A Strategy for Iraq
By John F. Kerry
Tuesday, April 13, 2004; Page A19
To be successful in Iraq, and in any war for that matter, our use of force must be tied to a political objective more complete than the ouster of a regime. To date, that has not happened in Iraq. It is time it did.
In the past week the situation in Iraq has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. While we may have differed on how we went to war, Americans of all political persuasions are united in our determination to succeed. The extremists attacking our forces should know they will not succeed in dividing America, or in sapping American resolve, or in forcing the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops. Our country is committed to help the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society. No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission.
But to maximize our chances for success, and to minimize the risk of failure, we must make full use of the assets we have. If our military commanders request more troops, we should deploy them. Progress is not possible in Iraq if people lack the security to go about the business of daily life. Yet the military alone cannot win the peace in Iraq. We need a political strategy that will work.
Over the past year the Bush administration has advanced several plans for a transition to democratic rule in Iraq. Each of those plans, after proving to be unworkable, was abandoned. The administration has set a date (June 30) for returning authority to an Iraqi entity to run the country, but there is no agreement with the Iraqis on how it will be constituted to make it representative enough to have popular legitimacy. Because of the way the White House has run the war, we are left with the United States bearing most of the costs and risks associated with every aspect of the Iraqi transition. We have lost lives, time, momentum and credibility. And we are seeing increasing numbers of Iraqis lashing out at the United States to express their frustration over what the Bush administration has and hasn't done.
In recent weeks the administration -- in effect acknowledging the failure of its own efforts -- has turned to U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi to develop a formula for an interim Iraqi government that each of the major Iraqi factions can accept. It is vital that Brahimi accomplish this mission, but the odds are long, because tensions have been allowed to build and distrust among the various Iraqi groups runs deep. The United States can bolster Brahimi's limited leverage by saying in advance that we will support any plan he proposes that gains the support of Iraqi leaders. Moving forward, the administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq's transition to a new constitution and government. We also need to renew our effort to attract international support in the form of boots on the ground to create a climate of security in Iraq. We need more troops and more people who can train Iraqi troops and assist Iraqi police.
We should urge NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander. This would help us obtain more troops from major powers. The events of the past week will make foreign governments extremely reluctant to put their citizens at risk. That is why international acceptance of responsibility for stabilizing Iraq must be matched by international authority for managing the remainder of the Iraqi transition. The United Nations, not the United States, should be the primary civilian partner in working with Iraqi leaders to hold elections, restore government services, rebuild the economy, and re-create a sense of hope and optimism among the Iraqi people. The primary responsibility for security must remain with the U.S. military, preferably helped by NATO until we have an Iraqi security force fully prepared to take responsibility.
Finally, we must level with our citizens. Increasingly, the American people are confused about our goals in Iraq, particularly why we are going it almost alone. The president must rally the country around a clear and credible goal. The challenges are significant and the costs are high. But the stakes are too great to lose the support of the American people.
This morning, as we sit down to read newspapers in the comfort of our homes or offices, we have an obligation to think of our fighting men and women in Iraq who awake each morning to a shooting gallery in which it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish friend from foe, and the death of every innocent creates more enemies. We owe it to our soldiers and Marines to use absolutely every tool we can muster to help them succeed in their mission without exposing them to unnecessary risk. That is not a partisan proposal. It is a matter of national honor and trust.
Sen. Kerry (D-Mass.) is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
_________________________________________________________
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
April 13, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES
Snares and Delusions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a "small faction." Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support.
Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever.
Events should have cured the Bush team of its illusions. After all, before the invasion Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about the possibility that we would be seen as conquerors, not liberators, and would be faced with "a long, costly and bloody battle." Mr. Cheney replied, "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Uh-huh.
But Bush officials seem to have learned nothing. Consider, for example, the continuing favor shown to Ahmad Chalabi. Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of U.P.I., however, administration officials gave him control of Saddam's secret files — a fine tool for blackmail — and are letting him influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks.
And we keep repeating the same mistakes. The story behind last week's uprising by followers of Moktada al-Sadr bears a striking resemblance to the story of the wave of looting a year ago, after Baghdad fell.
In both cases, officials were unprepared for an obvious risk. According to The Washington Post: "One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision [to close Sadr's newspaper] was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad."
If we're lucky, the Sadrist uprising will eventually fade out, just as the postwar looting did; but the occupation's dwindling credibility has taken another huge blow.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, who once challenged his own father to go mano a mano, is still addicted to tough talk, and still personalizes everything.
Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago — was it only six weeks? — Al Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in.
The situation in Falluja seems to have been greatly exacerbated by tough-guy posturing and wishful thinking. According to The Jerusalem Post, after the murder and mutilation of American contractors, Mr. Bush told officials that "I want heads to roll." Didn't someone warn him of the likely consequences of attempting to carry out a manhunt in a hostile, densely populated urban area?
And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that "the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr." If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it?
When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course.
The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far — and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam.
_____________________________________________________________________
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES
Snares and Delusions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a "small faction." Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support.
Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever.
Events should have cured the Bush team of its illusions. After all, before the invasion Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about the possibility that we would be seen as conquerors, not liberators, and would be faced with "a long, costly and bloody battle." Mr. Cheney replied, "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Uh-huh.
But Bush officials seem to have learned nothing. Consider, for example, the continuing favor shown to Ahmad Chalabi. Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of U.P.I., however, administration officials gave him control of Saddam's secret files — a fine tool for blackmail — and are letting him influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks.
And we keep repeating the same mistakes. The story behind last week's uprising by followers of Moktada al-Sadr bears a striking resemblance to the story of the wave of looting a year ago, after Baghdad fell.
In both cases, officials were unprepared for an obvious risk. According to The Washington Post: "One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision [to close Sadr's newspaper] was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad."
If we're lucky, the Sadrist uprising will eventually fade out, just as the postwar looting did; but the occupation's dwindling credibility has taken another huge blow.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, who once challenged his own father to go mano a mano, is still addicted to tough talk, and still personalizes everything.
Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago — was it only six weeks? — Al Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in.
The situation in Falluja seems to have been greatly exacerbated by tough-guy posturing and wishful thinking. According to The Jerusalem Post, after the murder and mutilation of American contractors, Mr. Bush told officials that "I want heads to roll." Didn't someone warn him of the likely consequences of attempting to carry out a manhunt in a hostile, densely populated urban area?
And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that "the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr." If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it?
When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course.
The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far — and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam.
_____________________________________________________________________
Kerry surges ahead of Bush: poll
Mon Apr 12, 6:27 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry surged ahead of President George W. Bush in a poll that gave the Massachusetts senator a seven point lead in a two-way race.
According to a Newsweek magazine poll, Kerry was backed by 50 percent of the people polled April 8-9, while 43 percent said they favored Bush in the November 2 presidential campaign.
The Newsweek poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, which interviewed 1,005 adults by telephone. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
When independent candidate Ralph Nader was added to the survey, Kerry maintained a 46 percent to 42 percent lead over Bush. Nader was blamed for grabbing crucial votes from then-vice president Al Gore, a Democrat, in the 2000 election.
Previous polls have shown Bush and Kerry running neck-and-neck.
The poll showed many Americans were unhappy with "the way things are going in this country," according to Newsweek.
While 36 percent said they were satisfied with "the way things are going in this country," 59 percent said they were dissatisfied.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rices much-awaited testimony before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks had a limited impact on public opinion, the poll found.
Fifty-six percent of people polled said they paid "at least some attention" to Rice's nationally televised testimony, Newsweek said.
But 43 percent said the testimony did not change their opinion of how Bush has handled terrorism and 18 percent could not say what effect it had.
____________________________________________________________________
Mon Apr 12, 6:27 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry surged ahead of President George W. Bush in a poll that gave the Massachusetts senator a seven point lead in a two-way race.
According to a Newsweek magazine poll, Kerry was backed by 50 percent of the people polled April 8-9, while 43 percent said they favored Bush in the November 2 presidential campaign.
The Newsweek poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, which interviewed 1,005 adults by telephone. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
When independent candidate Ralph Nader was added to the survey, Kerry maintained a 46 percent to 42 percent lead over Bush. Nader was blamed for grabbing crucial votes from then-vice president Al Gore, a Democrat, in the 2000 election.
Previous polls have shown Bush and Kerry running neck-and-neck.
The poll showed many Americans were unhappy with "the way things are going in this country," according to Newsweek.
While 36 percent said they were satisfied with "the way things are going in this country," 59 percent said they were dissatisfied.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rices much-awaited testimony before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks had a limited impact on public opinion, the poll found.
Fifty-six percent of people polled said they paid "at least some attention" to Rice's nationally televised testimony, Newsweek said.
But 43 percent said the testimony did not change their opinion of how Bush has handled terrorism and 18 percent could not say what effect it had.
____________________________________________________________________
Monday, April 12, 2004
As the little Church Lady might say about who is really backing George Bush, "Hmmmm, could it be..."
The Unofficial Campaign Song for the 2004 Election (click to go hear it)
Lyrics for "Little Know Ye Who's Comin'", traditional, originally from 1824, adapted by Piñataland in 2004
Little Know Ye Who's Comin'
Little Know Ye Who's Comin'
Little Know Ye Who's Comin'
If John Kerry Not Be Comin'!
Fire's Comin', swords is comin',
Pistols, guns and knives is comin',
Famine's comin', bannin's comin',
If John Kerry not be comin'!
Slavery's comin', knavery's comin',
Wonder's comin;, plunder's comin',
Jobbin's comin;, robbin's comin'
If John Kerry not be comin'!
Tears are comin', fears are comin;,
Plague and pestilence is comin',
Hatin's comin;, Satan's comin',
If John Kerry not be comin'!
___________________________________________________________
The Unofficial Campaign Song for the 2004 Election (click to go hear it)
Lyrics for "Little Know Ye Who's Comin'", traditional, originally from 1824, adapted by Piñataland in 2004
Little Know Ye Who's Comin'
Little Know Ye Who's Comin'
Little Know Ye Who's Comin'
If John Kerry Not Be Comin'!
Fire's Comin', swords is comin',
Pistols, guns and knives is comin',
Famine's comin', bannin's comin',
If John Kerry not be comin'!
Slavery's comin', knavery's comin',
Wonder's comin;, plunder's comin',
Jobbin's comin;, robbin's comin'
If John Kerry not be comin'!
Tears are comin', fears are comin;,
Plague and pestilence is comin',
Hatin's comin;, Satan's comin',
If John Kerry not be comin'!
___________________________________________________________
FBI AND US SPY AGENTS SAY BUSH SPIKED BIN LADEN PROBES BEFORE 11 SEPTEMBER
The Guardian (London)
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
In honor of Condy Rice's testimony before the September 11th commission, this award winning article, from the Guardian, details what George "Dubya" Bush knew and when he forgot it!
---------------------------
2001 Project Censored Award Winner
Officials told to 'back off' on Saudis before September 11
by Greg Palast and David Pallister
FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.
US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.
FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with which they were linked.
The FBI file, marked Secret and coded 199, which means a case involving national security, records that Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Washington, had originally had a file opened on him "because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth - a suspected terrorist organisation".
WAMY members deny they have been involved with terrorist activities, and WAMY has not been placed on the latest list of terrorist organisations whose assets are being frozen.
Abdullah, who lived with his brother Omar at the time in Falls Church, a town just outside Washington, was the US director of WAMY, whose offices were in a basement nearby.
But the FBI files were closed in 1996 apparently before any conclusions could be reached on either the Bin Laden brothers or the organisation itself. High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis".
They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan.
"There were particular investigations that were effectively killed."
Only after the September 11 attacks was the stance of political and commercial closeness reversed towards the other members of the large Bin Laden clan, who have classed Osama bin Laden as their "black sheep".
Yesterday, the head of the Saudi-based WAMY's London office, Nouredine Miladi, said the charity was totally against Bin Laden's violent methods. "We seek social change through education and cooperation, not force."
He said Abdullah bin Laden had ceased to run WAMY's US operation a year ago.
Neither Abdullah nor Omar bin Laden could be contacted in Saudi Arabia for comment.
WAMY was founded in 1972 in a Saudi effort to prevent the "corrupting" ideas of the west ern world influencing young Muslims. With official backing it grew to embrace 450 youth and student organisations with 34 offices worldwide.
Its aim was to encourage "concerned Muslims to take up the challenge by arming the youth with sound understanding of Islam, guarding them against destructive ideologies, and instilling in them level-headed wisdom".
In Britain it has 20 associated organisations, many highly respectable.
But as long as 10 years ago it was named as a discreet channel for public and private Saudi donations to hardline Islamic organisations. One of the recipients of its largesse has been the militant Students Islamic Movement of India, which has lent support to Pakistani-backed terrorists in Kashmir and seeks to set up an Islamic state in India.
Since September 11 WAMY has been investigated in the US along with a number of other Muslim charities. There have been several grand jury investigations but no findings have been made against any of them.
Current FBI interest in WAMY is shown in their agents' interrogation of a radiologist from San Antonio, Texas, Dr Al Badr al-Hazmi, who was arrested on September 12 and released without charge two weeks later. He had the same surname as two of the plane hijackers.
He was also questioned about his contacts with Abdullah bin Laden at the US WAMY office.
Mr Al-Hazmi said that he had made phone calls to Abdullah bin Laden in 1999 trying to obtain books and videotapes about Islamic teachings for the Islamic Centre of San Antonio.
To view the BBC television broadcast of the Palast investigation, go to HERE.
_____________________________________________________________________
The Guardian (London)
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
In honor of Condy Rice's testimony before the September 11th commission, this award winning article, from the Guardian, details what George "Dubya" Bush knew and when he forgot it!
---------------------------
2001 Project Censored Award Winner
Officials told to 'back off' on Saudis before September 11
by Greg Palast and David Pallister
FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.
US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.
FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with which they were linked.
The FBI file, marked Secret and coded 199, which means a case involving national security, records that Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Washington, had originally had a file opened on him "because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth - a suspected terrorist organisation".
WAMY members deny they have been involved with terrorist activities, and WAMY has not been placed on the latest list of terrorist organisations whose assets are being frozen.
Abdullah, who lived with his brother Omar at the time in Falls Church, a town just outside Washington, was the US director of WAMY, whose offices were in a basement nearby.
But the FBI files were closed in 1996 apparently before any conclusions could be reached on either the Bin Laden brothers or the organisation itself. High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis".
They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan.
"There were particular investigations that were effectively killed."
Only after the September 11 attacks was the stance of political and commercial closeness reversed towards the other members of the large Bin Laden clan, who have classed Osama bin Laden as their "black sheep".
Yesterday, the head of the Saudi-based WAMY's London office, Nouredine Miladi, said the charity was totally against Bin Laden's violent methods. "We seek social change through education and cooperation, not force."
He said Abdullah bin Laden had ceased to run WAMY's US operation a year ago.
Neither Abdullah nor Omar bin Laden could be contacted in Saudi Arabia for comment.
WAMY was founded in 1972 in a Saudi effort to prevent the "corrupting" ideas of the west ern world influencing young Muslims. With official backing it grew to embrace 450 youth and student organisations with 34 offices worldwide.
Its aim was to encourage "concerned Muslims to take up the challenge by arming the youth with sound understanding of Islam, guarding them against destructive ideologies, and instilling in them level-headed wisdom".
In Britain it has 20 associated organisations, many highly respectable.
But as long as 10 years ago it was named as a discreet channel for public and private Saudi donations to hardline Islamic organisations. One of the recipients of its largesse has been the militant Students Islamic Movement of India, which has lent support to Pakistani-backed terrorists in Kashmir and seeks to set up an Islamic state in India.
Since September 11 WAMY has been investigated in the US along with a number of other Muslim charities. There have been several grand jury investigations but no findings have been made against any of them.
Current FBI interest in WAMY is shown in their agents' interrogation of a radiologist from San Antonio, Texas, Dr Al Badr al-Hazmi, who was arrested on September 12 and released without charge two weeks later. He had the same surname as two of the plane hijackers.
He was also questioned about his contacts with Abdullah bin Laden at the US WAMY office.
Mr Al-Hazmi said that he had made phone calls to Abdullah bin Laden in 1999 trying to obtain books and videotapes about Islamic teachings for the Islamic Centre of San Antonio.
To view the BBC television broadcast of the Palast investigation, go to HERE.
_____________________________________________________________________
Hey, I've been railing on this since before Bush broke his way into the White House.
'The Wizard of Oz Letter'
Bush pulls back the curtain on who really runs the White House
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 1:50 p.m. ET
April 02, 2004 - This was the week the curtain got pulled back on the Bush presidency. In exchange for allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath, President Bush gets to bring along his vice president when he appears privately before the commission. (Sam note: Bush can NOT carry his own water like a man. He has to have his Uncle Dick do it for him.)
A top Republican strategist dubbed the legal document striking the unusual deal “the Wizard of Oz letter” because it strips away the myth that Bush is in charge. Until now, it’s been all speculation about Vice President Cheney’s influence. With the revelation of the tandem testimony, nobody with a straight face can deny Cheney is a co-president or worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush’s strings.
Aside from being fodder for the late-night comics, the arrangement confirms Bush’s inability to articulate anything without a script--or a tutor by his side. There’s a reason lawyers don’t take testimony in groups. The whole idea is to get individual recollections and then compare stories to uncover contradictions. Try thinking about it this way: can anyone imagine Bush’s father in a similar situation bringing his vice president? (For those who need a refresher course, the elder Bush was a rocket scientist compared to his son, and the vice president was Dan Quayle.)
Even President Reagan testified alone on the Iran-contra scandal. He didn’t insist on having Vice President Bush sit beside him. Of course, Reagan couldn’t remember much of anything. His faculties were failing as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, which he later revealed. Still, Reagan permitted his testimony to be videotaped.
This is a defining moment in the Bush presidency because it reveals weakness at the top.
What Cheney and the tight circle around Bush are protecting is the myth they have created since 9/11 of a war president astride the world stage. Anybody who punctures that imagery is destroyed. Richard Clarke is only the latest in a series of insiders who have pulled back the curtain. At the center is an incurious president who is so inarticulate that he can’t be left on his own to make a sustained argument on behalf of his policies without falling back on rehearsed talking points and sound bites.
The Democrats must be greatly tempted to lampoon Bush, but they should leave that to Jay Leno and Jon Stewart. John Kerry is smart to stay out of the way when it comes to the 9/11 commission. The Bush strategy is to muddy the picture, castigate Clarke as a disgruntled partisan, and portray his criticisms as nothing but politics. But Clarke’s book is flying off the shelves, and his revelations will be followed later this month by a sequel to “Bush at War” from Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, which the White House is nervously anticipating.
Also due by the end of April is a memoir/expose by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who angered the administration last year when he went public with his finding that Iraq had not sought uranium from Africa. Wilson’s wife was then exposed as a CIA operative by columnist Robert Novak, who was acting on information provided by the administration. Wilson’s book is titled, “The Politics of Truth.” It could be subtitled: “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
Wilson praises Clarke for how he’s handling himself in the media spotlight. “He’s a ferocious bureaucrat,” says Wilson, “and I mean that in the positive sense of the term. He learned to operate in that environment.” When 9/11 commissioner Jim Thompson confronted Clarke on the gap between what he is saying now and the rosy briefings he gave while working the White House, Clarke explained that was politics. Wilson says an effective response would have been to point out to the many lawyers on the 9/11 commission that White House aides are paid to make the case for the president just as lawyers make the case for their client. “If you can’t abide it, then you step away,” says Wilson. “Clarke was in it for the long haul, to roll back Al Qaeda.”
Clarke said under oath that he would not accept a job with the Kerry campaign, and he asked an activist group (MoveOn.org) to stop using his voice on an ad bashing Bush. What Clarke said has been said before, that the Bush administration was slow to recognize the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that going to war in Iraq was unnecessary and has made us less safe. The difference is who’s saying it. Clark is not some Washington time-server. He’s the ultimate serious guy who knows what he’s doing and cares passionately about countering terrorism. He was Bush’s crisis manager on 9/11, the man who sat in the chair in the Situation Room while other top aides fled to safety.
The person whose reputation got hurt the most during the Clarke counterattack was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who went to the Senate floor to threaten Clarke with perjury. It was crude character assassination, and it opened the door for Democrats to make the same accusation against Condoleezza Rice, who has made more conflicting statements than Clarke. The danger is not that Rice might actually be prosecuted, but the charge is political mud, and it might stick.
______________________________________________________________________
'The Wizard of Oz Letter'
Bush pulls back the curtain on who really runs the White House
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 1:50 p.m. ET
April 02, 2004 - This was the week the curtain got pulled back on the Bush presidency. In exchange for allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath, President Bush gets to bring along his vice president when he appears privately before the commission. (Sam note: Bush can NOT carry his own water like a man. He has to have his Uncle Dick do it for him.)
A top Republican strategist dubbed the legal document striking the unusual deal “the Wizard of Oz letter” because it strips away the myth that Bush is in charge. Until now, it’s been all speculation about Vice President Cheney’s influence. With the revelation of the tandem testimony, nobody with a straight face can deny Cheney is a co-president or worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush’s strings.
Aside from being fodder for the late-night comics, the arrangement confirms Bush’s inability to articulate anything without a script--or a tutor by his side. There’s a reason lawyers don’t take testimony in groups. The whole idea is to get individual recollections and then compare stories to uncover contradictions. Try thinking about it this way: can anyone imagine Bush’s father in a similar situation bringing his vice president? (For those who need a refresher course, the elder Bush was a rocket scientist compared to his son, and the vice president was Dan Quayle.)
Even President Reagan testified alone on the Iran-contra scandal. He didn’t insist on having Vice President Bush sit beside him. Of course, Reagan couldn’t remember much of anything. His faculties were failing as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, which he later revealed. Still, Reagan permitted his testimony to be videotaped.
This is a defining moment in the Bush presidency because it reveals weakness at the top.
What Cheney and the tight circle around Bush are protecting is the myth they have created since 9/11 of a war president astride the world stage. Anybody who punctures that imagery is destroyed. Richard Clarke is only the latest in a series of insiders who have pulled back the curtain. At the center is an incurious president who is so inarticulate that he can’t be left on his own to make a sustained argument on behalf of his policies without falling back on rehearsed talking points and sound bites.
The Democrats must be greatly tempted to lampoon Bush, but they should leave that to Jay Leno and Jon Stewart. John Kerry is smart to stay out of the way when it comes to the 9/11 commission. The Bush strategy is to muddy the picture, castigate Clarke as a disgruntled partisan, and portray his criticisms as nothing but politics. But Clarke’s book is flying off the shelves, and his revelations will be followed later this month by a sequel to “Bush at War” from Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, which the White House is nervously anticipating.
Also due by the end of April is a memoir/expose by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who angered the administration last year when he went public with his finding that Iraq had not sought uranium from Africa. Wilson’s wife was then exposed as a CIA operative by columnist Robert Novak, who was acting on information provided by the administration. Wilson’s book is titled, “The Politics of Truth.” It could be subtitled: “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
Wilson praises Clarke for how he’s handling himself in the media spotlight. “He’s a ferocious bureaucrat,” says Wilson, “and I mean that in the positive sense of the term. He learned to operate in that environment.” When 9/11 commissioner Jim Thompson confronted Clarke on the gap between what he is saying now and the rosy briefings he gave while working the White House, Clarke explained that was politics. Wilson says an effective response would have been to point out to the many lawyers on the 9/11 commission that White House aides are paid to make the case for the president just as lawyers make the case for their client. “If you can’t abide it, then you step away,” says Wilson. “Clarke was in it for the long haul, to roll back Al Qaeda.”
Clarke said under oath that he would not accept a job with the Kerry campaign, and he asked an activist group (MoveOn.org) to stop using his voice on an ad bashing Bush. What Clarke said has been said before, that the Bush administration was slow to recognize the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that going to war in Iraq was unnecessary and has made us less safe. The difference is who’s saying it. Clark is not some Washington time-server. He’s the ultimate serious guy who knows what he’s doing and cares passionately about countering terrorism. He was Bush’s crisis manager on 9/11, the man who sat in the chair in the Situation Room while other top aides fled to safety.
The person whose reputation got hurt the most during the Clarke counterattack was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who went to the Senate floor to threaten Clarke with perjury. It was crude character assassination, and it opened the door for Democrats to make the same accusation against Condoleezza Rice, who has made more conflicting statements than Clarke. The danger is not that Rice might actually be prosecuted, but the charge is political mud, and it might stick.
______________________________________________________________________
THE NUMBERS TELL
44 Million
Americans without health insurance.
8.3 Million
Americans who are unemployed.
3 Million
Americans who have lost their jobs during Bush Administration, resulting in over 6% unemployment, about twice as much as during Clinton terms.
300,000
Americans who have stopped looking for work due to weakened economy.
84,000 and $270 Million
Students who will not receive Federal education grants and the amount of money Bush wants to cut from government scholarships.
88%
Americans who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of the 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.
40%
National Guardsmen 19 to 35 years old without health insurance.
$5-7 Trillion
The 10-year forecast from Congressional Budget Office, of U.S. deficit.
$1.35 Trillion
Cost of 2003 tax cut package passed by Republican Congress; 40% of benefits go to top 1% of income earners.
$410-425 Billion
Expected U.S. deficit for 2003, excluding cost of war in Iraq.
$100-600 Billion
Costs that "think tanks" estimated for rebuilding Iraq over decade. (While class sizes have to increase in schools as teacher numbers are reduced.)
$236 Billion
Surplus inherited from President Clinton, 2000.
$15 Billion
Amount offered by Bush to countries for HIV/AIDs prevention. But, in Aug. 2003, he authorized those funds only to organizations not providing family planning.
$12 Billion
Amount Bush requested for "No Child Left Behind" program, $6 billion LESS than Congress approved.
$8 Billion
Value of NO-BID contract to Halliburton, Cheney's company up to 2000. Total profits reported to SEC from Iraq, in 2003: $85 million.
$61,000,000
Amount Halliburton is accused of overbilling the U.S. on Iraq contracts.
$4 Billion
Monthly cost for 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
$106,864,215,738
Cost of Iraq war (March 2004)
$3 Million
Amount to commission looking into intelligence failures leading to 9/11. Compare: $100 million was spent on inquiries into Clinton presi-dency.
225,000
Number of people who wrote to Bush opposing changes in Clean Air Act.
$93,500
Average amount received by anyone earning over $1 million,result of tax cut
17,000
Number of facilities no longer required to put in anti-pollution controls, under Bush Executive order.
2 1/2 years
Number of years since Bush said he would find Osama Bin Laden, "dead or alive".
________________________________________________________________
44 Million
Americans without health insurance.
8.3 Million
Americans who are unemployed.
3 Million
Americans who have lost their jobs during Bush Administration, resulting in over 6% unemployment, about twice as much as during Clinton terms.
300,000
Americans who have stopped looking for work due to weakened economy.
84,000 and $270 Million
Students who will not receive Federal education grants and the amount of money Bush wants to cut from government scholarships.
88%
Americans who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of the 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.
40%
National Guardsmen 19 to 35 years old without health insurance.
$5-7 Trillion
The 10-year forecast from Congressional Budget Office, of U.S. deficit.
$1.35 Trillion
Cost of 2003 tax cut package passed by Republican Congress; 40% of benefits go to top 1% of income earners.
$410-425 Billion
Expected U.S. deficit for 2003, excluding cost of war in Iraq.
$100-600 Billion
Costs that "think tanks" estimated for rebuilding Iraq over decade. (While class sizes have to increase in schools as teacher numbers are reduced.)
$236 Billion
Surplus inherited from President Clinton, 2000.
$15 Billion
Amount offered by Bush to countries for HIV/AIDs prevention. But, in Aug. 2003, he authorized those funds only to organizations not providing family planning.
$12 Billion
Amount Bush requested for "No Child Left Behind" program, $6 billion LESS than Congress approved.
$8 Billion
Value of NO-BID contract to Halliburton, Cheney's company up to 2000. Total profits reported to SEC from Iraq, in 2003: $85 million.
$61,000,000
Amount Halliburton is accused of overbilling the U.S. on Iraq contracts.
$4 Billion
Monthly cost for 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
$106,864,215,738
Cost of Iraq war (March 2004)
$3 Million
Amount to commission looking into intelligence failures leading to 9/11. Compare: $100 million was spent on inquiries into Clinton presi-dency.
225,000
Number of people who wrote to Bush opposing changes in Clean Air Act.
$93,500
Average amount received by anyone earning over $1 million,result of tax cut
17,000
Number of facilities no longer required to put in anti-pollution controls, under Bush Executive order.
2 1/2 years
Number of years since Bush said he would find Osama Bin Laden, "dead or alive".
________________________________________________________________
From Wayne Williams: The Republicans and their Right Wing media lackeys have been out to attack Kerry's tax plan... here is a review of an amazing book "Perfectly Legal" by David Cay Johnston on how the tax system is currently rigged to benefit the Super Rich and cheat everyone else.
-------------------------
February 1, 2004
'Perfectly Legal': Nothing Is Certain but Death
By JAMES K. GALBRAITH
PERFECTLY LEGAL
The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else.
By David Cay Johnston.
338 pp. New York: Portfolio. $25.95.
Readers of this important book may be misled by the routine material up front. Here David Cay Johnston recounts two oft-told tales: the rich getting richer and the rich escaping tax. Thus he tells how from 1970 to 2000 the income share of just 13,400 households -- the richest hundredth of 1 percent -- rose from 1 percent to 5 percent of all income, and from 100 to 560 times the national average. And he tells how one of those households, that of William and Melinda Gates, ''devised a way . . . to reap $200 million in profits on Microsoft stock without paying the $56 million of capital gains taxes that federal law required.''
Yet really, what's so shocking? In the late 1990's, the United States ran an experiment unseen since 1926: a drive to full employment based solely on private capital investment. Under capitalism, private capital is invariably held by a minority, so such prosperity must mean a rise in the wealth of the rich. The United States is not a people's republic. And it was those gains precisely that financed the surge in business investment, producing full employment and actual rising wages and income for working American families for the first time in 30 years.
The tax take also rose, by 2 percent of total income between 1995 and 2000. The federal budget went into surplus. For a moment states like California, riding a bubble in options realizations and capital gains, also had more revenue than they could use. The prelude to recession was a rising tax burden, paid from the bite on exploding upper incomes. It should have been offset by rising public spending, to meet national needs, fight poverty and prevent the slump of 2001. But with blind faith in the New Economy, that didn't happen until terrorism and war split open the public purse.
As Johnston knows, the real scandal of our federal tax system isn't so much what the rich didn't pay. It's what the rest of us now have to -- particularly the middle and upper middle classes, with incomes from $50,000 to $500,000. This is the group Bush is squeezing, to benefit what Johnston aptly calls the ''political donor class.'' This truly shocking story emerges later on in ''Perfectly Legal.''
First we have the repeal of the estate tax, which shifts the tax burden downscale and from the dead to the living. Johnston, a business and financial reporter for The New York Times, explains how this tax, affecting only a handful of the very, very rich, fell victim to the arts of propaganda: ''The term death tax is a superb example of marketing triumphing over reasoned debate. So thoroughly has the phrase been infused into Washington that many journalists . . . employ this term of advocacy instead of the neutral, and correct term, estate tax, without rebuke by their superiors.'' He notes that the pollster Frank Luntz, the carnival barker of this operation, would have advised the Democrats to call it the ''billionaire's tax.'' No such luck.
Next there is the Alternative Minimum Tax, the ''stealth tax,'' designed for the very rich but now set to overrun Middle America. In 2000 this tax hit just 1.3 million households; Treasury estimates held that it would affect 17.9 million by 2010. But the Bush tax cuts doubled this number to 35.6 million by design: ''Between 2003 and 2012 the Bush tax cuts will force an increase of $560 billion in taxes to be paid under the alternative minimum tax. . . . It is a subsidy of the super rich paid for by the middle class and the upper middle class.'' And it is a horror -- attorney's fees in legal settlements or medical expenses can't be deducted (to the same degree), or even the costs of having many children. Still the very rich escape. Promises that this train wreck will be averted are not credible, in Johnston's view. The tax was a betrayal, and the Bush people who committed it knew exactly what they were doing.
Then there is the payroll tax, a travesty ever since 1983, when Alan Greenspan sold the public on the myth of paying for Social Security in advance. And the difference between the amount brought in through the payroll tax and the amount needed to pay benefits underwrote Reagan's tax cuts for the rich, while the government stuffed a ''Trust Fund'' with I.O.U.'s. But with what? Paying them off will require either more borrowing or a rise in taxes -- exactly as if the trust fund did not exist. Meanwhile, the $1.7 trillion in excess payroll taxes already paid would be enough to completely pay off all consumer debt in 2001. And we are told that there is a ''crisis'' because the Trust Fund will eventually ''run dry.'' In fact, there's no need to cut the benefits for which soon-to-be-retired workers have been overcharged for decades, or to raise payroll taxes even more on the next generation. The only issue is whether wealthy Americans will pay any part of the bill.
Finally, Johnston surveys the decrepit, undercomputerized, legislatively crippled, mismanaged and harassed Internal Revenue Service, shanghaied in recent years to pursue supposed low-income abusers of the earned-income tax credit while the returns of the criminal rich escape audit and their money slips to havens overseas. The I.R.S. is a police agency under extreme pressure to treat big perpetrators with kid gloves. This material is, all in all, perhaps the most shocking stuff, particularly when one notes names like Harken Energy and Halliburton among the defectors.
What should be done? Perhaps daunted by deep knowledge of how the cheats work, Johnston is cautious. He considers, and then rejects, shifting to a consumption tax like the flat tax. Sensibly, he leans toward a leaner, meaner income tax, with higher top rates, few deferrals, a broad definition of income and reform of the alternative minimum tax. Add a stiff estate and gift tax to recover from the largest fortunes at death, treat capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, then cut or offset the payroll tax and you would have the elements of a fairer system.
Interestingly, the progressive tax bill of 2003, introduced by Representatives Dennis J. Kucinich, Barbara Lee and Bernard Sanders, comes close to these goals. It would claw back $107 billion from Bush's cuts and provide $88 billion in relief to working Americans, mainly through an attractive simplified family credit. Happily a few leaders remain, in these venal days, who are prepared to think boldly about our tax problem.
James K. Galbraith is an economist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and senior scholar of the Levy Economics Institute.
______________________________________________________________
-------------------------
February 1, 2004
'Perfectly Legal': Nothing Is Certain but Death
By JAMES K. GALBRAITH
PERFECTLY LEGAL
The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else.
By David Cay Johnston.
338 pp. New York: Portfolio. $25.95.
Readers of this important book may be misled by the routine material up front. Here David Cay Johnston recounts two oft-told tales: the rich getting richer and the rich escaping tax. Thus he tells how from 1970 to 2000 the income share of just 13,400 households -- the richest hundredth of 1 percent -- rose from 1 percent to 5 percent of all income, and from 100 to 560 times the national average. And he tells how one of those households, that of William and Melinda Gates, ''devised a way . . . to reap $200 million in profits on Microsoft stock without paying the $56 million of capital gains taxes that federal law required.''
Yet really, what's so shocking? In the late 1990's, the United States ran an experiment unseen since 1926: a drive to full employment based solely on private capital investment. Under capitalism, private capital is invariably held by a minority, so such prosperity must mean a rise in the wealth of the rich. The United States is not a people's republic. And it was those gains precisely that financed the surge in business investment, producing full employment and actual rising wages and income for working American families for the first time in 30 years.
The tax take also rose, by 2 percent of total income between 1995 and 2000. The federal budget went into surplus. For a moment states like California, riding a bubble in options realizations and capital gains, also had more revenue than they could use. The prelude to recession was a rising tax burden, paid from the bite on exploding upper incomes. It should have been offset by rising public spending, to meet national needs, fight poverty and prevent the slump of 2001. But with blind faith in the New Economy, that didn't happen until terrorism and war split open the public purse.
As Johnston knows, the real scandal of our federal tax system isn't so much what the rich didn't pay. It's what the rest of us now have to -- particularly the middle and upper middle classes, with incomes from $50,000 to $500,000. This is the group Bush is squeezing, to benefit what Johnston aptly calls the ''political donor class.'' This truly shocking story emerges later on in ''Perfectly Legal.''
First we have the repeal of the estate tax, which shifts the tax burden downscale and from the dead to the living. Johnston, a business and financial reporter for The New York Times, explains how this tax, affecting only a handful of the very, very rich, fell victim to the arts of propaganda: ''The term death tax is a superb example of marketing triumphing over reasoned debate. So thoroughly has the phrase been infused into Washington that many journalists . . . employ this term of advocacy instead of the neutral, and correct term, estate tax, without rebuke by their superiors.'' He notes that the pollster Frank Luntz, the carnival barker of this operation, would have advised the Democrats to call it the ''billionaire's tax.'' No such luck.
Next there is the Alternative Minimum Tax, the ''stealth tax,'' designed for the very rich but now set to overrun Middle America. In 2000 this tax hit just 1.3 million households; Treasury estimates held that it would affect 17.9 million by 2010. But the Bush tax cuts doubled this number to 35.6 million by design: ''Between 2003 and 2012 the Bush tax cuts will force an increase of $560 billion in taxes to be paid under the alternative minimum tax. . . . It is a subsidy of the super rich paid for by the middle class and the upper middle class.'' And it is a horror -- attorney's fees in legal settlements or medical expenses can't be deducted (to the same degree), or even the costs of having many children. Still the very rich escape. Promises that this train wreck will be averted are not credible, in Johnston's view. The tax was a betrayal, and the Bush people who committed it knew exactly what they were doing.
Then there is the payroll tax, a travesty ever since 1983, when Alan Greenspan sold the public on the myth of paying for Social Security in advance. And the difference between the amount brought in through the payroll tax and the amount needed to pay benefits underwrote Reagan's tax cuts for the rich, while the government stuffed a ''Trust Fund'' with I.O.U.'s. But with what? Paying them off will require either more borrowing or a rise in taxes -- exactly as if the trust fund did not exist. Meanwhile, the $1.7 trillion in excess payroll taxes already paid would be enough to completely pay off all consumer debt in 2001. And we are told that there is a ''crisis'' because the Trust Fund will eventually ''run dry.'' In fact, there's no need to cut the benefits for which soon-to-be-retired workers have been overcharged for decades, or to raise payroll taxes even more on the next generation. The only issue is whether wealthy Americans will pay any part of the bill.
Finally, Johnston surveys the decrepit, undercomputerized, legislatively crippled, mismanaged and harassed Internal Revenue Service, shanghaied in recent years to pursue supposed low-income abusers of the earned-income tax credit while the returns of the criminal rich escape audit and their money slips to havens overseas. The I.R.S. is a police agency under extreme pressure to treat big perpetrators with kid gloves. This material is, all in all, perhaps the most shocking stuff, particularly when one notes names like Harken Energy and Halliburton among the defectors.
What should be done? Perhaps daunted by deep knowledge of how the cheats work, Johnston is cautious. He considers, and then rejects, shifting to a consumption tax like the flat tax. Sensibly, he leans toward a leaner, meaner income tax, with higher top rates, few deferrals, a broad definition of income and reform of the alternative minimum tax. Add a stiff estate and gift tax to recover from the largest fortunes at death, treat capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, then cut or offset the payroll tax and you would have the elements of a fairer system.
Interestingly, the progressive tax bill of 2003, introduced by Representatives Dennis J. Kucinich, Barbara Lee and Bernard Sanders, comes close to these goals. It would claw back $107 billion from Bush's cuts and provide $88 billion in relief to working Americans, mainly through an attractive simplified family credit. Happily a few leaders remain, in these venal days, who are prepared to think boldly about our tax problem.
James K. Galbraith is an economist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and senior scholar of the Levy Economics Institute.
______________________________________________________________
COMMENTARY
A New Meaning for 'Bully Pulpit'
By Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby is the author of the recently published "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (Metropolitan Books) and director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.
April 12, 2004
One of the pious maxims of American politics for the last 40 years has been that a candidate should never be attacked on religious grounds. This stricture is eminently fair insofar as private faith is concerned. But when personal faith begins to determine public policy, then the issue becomes fair game.
When John F. Kennedy was running in 1960, he was called on, as the second Roman Catholic to seek the nation's highest office, to affirm his support for the separation of church and state. In a speech regarded as a turning point of his campaign, Kennedy memorably declared, "I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me."
President Bush's candidacy deserves the same level of scrutiny — not because of what he might do in the future but because of what he has already done on behalf of an ultraconservative, mainly Christian constituency that has no qualms about trying to turn its faith into the law of the land.
There is no precedent in American history for the Bush administration's determination to infuse government with a highly specific set of religious values. Thomas Jefferson, a champion of strict separation of church and state even though his private religious beliefs remain a subject of debate, refused the request of evangelical religious supporters that he issue a presidential proclamation of thanksgiving to God for his blessings on America. James Madison vetoed a bill to grant public land in Mississippi to a Baptist church. And in the 1870s, Ulysses S. Grant made what would be an unthinkable suggestion for a president today — that all church property be subject to taxation.
For nearly all American presidents before the current era of political piety, it would have been truly unimaginable to endorse a constitutional amendment dealing with any divisive religious issue. If gay marriage was not a hot issue in the past, the Constitution's omission of God was.
When Abraham Lincoln was approached during the Civil War by Protestant ministers demanding that he support an amendment to declare Jesus Christ the supreme government authority, the president cagily promised to take such action as "my responsibility to my Maker and our country demands." His action was to take no action at all.
The Bush administration, by contrast, has consistently taken aggressive measures to favor the most conservative religious elements in American society.
It is well known that the administration's anti-abortion policies are responsible for restricting embryonic stem cell experiments in ways that leading scientists believe are already causing the U.S. to fall behind the rest of the world in potentially lifesaving biomedical research. But that is only one segment of a wide-ranging assault on secular policies at every level of government.
Last September, for example, Bush announced changes in federal rules — all accomplished by executive orders circumventing Congress — that allow "faith-based" groups to compete with secular organizations for federal funds subsidizing everything from the renovation of churches to drug rehabilitation. Religious organizations may now receive tax money even if they discriminate against job applicants of other faiths. They may also promote religious conversions with public dollars.
Liberals usually shy away from challenging such practices because polls show that 75% of the public supports faith-based funding.
But they — and John F. Kerry — should take a close look at a 2001 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that found that 80% of Americans disapprove of any tax subsidies for groups refusing to hire workers of other faiths, which many of these evangelical organizations do. Taxpayers may like the idea of faith-based funding, but they have serious, practical reservations about what specific churches might do with the money.
Of even greater importance are the views of judicial appointees, who will shape policy long after Bush is gone. Alabama Atty. Gen. William Pryor, recently named by Bush to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a "recess appointment" bypassing Senate confirmation, has displayed unabashed contempt for the 1st Amendment's establishment-of-religion clause.
Pryor was an ardent defender of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who defied court orders to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse. At a pro-Moore rally, Pryor declared that "God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time, this place, for all Christians — Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox — to save our country and save our courts." That statement alone ought to disqualify anyone for a federal judgeship.
There is a religious issue facing the country today: whether, in the 21st century, political leaders will continue to devalue the separation of church and state that has been the glory of our nation since the founders wrote a constitution assigning governmental power not to any deity but to "We the People."
_______________________________________________________________
A New Meaning for 'Bully Pulpit'
By Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby is the author of the recently published "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (Metropolitan Books) and director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.
April 12, 2004
One of the pious maxims of American politics for the last 40 years has been that a candidate should never be attacked on religious grounds. This stricture is eminently fair insofar as private faith is concerned. But when personal faith begins to determine public policy, then the issue becomes fair game.
When John F. Kennedy was running in 1960, he was called on, as the second Roman Catholic to seek the nation's highest office, to affirm his support for the separation of church and state. In a speech regarded as a turning point of his campaign, Kennedy memorably declared, "I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me."
President Bush's candidacy deserves the same level of scrutiny — not because of what he might do in the future but because of what he has already done on behalf of an ultraconservative, mainly Christian constituency that has no qualms about trying to turn its faith into the law of the land.
There is no precedent in American history for the Bush administration's determination to infuse government with a highly specific set of religious values. Thomas Jefferson, a champion of strict separation of church and state even though his private religious beliefs remain a subject of debate, refused the request of evangelical religious supporters that he issue a presidential proclamation of thanksgiving to God for his blessings on America. James Madison vetoed a bill to grant public land in Mississippi to a Baptist church. And in the 1870s, Ulysses S. Grant made what would be an unthinkable suggestion for a president today — that all church property be subject to taxation.
For nearly all American presidents before the current era of political piety, it would have been truly unimaginable to endorse a constitutional amendment dealing with any divisive religious issue. If gay marriage was not a hot issue in the past, the Constitution's omission of God was.
When Abraham Lincoln was approached during the Civil War by Protestant ministers demanding that he support an amendment to declare Jesus Christ the supreme government authority, the president cagily promised to take such action as "my responsibility to my Maker and our country demands." His action was to take no action at all.
The Bush administration, by contrast, has consistently taken aggressive measures to favor the most conservative religious elements in American society.
It is well known that the administration's anti-abortion policies are responsible for restricting embryonic stem cell experiments in ways that leading scientists believe are already causing the U.S. to fall behind the rest of the world in potentially lifesaving biomedical research. But that is only one segment of a wide-ranging assault on secular policies at every level of government.
Last September, for example, Bush announced changes in federal rules — all accomplished by executive orders circumventing Congress — that allow "faith-based" groups to compete with secular organizations for federal funds subsidizing everything from the renovation of churches to drug rehabilitation. Religious organizations may now receive tax money even if they discriminate against job applicants of other faiths. They may also promote religious conversions with public dollars.
Liberals usually shy away from challenging such practices because polls show that 75% of the public supports faith-based funding.
But they — and John F. Kerry — should take a close look at a 2001 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that found that 80% of Americans disapprove of any tax subsidies for groups refusing to hire workers of other faiths, which many of these evangelical organizations do. Taxpayers may like the idea of faith-based funding, but they have serious, practical reservations about what specific churches might do with the money.
Of even greater importance are the views of judicial appointees, who will shape policy long after Bush is gone. Alabama Atty. Gen. William Pryor, recently named by Bush to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a "recess appointment" bypassing Senate confirmation, has displayed unabashed contempt for the 1st Amendment's establishment-of-religion clause.
Pryor was an ardent defender of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who defied court orders to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse. At a pro-Moore rally, Pryor declared that "God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time, this place, for all Christians — Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox — to save our country and save our courts." That statement alone ought to disqualify anyone for a federal judgeship.
There is a religious issue facing the country today: whether, in the 21st century, political leaders will continue to devalue the separation of church and state that has been the glory of our nation since the founders wrote a constitution assigning governmental power not to any deity but to "We the People."
_______________________________________________________________
BuzzFlash Interviews
4/12/04
John Dean, former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon and Author of "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW wiith JOHN DEAN
"In the Bush White House, I found the same kind of political mentality that drove the Nixon White House, where every decision was made for its political consequence and potential of reelection, rather than any substantive merit, driving all the decision making. I sort of slowly unwind this piece by piece, and show what I believe are circumstances that are worse than Watergate." -- John Dean
With a title like "Worse Than Watergate" -- and written by THE John Dean -- do we need to say anything more?
John Dean, a favorite of ours at BuzzFlash, knows of what he speaks. The legal counsel to the White House who warned Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency can spot an ethically and morally corrupt administration when he sees one.
Dean documents how Bush and Cheney have "created the most secretive presidency of my [Dean's] lifetime." For someone who was exposed to the dark secrets of the Nixon administration, there can be no more searing indictment.
And an indictment this book is. The only thing that keeps Bush and Cheney from being impeached is the carefully crafted veil of secrecy that they have created to hide their misdeeds from public and legal scrutiny.
Of course, controlling all three branches of government -- Soviet style -- helps. And it also helps to have an Attorney General who is as blindly loyal as a pet pooch.
" To say that their secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement," Dean declares.
The only thing, Dean argues, between Bush, Cheney and orange jumpsuits and jail bars is the revelation of the truth. John Dean gets as close as one can get in this book.
Dean's book makes you realize that the Bush Cartel is going to do everything they can to steal the 2004 election. Because if they lose, they might end up in a federal prison, if they don't pardon themselves before they are indicted.
The White House doesn't have enough shredders to cover up their likely crimes.
* * *
BuzzFlash: In your book, "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," you note that in the course of writing the book, you moved from warning about the abuses of power to actually creating a list and writing a book that chronicles alleged abuses of power because there were just too damn many.
John W. Dean: If you could just strike the word “alleged.” But to answer your question, what happened in the process of writing the book is that I couldn’t get out in front of the abuses of power that I was witnessing. Therefore, what became warnings quickly were transformed into indictments. So I found myself preparing a Bill of Particulars, because it became quickly apparent, particularly in the area that I was focusing on, which was the repressive if not obsessive secrecy -- that it was policy. They knew exactly what they were doing. They wouldn’t want to hear or entertain any warnings or alerts from anybody who might see what they’re doing as not the wisest course to take.
BuzzFlash: You were a legal counsel to President Nixon. You had a Congress at that time that had hearings held by a Democratic senator, and there also was a legal process that was unfolding. Now one party controls three branches of government, and it seems to have a point man on the Supreme Court, Anton Scalia, who believes he’s above any conflict of interest, despite his partisan performance in Election 2000. Even with all the outrage that’s occurring over charges Richard Clarke makes in his book about the Bush administration being asleep at the wheel in regards to terrorism pre-9/11, there is no investigative process of any serious kind in Congress.
The Attorney General’s office, other than handing over the Plame investigation to a respected prosecutor in Chicago, isn’t seriously pursuing any active investigations of this administration. We have the 9/11 Commission out there, but up to now, they seem to be politically straddling the fence in the conclusions they’ve come to, saying basically that neither Clinton nor Bush were doing a particularly good job.
So this is our point: you write about secrecy. How do you get inside the secrecy when there’s no vigorous independent "process" to expose the Bush administration from an investigative of legal standpoint?
John W. Dean: Let me explain it. First, yes, as somebody who has been inside as counsel, what I see is a White House that has got some very serious problems. How do I know that? How, given the fact that there are no investigations actively going on by independent bodies? Well, I know it because one can connect the dots. There are patterns that become very clear when you start sifting through what we do know, and putting it together with what we don’t know. Circumstantial cases are often stronger than direct evidence, and I think there’s certainly an overwhelming circumstantial case as to the obsessive secrecy of this presidency. As to the events and the activities that are being undertaken in secret, we’re just getting glimpses. And as I watched the figures move in the shadows, I’ve got a pretty good idea what they’re doing. Can I say so with certainty? In some instances yes, but others, no. But I can tell you that everybody should be watching this very carefully because it’s deeply troubling.
BuzzFlash: You have a pretty provocative title. What moved you to title your book "Worse Than Watergate?"
John W. Dean: As I explain in the preface, because that will obviously be one of the early questions people have, is that I really can’t claim original authorship of the title. What happened was I wrote a column for FindLaw.com that was republished by Salon? And the editors at Salon, after they had read the column, put the title on – “Worse Than Watergate.” That was the first time the title popped up. A few months after that, after the Valerie Plame Wilson leak occurred, Chris Matthews had [RNC Chairman] Ed Gillespie on. He and Gillespie were talking about it, and Chris said, This is worse than Watergate, isn’t it? This underlying activity? And Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, agreed. That was the second time.
BuzzFlash: Did he agree that it could be worse than Watergate, or that it was worse than Watergate?
John W. Dean: When you look at the transcript, he is agreeing with Chris’ characterization, and saying, yes, if this happened, it’s worse than Watergate.
When my editor raised it as an appropriate title for my book, I realized that it worked in more ways than I had anticipated – that, yes, some of the underlying activity, I think, is far more egregious than Watergate. Certainly the secrecy I was running into and plowing through was far worse than anything I had experienced within the Nixon White House. In the Bush White House, it’s become a policy and the whole approach to government to do everything in secret. In the Bush White House, I found the same kind of political mentality that drove the Nixon White House, where every decision was made for its political consequence and potential of reelection, rather than any substantive merit, driving all the decision making. I sort of slowly unwind this piece by piece, and show what I believe are circumstances that are worse than Watergate.
BuzzFlash: You wrote a book, which we interviewed you, called "The Rehnquist Choice." And it was a marvelous book. When you researched the book on Rehnquist's appointment, you went back and listened to the Nixon tapes, and there were wonderful revelations about Nixon’s thinking and his political strategy and so forth.
One of the issues that comes to mind here is the number of Reagan-Bush appointees that are hearing cases -- Cheney’s energy panel, for example -- and tend to uphold the Administration.
John W. Dean: Cheney is claming that, in both those instances, that he, as vice president, is beyond any reach of the courts or the Congress, or the GAO. It is a remarkable position. And I think he believes that the gang of five that put him and Bush in the White House may give them this prerogative as well.
BuzzFlash: What do you make of Justice Scalia’s claim that he’s above any conflict of interest? He’s insulted that anyone would accuse him of possibly being preferential, merely because he’s gone hunting with the vice president.
John W. Dean: There are two ways to look at his 21-page memorandum, which I read carefully and closely. One is that he can make a logical and respectable argument to not recuse himself – no question. But what he misses in making that argument is he is saying, hey, there is a situation here in Washington where people remains friends after one gets a high appointment; merely because we get these high appointments doesn’t mean that we can’t be impartial.
It’s a terrible attitude when you look at the appearances of it. He just doesn’t seem to get it. And I’m really kind of surprised at his inability to see what he’s doing. But he doesn’t care. I’ve wondered if he has kissed off the idea of ever being chief justice, because, given the position he’s taken on this issue at this time, should Bush be reelected and ever want to put him in the middle chair, you can bet on him being confronted with a filibuster. He has made himself so political that he has virtually precluded himself as Chief Justice. I also keep wondering if he hasn’t decided, well, I’m looking at all my Republican friends making all that money out there in the private sector. Maybe I’ll step down and go out, and make some money before I’m too much older.
BuzzFlash: His 21-page statement refusing to recuse himself from the Cheney case was sarcastic, bitter, at times, even angry. And certainly he was indignant that anyone would think he would possibly mix social life and his position.
John W. Dean: Well, he doesn’t care it there is an appearance of a conflict. And he’s saying that all those editorials where people expressed their disquiet and concern about his conflict, well, they are simply uninformed people. He is saying they don’t understand the facts. I don’t think that’s true.
BuzzFlash: He dismisses that people might suspect he might be biased, considering his actions and statements, written and otherwise, during the 2000 recount. Certainly those among us who would think that would also think twice about his ability as a justice to be independent about a case when he’s still socializing with the vice president, after putting him and Bush in office in 2000.
John W. Dean: I’ve read reports that he indeed had dinner with Cheney just shortly before Cheney filed his petition for certiorari, which was quickly accepted by the court after it was initially filed. It’s a very unusual case to take to the Supreme Court in these circumstances. But Cheney is taking this position that, hey, I’m the vice president. I don’t have to comply with the lower courts. First, he stiffed the District Court. Then he stiffed the Court of Appeals twice. He stiffed the judge when he didn’t want to go in a stay, and took it to the Supreme Court, where he feels he’ll get a better shot at changing the law. Indeed, given the culture of secrecy that has descended on Washington, the gang of five may well give him that put him in the White House may give him what he wants.
BuzzFlash: Why is it an unusual case for the Supreme Court to hear?
John W. Dean: It’s a simple discovery case. A run of the mill civil case. I’m also surprised at the petition filed with the high Court by the solicitor general’s office, which mischaracterized the case. It’s a simple case because it’s a very early discovery seeking documents and interrogatories. Judge Emmett Sullivan, on the Federal District Court, has narrowed the discovery down to make it sure it is not a fishing expedition. He’s made it very limited. He’s said to the vice president, “I want to know what it is that you object to. I want to know what privilege you want to invoke. And I want a list of the documents that you’re refusing to produce.” The Vice President said, “We won’t even give you that. You can’t even have even the most fundamental of discovery, because nobody can’t sue a vice president.”
BuzzFlash: Now this is an example of what you call in Chapter 2 – the title’s “Stonewalling.”
John W. Dean: No, I would call this beyond stonewalling. This is the arrogance of power, if you will, it is beyond stonewalling, which is stalling, stalling, stalling. I have a separate chapter on that. All those chapters add up to the most obsessive secrecy we have ever – and I mean ever – had by a presidency.
BuzzFlash: You begin the “Stonewalling” chapter with a quote from Richard Nixon: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it.” The stonewalling you saw in the Nixon administration – how does that compare to the stonewalling of this administration?
John W. Dean: In the Nixon administration, the stonewalling really didn’t start in earnest until Watergate was fairly far along, and when it was starting to threaten the White House. With the Bush administration, it really started in the 2000 campaign. Bush and Cheney were able to successfully stonewall their way through the 2000 campaign. I offer several important examples. The press never pushed them, never pressed them for the information. And they got away with it. And then they took their stonewalling from their campaign, and it morphed into continued stonewalling right in the White House, which is the reason I pick examples with the campaign and track them right into the White House.
Let me give you a “for example.” Cheney’s health came up very early, right after he was selected by Bush. He has stonewalled and refused to supply any kind of relevant medical data where any outside physician could examine that data and tell us how healthy or sick this man really is. Obviously I suspect there’s a reason for that, more than his privacy. If Dick Cheney were running a committee to select the Vice President, given his health, he’s the last guy he would select. It is just too tenuous. You’ve to also remember, as I point out in the book, that Cheney had a quadruple bypass. They have about a 20-year life expectancy, until they really are questioned as to how much longer the bypass will be effective. Cheney’s 20 years runs out in the middle of the 2004 campaign.
BuzzFlash: There’s another chapter titled “Obsessive Secrecy.” The lying and secrecy is so brazen in this administration, and so obsessive and overwhelming, that you almost can’t get your arms around it. There’s so much, it seems silly and paranoid to talk about it.
John W. Dean: Yes, it is unbelievable. I did not write a book about their dissembling, their distortions, their rather crude lies, though some of that clearly is in my book. Mendacity is another form of secrecy. What I did, though, is I carefully looked at all the authors and writers who had addressed that subject. And you’re correct -- it is an overwhelming collection of lies.
I happened to rely on David Corn, who I find to be a very good Washington journalist, somebody who wouldn’t push the envelope looking for lies. He doesn’t in his book. I used that as one of my guides, and really went closely through David’s work, and found he had solid corroboration for everything. In the other instances where I’ve looked at people’s work, as you’ve noticed in my book, I’ve documented virtually everything as to where it came from and where I got it. So you’re right. And I see lying – and this is based on my own experience in the Nixon White House – as a blatant means of protecting secrecy. If you tell people a falsehood, you don’t tell them what you’re really doing.
BuzzFlash: Cheney made an offhand remark about three months ago where – and I’m paraphrasing – he was sort of mocking the notion that he’s secretive while at the same time corroborating it. People say I’m just off here in some deep hole, secretly running the government, he said, and then he paused and added: It’s not a bad way to operate. It seemed, at least from the accounts I’ve read, to have been said with a tone of grim ironic truth.
John W. Dean: Well, any good humor always has an element of truth. I think that he hit a responsive chord with the element of truth in his humor. There’s no question that Dick Cheney is a behind-the-scenes-type operator. That’s been his whole modus operandi throughout his government career. He likes to work the back alleys and the back rooms and behind closed doors. That’s where he is most comfortable; that’s where he’s most effective. People I know who’ve worked with Cheney say that one-on-one, he is very persuasive. The hushed voice and the whisper, and the lean-in -- he’s just very good at that. That’s the way he works, and there’s only one person he has to report to: his student, his partner, George W. Bush.
BuzzFlash: Cheney remains a sort of mysterious, elusive character because he’s very selective about his appearances. He pops up on Rush Limbaugh every once in awhile. He pops up at fundraisers. He does a little thing with Tim Russert. But the rest of the time, no one knows where the heck the guy is.
John W. Dean: Nor does he have to answer to anybody, as I say, other than to George W. Bush, who, I’m sure, doesn’t press him for anything other than what Bush should be doing next.
BuzzFlash: You write this book as a call to point out that the way the government’s being run is a slap in the face to democracy. You have a cabal of people who operate a shadow government in secrecy from the American people. Do you think Cheney just has contempt for democracy? Or is he just drunk with power?
John W. Dean: Everything I’ve been able to discern about Cheney and Bush is that they’re well meaning. They believe that they are serving the greater good. It happens to be the greater good that relates primary and principally to Republican contributors. It’s a “what’s good for their contributors is good for America” kind of attitude. But I don’t find them to be evil men. I find them to be zealous men who can’t hear anybody other than themselves. I think they have been caught up by the power of their offices, and I find their attitude toward government very disquieting. They’ve learned nothing from the mistakes that their predecessors have made, and rather have decided to see if they can’t make all those mistakes on their own.
BuzzFlash: One characteristic that they share with Nixon is vindictiveness. It does seem that this administration is worse than Nixon in that way. If we look, for instance, at the Valerie Plame case, they were willing to expose a CIA agent who was an expert in the trafficking of WMDs to renegade governments. It would seem to betray the national interest, if not the very basis on which they made their claim to go to war with Iraq. What do you make of that?
John W. Dean: As I say in the book, it’s probably the dirtiest political trick I’ve ever seen. Nixon at his worst never put out “a hit” on anybody. And Nixon at his worst never went after one of his enemies’ wives or husbands, if it happened to be a female. What’s striking to me about the way this administration plays it is not only are they vicious with their perceived enemies, they literally eat their own when they do something they don’t like.
Take Paul O’Neill. They, in essence, tried to eviscerate the man for being truthful about what he’d seen in the Bush White House. It was obviously something they didn’t want to get out – that the president was scripted, that the president really couldn’t ask an intelligent question of as his treasury secretary says; O’Neill also reported that they were planning to do something with Iraq from virtually the day they walked in the White House. They really went after O’Neill, and O’Neill is not a political fighter at this stage of his life, so he just sort disappeared.
You’ve got the same situation in a sense now of another insider, Richard Clarke. They're going after him tooth and nail. He really had been there for a long time as a pure professional, but he was one of theirs. And now because he’s explained what really happened, they’re trying to do everything they can to destroy the man. It’s really rather sad and pathetic, but it’s the way they play it.
BuzzFlash: They also did that to John DiIulio, who left after a short stint at the White House. He was quoted in a scathing commentary on the Bush administration, in which he referred to them as the Mayberry Machiavellians, particularly Karl Rove, and said they didn’t do anything unless they polled first. They went after him like a buzzsaw, and he just quickly shut up.
John W. Dean: Yes. And you know, he actually liked Bush. Actually I had some material I didn’t use in the book about all that – Bush actually liked him as an academic, which was unusual. Apparently he’s a very likeable person. And while he’s a Democrat, he really wasn’t playing it partisan. He was interested as an academic in the potentials of using the charitable community to do more government work, both religious and non-religious. He had reached these conclusions based on academic study, whereas Bush had come to that position through his catering to his religious right base. But they had a mutuality of interest. Then when it was too much candor, they attacked, as they do with anybody’s who candid.
BuzzFlash: And he quickly retreated. He went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor. He issued a statement after his letter was printed that I think Ari Fleischer read, which said he meant no harm to the president, etc., and now he’s going to shut up. It was sort of a forced retraction. I’m paraphrasing, obviously. But they do have a way of shutting people up.
John W. Dean: They eliminate them. They try to make examples out of these people. There’s the one case I cite in the book where they literally took a rather low-level drug agent – an intelligent agent – and threatened to send him to jail for life for leaking. It’s pretty tough stuff. And when they’re doing this, they’re sending messages to others that you’ve got to toe the secrecy line. They want to have that White House practically in shrink wrap. When they see a leak, if they can spot it and identify it, they’re pretty vicious.
BuzzFlash: Isn’t it kind of ironic that President Bush was so blasé when the Valerie Plame leak came out? “Well, people leak all the time,” he said. All of a sudden, leaks weren’t so significant to him.
John W. Dean: I think the American public is much more sophisticated than we often give them credit for, and they can see those kinds of things for exactly what they’re are. For the Bush loyalists who will question nothing, that’s fine. Or the partisans who are with Bush think it’s even better. Those who are in the middle – and really that’s, in some ways, the one audience I am hoping to reach; I happen to be an independent, and they are the people who are going to be important in this next election -- they’re the people who Bush is not paying much attention to. He pays no attention to Democrats. He governs for Republicans and tries to appeal to independents when he needs something from them.
BuzzFlash: Going back to Watergate, it seems our modern era of politics was born then, if you want to look at it as the Hatfield and McCoys between the Democrats and the Republicans. The extreme wing of the Republican Party never forgave the Democrats for Watergate and Nixon’s impeachment. But if Watergate was about anything, it was about holding the president of the United States to the rule of law. We heard Tom DeLay, Henry Hyde, and many others during the Clinton impeachment process saying the same thing about Bill Clinton. You used the term in your book that Cheney thinks he’s above the law, and the Bush administration generally thinks so. What sort of dangers does that pose to the republic when you have people governing who think, in essence, the law doesn’t apply to them?
John W. Dean: It’s terribly troubling. I happen to believe that until we get back to divided government, meaning one or more of the houses of Congress is not that of the president, then we’re playing with very dangerous circumstances in an era of terrorism. I shudder at the thought of what could happen in this country if there’s another and even more violent terror attack, where Bush and Cheney are at the helm, and would try to manipulate the next event the way they are continuing to manipulate 9/11. It’s a very frightening prospect. This is one of the most serious issues I address in the book. There has been no effort by the president to reduce the “terror” in terrorism, and to the contrary they want to govern by fear for it is easier. It is also undemocratic.
BuzzFlash: What do you think in general of the packing of the courts? This has been an obsession with the right wing, and certainly with the Bush administration. Even with Bush I, we had the Clarence Thomas appointment and so forth.
John W. Dean: It is very unhealthy for the system. And if we get partisan courts, or people perceive them as partisan – and they are certainly increasingly becoming that way – I think we’ve got a real problem with that branch of the government.
BuzzFlash: Back to "Worse than Watergate," we had an investigative process in Watergate that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation prior to impeachment, which seemed inevitable, for high crimes and misdemeanors. Currently, we don’t have a comparable process here, certainly not in Congress.
John W. Dean: In using the reference to “worse than Watergate,” what I’ve done is I’ve used it more as a frame of reference than a comparative reference. I explain the title in some detail in the book’s preface. I’ve acknowledged that there is no scandal that is equal to Watergate at this time. However, I lay out 11 potential scandals that could break at any time that are certainly inchoate at this point, and could become full-blown scandals with the slightest of tripping. Together they are worse than Watergate, and several of them alone are worse.
BuzzFlash: Could anything become a scandal unless there’s legal recourse to investigate and prosecute it, which is unlikely at this time because Bush and the Republicans control all three branches of government?
John W. Dean: No question about it, because when you have a situation where the Congress refuses to act because of its own partisan position, there’s only one other body – in a sense, one other institution – and that’s the fourth estate. Add to that something that is now present that has never existed before, and that’s the Internet. In the 2000 election, for example, the Internet played a nominal, and minimal, role. But the Internet is growing by leaps and bounds -- from bloggers to web pages, to fundraising – so it is beginning to have its own impact. And what you’ve got to understand is that all scandals that are outside your neighborhood or your office or and occur on a national scale are "media"-ted scandals. In other words, the media itself creates the scandal. Without the media, you can’t have a scandal. If the media says something is not a scandal, this doesn’t bother them; then there is simply no scandal. It’s like a tree falling in a forest and nobody to hear it. So you’ve got to have the media. But we have a new media, and that’s the Internet. And I believe that could have a dire impact on this Bush-Cheney presidency.
BuzzFlash: In terms of the election?
John W. Dean: I think it could affect the election. We’ve got a number of investigations going on. We’ve got an SEC investigation into Cheney right now. I believe that if that if that investigation is followed to its logical conclusion, Dick Cheney could be in very deep trouble. You’ve got the Valerie Plame grand jury going on right now. If that grand jury doesn’t proceed to ask the leader of the Western World what he knows about this leak and the events following it, then the man who is heading that prosecution isn’t half as credentialed as he has been portrayed.
You’ve got the 9/11 Commission investigating right now. It’s going to report in July. That could erupt. I’ve explained several scandals they could erupt before the election.
These scandals would take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon.
But this is what is far more troublesome to me: I open and close the book with the fact that Bush and Cheney could take the air out of democracy. That is what truly worries me. And since no one is discussing their obsessive secrecy and its dangerous implications, I decided I had to write this book, and do my best to get it before the American people before November 2004. They must decide if they want a situation that is worse than Watergate.
______________________________________________
4/12/04
John Dean, former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon and Author of "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW wiith JOHN DEAN
"In the Bush White House, I found the same kind of political mentality that drove the Nixon White House, where every decision was made for its political consequence and potential of reelection, rather than any substantive merit, driving all the decision making. I sort of slowly unwind this piece by piece, and show what I believe are circumstances that are worse than Watergate." -- John Dean
With a title like "Worse Than Watergate" -- and written by THE John Dean -- do we need to say anything more?
John Dean, a favorite of ours at BuzzFlash, knows of what he speaks. The legal counsel to the White House who warned Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency can spot an ethically and morally corrupt administration when he sees one.
Dean documents how Bush and Cheney have "created the most secretive presidency of my [Dean's] lifetime." For someone who was exposed to the dark secrets of the Nixon administration, there can be no more searing indictment.
And an indictment this book is. The only thing that keeps Bush and Cheney from being impeached is the carefully crafted veil of secrecy that they have created to hide their misdeeds from public and legal scrutiny.
Of course, controlling all three branches of government -- Soviet style -- helps. And it also helps to have an Attorney General who is as blindly loyal as a pet pooch.
" To say that their secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement," Dean declares.
The only thing, Dean argues, between Bush, Cheney and orange jumpsuits and jail bars is the revelation of the truth. John Dean gets as close as one can get in this book.
Dean's book makes you realize that the Bush Cartel is going to do everything they can to steal the 2004 election. Because if they lose, they might end up in a federal prison, if they don't pardon themselves before they are indicted.
The White House doesn't have enough shredders to cover up their likely crimes.
* * *
BuzzFlash: In your book, "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," you note that in the course of writing the book, you moved from warning about the abuses of power to actually creating a list and writing a book that chronicles alleged abuses of power because there were just too damn many.
John W. Dean: If you could just strike the word “alleged.” But to answer your question, what happened in the process of writing the book is that I couldn’t get out in front of the abuses of power that I was witnessing. Therefore, what became warnings quickly were transformed into indictments. So I found myself preparing a Bill of Particulars, because it became quickly apparent, particularly in the area that I was focusing on, which was the repressive if not obsessive secrecy -- that it was policy. They knew exactly what they were doing. They wouldn’t want to hear or entertain any warnings or alerts from anybody who might see what they’re doing as not the wisest course to take.
BuzzFlash: You were a legal counsel to President Nixon. You had a Congress at that time that had hearings held by a Democratic senator, and there also was a legal process that was unfolding. Now one party controls three branches of government, and it seems to have a point man on the Supreme Court, Anton Scalia, who believes he’s above any conflict of interest, despite his partisan performance in Election 2000. Even with all the outrage that’s occurring over charges Richard Clarke makes in his book about the Bush administration being asleep at the wheel in regards to terrorism pre-9/11, there is no investigative process of any serious kind in Congress.
The Attorney General’s office, other than handing over the Plame investigation to a respected prosecutor in Chicago, isn’t seriously pursuing any active investigations of this administration. We have the 9/11 Commission out there, but up to now, they seem to be politically straddling the fence in the conclusions they’ve come to, saying basically that neither Clinton nor Bush were doing a particularly good job.
So this is our point: you write about secrecy. How do you get inside the secrecy when there’s no vigorous independent "process" to expose the Bush administration from an investigative of legal standpoint?
John W. Dean: Let me explain it. First, yes, as somebody who has been inside as counsel, what I see is a White House that has got some very serious problems. How do I know that? How, given the fact that there are no investigations actively going on by independent bodies? Well, I know it because one can connect the dots. There are patterns that become very clear when you start sifting through what we do know, and putting it together with what we don’t know. Circumstantial cases are often stronger than direct evidence, and I think there’s certainly an overwhelming circumstantial case as to the obsessive secrecy of this presidency. As to the events and the activities that are being undertaken in secret, we’re just getting glimpses. And as I watched the figures move in the shadows, I’ve got a pretty good idea what they’re doing. Can I say so with certainty? In some instances yes, but others, no. But I can tell you that everybody should be watching this very carefully because it’s deeply troubling.
BuzzFlash: You have a pretty provocative title. What moved you to title your book "Worse Than Watergate?"
John W. Dean: As I explain in the preface, because that will obviously be one of the early questions people have, is that I really can’t claim original authorship of the title. What happened was I wrote a column for FindLaw.com that was republished by Salon? And the editors at Salon, after they had read the column, put the title on – “Worse Than Watergate.” That was the first time the title popped up. A few months after that, after the Valerie Plame Wilson leak occurred, Chris Matthews had [RNC Chairman] Ed Gillespie on. He and Gillespie were talking about it, and Chris said, This is worse than Watergate, isn’t it? This underlying activity? And Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, agreed. That was the second time.
BuzzFlash: Did he agree that it could be worse than Watergate, or that it was worse than Watergate?
John W. Dean: When you look at the transcript, he is agreeing with Chris’ characterization, and saying, yes, if this happened, it’s worse than Watergate.
When my editor raised it as an appropriate title for my book, I realized that it worked in more ways than I had anticipated – that, yes, some of the underlying activity, I think, is far more egregious than Watergate. Certainly the secrecy I was running into and plowing through was far worse than anything I had experienced within the Nixon White House. In the Bush White House, it’s become a policy and the whole approach to government to do everything in secret. In the Bush White House, I found the same kind of political mentality that drove the Nixon White House, where every decision was made for its political consequence and potential of reelection, rather than any substantive merit, driving all the decision making. I sort of slowly unwind this piece by piece, and show what I believe are circumstances that are worse than Watergate.
BuzzFlash: You wrote a book, which we interviewed you, called "The Rehnquist Choice." And it was a marvelous book. When you researched the book on Rehnquist's appointment, you went back and listened to the Nixon tapes, and there were wonderful revelations about Nixon’s thinking and his political strategy and so forth.
One of the issues that comes to mind here is the number of Reagan-Bush appointees that are hearing cases -- Cheney’s energy panel, for example -- and tend to uphold the Administration.
John W. Dean: Cheney is claming that, in both those instances, that he, as vice president, is beyond any reach of the courts or the Congress, or the GAO. It is a remarkable position. And I think he believes that the gang of five that put him and Bush in the White House may give them this prerogative as well.
BuzzFlash: What do you make of Justice Scalia’s claim that he’s above any conflict of interest? He’s insulted that anyone would accuse him of possibly being preferential, merely because he’s gone hunting with the vice president.
John W. Dean: There are two ways to look at his 21-page memorandum, which I read carefully and closely. One is that he can make a logical and respectable argument to not recuse himself – no question. But what he misses in making that argument is he is saying, hey, there is a situation here in Washington where people remains friends after one gets a high appointment; merely because we get these high appointments doesn’t mean that we can’t be impartial.
It’s a terrible attitude when you look at the appearances of it. He just doesn’t seem to get it. And I’m really kind of surprised at his inability to see what he’s doing. But he doesn’t care. I’ve wondered if he has kissed off the idea of ever being chief justice, because, given the position he’s taken on this issue at this time, should Bush be reelected and ever want to put him in the middle chair, you can bet on him being confronted with a filibuster. He has made himself so political that he has virtually precluded himself as Chief Justice. I also keep wondering if he hasn’t decided, well, I’m looking at all my Republican friends making all that money out there in the private sector. Maybe I’ll step down and go out, and make some money before I’m too much older.
BuzzFlash: His 21-page statement refusing to recuse himself from the Cheney case was sarcastic, bitter, at times, even angry. And certainly he was indignant that anyone would think he would possibly mix social life and his position.
John W. Dean: Well, he doesn’t care it there is an appearance of a conflict. And he’s saying that all those editorials where people expressed their disquiet and concern about his conflict, well, they are simply uninformed people. He is saying they don’t understand the facts. I don’t think that’s true.
BuzzFlash: He dismisses that people might suspect he might be biased, considering his actions and statements, written and otherwise, during the 2000 recount. Certainly those among us who would think that would also think twice about his ability as a justice to be independent about a case when he’s still socializing with the vice president, after putting him and Bush in office in 2000.
John W. Dean: I’ve read reports that he indeed had dinner with Cheney just shortly before Cheney filed his petition for certiorari, which was quickly accepted by the court after it was initially filed. It’s a very unusual case to take to the Supreme Court in these circumstances. But Cheney is taking this position that, hey, I’m the vice president. I don’t have to comply with the lower courts. First, he stiffed the District Court. Then he stiffed the Court of Appeals twice. He stiffed the judge when he didn’t want to go in a stay, and took it to the Supreme Court, where he feels he’ll get a better shot at changing the law. Indeed, given the culture of secrecy that has descended on Washington, the gang of five may well give him that put him in the White House may give him what he wants.
BuzzFlash: Why is it an unusual case for the Supreme Court to hear?
John W. Dean: It’s a simple discovery case. A run of the mill civil case. I’m also surprised at the petition filed with the high Court by the solicitor general’s office, which mischaracterized the case. It’s a simple case because it’s a very early discovery seeking documents and interrogatories. Judge Emmett Sullivan, on the Federal District Court, has narrowed the discovery down to make it sure it is not a fishing expedition. He’s made it very limited. He’s said to the vice president, “I want to know what it is that you object to. I want to know what privilege you want to invoke. And I want a list of the documents that you’re refusing to produce.” The Vice President said, “We won’t even give you that. You can’t even have even the most fundamental of discovery, because nobody can’t sue a vice president.”
BuzzFlash: Now this is an example of what you call in Chapter 2 – the title’s “Stonewalling.”
John W. Dean: No, I would call this beyond stonewalling. This is the arrogance of power, if you will, it is beyond stonewalling, which is stalling, stalling, stalling. I have a separate chapter on that. All those chapters add up to the most obsessive secrecy we have ever – and I mean ever – had by a presidency.
BuzzFlash: You begin the “Stonewalling” chapter with a quote from Richard Nixon: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it.” The stonewalling you saw in the Nixon administration – how does that compare to the stonewalling of this administration?
John W. Dean: In the Nixon administration, the stonewalling really didn’t start in earnest until Watergate was fairly far along, and when it was starting to threaten the White House. With the Bush administration, it really started in the 2000 campaign. Bush and Cheney were able to successfully stonewall their way through the 2000 campaign. I offer several important examples. The press never pushed them, never pressed them for the information. And they got away with it. And then they took their stonewalling from their campaign, and it morphed into continued stonewalling right in the White House, which is the reason I pick examples with the campaign and track them right into the White House.
Let me give you a “for example.” Cheney’s health came up very early, right after he was selected by Bush. He has stonewalled and refused to supply any kind of relevant medical data where any outside physician could examine that data and tell us how healthy or sick this man really is. Obviously I suspect there’s a reason for that, more than his privacy. If Dick Cheney were running a committee to select the Vice President, given his health, he’s the last guy he would select. It is just too tenuous. You’ve to also remember, as I point out in the book, that Cheney had a quadruple bypass. They have about a 20-year life expectancy, until they really are questioned as to how much longer the bypass will be effective. Cheney’s 20 years runs out in the middle of the 2004 campaign.
BuzzFlash: There’s another chapter titled “Obsessive Secrecy.” The lying and secrecy is so brazen in this administration, and so obsessive and overwhelming, that you almost can’t get your arms around it. There’s so much, it seems silly and paranoid to talk about it.
John W. Dean: Yes, it is unbelievable. I did not write a book about their dissembling, their distortions, their rather crude lies, though some of that clearly is in my book. Mendacity is another form of secrecy. What I did, though, is I carefully looked at all the authors and writers who had addressed that subject. And you’re correct -- it is an overwhelming collection of lies.
I happened to rely on David Corn, who I find to be a very good Washington journalist, somebody who wouldn’t push the envelope looking for lies. He doesn’t in his book. I used that as one of my guides, and really went closely through David’s work, and found he had solid corroboration for everything. In the other instances where I’ve looked at people’s work, as you’ve noticed in my book, I’ve documented virtually everything as to where it came from and where I got it. So you’re right. And I see lying – and this is based on my own experience in the Nixon White House – as a blatant means of protecting secrecy. If you tell people a falsehood, you don’t tell them what you’re really doing.
BuzzFlash: Cheney made an offhand remark about three months ago where – and I’m paraphrasing – he was sort of mocking the notion that he’s secretive while at the same time corroborating it. People say I’m just off here in some deep hole, secretly running the government, he said, and then he paused and added: It’s not a bad way to operate. It seemed, at least from the accounts I’ve read, to have been said with a tone of grim ironic truth.
John W. Dean: Well, any good humor always has an element of truth. I think that he hit a responsive chord with the element of truth in his humor. There’s no question that Dick Cheney is a behind-the-scenes-type operator. That’s been his whole modus operandi throughout his government career. He likes to work the back alleys and the back rooms and behind closed doors. That’s where he is most comfortable; that’s where he’s most effective. People I know who’ve worked with Cheney say that one-on-one, he is very persuasive. The hushed voice and the whisper, and the lean-in -- he’s just very good at that. That’s the way he works, and there’s only one person he has to report to: his student, his partner, George W. Bush.
BuzzFlash: Cheney remains a sort of mysterious, elusive character because he’s very selective about his appearances. He pops up on Rush Limbaugh every once in awhile. He pops up at fundraisers. He does a little thing with Tim Russert. But the rest of the time, no one knows where the heck the guy is.
John W. Dean: Nor does he have to answer to anybody, as I say, other than to George W. Bush, who, I’m sure, doesn’t press him for anything other than what Bush should be doing next.
BuzzFlash: You write this book as a call to point out that the way the government’s being run is a slap in the face to democracy. You have a cabal of people who operate a shadow government in secrecy from the American people. Do you think Cheney just has contempt for democracy? Or is he just drunk with power?
John W. Dean: Everything I’ve been able to discern about Cheney and Bush is that they’re well meaning. They believe that they are serving the greater good. It happens to be the greater good that relates primary and principally to Republican contributors. It’s a “what’s good for their contributors is good for America” kind of attitude. But I don’t find them to be evil men. I find them to be zealous men who can’t hear anybody other than themselves. I think they have been caught up by the power of their offices, and I find their attitude toward government very disquieting. They’ve learned nothing from the mistakes that their predecessors have made, and rather have decided to see if they can’t make all those mistakes on their own.
BuzzFlash: One characteristic that they share with Nixon is vindictiveness. It does seem that this administration is worse than Nixon in that way. If we look, for instance, at the Valerie Plame case, they were willing to expose a CIA agent who was an expert in the trafficking of WMDs to renegade governments. It would seem to betray the national interest, if not the very basis on which they made their claim to go to war with Iraq. What do you make of that?
John W. Dean: As I say in the book, it’s probably the dirtiest political trick I’ve ever seen. Nixon at his worst never put out “a hit” on anybody. And Nixon at his worst never went after one of his enemies’ wives or husbands, if it happened to be a female. What’s striking to me about the way this administration plays it is not only are they vicious with their perceived enemies, they literally eat their own when they do something they don’t like.
Take Paul O’Neill. They, in essence, tried to eviscerate the man for being truthful about what he’d seen in the Bush White House. It was obviously something they didn’t want to get out – that the president was scripted, that the president really couldn’t ask an intelligent question of as his treasury secretary says; O’Neill also reported that they were planning to do something with Iraq from virtually the day they walked in the White House. They really went after O’Neill, and O’Neill is not a political fighter at this stage of his life, so he just sort disappeared.
You’ve got the same situation in a sense now of another insider, Richard Clarke. They're going after him tooth and nail. He really had been there for a long time as a pure professional, but he was one of theirs. And now because he’s explained what really happened, they’re trying to do everything they can to destroy the man. It’s really rather sad and pathetic, but it’s the way they play it.
BuzzFlash: They also did that to John DiIulio, who left after a short stint at the White House. He was quoted in a scathing commentary on the Bush administration, in which he referred to them as the Mayberry Machiavellians, particularly Karl Rove, and said they didn’t do anything unless they polled first. They went after him like a buzzsaw, and he just quickly shut up.
John W. Dean: Yes. And you know, he actually liked Bush. Actually I had some material I didn’t use in the book about all that – Bush actually liked him as an academic, which was unusual. Apparently he’s a very likeable person. And while he’s a Democrat, he really wasn’t playing it partisan. He was interested as an academic in the potentials of using the charitable community to do more government work, both religious and non-religious. He had reached these conclusions based on academic study, whereas Bush had come to that position through his catering to his religious right base. But they had a mutuality of interest. Then when it was too much candor, they attacked, as they do with anybody’s who candid.
BuzzFlash: And he quickly retreated. He went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor. He issued a statement after his letter was printed that I think Ari Fleischer read, which said he meant no harm to the president, etc., and now he’s going to shut up. It was sort of a forced retraction. I’m paraphrasing, obviously. But they do have a way of shutting people up.
John W. Dean: They eliminate them. They try to make examples out of these people. There’s the one case I cite in the book where they literally took a rather low-level drug agent – an intelligent agent – and threatened to send him to jail for life for leaking. It’s pretty tough stuff. And when they’re doing this, they’re sending messages to others that you’ve got to toe the secrecy line. They want to have that White House practically in shrink wrap. When they see a leak, if they can spot it and identify it, they’re pretty vicious.
BuzzFlash: Isn’t it kind of ironic that President Bush was so blasé when the Valerie Plame leak came out? “Well, people leak all the time,” he said. All of a sudden, leaks weren’t so significant to him.
John W. Dean: I think the American public is much more sophisticated than we often give them credit for, and they can see those kinds of things for exactly what they’re are. For the Bush loyalists who will question nothing, that’s fine. Or the partisans who are with Bush think it’s even better. Those who are in the middle – and really that’s, in some ways, the one audience I am hoping to reach; I happen to be an independent, and they are the people who are going to be important in this next election -- they’re the people who Bush is not paying much attention to. He pays no attention to Democrats. He governs for Republicans and tries to appeal to independents when he needs something from them.
BuzzFlash: Going back to Watergate, it seems our modern era of politics was born then, if you want to look at it as the Hatfield and McCoys between the Democrats and the Republicans. The extreme wing of the Republican Party never forgave the Democrats for Watergate and Nixon’s impeachment. But if Watergate was about anything, it was about holding the president of the United States to the rule of law. We heard Tom DeLay, Henry Hyde, and many others during the Clinton impeachment process saying the same thing about Bill Clinton. You used the term in your book that Cheney thinks he’s above the law, and the Bush administration generally thinks so. What sort of dangers does that pose to the republic when you have people governing who think, in essence, the law doesn’t apply to them?
John W. Dean: It’s terribly troubling. I happen to believe that until we get back to divided government, meaning one or more of the houses of Congress is not that of the president, then we’re playing with very dangerous circumstances in an era of terrorism. I shudder at the thought of what could happen in this country if there’s another and even more violent terror attack, where Bush and Cheney are at the helm, and would try to manipulate the next event the way they are continuing to manipulate 9/11. It’s a very frightening prospect. This is one of the most serious issues I address in the book. There has been no effort by the president to reduce the “terror” in terrorism, and to the contrary they want to govern by fear for it is easier. It is also undemocratic.
BuzzFlash: What do you think in general of the packing of the courts? This has been an obsession with the right wing, and certainly with the Bush administration. Even with Bush I, we had the Clarence Thomas appointment and so forth.
John W. Dean: It is very unhealthy for the system. And if we get partisan courts, or people perceive them as partisan – and they are certainly increasingly becoming that way – I think we’ve got a real problem with that branch of the government.
BuzzFlash: Back to "Worse than Watergate," we had an investigative process in Watergate that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation prior to impeachment, which seemed inevitable, for high crimes and misdemeanors. Currently, we don’t have a comparable process here, certainly not in Congress.
John W. Dean: In using the reference to “worse than Watergate,” what I’ve done is I’ve used it more as a frame of reference than a comparative reference. I explain the title in some detail in the book’s preface. I’ve acknowledged that there is no scandal that is equal to Watergate at this time. However, I lay out 11 potential scandals that could break at any time that are certainly inchoate at this point, and could become full-blown scandals with the slightest of tripping. Together they are worse than Watergate, and several of them alone are worse.
BuzzFlash: Could anything become a scandal unless there’s legal recourse to investigate and prosecute it, which is unlikely at this time because Bush and the Republicans control all three branches of government?
John W. Dean: No question about it, because when you have a situation where the Congress refuses to act because of its own partisan position, there’s only one other body – in a sense, one other institution – and that’s the fourth estate. Add to that something that is now present that has never existed before, and that’s the Internet. In the 2000 election, for example, the Internet played a nominal, and minimal, role. But the Internet is growing by leaps and bounds -- from bloggers to web pages, to fundraising – so it is beginning to have its own impact. And what you’ve got to understand is that all scandals that are outside your neighborhood or your office or and occur on a national scale are "media"-ted scandals. In other words, the media itself creates the scandal. Without the media, you can’t have a scandal. If the media says something is not a scandal, this doesn’t bother them; then there is simply no scandal. It’s like a tree falling in a forest and nobody to hear it. So you’ve got to have the media. But we have a new media, and that’s the Internet. And I believe that could have a dire impact on this Bush-Cheney presidency.
BuzzFlash: In terms of the election?
John W. Dean: I think it could affect the election. We’ve got a number of investigations going on. We’ve got an SEC investigation into Cheney right now. I believe that if that if that investigation is followed to its logical conclusion, Dick Cheney could be in very deep trouble. You’ve got the Valerie Plame grand jury going on right now. If that grand jury doesn’t proceed to ask the leader of the Western World what he knows about this leak and the events following it, then the man who is heading that prosecution isn’t half as credentialed as he has been portrayed.
You’ve got the 9/11 Commission investigating right now. It’s going to report in July. That could erupt. I’ve explained several scandals they could erupt before the election.
These scandals would take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon.
But this is what is far more troublesome to me: I open and close the book with the fact that Bush and Cheney could take the air out of democracy. That is what truly worries me. And since no one is discussing their obsessive secrecy and its dangerous implications, I decided I had to write this book, and do my best to get it before the American people before November 2004. They must decide if they want a situation that is worse than Watergate.
______________________________________________
COMMENTARY L.A. TIMES
The More We Try, the Worse Iraq Gets
Robert Scheer
April 6, 2004
It is the beginning of the end for the United States in Iraq. No amount of glib optimism from Bush administration soothsayers can conceal that reality. Sure, the U.S. possesses the military might to hang on indefinitely, but only through the continuous sacrifice of lives in a reckless venture that never had an honestly stated purpose.
Now that thousands of rioting Shiites have been added to the persistent Sunni insurrection targeting the U.S.-led occupation, it is absurd to define the enemy as only foreigners or agents of the captured tyrant Saddam Hussein. The "coalition" forces are the foreigners, in fact, and the U.S.-financed quisling local government fools no one, regardless of the planned "handover" of power.
Under the false conceit that the adventure made sense as part of the fight against terror, the U.S. seized a country containing a major portion of the world's most valued and scarce resource. Yet our leaders expect the natives to believe that the corporate camp followers of the U.S. military are only swarming over their country for the purpose of humanitarian reconstruction.
Just how dumb do we think they are? After all, Iraqis know their own tortuous history. Theirs is a country patched together at the end of a gun barrel by previous colonizers. The common denominator of those imperial designs was the exploitation of oil rather than the desire to produce a harmonious, let alone democratic, society.
Nor does the U.S. have clean hands. During the Cold War, Washington tried to break any government or leader in the region unwilling to bend to its will, including popular nationalists Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Abdul Karim Kassem in Iraq. Never heard of Kassem? He's the guy the CIA hired young Hussein and other unsavory thugs to overthrow (and then kill) because he dared to challenge the strong U.S. role in the region after World War II.
And so it goes. Hussein's rule emerged from U.S. inability to allow yet another country to find its own way, just as Al Qaeda was blowback from our "freedom-fighting" team in the cynical Cold War proxy conflict that destroyed Afghanistan. The only link between Osama bin Laden and Hussein is that they are both monsters of our creation.
To its credit, the U.S. is also the nation that genuinely sought to advance the Mideast peace process under every recent president until George W. Bush. From Jimmy Carter through the first President Bush to Bill Clinton, the U.S. aimed to undermine the region's irrational and fundamentalist forces with a genuine peace between Palestinians and Israelis. For once, the United States deserved high praise for attempting to mitigate rather than exploit the grievances that have left the region a breeding ground for terrorism and rage.
Yet, under the current administration, this good-faith effort has been discarded, further disillusioning U.S. friends in the Mideast and stoking those in the region who spew hateful rhetoric against Jews and "infidels."
And even when that rhetoric again manifested itself in violence with the deadly attacks on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, it was of bare interest to then-candidate Bush. He rarely referenced terrorism during the campaign and, the record is now clear, all but ignored the Al Qaeda terror threat in the months leading up to the attacks on 9/11.
Instead, his focus was the irrelevant target of Iraq, defanged by 10 years of sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections but still possessing huge reserves of black gold. Few in the rest of the world, least of all the Iraqi people, are buying the administration's current line, that the prime goal of the occupation is simply to turn Iraq into a good place to live.
Consequently, while it would be great if that country were to end up in the column of democratic societies, the tragic events of recent days once again remind us that it is an outcome made less likely by each additional day we presume to know what is best for the rest of the world — and we impose those views with our awesome military power.
__________________________________________________________________
The More We Try, the Worse Iraq Gets
Robert Scheer
April 6, 2004
It is the beginning of the end for the United States in Iraq. No amount of glib optimism from Bush administration soothsayers can conceal that reality. Sure, the U.S. possesses the military might to hang on indefinitely, but only through the continuous sacrifice of lives in a reckless venture that never had an honestly stated purpose.
Now that thousands of rioting Shiites have been added to the persistent Sunni insurrection targeting the U.S.-led occupation, it is absurd to define the enemy as only foreigners or agents of the captured tyrant Saddam Hussein. The "coalition" forces are the foreigners, in fact, and the U.S.-financed quisling local government fools no one, regardless of the planned "handover" of power.
Under the false conceit that the adventure made sense as part of the fight against terror, the U.S. seized a country containing a major portion of the world's most valued and scarce resource. Yet our leaders expect the natives to believe that the corporate camp followers of the U.S. military are only swarming over their country for the purpose of humanitarian reconstruction.
Just how dumb do we think they are? After all, Iraqis know their own tortuous history. Theirs is a country patched together at the end of a gun barrel by previous colonizers. The common denominator of those imperial designs was the exploitation of oil rather than the desire to produce a harmonious, let alone democratic, society.
Nor does the U.S. have clean hands. During the Cold War, Washington tried to break any government or leader in the region unwilling to bend to its will, including popular nationalists Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Abdul Karim Kassem in Iraq. Never heard of Kassem? He's the guy the CIA hired young Hussein and other unsavory thugs to overthrow (and then kill) because he dared to challenge the strong U.S. role in the region after World War II.
And so it goes. Hussein's rule emerged from U.S. inability to allow yet another country to find its own way, just as Al Qaeda was blowback from our "freedom-fighting" team in the cynical Cold War proxy conflict that destroyed Afghanistan. The only link between Osama bin Laden and Hussein is that they are both monsters of our creation.
To its credit, the U.S. is also the nation that genuinely sought to advance the Mideast peace process under every recent president until George W. Bush. From Jimmy Carter through the first President Bush to Bill Clinton, the U.S. aimed to undermine the region's irrational and fundamentalist forces with a genuine peace between Palestinians and Israelis. For once, the United States deserved high praise for attempting to mitigate rather than exploit the grievances that have left the region a breeding ground for terrorism and rage.
Yet, under the current administration, this good-faith effort has been discarded, further disillusioning U.S. friends in the Mideast and stoking those in the region who spew hateful rhetoric against Jews and "infidels."
And even when that rhetoric again manifested itself in violence with the deadly attacks on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, it was of bare interest to then-candidate Bush. He rarely referenced terrorism during the campaign and, the record is now clear, all but ignored the Al Qaeda terror threat in the months leading up to the attacks on 9/11.
Instead, his focus was the irrelevant target of Iraq, defanged by 10 years of sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections but still possessing huge reserves of black gold. Few in the rest of the world, least of all the Iraqi people, are buying the administration's current line, that the prime goal of the occupation is simply to turn Iraq into a good place to live.
Consequently, while it would be great if that country were to end up in the column of democratic societies, the tragic events of recent days once again remind us that it is an outcome made less likely by each additional day we presume to know what is best for the rest of the world — and we impose those views with our awesome military power.
__________________________________________________________________
The two-faced hypocrite that sits on the Supreme Court.
EDITORIAL L.A. TIMES
The Justice in the Bubble
April 12, 2004
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia lives in a place of such privilege that even his public statements may not be repeated. However, in apparently ordering a U.S. deputy marshal to confiscate and erase recordings made by two reporters invited to attend his speech to a high school crowd in Mississippi, he has gone too far.
The occasion is rich with irony, since Scalia was instructing students that "I am here to persuade you that our Constitution is something extraordinary, something to revere." The students could certainly conclude that Scalia's actions speak louder than his words. The U.S. marshal in charge of the region has defended his subordinate's action, noting only that perhaps a prohibition on recording should have been announced beforehand. But why is it the job of federal law enforcement to carry out Scalia's whim?
If Scalia failed to communicate that no members of the press were to be allowed at his speech, that was his problem, not the reporters' or the school's. Once the reporters were invited by Scalia's hosts, attended the speech and recorded it, there was more than a whiff of the jackboot in ordering federal police to grab the recordings.
Supreme Court justices do have a legitimate sphere of privacy that extends to their deliberations and maybe even to public appearances. But Scalia has made an obsession of walling out the press. It reached its previous pinnacle a year ago, when he barred reporters from a ceremony in Cleveland where he accepted a free speech award.
Seizing tapes outright, as happened at Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg, is a more serious matter. Experts like Burt Neuborne, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Jane Kirtley, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, say Scalia's move appears to violate 1st Amendment rights as well as a 1980 privacy protection law that specifically defines protections for journalists who seek to disseminate information to the public. Whether or not Scalia wants to accept it, he is governed by the same laws that he interprets for others.
Scalia had already carved out his separate zone of ethics by refusing to recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney after spending a weekend duck hunting in Louisiana with Cheney, who arranged for Scalia to travel with him on Air Force Two. By imperiously ordering his federal law enforcement escort to seize reporters' digital and tape recordings, he denigrates the U.S. marshals' office, the students listening to him and the very U.S. Constitution he so copiously praises.
____________________________________________________________________________
EDITORIAL L.A. TIMES
The Justice in the Bubble
April 12, 2004
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia lives in a place of such privilege that even his public statements may not be repeated. However, in apparently ordering a U.S. deputy marshal to confiscate and erase recordings made by two reporters invited to attend his speech to a high school crowd in Mississippi, he has gone too far.
The occasion is rich with irony, since Scalia was instructing students that "I am here to persuade you that our Constitution is something extraordinary, something to revere." The students could certainly conclude that Scalia's actions speak louder than his words. The U.S. marshal in charge of the region has defended his subordinate's action, noting only that perhaps a prohibition on recording should have been announced beforehand. But why is it the job of federal law enforcement to carry out Scalia's whim?
If Scalia failed to communicate that no members of the press were to be allowed at his speech, that was his problem, not the reporters' or the school's. Once the reporters were invited by Scalia's hosts, attended the speech and recorded it, there was more than a whiff of the jackboot in ordering federal police to grab the recordings.
Supreme Court justices do have a legitimate sphere of privacy that extends to their deliberations and maybe even to public appearances. But Scalia has made an obsession of walling out the press. It reached its previous pinnacle a year ago, when he barred reporters from a ceremony in Cleveland where he accepted a free speech award.
Seizing tapes outright, as happened at Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg, is a more serious matter. Experts like Burt Neuborne, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Jane Kirtley, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, say Scalia's move appears to violate 1st Amendment rights as well as a 1980 privacy protection law that specifically defines protections for journalists who seek to disseminate information to the public. Whether or not Scalia wants to accept it, he is governed by the same laws that he interprets for others.
Scalia had already carved out his separate zone of ethics by refusing to recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney after spending a weekend duck hunting in Louisiana with Cheney, who arranged for Scalia to travel with him on Air Force Two. By imperiously ordering his federal law enforcement escort to seize reporters' digital and tape recordings, he denigrates the U.S. marshals' office, the students listening to him and the very U.S. Constitution he so copiously praises.
____________________________________________________________________________
Bush and his policy advisors were so inept at dealing with the terrorists attacks along with making the deception for invading Iraq that he and his corrupt administration have not only raised the threat level for the U.S., but caused the entire world to become a more dangerous place for its citizens AND traveling Americans.
Critics Say Rush to War in Iraq Hurt U.S.
Sat Apr 10, 1:02 PM ET
By SONYA ROSS, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The deadly insurgency in Iraq is a direct result of tactical missteps by the United States during the rush to war a year ago and in the months afterward, some critics say.
President Bush could have spared himself major headaches if he had heeded the advice of experts who urged him to assemble a larger force, including Muslim soldiers from Turkey and others countries, to take into Iraq. He also should have avoided the assumption that Iraqis would embrace American soldiers as liberators after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
A healthier regard for Arab perceptions could have helped, said Nayef Samhat, a government and international relations expert at Centre College in Danville, Ky.
"The invasion was clearly unprovoked and can be easily seen by many in the Arab-Islamic world as nothing more than the reinvention of imperialism," Samhat said. "The images, too, are quite similar to those of Israeli military actions against Palestinians.
"Arabs will see the similarity," Samhat said, "and associate the two quite easily."
Other U.S. shortcomings, such as failing to work effectively with important Muslim clerics and the inability to halt looting during the fall of Baghdad, have worsened the difficult task of occupying a foreign country.
"Most Iraqis had many reasons to hate Saddam Hussein and we removed him. But that did not automatically make them love us," said Duke University professor Ole Holsti.
"It is at least reasonable to believe that a more orderly and less chaotic transition to a post-Saddam era would have reduced the kinds of frustration that probably underlies at least some of the current problems," Holsti said.
In hindsight, experts say they believe they have been proved right: The military operation in Iraq should have been an international effort from the start, much like it was in Afghanistan, which eventually was taken over by NATO.
And, they note, the United States should not have dismantled the 200,000-member Iraqi army once Saddam fell.
"If that army had been kept intact, it would have been a trained military force to maintain order," said Pepperdine University political scientist Dan Caldwell.
But more important, many critics believe, Bush should have listened to former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who said a postwar occupying force in Iraq would have to number in the hundreds of thousands.
Such a force, Shinseki said, is needed to maintain security and calm ethnic tensions in the immediate aftermath of the fall of a government.
The Bush administration settled on a force of about 150,000, expecting it would be augmented by eventual support from other countries.
Reinforcements did not arrive right away or in massive numbers. So when looting broke out, there were not enough soldiers on hand to bring the situation under control.
At the time, Shinseki's troop estimate was called "wildly off the mark" by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
"It turns out Wolfowitz was wildly wrong," said Joseph Nye, a former assistant defense secretary who is dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
"If they had put in more troops, they would have prevented the looting and the situation from deteriorating," Nye said.
Throughout the year since Saddam fell, the United States has struggled to build better ties with moderate Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who had demanded a swift return to Iraqi sovereignty.
As the insurgency pulsed through Iraq last week, fueled by militias of a more radical Shiite cleric, the more moderate al-Sistani sat silent.
When he finally spoke at midweek, he condemned the tactics of both the U.S. occupation force and the Shiite militias.
"We have taken a low-level cleric and made him into a national symbol of resistance against the Americans, just before an Islamic holy day of all times," said George Lopez, international security expert at the University of Notre Dame.
"And we have backed al-Sistani, our one major hope for preaching calm and patience among the Shiites, into a corner."
________________________________________________________________
Critics Say Rush to War in Iraq Hurt U.S.
Sat Apr 10, 1:02 PM ET
By SONYA ROSS, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The deadly insurgency in Iraq is a direct result of tactical missteps by the United States during the rush to war a year ago and in the months afterward, some critics say.
President Bush could have spared himself major headaches if he had heeded the advice of experts who urged him to assemble a larger force, including Muslim soldiers from Turkey and others countries, to take into Iraq. He also should have avoided the assumption that Iraqis would embrace American soldiers as liberators after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
A healthier regard for Arab perceptions could have helped, said Nayef Samhat, a government and international relations expert at Centre College in Danville, Ky.
"The invasion was clearly unprovoked and can be easily seen by many in the Arab-Islamic world as nothing more than the reinvention of imperialism," Samhat said. "The images, too, are quite similar to those of Israeli military actions against Palestinians.
"Arabs will see the similarity," Samhat said, "and associate the two quite easily."
Other U.S. shortcomings, such as failing to work effectively with important Muslim clerics and the inability to halt looting during the fall of Baghdad, have worsened the difficult task of occupying a foreign country.
"Most Iraqis had many reasons to hate Saddam Hussein and we removed him. But that did not automatically make them love us," said Duke University professor Ole Holsti.
"It is at least reasonable to believe that a more orderly and less chaotic transition to a post-Saddam era would have reduced the kinds of frustration that probably underlies at least some of the current problems," Holsti said.
In hindsight, experts say they believe they have been proved right: The military operation in Iraq should have been an international effort from the start, much like it was in Afghanistan, which eventually was taken over by NATO.
And, they note, the United States should not have dismantled the 200,000-member Iraqi army once Saddam fell.
"If that army had been kept intact, it would have been a trained military force to maintain order," said Pepperdine University political scientist Dan Caldwell.
But more important, many critics believe, Bush should have listened to former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who said a postwar occupying force in Iraq would have to number in the hundreds of thousands.
Such a force, Shinseki said, is needed to maintain security and calm ethnic tensions in the immediate aftermath of the fall of a government.
The Bush administration settled on a force of about 150,000, expecting it would be augmented by eventual support from other countries.
Reinforcements did not arrive right away or in massive numbers. So when looting broke out, there were not enough soldiers on hand to bring the situation under control.
At the time, Shinseki's troop estimate was called "wildly off the mark" by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
"It turns out Wolfowitz was wildly wrong," said Joseph Nye, a former assistant defense secretary who is dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
"If they had put in more troops, they would have prevented the looting and the situation from deteriorating," Nye said.
Throughout the year since Saddam fell, the United States has struggled to build better ties with moderate Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who had demanded a swift return to Iraqi sovereignty.
As the insurgency pulsed through Iraq last week, fueled by militias of a more radical Shiite cleric, the more moderate al-Sistani sat silent.
When he finally spoke at midweek, he condemned the tactics of both the U.S. occupation force and the Shiite militias.
"We have taken a low-level cleric and made him into a national symbol of resistance against the Americans, just before an Islamic holy day of all times," said George Lopez, international security expert at the University of Notre Dame.
"And we have backed al-Sistani, our one major hope for preaching calm and patience among the Shiites, into a corner."
________________________________________________________________
Note how this memo was released on the Saturday before Easter in a White House attempt to blunt its impact (get it crowded out by other news stories).
Pre-9/11 Memo Shows al-Qaida's Intent
Sun Apr 11,11:43 AM ET
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer
CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot. Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to a memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday.
White House aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president ever publicly releasing the highly sensitive document, known as a PDB, for presidential daily briefing.
The Aug. 6, 2001 PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.
The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, asked the White House to declassify the document at its meeting Thursday. It is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike.
The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years.
Democratic and Republican members of the 9-11 commission saw the document differently.
Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska, said the memo's details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more intelligence information about possible domestic hijackings.
"The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States — this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn't scramble our agencies to that," he said.
Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo calls into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice ( news -web sites )'s assertion Thursday that the memo was purely a "historical" document.
"This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security," he said.
Senior administration officials said Bush saw more than 40 mentions of al-Qaida in his daily intelligence updates during the first eight months of his presidency. The CIA prepared the document "in response to questions asked by the president about the possibility of attacks by al-Qaida inside the U.S," one said.
But the senior officials refused to say what Bush's response to the memo was.
Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said the memo "didn't call for anything to be done" by Bush.
The memo's details confirm that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving airplanes as missiles, Thompson said.
"The PDB backs up what Dr. Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun," he said.
"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.," the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."
After President Clinton launched missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington," the memo said.
The memo cited intelligence from other countries in three instances, but the White House blacked out the names of the nations.
Efforts to launch an attack from Canada around the time of millennium celebrations in 2000 "may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.," the document stated.
Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam, who was caught trying to cross the Canadian border with explosives about 60 miles north of Seattle in late 1999, told the FBI that he alone conceived an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation," the document said. Ressam is still awaiting sentencing after agreeing to testify in other terrorism cases.
Zubaydah was a senior al-Qaida planner who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002.
Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said.
"The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks," it warned.
The document said that "some of the more sensational threat reporting" — such as an intelligence tip in 1998 that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to win the release of fellow extremists — could not be corroborated.
One item in the memo referred to "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." A White House official speaking on condition of anonymity said that was a reference to two Yemeni men the FBI interviewed and concluded were simply tourists taking photographs.
On May 15, 2001, a caller to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates warned of planned bin Laden attacks with explosives in the United States, but did not say where or when.
The CIA reported the incident to other government officials the next day, and a dozen or more steps were taken by the CIA and other agencies "to run down" the information from the phone call, senior administration officials said Saturday evening.
One official said references to al-Qaida in prior presidential briefings "would indicate 'they are here, they are there' in various countries and the CIA director would tell the president what was being done to address "these different operations."
___________________________________________________________________
Pre-9/11 Memo Shows al-Qaida's Intent
Sun Apr 11,11:43 AM ET
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer
CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot. Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to a memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday.
White House aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president ever publicly releasing the highly sensitive document, known as a PDB, for presidential daily briefing.
The Aug. 6, 2001 PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.
The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, asked the White House to declassify the document at its meeting Thursday. It is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike.
The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years.
Democratic and Republican members of the 9-11 commission saw the document differently.
Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska, said the memo's details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more intelligence information about possible domestic hijackings.
"The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States — this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn't scramble our agencies to that," he said.
Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo calls into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice ( news -web sites )'s assertion Thursday that the memo was purely a "historical" document.
"This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security," he said.
Senior administration officials said Bush saw more than 40 mentions of al-Qaida in his daily intelligence updates during the first eight months of his presidency. The CIA prepared the document "in response to questions asked by the president about the possibility of attacks by al-Qaida inside the U.S," one said.
But the senior officials refused to say what Bush's response to the memo was.
Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said the memo "didn't call for anything to be done" by Bush.
The memo's details confirm that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving airplanes as missiles, Thompson said.
"The PDB backs up what Dr. Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun," he said.
"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.," the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."
After President Clinton launched missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington," the memo said.
The memo cited intelligence from other countries in three instances, but the White House blacked out the names of the nations.
Efforts to launch an attack from Canada around the time of millennium celebrations in 2000 "may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.," the document stated.
Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam, who was caught trying to cross the Canadian border with explosives about 60 miles north of Seattle in late 1999, told the FBI that he alone conceived an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation," the document said. Ressam is still awaiting sentencing after agreeing to testify in other terrorism cases.
Zubaydah was a senior al-Qaida planner who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002.
Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said.
"The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks," it warned.
The document said that "some of the more sensational threat reporting" — such as an intelligence tip in 1998 that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to win the release of fellow extremists — could not be corroborated.
One item in the memo referred to "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." A White House official speaking on condition of anonymity said that was a reference to two Yemeni men the FBI interviewed and concluded were simply tourists taking photographs.
On May 15, 2001, a caller to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates warned of planned bin Laden attacks with explosives in the United States, but did not say where or when.
The CIA reported the incident to other government officials the next day, and a dozen or more steps were taken by the CIA and other agencies "to run down" the information from the phone call, senior administration officials said Saturday evening.
One official said references to al-Qaida in prior presidential briefings "would indicate 'they are here, they are there' in various countries and the CIA director would tell the president what was being done to address "these different operations."
___________________________________________________________________
Support for Iraq conflict erodes: poll
Sun Apr 11, 3:38 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US support for the conflict in Iraq is eroding, according to the latest CNN/Time survey, which found, amid a new Iraqi insurgency against US troops, that 57 percent of Americans think US military goals will fail unless a tougher stance is taken.
Approval of US President George W. Bush ( news -web sites ) and his administration's handling of Iraq was down to 44 percent of Americans, according to the poll, new elements of which were released Sunday, down from 51 percent surveyed March 26-28.
Meanwhile, Bush's overall approval rating had sunk to a record low of 49 percent since CNN/Time started polling the earliest days of the Bush presidency in 2001.
Surveyed after insurgents backing rebel Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr launched their onslaught against the US-led occupation last weekend, 57 percent said more intense US military efforts were needed to combat the rebels' action.
But some 36 percent said the recent attacks showed the United States, due to hand over power to Iraqis on June 30, is unlikely to achieve its goals in Iraq and needs to begin reducing its military efforts there.
A majority say the United States should hand power to the Iraqis on June 30 -- a date Bush says is "fixed" -- while 38 percent think it should keep power beyond that date.
A hefty 87 percent of those surveyed believe that creating a stable democratic government in Iraq will be either somewhat or very difficult, according to the poll.
Just over half the respondents, or 51 percent, disapproved of the president's management of Iraq, according to the poll which was conducted April 8.
Overall, 47 percent said they disapproved of the way Bush is handling his job as president.
However, public perception of Bush as a strong fighter of terrorism remained robust, a majority of 55 percent backed Bush in this regard against 39 percent who disapproved.
On the economy -- which consistently ranks amongst the public's highest concerns -- a minority of 41 percent expressed satisfation with Bush while 54 percent disapproved of his economic management of the country.
The telephone poll canvassed 1,005 adults. The margin of error was three percent.
_____________________________________________________________________
Sun Apr 11, 3:38 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US support for the conflict in Iraq is eroding, according to the latest CNN/Time survey, which found, amid a new Iraqi insurgency against US troops, that 57 percent of Americans think US military goals will fail unless a tougher stance is taken.
Approval of US President George W. Bush ( news -web sites ) and his administration's handling of Iraq was down to 44 percent of Americans, according to the poll, new elements of which were released Sunday, down from 51 percent surveyed March 26-28.
Meanwhile, Bush's overall approval rating had sunk to a record low of 49 percent since CNN/Time started polling the earliest days of the Bush presidency in 2001.
Surveyed after insurgents backing rebel Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr launched their onslaught against the US-led occupation last weekend, 57 percent said more intense US military efforts were needed to combat the rebels' action.
But some 36 percent said the recent attacks showed the United States, due to hand over power to Iraqis on June 30, is unlikely to achieve its goals in Iraq and needs to begin reducing its military efforts there.
A majority say the United States should hand power to the Iraqis on June 30 -- a date Bush says is "fixed" -- while 38 percent think it should keep power beyond that date.
A hefty 87 percent of those surveyed believe that creating a stable democratic government in Iraq will be either somewhat or very difficult, according to the poll.
Just over half the respondents, or 51 percent, disapproved of the president's management of Iraq, according to the poll which was conducted April 8.
Overall, 47 percent said they disapproved of the way Bush is handling his job as president.
However, public perception of Bush as a strong fighter of terrorism remained robust, a majority of 55 percent backed Bush in this regard against 39 percent who disapproved.
On the economy -- which consistently ranks amongst the public's highest concerns -- a minority of 41 percent expressed satisfation with Bush while 54 percent disapproved of his economic management of the country.
The telephone poll canvassed 1,005 adults. The margin of error was three percent.
_____________________________________________________________________
Bush looks unconcerned about a terrorist attack as he vacations at his ranch.
President Bush ( Click on Bush to see photo), right, talks with staff at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in this Aug. 6, 2001 file photo. That day Bush jogged, fished, and received a memo from the CIA with the title 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US'. (AP Photo/The White House, Eric Draper/ File)
President Bush ( Click on Bush to see photo), right, talks with staff at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in this Aug. 6, 2001 file photo. That day Bush jogged, fished, and received a memo from the CIA with the title 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US'. (AP Photo/The White House, Eric Draper/ File)
We can't expect Bush to step forward and do the right thing. He's too tainted by his record and it's clear the man is out of his league.
It's time to put a real leader with a real record into the White House who can guide the nation from a position built on a lifetime of learning and gaining knowledge, government experience and governing, and a dedication to justice and equality for all Americans, not just the wealthy financial supporters of his campaign. It's time to work as hard as possible every day for the next seven months to defeat Bush, Cheney and their right wing extremist cabal of neo-cons and elect John Kerry president of the United States.
April 12, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
The Silent President
President Bush was asked, during a very brief session with reporters yesterday, about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received on domestic terrorism. He responded with the familiar White House complaint about lack of specificity in the C.I.A.'s warnings — although the memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked planes and New York City. The most striking thing about the president's comment, however, was his bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and officials from two administrations talk about their feelings of responsibility, about how they compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll, asking themselves whether they could have done anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It is beginning to seem that the only person free of that kind of self-examination is the man who was chief executive when the attacks occurred.
No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should haunt the president as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they do and it is only the demands of his re-election campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.
•
It is time for the president to drop his political posture and reassure the country that his first and foremost concern is not his re-election but the safety of Americans at home and abroad. Instead of passively noting that it is the job of the 9/11 commission to figure out whether anything could or should have been done differently, he must demonstrate that he is asking those questions of himself. Instead of preparing — as the administration seems to be preparing — to blame the C.I.A. and F.B.I. for everything that went wrong, he needs to ask whether the structure of the Bush White House itself is part of the problem.
Perhaps no other administration would have responded differently to the skimpy document Mr. Bush received in August 2001. But most other presidents did not limit critical briefing papers to little more than a page, give political advisers such a prominent place in the White House and so dramatically restrict the number of policy makers who had access to the Oval Office. All of Mr. Bush's recent predecessors had at least one of those flaws, but no one else had them all.
The "fact sheet" the White House released over the weekend along with the August 2001 briefing memo hardly shows any rethinking of the way Mr. Bush operates his government. It is instead an extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection. It says that the notion that Osama bin Laden wanted to mount an attack on the United States was familiar information and "publicly well known." It said the presence of Qaeda agents in the United States was equally old news to the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies. It makes it sound as if everyone knew about Osama bin Laden's danger to America except the inattentive president.
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, gave a bureaucrat's hedged responses in her appearance before the 9/11 commission. The public needs to hear a leader's candid answers from President Bush, who so far has agreed to appear before the commission only in private and in the company of the vice president.
This is not a time for more secrecy and presidential isolation. Mr. Bush is asking Americans to simply take his word for the need to stick to an increasingly bloody and chaotic mission in Iraq that he won't even define clearly. (When asked by NBC's Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, the American proconsul Paul Bremer III chillingly began his answer with "That's a good question.")
Mr. Bush needs to speak out fully in public, both about 9/11 and about Iraq. He is chief executive of a country that once trusted him to lead in perilous times. The public supported his decision to go to war in the Middle East because most Americans believed his judgment was sound. That kind of faith is not just what he needs to win an election in November. It is what he needs to run the country, and he is in grave danger of losing it. Neither administration officials nor political advisers nor the White House spin team can hold on to the country's ebbing confidence. The president must do this himself, and quickly.
__________________________________________________________________
It's time to put a real leader with a real record into the White House who can guide the nation from a position built on a lifetime of learning and gaining knowledge, government experience and governing, and a dedication to justice and equality for all Americans, not just the wealthy financial supporters of his campaign. It's time to work as hard as possible every day for the next seven months to defeat Bush, Cheney and their right wing extremist cabal of neo-cons and elect John Kerry president of the United States.
April 12, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
The Silent President
President Bush was asked, during a very brief session with reporters yesterday, about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received on domestic terrorism. He responded with the familiar White House complaint about lack of specificity in the C.I.A.'s warnings — although the memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked planes and New York City. The most striking thing about the president's comment, however, was his bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and officials from two administrations talk about their feelings of responsibility, about how they compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll, asking themselves whether they could have done anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It is beginning to seem that the only person free of that kind of self-examination is the man who was chief executive when the attacks occurred.
No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should haunt the president as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they do and it is only the demands of his re-election campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.
•
It is time for the president to drop his political posture and reassure the country that his first and foremost concern is not his re-election but the safety of Americans at home and abroad. Instead of passively noting that it is the job of the 9/11 commission to figure out whether anything could or should have been done differently, he must demonstrate that he is asking those questions of himself. Instead of preparing — as the administration seems to be preparing — to blame the C.I.A. and F.B.I. for everything that went wrong, he needs to ask whether the structure of the Bush White House itself is part of the problem.
Perhaps no other administration would have responded differently to the skimpy document Mr. Bush received in August 2001. But most other presidents did not limit critical briefing papers to little more than a page, give political advisers such a prominent place in the White House and so dramatically restrict the number of policy makers who had access to the Oval Office. All of Mr. Bush's recent predecessors had at least one of those flaws, but no one else had them all.
The "fact sheet" the White House released over the weekend along with the August 2001 briefing memo hardly shows any rethinking of the way Mr. Bush operates his government. It is instead an extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection. It says that the notion that Osama bin Laden wanted to mount an attack on the United States was familiar information and "publicly well known." It said the presence of Qaeda agents in the United States was equally old news to the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies. It makes it sound as if everyone knew about Osama bin Laden's danger to America except the inattentive president.
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, gave a bureaucrat's hedged responses in her appearance before the 9/11 commission. The public needs to hear a leader's candid answers from President Bush, who so far has agreed to appear before the commission only in private and in the company of the vice president.
This is not a time for more secrecy and presidential isolation. Mr. Bush is asking Americans to simply take his word for the need to stick to an increasingly bloody and chaotic mission in Iraq that he won't even define clearly. (When asked by NBC's Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, the American proconsul Paul Bremer III chillingly began his answer with "That's a good question.")
Mr. Bush needs to speak out fully in public, both about 9/11 and about Iraq. He is chief executive of a country that once trusted him to lead in perilous times. The public supported his decision to go to war in the Middle East because most Americans believed his judgment was sound. That kind of faith is not just what he needs to win an election in November. It is what he needs to run the country, and he is in grave danger of losing it. Neither administration officials nor political advisers nor the White House spin team can hold on to the country's ebbing confidence. The president must do this himself, and quickly.
__________________________________________________________________
April 12, 2004 NY TIMES
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
For Ralph Nader, but Not for President
By HOWARD DEAN
BURLINGTON, Vt.
Everyone expects this year's presidential election to be decided by razor-thin margins in a few battleground states. Everyone also expects the candidacy of Ralph Nader to make the race between John Kerry and George Bush even closer. As I know from experience, however, voters have a way of proving everyone wrong.
Democrats are motivated to defeat the president this year. They've seen firsthand what three years of Bush administration policies have done to America. And they want to stop his policies from inflicting any more damage on working-class Americans, the environment, our international standing or a woman's right to choose.
Many Democrats also admire Ralph Nader's achievements, as I do. But if they truly want George Bush out of the White House, they won't vote for Ralph Nader in November.
Ralph Nader has built a remarkable legacy as a consumer advocate. Because of his tireless work, we have federal consumer protection laws and a federal department dedicated to the protection of our environment, and millions of defective motor vehicles are off the roads. And I campaigned against the very same corporate special interests that he has been criticizing longer than almost anyone else.
But I don't believe that the best way to do justice to Ralph Nader's legacy is to vote for him for president. Re-electing George Bush would undo everything Ralph Nader has worked for through his entire career and, in fact, could lead to the dismantling of many of his accomplishments.
Voting for Ralph Nader, or for any third-party candidate for president, means a vote for a candidate who has no realistic shot of winning the White House. To underscore the danger of voting for any third-party candidate in elections this close, a statistic from the 2000 campaign may prove useful: a total of eight third-party candidates won more votes than the difference between Al Gore and George Bush nationwide.
When I ended my bid for the presidency, I asked my supporters to continue our quest for change in America. Our group, Democracy for America, is committed to exposing the ways in which the Bush administration's policies are designed to prop up the privileged and please right-wing ideologues. Our agenda is rooted in hope and real American values — opportunity, integrity, honesty. This is the way to defeat George Bush.
Ralph Nader once said that your best teacher is your last mistake. Too many of us learned the consequences of not standing together four years ago. This November, we can elect a president who fights for average Americans. But we can achieve this goal only if we join together — and don't repeat our last mistake.
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, ended his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in February.
_________________________________________________________________
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
For Ralph Nader, but Not for President
By HOWARD DEAN
BURLINGTON, Vt.
Everyone expects this year's presidential election to be decided by razor-thin margins in a few battleground states. Everyone also expects the candidacy of Ralph Nader to make the race between John Kerry and George Bush even closer. As I know from experience, however, voters have a way of proving everyone wrong.
Democrats are motivated to defeat the president this year. They've seen firsthand what three years of Bush administration policies have done to America. And they want to stop his policies from inflicting any more damage on working-class Americans, the environment, our international standing or a woman's right to choose.
Many Democrats also admire Ralph Nader's achievements, as I do. But if they truly want George Bush out of the White House, they won't vote for Ralph Nader in November.
Ralph Nader has built a remarkable legacy as a consumer advocate. Because of his tireless work, we have federal consumer protection laws and a federal department dedicated to the protection of our environment, and millions of defective motor vehicles are off the roads. And I campaigned against the very same corporate special interests that he has been criticizing longer than almost anyone else.
But I don't believe that the best way to do justice to Ralph Nader's legacy is to vote for him for president. Re-electing George Bush would undo everything Ralph Nader has worked for through his entire career and, in fact, could lead to the dismantling of many of his accomplishments.
Voting for Ralph Nader, or for any third-party candidate for president, means a vote for a candidate who has no realistic shot of winning the White House. To underscore the danger of voting for any third-party candidate in elections this close, a statistic from the 2000 campaign may prove useful: a total of eight third-party candidates won more votes than the difference between Al Gore and George Bush nationwide.
When I ended my bid for the presidency, I asked my supporters to continue our quest for change in America. Our group, Democracy for America, is committed to exposing the ways in which the Bush administration's policies are designed to prop up the privileged and please right-wing ideologues. Our agenda is rooted in hope and real American values — opportunity, integrity, honesty. This is the way to defeat George Bush.
Ralph Nader once said that your best teacher is your last mistake. Too many of us learned the consequences of not standing together four years ago. This November, we can elect a president who fights for average Americans. But we can achieve this goal only if we join together — and don't repeat our last mistake.
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, ended his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in February.
_________________________________________________________________
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)