to have a smaller air force, you don't need as many F-16s…The F-16D we basically continue to buy and close it out because we're not going to have as big a force structure and we won't need as many F-16s.” According to the Boston Globe, Bush’s 1991 defense budget “kill[ed] 81 programs for potential savings of $ 11.9 billion…Major weapons killed include[d]….the Air Force's F-16 airplane.” [Cheney testimony, House Armed Services Committee, 2/7/91; Boston Globe, 2/5/91; From RNC Research Memo, “Kerry’s Military: As He Would Like It,” 7/18/03.]
TOMAHAWK MISSILES: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $6 billion in defense authorizations for the Tomahawk missile program.
THE CHENEY RECORD: No New Missiles Requested Even As Stocks Depleted Before Gulf War, Cutbacks Lead To Layoffs: Cheney’s defense budget was so pared-down that it didn’t include any funds for more Tomahawk missiles in 1991, despite stocks rapidly diminished by the military action in the Persian Gulf. Cuts in 1990 led to layoffs throughout the nation. [Washington Post, 2/5/91; Aerospace Daily, 1/23/91; AP, 6/20/90]
C-130 CARGO JETS: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least at least $12 billion in defense authorizations for the C-130
THE CHENEY RECORD: Move Hurricane Plane Out of Dept. of Defense, Move Considered Dangerous. In 1990, Cheney pushed a potentially dangerous move by trying to shift the WC-130 Hurricane Hunter planes from the Department of Defense and into the Department of Commerce. The WC-130 is used to track Hurricanes and warn coastal residents in time to evacuate the area. In July 1990, Cheney ordered that the Air Force halt all WC-130 flights by October 1, 1990 and turn the mission to the Commerce Department. Reed Boatright, a spokesman for the Commerce Department said, “we are not in a position to accept planes either financially or infrastructure wise.” According to Jerry Jarrell, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, “It would be devastating” if the Commerce Department was unable to pick up the WC-130 after Cheney released it from Defense. Today, the WC-130 remains at Defense. [UPI, 7/11/00]
PATRIOT MISSILE SYSTEM: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $10 billion in defense authorizations for the Patriot program.
SOURCES ON KERRY SPENDING: Congressional Quarterly Almanacs, 1986-2002; House Armed Service Committee Authorization Conference Report Summaries; Conference Reports for Defense Authorizations, FY1986 – present
Posted in Election 2004 | Entry link
By Peter Daou on April 26, 2004 at 10:47 AM
_________________________________________________________________________________
THE FACTS:
THE FACTS ABOUT CHENEY’S CUTS TO KEY MILITARY PROGRAMS
Cheney Proposed Cutting Weapons Programs That Were Important to Success in Iraq. In 1990, Cheney proposed cutting 90 C-17 Air Force cargo transport planes and 14 B-52 bombers. Cheney also sought the retirement of two Navy battleships, two nuclear cruisers, and eight nuclear-powered attack submarines. In 1991, Cheney scrapped the Navy’s A-12 Stealth attack plane, a fighter that was proclaimed to be a key part of the future of navy aviation in advanced stealth technology. [Newday, 2/5/91; NY Times, 1/8/91; Boston Globe, 4/27/90; Boston Globe, 1/30/90]
C-17s and B-52s Vital to Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to Defense Daily, “From January through mid-April C-17s in the Central Command's Middle East theater of operations conducted 2,600 missions, carrying more than 23,000 personnel, and more than 73 million pounds of cargo.” An analysis by Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies showed that the Air Force B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers dropped nearly two-thirds of the total bombs in the war. [Defense Daily, 5/21/03; Copley News Service, 7/3/03]
Cheney Cut Thousands of Active-Duty, Reserve, and Civilian Forces. In January 1990, Cheney banned the hiring of any new civilian personnel in the Defense Department through the end of September, which left more than 65,000 jobs vacant. Under the budget proposed in 1990, the Pentagon would have reduced active military personnel by 38,000; selected reserves would have fallen by 3,000. The budget called for the deactivation of two Army divisions. Long range, the Pentagon planned to reduce its work force by 300,000, including about 200,000 military personnel and 100,000 civilians. In 1991, he called for reduction of 200,000 active and reserve military personnel over two years. In 1992, Cheney called for cutting 500,000 active-duty people, 200,000 reservists, and 200,000 civilians over five years. [Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 2/2/92; Chicago Tribune, 2/20/91; 1990 CQ Almanac, p. 672; Washington Post, 1/13/90; Boston Globe, 1/30/90]
Reserves Being Used at “Unprecedented Rate” in Iraq. National guardsmen and reservists will soon make up 40 percent of the total U.S. force in Iraq. Reservists are being used at “unprecedented rate,” according to Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the Army National Guard. Tasked with homeland security missions and combat rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the part-time soldiers mobilized in the first days after September 11 have yet to be deactivated. An internal Army National Guard survey of 5,000 soldiers in 15 states recently presented a disturbing forecast: The rate at which Army Guard members leave the force after extended deployments could nearly double to 22 percent. [U.S. News & World Report, 2/9/04; Chicago Tribune, 2/9/04]
THE TRUTH ABOUT KERRY AND CHENEY RECORDS
Kerry is a Strong Supporter of America’s Military; Has Supported More Than $4.4 Trillion in Defense Spending & Voted for “Largest Increase in Defense Spending Since the Early 1980’s. He has support 16 of the 19 defense authorization bills since elected to the Senate. John Kerry is a strong supporter of the U.S. Armed Services and has consistently worked to ensure the military has the best equipment and training possible. In 2002, John Kerry voted for a large increase in the defense budget. This increase provided more than $355 billion for the Defense Department for 2003, an increase of $21 billion over 2002. This measure includes $71.5 billion for procurement programs such as $4 billion for the Air Force's F-22 fighter jets, $3.5 billion for the Joint Strike Fighter and $279.3 million for an E-8C Joint Stars (JSTARS) aircraft. Kerry’s vote also funded a 4.1% pay increase for military personnel, $160 million for the B-1 Bomber Defense System Upgrade, $1.5 billion for a new attack submarine, more than $630 million for Army and Navy variants of the Blackhawk helicopter, $3.2 billion for additional C-17 transports, $900 million for R&D of the Comanche helicopter and more than $800 million for Trident Submarine conversion. The current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner (R-VA) stated: “The defense spending increase for FY03 is the largest increase in defense spending since the early 1980's-reflecting the importance of defending the homeland and winning the global war against terrorism” [2002, Senate Roll Call Vote # 239; Websites of U.S. Senators Warner, Daschle, Dodd accessed 7/25/03]
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PROGRAMS JOHN KERRY IS BEING ATTACKED ON
APACHE HELICOPTER: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported $13 billion in defense authorizations for the Apache
THE CHENEY RECORD: Terminate The Apache; According to the RNC, AH-64 Apache Helicopters Were Crucial to Operation Iraqi Freedom.In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, Cheney said, “This is just a list of some of the programs that I've recommended termination: the V-22 Osprey, the F-14D, the Army Helicopter Improvement Program, Phoenix missile, F-15E, the Apache helicopter, the M1 tank, et cetera.” In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Cheney said, “The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64…I forced the Army to make choices…So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out.” [Cheney testimony, Senate Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, 6/12/90; Cheney Testimony, House Armed Services Committee, 7/13/89; Kerry’s Military: As He Would Like It,” 7/18/03]
AEGIS SHIPS: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported at least $53 billion defense authorizations for the Aegis program
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cheney Cut Program, Costing Jobs. Cheney plan cut 9 of original 25 ships planned, putting shipyard in jeopardy [States News Service, 8/14/90; Aviation Week and Space Technology, 9/24/90]
BRADLEY FIGHTING VEHICLES: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported at least $8.5 billion in defense authorizations for the Bradley program
THE CHENEY RECORD: Bush-Cheney Budget Terminated The Bradley. “Major weapons killed include the Army's M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Navy's Trident submarine and F-14 aircraft, and the Air Force's F-16 airplane. Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons.” [Boston Globe, 2/5/91]
BLACKHAWK HELICPTERS: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported at least $13 billion in defense authorizations on versions of the Blackhawk.
THE CHENEY RECORD: Terminate The Black Hawk. The Pentagon’s internal budget deliberations recommended termination of the Black Hawk program under Secretary Cheney.” [Aerospace Daily, 5/15/90]
B-2 BOMBER: The Kerry Record
Kerry has supported over $16.7 billion in defense authorizations for the B-2 program
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cheney Proposed Cuts to B-2 Program, According to the RNC, B-2s Were Crucial to Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to the Boston Globe, in 1990, “Defense Secretary Richard Cheney announced a cutback… of nearly 45 percent in the administration's B-2 Stealth bomber program, from 132 airplanes to 75…” [Boston Globe, 4/27/90; From RNC Research Memo, “Kerry’s Military: As He Would Like It,” 7/18/03:
C-17 CARGO JETS: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $34.5 billion in defense authorizations for the C-17
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cutting C-17 Program. In 1990, Cheney proposed cutting 90 C-17 Air Force cargo transport planes [Newsday, 2/5/91; NY Times, 1/8/91; Boston Globe, 4/27/90; Boston Globe, 1/30/90]
F/A-18 FIGHTER JETS : The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $60 billion in defense authorizations for the F/A-18 and F-18
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cutbacks Hit Industry Hard: Workers and the industry were hit hard by Cheney’s decision for “major cuts” in the F/A-18 program and upgrades to the F-18 in the late 1980s [Flight International, 6/27/90; Los Angeles Times, 12/17/89; Aerospace Daily, 5/26/89; Aviation Week and Space Technology, 5/1/89]
F-16 FIGHTER JETS: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $25 billion in defense authorizations for the F-16.
THE CHENEY RECORD: Cheney Proposed Cutting F-16 Aircraft, According to the RNC, F-16s Were Crucial to Operation Iraqi Freedom. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Cheney said, “If you're going to have a smaller air force, you don't need as many F-16s…The F-16D we basically continue to buy and close it out because we're not going to have as big a force structure and we won't need as many F-16s.” According to the Boston Globe, Bush’s 1991 defense budget “kill[ed] 81 programs for potential savings of $ 11.9 billion…Major weapons killed include[d]….the Air Force's F-16 airplane.” [Cheney testimony, House Armed Services Committee, 2/7/91; Boston Globe, 2/5/91; From RNC Research Memo, “Kerry’s Military: As He Would Like It,” 7/18/03.]
TOMAHAWK MISSILES: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $6 billion in defense authorizations for the Tomahawk missile program.
THE CHENEY RECORD: No New Missiles Requested Even As Stocks Depleted Before Gulf War, Cutbacks Lead To Layoffs: Cheney’s defense budget was so pared-down that it didn’t include any funds for more Tomahawk missiles in 1991, despite stocks rapidly diminished by the military action in the Persian Gulf. Cuts in 1990 led to layoffs throughout the nation. [Washington Post, 2/5/91; Aerospace Daily, 1/23/91; AP, 6/20/90]
C-130 CARGO JETS: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least at least $12 billion in defense authorizations for the C-130
THE CHENEY RECORD: Move Hurricane Plane Out of Dept. of Defense, Move Considered Dangerous. In 1990, Cheney pushed a potentially dangerous move by trying to shift the WC-130 Hurricane Hunter planes from the Department of Defense and into the Department of Commerce. The WC-130 is used to track Hurricanes and warn coastal residents in time to evacuate the area. In July 1990, Cheney ordered that the Air Force halt all WC-130 flights by October 1, 1990 and turn the mission to the Commerce Department. Reed Boatright, a spokesman for the Commerce Department said, “we are not in a position to accept planes either financially or infrastructure wise.” According to Jerry Jarrell, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, “It would be devastating” if the Commerce Department was unable to pick up the WC-130 after Cheney released it from Defense. Today, the WC-130 remains at Defense. [UPI, 7/11/00]
PATRIOT MISSILE SYSTEM: The Kerry Record
Kerry supported at least $10 billion in defense authorizations for the Patriot program.
SOURCES ON KERRY SPENDING: Congressional Quarterly Almanacs, 1986-2002; House Armed Service Committee Authorization Conference Report Summaries; Conference Reports for Defense Authorizations, FY1986 – present
Posted in Election 2004 | Entry link
By Peter Daou on April 26, 2004 at 10:47 AM
_________________________________________________________________________________
CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS
No Defense for Cheney
Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to deliver a speech in Missouri today attacking his political opponents for supposedly trying to cut defense spending in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet, a look back at the record shows it was Cheney who repeatedly tried to cut defense spending at this time, even publicly attacking a president of his own party. During the height of Cold War tensions, it was Cheney who told the Washington Post on 12/16/84 that if President Reagan, "doesn't really cut defense, he becomes the No. 1 special pleader in town." Cheney said "the president has to reach out and take a whack at everything to be credible" and said that absent a raid of Social Security or a tax increase, "you've got to hit defense." Six years later, on 2/1/90, it was Cheney who proudly told Congress "since I became Secretary, we've been through a fairly major process of reducing the defense budget." He bragged that during the first year of his tenure, he "cut almost $65 billion out of the five-year defense program" and that subsequent proposals would "take another $167 billion out." He trumpeted the fact that "we're recommending base closures," "we're talking about force structure cuts" and "we've got a military construction freeze." And as the 8/4/91 NY Times noted, Cheney tried "to reduce active-duty troop strength" from 2.2 million to 1.6 million while making "deep cuts in the Reserves and National Guard" – a move that is now, in part, forcing the military to extend tours of duty and increase the combat burden on reservists. See an analysis of defense spending by American Progress's Larry Korb.
CHENEY ATTACKS WEAPONS CUTS AFTER CUTTING WEAPONS: In a similar speech attacking opponents earlier this year, Cheney claimed his opponents have "repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military," including "voting against the Apache helicopter." Yet in 1990 Cheney bragged to Congress about weapons "programs that I have recommended for termination," including fighter jets, the Phoenix missile and "the Apache helicopter." Cheney also this year criticized opponents for voting "against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle." But according to the Chicago Tribune, it is the Bush administration who is "dramatically reducing the number of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in Iraq," even as the fighting intensifies. That means more troops are forced to "ride in lightly protected Humvees, trucks and troop carriers" which are much more vulnerable to attack. As former Gen. Barry McCaffrey said, "This is high-intensity combat. If you have got a chance to fight this with Bradley Fighting Vehicles or fight this without them, you would be crazy to be fighting without them."
CHENEY ATTACKS TROOP PAY CUT AFTER TRYING TO CUT TROOP PAY: Earlier this year, Cheney criticized opponents for supposedly being a "reliable vote against military pay increases." Yet, as the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, it was the Bush Administration last year which tried "to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who already are contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120-degree-plus heat." As the Army Times noted, the White House "announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones." Additionally, the White House "proposed capping pay raises" for various soldiers as a cost-cutting measure. Only when the effort became "a political embarrassment" did "the White House quickly backpedal" from the proposal.
DEFENSE CONTRACTS GEARED TOWARDS INDUSTRY NOT TROOPS: Even as Cheney claims the Bush administration is most committed to a strong defense, its defense spending decisions appear more focused on showering largesse on defense contractor cronies rather than on pressing national security needs. For instance, at the same time the White House is ignoring military commander's desperate calls for funding to fill shortfalls in "bolt-on vehicle armor, combat helmets, night sights and body armor," it is pressing ahead with a $9 billion missile defense plan, even as the government reports that the plan is untested and not ready for deployment. Similarly, the president "personally asked his aides to work out a deal" to circumvent traditional procurement rules and give Boeing a leasing deal that will "cost hundreds of millions to several billions of dollars more than it should." And it was the White House who, under pressure from defense contractors, revived its plan to build the Crusader weapons system, which it previously claimed was outdated. Meanwhile, the administration has refused to adequately monitor the funds being spent in Iraq, fueling billions in "corruption and inflated cost to taxpayers" – much of it going to Cheney's old firm Halliburton.
BATHING CAMPAIGN DONORS IN CASH WHILE STIFFING TROOPS: A look at who finances the president's political campaigns offers insight into the Bush administration's decisions to underfund basic troop equipment while pouring cash into untested, overpriced, outdated, or unregulated defense contracts. For instance, the missile defense program includes massive defense contracts for two of Bush's major campaign and party contributors, Northrop Grumman (more than $900,000 to Bush/allies) and Lockheed Martin (more than $1.2 million to Bush/allies). Lockheed, in particular, has a special connection to Bush: the company's Vice President, Bruce Jackson, "served as financial chair and fundraiser for Bush's presidential campaign" and, at a 1999 conference, bragged that he would personally "write the Republican platform" on defense if the Texas governor made it to the Oval Office. Similarly, Boeing received the sweetheart lease deal after sending more than $800,000 to Bush and his allies. Even the administration's abandonment of plans to cut the Crusader can be traced to financial connections: the company that reaps the most from the continuation of the weapon is the Carlyle Group – the firm that employs, among others, the president's father and former Secretary of State James Baker.
WOMEN'S RIGHTS
Throngs Protest Bush Policies
Hundreds of thousands of people marched on the Mall in Washington, DC, yesterday to voice their support for women's health and reproductive rights, and their opposition to President Bush's extremist agenda. While Bush tries to present himself as a moderate on women's issues – openly saying that America is not ready for a total ban on abortions – he has quietly pursued an aggressive agenda to restrict a women's right to choose. Since taking office, Bush has stopped funding overseas family planning clinics that provide abortion counseling, withheld millions from the United Nations Population Fund based on the fear mongering of anti-choice zealots and signed into law the first ban of an abortion procedure since Roe v. Wade. Most recently, Bush moved toward federal recognition of the fetus as a person – an important step in the effort to ban abortion – by making it a separate crime to kill a fetus of a pregnant women. The throngs of protestors yesterday had a simple message for the president – stop attacking women's rights. Read American Progress coverage of the March for Women's Lives. Also, read some perspectives of men and women advocating women's rights, and learn more about the issue.
KAREN HUGHES LIKENS SUPPORT OF ABORTION RIGHTS TO TERRORISM: Top presidential advisor Karen Hughes hit the airwaves yesterday to spin the demonstrations for the administration. Her message: those who support a women's right to choose have the same moral values as terrorists. Appearing on CNN, Hughes said that Americans support Bush's efforts to restrict abortion, especially after 9/11, because "the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life." (Curiously, Hughes' quote, included in an earlier internet version of a NYT story covering the March, was stripped from the story before it went to press). This isn't the first time that the administration has used the terrorism label to attack its political opponents. In February, Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the National Education Association – a labor organization of 2.7 million teachers – a "terrorist organization" because it opposed the Administration's implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act.
ANTI-CHOICE LEADER COMPARES MARCHERS TO HITLER SYMPATHIZERS: Randall Terry, president of the anti-abortion group Society for Truth and Justice compared those participating in the rally to Hitler supporters. Appearing on CNN Sunday Morning, Terry said "These celebrities who have attached their names to [the march], their names are going to have a certain amount of shame with it. Remember, Adolf Hitler in the mid '30s had really big crowds and had a lot of famous people saying he was a great guy. It didn't do him much good in 1945."
CHENEY REVEALS THE ADMINISTRATION'S TRUE COLORS: In a transparent attempt to broaden his appeal, President Bush carefully parses words when speaking about abortion. Yesterday, for example, his spokesman Taylor Gross said the president was committed to creating a "culture of life" in America. Vice President Cheney is less subtle about articulating the administration's true agenda. Speaking to an anti-abortion group last week, Cheney called efforts to ban abortion "a great movement of conscience." He labeled the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision an act of "raw judicial power." And while he acknowledged "America still has some distance to travel," Cheney expressed confidence that efforts to ban abortion in America would eventually be successful.
BUSH WITHDRAWS FROM GLOBAL EFFORTS TO IMPROVE WOMEN'S HEALTH: The administration's anti-abortion orthodoxy has led to America's near complete withdrawal from international efforts to bolster reproductive health. Today the U.S. Agency for International Development is expected to announce it is "scrapping plans to sponsor a major global health and reproductive rights conference." The move came after conservatives in Congress complained that some pro-choice groups were planning on having a presence at the conference.
CHOICE UNDER ATTACK ON STATE LEVEL: While Bush and Cheney have led the anti-abortion charge in Washington, likeminded conservatives have been even more successful restricting abortion on the state level. Over the last 9 years states "have enacted 450 laws restricting access to abortion by imposing waiting periods, requiring parental consent or notification for minors seeking an abortion, and setting stricter regulatory policies for medical clinics."
LEGAL – CHENEY'S ENERGY AIDE BECAME ENERGY LOBBYIST: The Boston Globe reports "the executive director of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force...became an energy lobbyist just months after leaving the White House." 9 months after the task force completed its work Andrew Lundquist "was a registered lobbyist for companies that stood to benefit from the energy policy he helped craft." Lundquist's clients paid him more than $300,000. Cheney's persistent refusal to disclose information about the task force has created a string of litigation that culminates tomorrow with oral arguments before the Supreme Court. (American Progress has co-authored an amicus brief arguing that Cheney's refusal to release the task force's records is improper).
IRAQ – WOODWARD SAYS SAUDI PRINCE IS LYING: Journalist Bob Woodward said on CNN that "Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan's assertions that he did not learn of President Bush's decision to launch war on Iraq before Secretary of State Colin Powell are false." Bandar said on Larry King Live last week "Both Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld told me before the briefing that the president has not made a decision yet, but here is the plan." Woodward set the facts straight: "In this meeting you have the secretary of defense saying -- according to the secretary of defense's own words – 'you can take this to the bank; this is going to happen.'"
MEDIA – THE DOUBLE STANDARD: When former NYT writer Jayson Blair was exposed as a serial plagiarizer last year columnists and writers such as Andrew Sullivan, Richard Cohen and Jennifer Harper lamented that Blair, who is African-American, had advanced so far because of "favoritism based on race." But four months after USA Today foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was exposed for committing similar improprieties none of them have asked the question: "What does this mean for the future of white journalism?" Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts picks up the slack. Pitts provocatively asks: " Did USA Today advance a moderately capable journalist because he was white? Did some white editor mentor him out of racial solidarity even though Kelley was unqualified? In light of this fiasco, should we re-examine the de facto affirmative action that gives white men preferential treatment in our newsrooms?"
ECONOMY – LONG-TERM PROBLEMS PERSIST: Although March was a good month for job creation, new Labor Department data reveals "that the problems of the long-term unemployed — those out of work 27 weeks or more — appeared to grow worse." According to an analysis of the data released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), "in March about 354,000 jobless workers exhausted their regular benefits without being able to receive additional federal aid," a number which "eclipsed the record high that was set just two months ago, in January 2004." There have been nearly 1.5 million "exhaustees" since late December, "when the federal program designed to help the long-term unemployed began phasing out." This is a troubling indicator, the CBPP concludes, suggesting "that the welcome news that jobs grew by 308,000 in March has yet to have had much of a spillover benefit to the long-term unemployed. To the contrary, the same labor market report showing the March jobs growth also showed, if anything, an increase in long-term unemployment."
IRAQ – TOP GENERAL SAYS MORE TROOPS NEEDED: When Gen. Eric K. Shinseki said before the war "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq," he was told his estimate was "wildly off the mark" by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But nearly a year after the president declared that "major combat operations in Iraq" had ended, the top United States commander in the Middle East is prepared to request an increase in troops. "The Pentagon has already extended by 90 days the tours of 20,000 soldiers" that were scheduled to return to their home bases after a year in Iraq and now, the NYT reports Gen. John Abizaid said Friday that "he was likely to ask for another extension in the current troop levels in Iraq, now at 135,000, and might even ask for more troops beyond that." The commander general "said the security situation was liable to worsen as June 30 approached, and with it the return of self-rule to Iraq. He cited the likelihood of new insurgent attacks against American troops and doubts about the current reliability of Iraqi security forces."
TERRORISM – BUSH ADMINISTRATION 'PAYING NO ATTENTION': The Chicago Reader reports L. Paul Bremer, the senior Coalition official in Iraq, had this to say about the Bush administration in late February, 2001: "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' That's too bad. They've been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they're not taking advantage of it. Maybe the folks in the press ought to be pushing a little bit." Bremer, who served as President Reagan's ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, and sat on a commission which explored the issue in 1999, chided the media among others for not paying attention: "There's been remarkably little attention to the major recommendation the Gilmore Commission made for a substantial reorganization of the government's approach to terrorism," Bremer said. "Journalists shouldn't let politicians get away with that."
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No Defense for Cheney
Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to deliver a speech in Missouri today attacking his political opponents for supposedly trying to cut defense spending in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet, a look back at the record shows it was Cheney who repeatedly tried to cut defense spending at this time, even publicly attacking a president of his own party. During the height of Cold War tensions, it was Cheney who told the Washington Post on 12/16/84 that if President Reagan, "doesn't really cut defense, he becomes the No. 1 special pleader in town." Cheney said "the president has to reach out and take a whack at everything to be credible" and said that absent a raid of Social Security or a tax increase, "you've got to hit defense." Six years later, on 2/1/90, it was Cheney who proudly told Congress "since I became Secretary, we've been through a fairly major process of reducing the defense budget." He bragged that during the first year of his tenure, he "cut almost $65 billion out of the five-year defense program" and that subsequent proposals would "take another $167 billion out." He trumpeted the fact that "we're recommending base closures," "we're talking about force structure cuts" and "we've got a military construction freeze." And as the 8/4/91 NY Times noted, Cheney tried "to reduce active-duty troop strength" from 2.2 million to 1.6 million while making "deep cuts in the Reserves and National Guard" – a move that is now, in part, forcing the military to extend tours of duty and increase the combat burden on reservists. See an analysis of defense spending by American Progress's Larry Korb.
CHENEY ATTACKS WEAPONS CUTS AFTER CUTTING WEAPONS: In a similar speech attacking opponents earlier this year, Cheney claimed his opponents have "repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military," including "voting against the Apache helicopter." Yet in 1990 Cheney bragged to Congress about weapons "programs that I have recommended for termination," including fighter jets, the Phoenix missile and "the Apache helicopter." Cheney also this year criticized opponents for voting "against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle." But according to the Chicago Tribune, it is the Bush administration who is "dramatically reducing the number of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in Iraq," even as the fighting intensifies. That means more troops are forced to "ride in lightly protected Humvees, trucks and troop carriers" which are much more vulnerable to attack. As former Gen. Barry McCaffrey said, "This is high-intensity combat. If you have got a chance to fight this with Bradley Fighting Vehicles or fight this without them, you would be crazy to be fighting without them."
CHENEY ATTACKS TROOP PAY CUT AFTER TRYING TO CUT TROOP PAY: Earlier this year, Cheney criticized opponents for supposedly being a "reliable vote against military pay increases." Yet, as the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, it was the Bush Administration last year which tried "to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who already are contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120-degree-plus heat." As the Army Times noted, the White House "announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones." Additionally, the White House "proposed capping pay raises" for various soldiers as a cost-cutting measure. Only when the effort became "a political embarrassment" did "the White House quickly backpedal" from the proposal.
DEFENSE CONTRACTS GEARED TOWARDS INDUSTRY NOT TROOPS: Even as Cheney claims the Bush administration is most committed to a strong defense, its defense spending decisions appear more focused on showering largesse on defense contractor cronies rather than on pressing national security needs. For instance, at the same time the White House is ignoring military commander's desperate calls for funding to fill shortfalls in "bolt-on vehicle armor, combat helmets, night sights and body armor," it is pressing ahead with a $9 billion missile defense plan, even as the government reports that the plan is untested and not ready for deployment. Similarly, the president "personally asked his aides to work out a deal" to circumvent traditional procurement rules and give Boeing a leasing deal that will "cost hundreds of millions to several billions of dollars more than it should." And it was the White House who, under pressure from defense contractors, revived its plan to build the Crusader weapons system, which it previously claimed was outdated. Meanwhile, the administration has refused to adequately monitor the funds being spent in Iraq, fueling billions in "corruption and inflated cost to taxpayers" – much of it going to Cheney's old firm Halliburton.
BATHING CAMPAIGN DONORS IN CASH WHILE STIFFING TROOPS: A look at who finances the president's political campaigns offers insight into the Bush administration's decisions to underfund basic troop equipment while pouring cash into untested, overpriced, outdated, or unregulated defense contracts. For instance, the missile defense program includes massive defense contracts for two of Bush's major campaign and party contributors, Northrop Grumman (more than $900,000 to Bush/allies) and Lockheed Martin (more than $1.2 million to Bush/allies). Lockheed, in particular, has a special connection to Bush: the company's Vice President, Bruce Jackson, "served as financial chair and fundraiser for Bush's presidential campaign" and, at a 1999 conference, bragged that he would personally "write the Republican platform" on defense if the Texas governor made it to the Oval Office. Similarly, Boeing received the sweetheart lease deal after sending more than $800,000 to Bush and his allies. Even the administration's abandonment of plans to cut the Crusader can be traced to financial connections: the company that reaps the most from the continuation of the weapon is the Carlyle Group – the firm that employs, among others, the president's father and former Secretary of State James Baker.
WOMEN'S RIGHTS
Throngs Protest Bush Policies
Hundreds of thousands of people marched on the Mall in Washington, DC, yesterday to voice their support for women's health and reproductive rights, and their opposition to President Bush's extremist agenda. While Bush tries to present himself as a moderate on women's issues – openly saying that America is not ready for a total ban on abortions – he has quietly pursued an aggressive agenda to restrict a women's right to choose. Since taking office, Bush has stopped funding overseas family planning clinics that provide abortion counseling, withheld millions from the United Nations Population Fund based on the fear mongering of anti-choice zealots and signed into law the first ban of an abortion procedure since Roe v. Wade. Most recently, Bush moved toward federal recognition of the fetus as a person – an important step in the effort to ban abortion – by making it a separate crime to kill a fetus of a pregnant women. The throngs of protestors yesterday had a simple message for the president – stop attacking women's rights. Read American Progress coverage of the March for Women's Lives. Also, read some perspectives of men and women advocating women's rights, and learn more about the issue.
KAREN HUGHES LIKENS SUPPORT OF ABORTION RIGHTS TO TERRORISM: Top presidential advisor Karen Hughes hit the airwaves yesterday to spin the demonstrations for the administration. Her message: those who support a women's right to choose have the same moral values as terrorists. Appearing on CNN, Hughes said that Americans support Bush's efforts to restrict abortion, especially after 9/11, because "the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life." (Curiously, Hughes' quote, included in an earlier internet version of a NYT story covering the March, was stripped from the story before it went to press). This isn't the first time that the administration has used the terrorism label to attack its political opponents. In February, Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the National Education Association – a labor organization of 2.7 million teachers – a "terrorist organization" because it opposed the Administration's implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act.
ANTI-CHOICE LEADER COMPARES MARCHERS TO HITLER SYMPATHIZERS: Randall Terry, president of the anti-abortion group Society for Truth and Justice compared those participating in the rally to Hitler supporters. Appearing on CNN Sunday Morning, Terry said "These celebrities who have attached their names to [the march], their names are going to have a certain amount of shame with it. Remember, Adolf Hitler in the mid '30s had really big crowds and had a lot of famous people saying he was a great guy. It didn't do him much good in 1945."
CHENEY REVEALS THE ADMINISTRATION'S TRUE COLORS: In a transparent attempt to broaden his appeal, President Bush carefully parses words when speaking about abortion. Yesterday, for example, his spokesman Taylor Gross said the president was committed to creating a "culture of life" in America. Vice President Cheney is less subtle about articulating the administration's true agenda. Speaking to an anti-abortion group last week, Cheney called efforts to ban abortion "a great movement of conscience." He labeled the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision an act of "raw judicial power." And while he acknowledged "America still has some distance to travel," Cheney expressed confidence that efforts to ban abortion in America would eventually be successful.
BUSH WITHDRAWS FROM GLOBAL EFFORTS TO IMPROVE WOMEN'S HEALTH: The administration's anti-abortion orthodoxy has led to America's near complete withdrawal from international efforts to bolster reproductive health. Today the U.S. Agency for International Development is expected to announce it is "scrapping plans to sponsor a major global health and reproductive rights conference." The move came after conservatives in Congress complained that some pro-choice groups were planning on having a presence at the conference.
CHOICE UNDER ATTACK ON STATE LEVEL: While Bush and Cheney have led the anti-abortion charge in Washington, likeminded conservatives have been even more successful restricting abortion on the state level. Over the last 9 years states "have enacted 450 laws restricting access to abortion by imposing waiting periods, requiring parental consent or notification for minors seeking an abortion, and setting stricter regulatory policies for medical clinics."
LEGAL – CHENEY'S ENERGY AIDE BECAME ENERGY LOBBYIST: The Boston Globe reports "the executive director of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force...became an energy lobbyist just months after leaving the White House." 9 months after the task force completed its work Andrew Lundquist "was a registered lobbyist for companies that stood to benefit from the energy policy he helped craft." Lundquist's clients paid him more than $300,000. Cheney's persistent refusal to disclose information about the task force has created a string of litigation that culminates tomorrow with oral arguments before the Supreme Court. (American Progress has co-authored an amicus brief arguing that Cheney's refusal to release the task force's records is improper).
IRAQ – WOODWARD SAYS SAUDI PRINCE IS LYING: Journalist Bob Woodward said on CNN that "Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan's assertions that he did not learn of President Bush's decision to launch war on Iraq before Secretary of State Colin Powell are false." Bandar said on Larry King Live last week "Both Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld told me before the briefing that the president has not made a decision yet, but here is the plan." Woodward set the facts straight: "In this meeting you have the secretary of defense saying -- according to the secretary of defense's own words – 'you can take this to the bank; this is going to happen.'"
MEDIA – THE DOUBLE STANDARD: When former NYT writer Jayson Blair was exposed as a serial plagiarizer last year columnists and writers such as Andrew Sullivan, Richard Cohen and Jennifer Harper lamented that Blair, who is African-American, had advanced so far because of "favoritism based on race." But four months after USA Today foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was exposed for committing similar improprieties none of them have asked the question: "What does this mean for the future of white journalism?" Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts picks up the slack. Pitts provocatively asks: " Did USA Today advance a moderately capable journalist because he was white? Did some white editor mentor him out of racial solidarity even though Kelley was unqualified? In light of this fiasco, should we re-examine the de facto affirmative action that gives white men preferential treatment in our newsrooms?"
ECONOMY – LONG-TERM PROBLEMS PERSIST: Although March was a good month for job creation, new Labor Department data reveals "that the problems of the long-term unemployed — those out of work 27 weeks or more — appeared to grow worse." According to an analysis of the data released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), "in March about 354,000 jobless workers exhausted their regular benefits without being able to receive additional federal aid," a number which "eclipsed the record high that was set just two months ago, in January 2004." There have been nearly 1.5 million "exhaustees" since late December, "when the federal program designed to help the long-term unemployed began phasing out." This is a troubling indicator, the CBPP concludes, suggesting "that the welcome news that jobs grew by 308,000 in March has yet to have had much of a spillover benefit to the long-term unemployed. To the contrary, the same labor market report showing the March jobs growth also showed, if anything, an increase in long-term unemployment."
IRAQ – TOP GENERAL SAYS MORE TROOPS NEEDED: When Gen. Eric K. Shinseki said before the war "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq," he was told his estimate was "wildly off the mark" by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But nearly a year after the president declared that "major combat operations in Iraq" had ended, the top United States commander in the Middle East is prepared to request an increase in troops. "The Pentagon has already extended by 90 days the tours of 20,000 soldiers" that were scheduled to return to their home bases after a year in Iraq and now, the NYT reports Gen. John Abizaid said Friday that "he was likely to ask for another extension in the current troop levels in Iraq, now at 135,000, and might even ask for more troops beyond that." The commander general "said the security situation was liable to worsen as June 30 approached, and with it the return of self-rule to Iraq. He cited the likelihood of new insurgent attacks against American troops and doubts about the current reliability of Iraqi security forces."
TERRORISM – BUSH ADMINISTRATION 'PAYING NO ATTENTION': The Chicago Reader reports L. Paul Bremer, the senior Coalition official in Iraq, had this to say about the Bush administration in late February, 2001: "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' That's too bad. They've been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they're not taking advantage of it. Maybe the folks in the press ought to be pushing a little bit." Bremer, who served as President Reagan's ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, and sat on a commission which explored the issue in 1999, chided the media among others for not paying attention: "There's been remarkably little attention to the major recommendation the Gilmore Commission made for a substantial reorganization of the government's approach to terrorism," Bremer said. "Journalists shouldn't let politicians get away with that."
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1.1 million pissed off women told the president the only Bush they trusted was their own.
April 26, 2004 NY TIMES
Abortion-Rights Marchers Vow to Fight Another Bush Term
By ROBIN TONER
WASHINGTON, April 25 — Hundreds of thousands of abortion rights supporters rallied Sunday in the nation's capital, protesting the policies of the Bush administration and its conservative allies and vowing to fight back in the November election.
The huge crowd marched slowly past the White House, chanting and waving signs like "My Body Is Not Public Property!" and "It's Your Choice, Not Theirs!," then filled the Mall, turning it into a sea of women, men and children for the first large-scale abortion rights demonstration here in 12 years.
Organizers asserted that the marchers numbered more than a million, in what they said was a clear demonstration of political clout. There was no official estimate of the crowd size from law enforcement authorities; the United States Park Police stopped providing counts for rallies after bitter disputes over past estimates.
Speaker after speaker declared that President Bush and his allies in Congress were trying to impose an ideological agenda on abortion and family planning programs, both at home and abroad. The advocates warned that the erosion might be stealthy and incremental — regulations and restrictions rather than outright bans — but asserted that the trend was unmistakable.
"We are determined to stop this war on women," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, a sponsor of the march. Gloria Steinem, one of many feminist icons who turned out Sunday, said, "We are here to take back our country."
The day had a decidedly partisan edge, with many in the crowd carrying signs for Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee; several members of his family were among the marchers, as was Howard Dean, who had also sought the Democratic nomination; Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader of the House; and Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party chairman.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, noted that the last time abortion rights supporters rallied in Washington, the nation elected her husband to the presidency just six months later.
"We didn't have to march for 12 long years because we had a government that respected the rights of women," she said. "The only way we're going to be able to avoid having to march again and again and again is to elect John Kerry president."
Mr. Bush was at Camp David this weekend, but a White House spokesman, Taylor Gross, said: "The president believes we should work to build a culture of life in America. And regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, we can all work together to reduce the number of abortions through promotion of abstinence education programs, support for parental notification laws and support for the ban on partial-birth abortions."
Administration officials, in fact, have long maintained that the president's policies are solidly in the mainstream of American public opinion; although he opposes abortion except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the woman, he has said the country is not ready for an outright ban.
But abortion rights advocates countered Sunday that Mr. Bush's policies put the government where it has no business: between doctor and patient. They are challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, for example, arguing that it is so vague that it could outlaw many types of abortions performed after the first trimester and could keep doctors from performing procedures they believe are in the best interest of the woman's health.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, another sponsor of the march, said the Bush administration was engaged in a wide-ranging assault on Americans' privacy. "The government does not belong in our bedrooms," he said. "It does not belong in our doctors' offices."
June Walker, president of Hadassah, told the audience, "Everywhere, it seems, we have ideology creeping into women's health policy."
Many abortion rights supporters argued that Mr. Bush's emphasis on programs that promote only abstinence is draining money from family planning programs that rely more on contraception. And they maintained that his restoration of a ban on federal aid to family planning groups that promote or perform abortions abroad is hurting thousands of vulnerable women.
The march came at a difficult time for the abortion rights movement, after months of legislative setbacks. The movement's leaders hoped to use the march to rouse voters who are sympathetic to their cause, to galvanize younger women and to build support among minorities.
In fact, there was a changing-of-the-guard tone to much of Sunday's program. Ms. Steinem, noting that she is now 70, declared proudly that by her estimate, "more than a third of the women in this march are women under 25." Kate Michelman, soon leaving her post as president of Naral Pro-Choice America, one of the sponsors of the march, took the stage with her granddaughter and declared, "It's your generation that must take the lead."
Juleah Swanson, 21, was one of roughly 80 students who arrived on two buses from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. Ms. Swanson and several young women from the Bowdoin delegation were carrying a giant uterus made of red clothing and stuffing, bearing the slogan "My Body, My Choice."
"It's a historic moment, and so important in this election year with so much at stake in the courts," said Ms. Swanson, a women's studies major.
There were many families marching together, wearing signs that declared three or four generations for choice. Melissa Bomes of Los Angeles was marching with her mother and her 7-month-old daughter, all of them dressed in the white of the women's suffrage movement. "We feel it's incredibly important to let the government know how important this is to us."
Along the march route, a line of anti-abortion protesters prayed, chanted and held up blown-up photographs of aborted fetuses and signs that said, "Have compassion on the little ones!" and "Women Need Love, Not Abortion."
The abortion rights protesters chanted back, "Pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care if women die," and "Not the church, not the state, women will decide their fate."
Many of the anti-abortion protesters, though, said they simply wanted to make a statement but not confront the marchers. "I'm here because I want women to know before they have an abortion that there is more to it than ending a pregnancy," said Amy Martin, 37, who said she had an abortion at age 16 that led to depression and a slew of regrets.
The religious and political fault lines on the abortion issue were apparent. Several speakers took note of the debate within the Roman Catholic hierarchy over how to respond to Catholic elected officials who support abortion rights, including Mr. Kerry. Mrs. Pelosi took the stage and declared, "I am a mother of five, a grandmother of five and a devout Roman Catholic," as well as a supporter of abortion rights.
Organizers said they were elated by the size of the march, which took more than a year to arrange. But crowd estimates for Washington demonstrations are a source of enduring controversy, particularly since the park police stopped making its own estimates. One of the few hard numbers came from the city's subway, which registered 320,138 riders from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., compared with 133,448 during the same period last week. But many of the marchers did not use the subways.
Like past abortion rights marches, this one included a large group of actors, including Ashley Judd, Kathleen Turner, Whoopi Goldberg and Cybill Shepherd, as well as other celebrities, like Ted Turner. A large delegation came from Capitol Hill, as well as from the seven sponsors.
In addition to Naral, the A.C.L.U. and the Feminist Majority, those sponsors were the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Organization for Women, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and the Black Women's Health Imperative.
At times, the march had the air of a vast reunion. Jackie Ballard, a 78-year-old fashion consultant from Orange County, Calif., came with Lyn Jerry, her college roommate from Wellesley. "I got the announcement and thought, `I've got to be there,' " said Ms. Ballard. "I called my roommate and said we had to go."
Stephani Tikalsky, 45, from Minneapolis, brought her daughter Libby, who was turning 12 on Monday. "She may not understand this now, but I'm hoping that it'll register years from now," Ms. Tikalsky said. "I hope when people talk about the March of 2004 she'll remember she was there."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Lynette Clemetson, Julie Bosman, Rhasheema A. Sweeting and Elizabeth Phillips.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
April 26, 2004 NY TIMES
Abortion-Rights Marchers Vow to Fight Another Bush Term
By ROBIN TONER
WASHINGTON, April 25 — Hundreds of thousands of abortion rights supporters rallied Sunday in the nation's capital, protesting the policies of the Bush administration and its conservative allies and vowing to fight back in the November election.
The huge crowd marched slowly past the White House, chanting and waving signs like "My Body Is Not Public Property!" and "It's Your Choice, Not Theirs!," then filled the Mall, turning it into a sea of women, men and children for the first large-scale abortion rights demonstration here in 12 years.
Organizers asserted that the marchers numbered more than a million, in what they said was a clear demonstration of political clout. There was no official estimate of the crowd size from law enforcement authorities; the United States Park Police stopped providing counts for rallies after bitter disputes over past estimates.
Speaker after speaker declared that President Bush and his allies in Congress were trying to impose an ideological agenda on abortion and family planning programs, both at home and abroad. The advocates warned that the erosion might be stealthy and incremental — regulations and restrictions rather than outright bans — but asserted that the trend was unmistakable.
"We are determined to stop this war on women," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, a sponsor of the march. Gloria Steinem, one of many feminist icons who turned out Sunday, said, "We are here to take back our country."
The day had a decidedly partisan edge, with many in the crowd carrying signs for Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee; several members of his family were among the marchers, as was Howard Dean, who had also sought the Democratic nomination; Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader of the House; and Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party chairman.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, noted that the last time abortion rights supporters rallied in Washington, the nation elected her husband to the presidency just six months later.
"We didn't have to march for 12 long years because we had a government that respected the rights of women," she said. "The only way we're going to be able to avoid having to march again and again and again is to elect John Kerry president."
Mr. Bush was at Camp David this weekend, but a White House spokesman, Taylor Gross, said: "The president believes we should work to build a culture of life in America. And regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, we can all work together to reduce the number of abortions through promotion of abstinence education programs, support for parental notification laws and support for the ban on partial-birth abortions."
Administration officials, in fact, have long maintained that the president's policies are solidly in the mainstream of American public opinion; although he opposes abortion except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the woman, he has said the country is not ready for an outright ban.
But abortion rights advocates countered Sunday that Mr. Bush's policies put the government where it has no business: between doctor and patient. They are challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, for example, arguing that it is so vague that it could outlaw many types of abortions performed after the first trimester and could keep doctors from performing procedures they believe are in the best interest of the woman's health.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, another sponsor of the march, said the Bush administration was engaged in a wide-ranging assault on Americans' privacy. "The government does not belong in our bedrooms," he said. "It does not belong in our doctors' offices."
June Walker, president of Hadassah, told the audience, "Everywhere, it seems, we have ideology creeping into women's health policy."
Many abortion rights supporters argued that Mr. Bush's emphasis on programs that promote only abstinence is draining money from family planning programs that rely more on contraception. And they maintained that his restoration of a ban on federal aid to family planning groups that promote or perform abortions abroad is hurting thousands of vulnerable women.
The march came at a difficult time for the abortion rights movement, after months of legislative setbacks. The movement's leaders hoped to use the march to rouse voters who are sympathetic to their cause, to galvanize younger women and to build support among minorities.
In fact, there was a changing-of-the-guard tone to much of Sunday's program. Ms. Steinem, noting that she is now 70, declared proudly that by her estimate, "more than a third of the women in this march are women under 25." Kate Michelman, soon leaving her post as president of Naral Pro-Choice America, one of the sponsors of the march, took the stage with her granddaughter and declared, "It's your generation that must take the lead."
Juleah Swanson, 21, was one of roughly 80 students who arrived on two buses from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. Ms. Swanson and several young women from the Bowdoin delegation were carrying a giant uterus made of red clothing and stuffing, bearing the slogan "My Body, My Choice."
"It's a historic moment, and so important in this election year with so much at stake in the courts," said Ms. Swanson, a women's studies major.
There were many families marching together, wearing signs that declared three or four generations for choice. Melissa Bomes of Los Angeles was marching with her mother and her 7-month-old daughter, all of them dressed in the white of the women's suffrage movement. "We feel it's incredibly important to let the government know how important this is to us."
Along the march route, a line of anti-abortion protesters prayed, chanted and held up blown-up photographs of aborted fetuses and signs that said, "Have compassion on the little ones!" and "Women Need Love, Not Abortion."
The abortion rights protesters chanted back, "Pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care if women die," and "Not the church, not the state, women will decide their fate."
Many of the anti-abortion protesters, though, said they simply wanted to make a statement but not confront the marchers. "I'm here because I want women to know before they have an abortion that there is more to it than ending a pregnancy," said Amy Martin, 37, who said she had an abortion at age 16 that led to depression and a slew of regrets.
The religious and political fault lines on the abortion issue were apparent. Several speakers took note of the debate within the Roman Catholic hierarchy over how to respond to Catholic elected officials who support abortion rights, including Mr. Kerry. Mrs. Pelosi took the stage and declared, "I am a mother of five, a grandmother of five and a devout Roman Catholic," as well as a supporter of abortion rights.
Organizers said they were elated by the size of the march, which took more than a year to arrange. But crowd estimates for Washington demonstrations are a source of enduring controversy, particularly since the park police stopped making its own estimates. One of the few hard numbers came from the city's subway, which registered 320,138 riders from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., compared with 133,448 during the same period last week. But many of the marchers did not use the subways.
Like past abortion rights marches, this one included a large group of actors, including Ashley Judd, Kathleen Turner, Whoopi Goldberg and Cybill Shepherd, as well as other celebrities, like Ted Turner. A large delegation came from Capitol Hill, as well as from the seven sponsors.
In addition to Naral, the A.C.L.U. and the Feminist Majority, those sponsors were the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Organization for Women, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and the Black Women's Health Imperative.
At times, the march had the air of a vast reunion. Jackie Ballard, a 78-year-old fashion consultant from Orange County, Calif., came with Lyn Jerry, her college roommate from Wellesley. "I got the announcement and thought, `I've got to be there,' " said Ms. Ballard. "I called my roommate and said we had to go."
Stephani Tikalsky, 45, from Minneapolis, brought her daughter Libby, who was turning 12 on Monday. "She may not understand this now, but I'm hoping that it'll register years from now," Ms. Tikalsky said. "I hope when people talk about the March of 2004 she'll remember she was there."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Lynette Clemetson, Julie Bosman, Rhasheema A. Sweeting and Elizabeth Phillips.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Sunday, April 25, 2004
From the Ponmona-Claremont, CA, Kerry Meet-Up site we have this Meet-Up Plus member, Sid, a Republican that can NOT support Bush and his cabal of neo-cons this coming election:
I am a Republican and have been one all my life. This year, I sincerely believe that the Republicans, and in particular Mr. Bush, is very bad for America. Therefore, I have decided to do whatever little I can to see that he is removed from office. Count me in!
Click to the right on the Kerry Meet-Up link and join today.
I am a Republican and have been one all my life. This year, I sincerely believe that the Republicans, and in particular Mr. Bush, is very bad for America. Therefore, I have decided to do whatever little I can to see that he is removed from office. Count me in!
Click to the right on the Kerry Meet-Up link and join today.
This is exactly the kind of energy and environmental policy that John Kerry has advocated for DECADES.
April 26, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
New Allies in the Energy Wars
The spirit of bipartisanship on energy and environmental policy that has taken root among Eastern governors is showing signs of life in the West, traditionally an area of nonstop ideological warfare on these issues. Earlier this month, at an "energy summit" of governors and representatives from 18 Western states, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican, co-signed a statement strongly endorsing energy efficiency and setting aggressive targets for much greater use of wind, solar, biomass and other forms of renewable energy throughout the region.
This was not politically risky for either man. Mr. Richardson, who served as President Bill Clinton's energy secretary, is known for his progressive views on these issues. Mr. Schwarzenegger's constituents include many lively and vocal environmentalists. Even so, their joint appeal for more enlightened strategies contrasts sharply with the gridlock over energy policy in Washington and with the Bush administration's faithful obeisance to the needs of producers of traditional fuels like oil, natural gas and coal.
The statement is intended as the starting point for a more detailed regional strategy the two governors will offer at another meeting in June. It calls for the 18 Western states to develop at least 30,000 megawatts of electricity from renewable sources by 2015. That is about 15 percent of current demand in the region. The statement also calls for a 20 percent increase in electrical efficiency by 2020. Energy experts regard these targets as ambitious but achievable.
The statement is timely because energy policy at the national level is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Congress favors traditional fossil-fuel industries. The Interior Department, following the playbook drawn up by the Cheney energy task force three years ago, is aggressively seeking to drill for oil and gas on sensitive public lands. And, according to recent surveys, Western regulators are abandoning plans for cleaner but more costly gas-fired power plants and instead are considering proposals for 35 new coal-fired power plants, all of them based on decades-old technologies that do little to control carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.
In recent years, innovative thinking on energy policy at the state level has been largely confined to the East, where officials like Gov. George Pataki of New York have developed plans for collective action to reduce air pollution and develop alternative energy sources. It is heartening to see Western governors rise to the challenge.
____________________________________________________________________
April 26, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
New Allies in the Energy Wars
The spirit of bipartisanship on energy and environmental policy that has taken root among Eastern governors is showing signs of life in the West, traditionally an area of nonstop ideological warfare on these issues. Earlier this month, at an "energy summit" of governors and representatives from 18 Western states, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican, co-signed a statement strongly endorsing energy efficiency and setting aggressive targets for much greater use of wind, solar, biomass and other forms of renewable energy throughout the region.
This was not politically risky for either man. Mr. Richardson, who served as President Bill Clinton's energy secretary, is known for his progressive views on these issues. Mr. Schwarzenegger's constituents include many lively and vocal environmentalists. Even so, their joint appeal for more enlightened strategies contrasts sharply with the gridlock over energy policy in Washington and with the Bush administration's faithful obeisance to the needs of producers of traditional fuels like oil, natural gas and coal.
The statement is intended as the starting point for a more detailed regional strategy the two governors will offer at another meeting in June. It calls for the 18 Western states to develop at least 30,000 megawatts of electricity from renewable sources by 2015. That is about 15 percent of current demand in the region. The statement also calls for a 20 percent increase in electrical efficiency by 2020. Energy experts regard these targets as ambitious but achievable.
The statement is timely because energy policy at the national level is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Congress favors traditional fossil-fuel industries. The Interior Department, following the playbook drawn up by the Cheney energy task force three years ago, is aggressively seeking to drill for oil and gas on sensitive public lands. And, according to recent surveys, Western regulators are abandoning plans for cleaner but more costly gas-fired power plants and instead are considering proposals for 35 new coal-fired power plants, all of them based on decades-old technologies that do little to control carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.
In recent years, innovative thinking on energy policy at the state level has been largely confined to the East, where officials like Gov. George Pataki of New York have developed plans for collective action to reduce air pollution and develop alternative energy sources. It is heartening to see Western governors rise to the challenge.
____________________________________________________________________
April 25, 2004 NY TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Orwellian Olsens
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
It's their reality. We just live and die in it.
In Bushworld, our troops go to war and get killed, but you never see the bodies coming home.
In Bushworld, flag-draped remains of the fallen are important to revere and show the nation, but only in political ads hawking the president's leadership against terror.
In Bushworld, we can create an exciting Iraqi democracy as long as it doesn't control its own military, pass any laws or have any power.
In Bushworld, we can win over Falluja by bulldozing it.
In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis can express their feelings ("Down With America!") without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers ("Down With America!") without shutting them down.
In Bushworld, it's fine to take $700 million that Congress provided for the war in Afghanistan and 9/11 recovery and divert it to the war in Iraq that you're insisting you're not planning.
In Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.
In Bushworld, it's O.K. to run for re-election as the avenger of 9/11, even as you make secret deals with the Arab kingdom where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from.
In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he's the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations.
In Bushworld, it makes sense to press for transparency in Mr. and Mrs. Rival while cultivating your own opacity.
In Bushworld, you can reign as the antiterror president even after hearing an intelligence report about Al Qaeda's plans to attack America and then stepping outside to clear brush.
In Bushworld, those who dissemble about the troops and money it will take to get Iraq on its feet are patriots, while those who are honest are patronizingly marginalized.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America.
In Bushworld, you can claim to be the environmental president on Earth Day while being the industry president every other day.
In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections.
In Bushworld, imperfect intelligence is good enough to knock over Iraq. But even better evidence that North Korea is building the weapons that Saddam could only dream about is hidden away.
In Bushworld, the C.I.A. says it can't find out whether there are W.M.D. in Iraq unless we invade on the grounds that there are W.M.D.
In Bushworld, there's no irony that so many who did so much to avoid the Vietnam draft have now strained the military so much that lawmakers are talking about bringing back the draft.
In Bushworld, we're making progress in the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists.
In Bushworld, you don't need to bother asking your vice president and top Defense Department officials whether you should go to war in Iraq, because they've already maneuvered you into going to war.
In Bushworld, it's perfectly natural for the president and vice president to appear before the 9/11 commission like the Olsen twins.
In Bushworld, you expound on remaking the Middle East and spreading pro-American sentiments even as you expand anti-American sentiments by ineptly occupying Iraq and unstintingly backing Ariel Sharon on West Bank settlements.
In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops.
In Bushworld, you pride yourself on the fact that your administration does not leak to the press, while you flood the best-known journalist in Washington with inside information.
In Bushworld, you list Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" as recommended reading on your campaign Web site, even though it makes you seem divorced from reality. That is, unless you live in Bushworld.
__________________________________________________________________________________
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Orwellian Olsens
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
It's their reality. We just live and die in it.
In Bushworld, our troops go to war and get killed, but you never see the bodies coming home.
In Bushworld, flag-draped remains of the fallen are important to revere and show the nation, but only in political ads hawking the president's leadership against terror.
In Bushworld, we can create an exciting Iraqi democracy as long as it doesn't control its own military, pass any laws or have any power.
In Bushworld, we can win over Falluja by bulldozing it.
In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis can express their feelings ("Down With America!") without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers ("Down With America!") without shutting them down.
In Bushworld, it's fine to take $700 million that Congress provided for the war in Afghanistan and 9/11 recovery and divert it to the war in Iraq that you're insisting you're not planning.
In Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.
In Bushworld, it's O.K. to run for re-election as the avenger of 9/11, even as you make secret deals with the Arab kingdom where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from.
In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he's the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations.
In Bushworld, it makes sense to press for transparency in Mr. and Mrs. Rival while cultivating your own opacity.
In Bushworld, you can reign as the antiterror president even after hearing an intelligence report about Al Qaeda's plans to attack America and then stepping outside to clear brush.
In Bushworld, those who dissemble about the troops and money it will take to get Iraq on its feet are patriots, while those who are honest are patronizingly marginalized.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America.
In Bushworld, you can claim to be the environmental president on Earth Day while being the industry president every other day.
In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections.
In Bushworld, imperfect intelligence is good enough to knock over Iraq. But even better evidence that North Korea is building the weapons that Saddam could only dream about is hidden away.
In Bushworld, the C.I.A. says it can't find out whether there are W.M.D. in Iraq unless we invade on the grounds that there are W.M.D.
In Bushworld, there's no irony that so many who did so much to avoid the Vietnam draft have now strained the military so much that lawmakers are talking about bringing back the draft.
In Bushworld, we're making progress in the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists.
In Bushworld, you don't need to bother asking your vice president and top Defense Department officials whether you should go to war in Iraq, because they've already maneuvered you into going to war.
In Bushworld, it's perfectly natural for the president and vice president to appear before the 9/11 commission like the Olsen twins.
In Bushworld, you expound on remaking the Middle East and spreading pro-American sentiments even as you expand anti-American sentiments by ineptly occupying Iraq and unstintingly backing Ariel Sharon on West Bank settlements.
In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops.
In Bushworld, you pride yourself on the fact that your administration does not leak to the press, while you flood the best-known journalist in Washington with inside information.
In Bushworld, you list Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" as recommended reading on your campaign Web site, even though it makes you seem divorced from reality. That is, unless you live in Bushworld.
__________________________________________________________________________________
April 25, 2004 NY TIMES
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Wrong Debate on Terrorism
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
The last month has seen a remarkable series of events that focused the public and news media on America's shortcomings in dealing with terrorism from radical Islamists. This catharsis, which is not yet over, is necessary for our national psyche. If we learn the right lessons, it may also prove to be an essential part of our future victory over those who now threaten us.
But how do we select the right lessons to learn? I tried to suggest some in my recent book, and many have attempted to do so in the 9/11 hearings, but such efforts have been largely eclipsed by partisan reaction.
One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower — as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 — we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam — not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West — is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.
I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.
What we have tried in the war of ideas has also fallen short. It is clear that United States government versions of MTV or CNN in Arabic will not put a dent in the popularity of the anti-American jihad. Nor will calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet. The Bush administration's much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative, therefore, was dead on arrival.
We must also be careful, while advocating democracy in the region, that we do not undermine the existing regimes without having a game plan for what should follow them and how to get there. The lesson of President Jimmy Carter's abandonment of the shah of Iran in 1979 should be a warning. So, too, should we be chastened by the costs of eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein, almost 25 years after the shah, also without a detailed plan for what would follow.
Other parts of the war of ideas include making real progress on the Israel-Palestinian issue, while safe-guarding Israeli security, and finding ideological and religious counter-weights to Osama bin Laden and the radical imams. Fashioning a comprehensive strategy to win the battle of ideas should be given as much attention as any other aspect of the war on terrorists, or else we will fight this war for the foreseeable future. For even when Osama bin Laden is dead, his ideas will carry on. Even as Al Qaeda has had its leadership attacked, it has morphed into a hydra, carrying out more major attacks in the 30 months since 9/11 than it did in the three years before.
The second major lesson of the last month of controversy is that the organizations entrusted with law enforcement and intelligence in the United States had not fully accepted the gravity of the threat prior to 9/11. Because this is now so clear, there will be a tendency to overemphasize organizational fixes. The 9/11 commission and President Bush seem to be in a race to propose creating a "director of national intelligence," who would be given control over all American intelligence agencies. The commission may also recommend a domestic security intelligence service, probably modeled on Britain's MI-5.
While some structural changes are necessary, they are a small part of the solution. And there is a risk that concentrating on chain-of-authority diagrams of federal agencies will further divert our attention from more important parts of the agenda. This new director of national intelligence would be able to make only marginal changes to agency budgets and interactions. The more important task is improving the quality of the analysts, agents and managers at the lead foreign intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.
In addition, no new domestic security intelligence service could leap full grown from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, creating another new organization while we are in a key phase in the war on terrorism would ignore the lesson that we should have learned from the creation of Homeland Security. Many observers, including some in the new department, now agree that the forced integration and reorganization of 22 agencies diverted attention from the missions of several agencies that were needed to go after the terrorists and to reduce our vulnerabilities at home.
We do not need another new agency right now. We do, however, need to create within the F.B.I. a strong organization that is vastly different from the federal police agency that was unable to notice the Al Qaeda presence in America before 9/11. For now, any American version of MI-5 must be a branch within the F.B.I. — one with a higher quality of analysts, agents and managers.
Rather than creating new organizations, we need to give the C.I.A. and F.B.I. makeovers. They cannot continue to be dominated by careerists who have carefully managed their promotions and ensured their retirement benefits by avoiding risk and innovation for decades. The agencies need regular infusions throughout their supervisory ranks of managers and thinkers from other, more creative organizational cultures.
In the new F.B.I., marksmanship, arrests and skill on the physical training obstacle course should no longer be prerequisites for recruitment and retention. Similarly, within the C.I.A. we should quash the belief that — as George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the 9/11 commission — those who have never worked in the directorate of operations cannot understand it and are unqualified to criticize it.
Finally, we must try to achieve a level of public discourse on these issues that is simultaneously energetic and mutually respectful. I hoped, through my book and testimony, to make criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism and the separate war in Iraq more active and legitimate. We need public debate if we are to succeed. We should not dismiss critics through character assassination, nor should we besmirch advocates of the Patriot Act as fascists.
We all want to defeat the jihadists. To do that, we need to encourage an active, critical and analytical debate in America about how that will best be done. And if there is another major terrorist attack in this country, we must not panic or stifle debate as we did for too long after 9/11.
Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."
__________________________________________________________________________________________
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Wrong Debate on Terrorism
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
The last month has seen a remarkable series of events that focused the public and news media on America's shortcomings in dealing with terrorism from radical Islamists. This catharsis, which is not yet over, is necessary for our national psyche. If we learn the right lessons, it may also prove to be an essential part of our future victory over those who now threaten us.
But how do we select the right lessons to learn? I tried to suggest some in my recent book, and many have attempted to do so in the 9/11 hearings, but such efforts have been largely eclipsed by partisan reaction.
One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower — as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 — we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam — not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West — is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.
I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.
What we have tried in the war of ideas has also fallen short. It is clear that United States government versions of MTV or CNN in Arabic will not put a dent in the popularity of the anti-American jihad. Nor will calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet. The Bush administration's much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative, therefore, was dead on arrival.
We must also be careful, while advocating democracy in the region, that we do not undermine the existing regimes without having a game plan for what should follow them and how to get there. The lesson of President Jimmy Carter's abandonment of the shah of Iran in 1979 should be a warning. So, too, should we be chastened by the costs of eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein, almost 25 years after the shah, also without a detailed plan for what would follow.
Other parts of the war of ideas include making real progress on the Israel-Palestinian issue, while safe-guarding Israeli security, and finding ideological and religious counter-weights to Osama bin Laden and the radical imams. Fashioning a comprehensive strategy to win the battle of ideas should be given as much attention as any other aspect of the war on terrorists, or else we will fight this war for the foreseeable future. For even when Osama bin Laden is dead, his ideas will carry on. Even as Al Qaeda has had its leadership attacked, it has morphed into a hydra, carrying out more major attacks in the 30 months since 9/11 than it did in the three years before.
The second major lesson of the last month of controversy is that the organizations entrusted with law enforcement and intelligence in the United States had not fully accepted the gravity of the threat prior to 9/11. Because this is now so clear, there will be a tendency to overemphasize organizational fixes. The 9/11 commission and President Bush seem to be in a race to propose creating a "director of national intelligence," who would be given control over all American intelligence agencies. The commission may also recommend a domestic security intelligence service, probably modeled on Britain's MI-5.
While some structural changes are necessary, they are a small part of the solution. And there is a risk that concentrating on chain-of-authority diagrams of federal agencies will further divert our attention from more important parts of the agenda. This new director of national intelligence would be able to make only marginal changes to agency budgets and interactions. The more important task is improving the quality of the analysts, agents and managers at the lead foreign intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.
In addition, no new domestic security intelligence service could leap full grown from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, creating another new organization while we are in a key phase in the war on terrorism would ignore the lesson that we should have learned from the creation of Homeland Security. Many observers, including some in the new department, now agree that the forced integration and reorganization of 22 agencies diverted attention from the missions of several agencies that were needed to go after the terrorists and to reduce our vulnerabilities at home.
We do not need another new agency right now. We do, however, need to create within the F.B.I. a strong organization that is vastly different from the federal police agency that was unable to notice the Al Qaeda presence in America before 9/11. For now, any American version of MI-5 must be a branch within the F.B.I. — one with a higher quality of analysts, agents and managers.
Rather than creating new organizations, we need to give the C.I.A. and F.B.I. makeovers. They cannot continue to be dominated by careerists who have carefully managed their promotions and ensured their retirement benefits by avoiding risk and innovation for decades. The agencies need regular infusions throughout their supervisory ranks of managers and thinkers from other, more creative organizational cultures.
In the new F.B.I., marksmanship, arrests and skill on the physical training obstacle course should no longer be prerequisites for recruitment and retention. Similarly, within the C.I.A. we should quash the belief that — as George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the 9/11 commission — those who have never worked in the directorate of operations cannot understand it and are unqualified to criticize it.
Finally, we must try to achieve a level of public discourse on these issues that is simultaneously energetic and mutually respectful. I hoped, through my book and testimony, to make criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism and the separate war in Iraq more active and legitimate. We need public debate if we are to succeed. We should not dismiss critics through character assassination, nor should we besmirch advocates of the Patriot Act as fascists.
We all want to defeat the jihadists. To do that, we need to encourage an active, critical and analytical debate in America about how that will best be done. And if there is another major terrorist attack in this country, we must not panic or stifle debate as we did for too long after 9/11.
Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."
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