4/19/2004
Scary Plan of Attack
How times have changed for the Bush administration. It didn't take President Bush long to exhaust the global supply of goodwill toward America after 9/11 - his brash, short-sighted foreign policy has left that well bone dry. It took slightly longer for the president to burn through his administration's supply of favorable press coverage in the post-9/11 era, but now that appears to have completely disappeared as well. In an interview on "60 Minutes" last night to promote his new book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward painted a terrifying portrait of a politically-driven Bush White House that couldn't be bothered with second guessing. Doesn't that sound familiar.
Here's a brief rundown of what he learned while covering the administration's push for war.
Just 72 days after 9/11, President Bush began pressing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the issue of Iraq. In turn, Rumsfeld gave Gen. Tommy Franks a blank check to develop war plans. In July 2002, President Bush approved $700 million for these tasks without Congress' knowledge . Where did the money come from? Appropriations for the Afghan War.
Franks was working on the Iraq invasion a year before the war. But when he was publicly asked about the situation in May 2002, he responded, "That's a great question and one for which I don't have an answer, because my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that [invade Iraq]."
In December 2002, CIA deputy John McLaughlin appeared in the Oval Office to brief President Bush about Iraq's WMD capabilities. McLaughlin's well-planned presentation flopped - the president responded by saying, "Nice try, but that isn't gonna sell Joe Public." At that point, CIA Director George Tenet reassured everyone in the room that it was a "slam-dunk" case.
President Bush decided to go to war in January 2003. While at his Texas ranch, he told National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, "We're gonna have to go. It's war."
Secretary of State Colin Powell was the last to be informed of the war plans. The president, vice president, Rice, and Rumsfeld all knew before him. Even Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar knew about the upcoming war before the secretary of state. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gen. Brett Myers all met with Bandar in order to obtain Saudi cooperation for an Iraqi invasion. During the meeting, Cheney assured Bandar that once the attack started, Saddam Hussein would be "toast." Powell wasn't notified of the war plans by President Bush until two days later.
During a meeting with President Bush, Prince Bandar engaged in a bit of political calculus over oil prices. Here's what he told the president: "They're [oil prices] high. And they could go down very quickly. That's the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer, or as we get closer to the election, they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly."
Woodward says that Bush never consulted with his father over the decision to invade Iraq. Even more amazing, "The president, in making the decision to go to war, did not ask his secretary of defense for an overall recommendation, did not ask his secretary of state, Colin Powell, for his recommendation," Woodward says.
The Bush administration was extremely negligent in its handling of plans for postwar Iraq. "On the real issue of security and possible violence, they did not see it coming," says Woodward.
In a familiar move, the Bush administration sent out its political henchman du jour - this time played by Condoleezza Rice - to attack the attackers on the Sunday news shows. What resulted was a surreal sight - Condoleezza Rice lecturing the American public about Bob Woodward's lack of credibility.
Rice initially attempted to parse phrases and claim that President Bush did not decide to go to war with Iraq in January 2002. Here's how she characterized the conversation on "Face the Nation":
"That was not a decision to go to war. The decision to go to war is in March. The president is saying in that conversation, 'I think the chances are that this is not going to work out any other way. We're going to have to go to war."'
Got that? The Bush administration has now officially resorted to splitting already-split hairs. It's probably time for them to start investing in microscopes if this trend continues.
Rice was also grilled about the $700 million that was taken from the Afghanistan fund and used for war preparations in Iraq. (Remember, the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq also resulted in troops that were on the hunt for bin Laden to be pulled off the trail and relocated to Iraq.) Rice attempted to duck the question by stating that we used everything in Afghanistan that we needed, but host Bob Schieffer quickly noted, "But, Dr. Rice, you cannot take money that Congress has appropriated for one purpose and spend it on something else. That's against the law."
Rice later - incredibly - attempted once more to convince the nation that Saddam did in fact have all the WMD that the Bush administration promised. This exchange on "Face the Nation" is just amazing:
RICE: Everyone believed at that time including intelligence agencies around the world, the United Nations, anybody who knew Saddam Hussein's history, how he'd hidden weapons before, how he'd used them before that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, an active program to continue to improve them.
KAREN TUMULTY: But they were wrong.
RICE: Well, no. If you look at what has been found since by David Kay and by Charlie Deulfer, what is clear is that the - the stockpiles what were unaccounted for...have not been found and no one knows precisely what came of them.
Don't you see? Weapons inspectors David Kay and Charlie Duelfer didn't find any of the unaccounted for WMD! What more proof could you possibly need that they actually exist?
It is astounding that the Bush administration would have the gall to continue to promote this particular issue as if it played right into their strengths. But the ability to latch onto a lie and continue to promote it as if it had any basis in real fact is one thing that has separated this administration from others.
Of course, something else that's separated the Bush administration from others is their willingness to inject politics into every running debate. During her interview on "Fox News Sunday," Rice commented that she worried that "the terrorists might have learned...the wrong lesson from Spain." She was referring to Spain's recent elections where Jose Maria Aznar - an ardent Bush supporter - was voted out from his post. It is pretty obvious what Rice considers "the wrong lesson" to be.
Read more here and here .
HEADLINE OF THE DAY:
"NORAD had drills of jets as weapons "-USA Today
That might make this perjury then, no?
"I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons." - Condoleezza Rice in front of the 9/11 commission
NORAD had drills of jets as weapons
By Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.
NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. It said the scenarios outlined were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide exercises.
"Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures."
A White House spokesman said Sunday that the Bush administration was not aware of the NORAD exercises. But the exercises using real aircraft show that at least one part of the government thought the possibility of such attacks, though unlikely, merited scrutiny.
On April 8, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks heard testimony from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the White House didn't anticipate hijacked planes being used as weapons.
On April 12, a watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, released a copy of an e-mail written by a former NORAD official referring to the proposed exercise targeting the Pentagon. The e-mail said the simulation was not held because the Pentagon considered it "too unrealistic."
President Bush said at a news conference Tuesday, "Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale."
The exercises differed from the Sept. 11 attacks in one important respect: The planes in the simulation were coming from a foreign country.
Until Sept. 11, NORAD was expected to defend the United States and Canada from aircraft based elsewhere. After the attacks, that responsibility broadened to include flights that originated in the two countries.
But there were exceptions in the early drills, including one operation, planned in July 2001 and conducted later, that involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington state that were "hijacked." Those planes were escorted by U.S. and Canadian aircraft to airfields in British Columbia and Alaska.
NORAD officials have acknowledged that "scriptwriters" for the drills included the idea of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons.
"Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the scriptwriters to invoke creativity and broaden the required response," Maj. Gen. Craig McKinley, a NORAD official, told the 9/11 commission. No exercise matched the specific events of Sept. 11, NORAD said.
"We have planned and executed numerous scenarios over the years to include aircraft originating from foreign airports penetrating our sovereign airspace," Gen. Ralph Eberhart, NORAD commander, told USA TODAY. "Regrettably, the tragic events of 9/11 were never anticipated or exercised."
NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian command, was created in 1958 to guard against Soviet bombers.
Until Sept. 11, 2001, NORAD conducted four major exercises a year. Most included a hijack scenario, but not all of those involved planes as weapons. Since the attacks, NORAD has conducted more than 100 exercises, all with mock hijackings.
NORAD fighters based in Florida have intercepted two hijacked smaller aircraft since the Sept. 11 attacks. Both originated in Cuba and were escorted to Key West in spring 2003, NORAD said.
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Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Monday, April 19, 2004
IRAQ
Secrets Exposed, Lies Revealed
Exposing previous White House denials as lies, journalist Bob Woodward this weekend revealed parts of his new book which provide evidence the Bush Administration began plans for an Iraq invasion immediately after 9/11; overhyped intelligence; and appeared to circumvent the Constitution to pursue its goals. In Woodward's account, which includes a three-and-a-half hour interview with President Bush, it is revealed that the President personally ordered plans for the Iraq war to be drawn up in November of 2001. While the White House has called such statements "revisionist history," Woodward's account is consistent with accounts given by Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former Bush State Department official Richard Haass, former British Ambassador Christopher Meyer, and an earlier CBS News report. Woodward's book explores the depth of White House cover-up efforts, showing how the Administration persuaded even top military officials to lie. For instance, at the same time General Tommy Franks was secretly developing the President's Iraq war plan, he was "simultaneously publicly denying that he was ever asked to do any plan." For instance, at the same time General Tommy Franks was secretly developing the President's Iraq war plan, he was "publicly denying that he was ever been asked to do any plan." Just as troubling, Woodward points out that the decision to go to war with Iraq was shared with Saudi Prince Bandar (who has milked his ties to the Bush Administration despite being under the microscope for money laundering) and RNC consultant Karen Hughes before it was shared with Secretary of State Colin Powell.
UNANSWERED – DID THE WHITE HOUSE VIOLATE THE LAW?: Woodward reveals that in July 2002, Bush secretly approved diverting $700 million meant for operations in Afghanistan into war planning for Iraq. Bush kept Congress "totally in the dark on this," which raises serious legal questions reminiscent of Iran-Contra: Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution vests the power of the purse with Congress, and statutes bar the executive from unilaterally moving money out of areas explicitly mandated by spending bills. On CBS's Face the Nation, Rice tried to defend the move, claiming "resources were not taken from Afghanistan." Not only did this response contradict the fact that special forces were pulled out of Afghanistan in 2002 and moved to Iraq, but it did not address legal questions. As CBS anchor Bob Schieffer said, "Dr. Rice, you cannot take money that Congress has appropriated for one purpose and spend it on something else. That's against the law." One other note: In the same supplemental bill, Bush further ignored the will of Congress, blocking a bipartisan, House- and Senate-passed homeland security funding package.
UNANSWERED – MANIPULATING OIL PRICES FOR BUSH CAMPAIGN?: Woodward also reveals that the Saudi Arabian government – the same government with potential ties to terror - "promised Bush that his country would lower oil prices before the November 2 presidential election." Woodward said Bandar specifically wanted Bush to know that the Saudis hope to "fine-tune oil prices" for the 2004 election. Recently, the Saudis led the charge to cut OPEC oil production, which has raised gas prices in America. Was that move meant to artificially raise the price, so that it could be lowered closer to the election?
PROOF - BUSH/CHENEY DELIBERATELY OVERHYPED INTELLIGENCE: According to Woodward's book, the President told aides in December of 2002, "Make sure no one stretches to make our case" about WMD. But a look at the record shows it was Bush and Vice President Cheney who, well before this cautionary statement, were aggressively hyping intelligence. For instance, Bush claimed in October 2002 that Iraq had "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons" – a claim that was rejected at the time by the Air Force intelligence unit most knowledgeable about the issue. He also claimed definitively that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons," despite warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that there was no solid proof. Similarly, Vice President Cheney was even more assertive, claiming without proof in August 2002 "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has WMD. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Even after Bush made his cautionary statement, the overhyping continued, with Cheney saying, "Iraq has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," Bush claiming "We found the WMD ," and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld saying "We know where the WMDs are." See other examples of how the White House ignored warnings that its WMD case for war was weak.
HEALTH CARE
Time To Talk About The Uninsured
According to the Institute of Medicine, the U.S. has a whopping health care problem which affects the entire nation. The swelling numbers of the uninsured in America is a problem which can no longer be ignored or brushed under the carpet as someone else's problem. The United States spends $35 billion every year to treat people with no insurance, while the economy loses between $65 billion and $130 billion in productivity. Over 18,000 25- to 64-year-olds die every year as a result lacking health insurance. Currently, 43.6 million Americans lack health insurance, and the trend is only getting worse. As costs spiral, more and more Americans, many of them children, are left to struggle for basic health care. The IOM has challenged Congress and the President to find a way to insure every American over the next decade.
CONSERVATIVE FOOT DRAGGING: Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson both said the IOM challenge to cover the uninsured was impossible; unbelievably, Thompson even claimed we already have universal coverage. Meanwhile, President Bush's tax credit proposal would potentially "cause more than 1 million people who have employer-based coverage to become uninsured."
LOWER CARE, HIGHER COSTS: Urban Institute researchers found the uninsured receive about half the care of those in private insurance. Since escalated cost causes many uninsured Americans to delay or defer treatment, the care they do get is the most expensive and least efficient, like emergency or hospital care. And according to a study by the California Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, uninsured Americans pay on average 68% more than the federal government for commonly prescribed drugs, such as those used to treat arthritis, high cholesterol and ulcers. And since many of the drugs in the survey treat chronic conditions, the price of refills can really add up quickly. For example, "an uninsured person regularly taking Zocor for high cholesterol...would pay at least $1,672 for a year's supply of Zocor. The government, on the other hand, must pay only $814 for the same quantity...a savings of $858." Which uninsured Americans are paying top dollar? The most expensive cities are Baltimore (at a whopping 84% higher average cost for medications), San Diego, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia.
SOME SUGGESTIONS TO FIX HEALTH CARE: Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed some basic structural changes to the health care system in this week's NY Times Magazine. First, change the way health care is delivered. One way to do this? Give Americans responsibility for keeping custody of their medical records, to create a "personal health record"; doing so would allow Americans to "assume more responsibility for improving their own health and lifestyles." Also, it's time for the medical field to harness technology. It's time to put health files – "test results, lab records, X-rays" – into a computer system accessible in seconds by doctors' offices and emergency rooms and to disseminate research. Finally, it's important to "recognize the larger factors that affect our health – from the environment to public health." A preemptive strike against factors which sicken Americans, like lead in the drinking water, obesity and smog, is more efficient than waiting for the effects to show in illness and injury.
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Justice for All?
As President Bush travels to Pennsylvania to tout his efforts to "expand the government's surveillance and detention powers," twice in the next ten days the Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of those efforts. Since 2001, hundred of detainees have been held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, not as prisoners of war entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, but as so-called "enemy combatants" who, according to the Bush Administration, "may be held and interrogated for as long as the executive branch considers it necessary." Four detainees, two Australian and two British citizens, challenged in court the circumstances of their detention, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court tomorrow. But the detainees are not asking to be set free. Rather, they are merely "asking the Supreme Court to declare that their cases are not, in fact, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts so that they may [at a later time] ask a federal judge to grant them some form of an opportunity to argue for their freedom." The decision, expected to be handed down mid-summer, will "extend well beyond U.S. borders, to allied governments and international public opinion, which often look to the United States as a symbol of freedom and the rule of law."
IGNORING THE LAW PUTS AMERICAN SOLDIERS AT RISK: The Administration claims that granting detainees the ability to contest their detention, "perhaps by producing evidence that they never actually fought against the United States," would compromise U.S. security interests. But, as a new column by American Progress Senior Vice President Mark Agrast notes, "thousands of such status hearings were held in Vietnam and during the first Iraq War." Refusing to provide detainees a forum to argue their innocence "could not only undermine the rule of law but could endanger American service members who are captured behind enemy lines."
ADMINISTRATION CREATED A PARALLEL LEGAL SYSTEM: Next week, the Supreme Court will hear the cases of Yasir Hamdi and Jose Padilla – two U.S. citizens who have been held in a military brig, under interrogation and without access to counsel, for nearly two years. When it became clear the Supreme Court would consider the circumstances of their detention, the Administration provided them limited access to counsel. The Supreme Court will decide if it was legal for the Bush Administration to create "a parallel legal system, separate from ordinary criminal justice and controlled almost exclusively by the executive" branch. Newsweek reports that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued for more American citizens to be detained indefinitely without access to counsel or the court, including six men in Lackawanna, NY, even though "there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist act."
BELATEDLY DISCOVERING THE SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – in an announcement that you wouldn't expect the United States government to need to make – declared Tuesday that "immigrants detained in terrorism investigations can no longer be held indefinitely without evidence." The decision came as a result of an investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General which found that hundreds of immigrants of Middle Eastern descent, detained for months on alleged minor immigration violations, were denied "basic standards of due process" and were subject to "physical abuse and mistreatment." Asa Hutchinson, DHS undersecretary, said that the new procedures are intended to "create a system of 'checks and balances'" – apparently forgetting that the system of checks and balances was created by the Constitution more than 200 years ago. Meanwhile, the 9/11 commission "has concluded that immigration policies promoted as essential to keeping the country safe from future attacks have been largely ineffective, producing little, if any, information leading to the identification or apprehension of terrorists."
IRAQ – IMAGE WORSENING: According to a news analysis by the LA Times, the growing perception across much of Iraq is that "the ground is giving way beneath the Americans." Instead of winning the war for the hearts of the Iraqi people, a series of missteps on the part of the occupation forces leave a different picture. "More and more Iraqis who once resented — but tolerated — Americans now refuse to even talk to them." According to one Iraqi, the recent escalation in violence is indicative of a larger problem: "America won the war on April 9 last year; they lost the war on April 9 this year." As a result, "an increasingly anxious Congress has summoned Bush administration officials to testify this week on their plans for quelling violence in Iraq and for handing power over to Iraqis by June 30."
ECONOMY – THE WAL-MART EFFECT: The NYT writes, Wal-Mart isn't just a discount store, it's practically its own country. The mega-corporation is the largest employer in the world; "If it were an independent nation, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner." However, the company doesn't use its massive influence for good. Unlike General Motors, the most influential company of the mid-20th century, Wal-Mart exerts a negative force on American workers. "G.M. helped build the world's most affluent middle class by paying wages far above the average and by providing generous health and pension plans...G.M.'s wage pattern spurred other companies to raise compensation levels, while Wal-Mart's relatively low wages and benefits — its workers average less than $18,000 a year — were doing just the opposite."
CORRUPTION – TAX BILL IS 'A NEW LEVEL OF SLEAZE': A bill that was supposed to settle a relatively minor trade dispute with Europe has been "packed with $170 billion in tax cuts aimed at cruise-ship operators, foreign dog-race gamblers, NASCAR track owners, bow-and-arrow makers and Oldsmobile dealers." It has gotten so bad that even a tax lobbyists said the bill "has risen to a new level of sleaze." Nevertheless, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) "supports all of the provisions that have been slipped in."
MILITARY – NEW PROBLEMS FOR PENTAGON CONTRACTOR: Northrop Grumman is in more hot water. According to the WSJ, new documents show the weapons company "covered up major accounting irregularities during the late 1980s to stay in the Pentagon's good graces." The documents, "which haven't been made public, form the heart of a U.S. government lawsuit against Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman that could result in penalties of hundreds of millions of dollars." At a time when Pentagon spending is on the rise, the company is under investigation by the Justice Department for, among other things, "falsely inflated, recorded and presented costs that were not actually incurred, including scrapping more parts than it had ordered. The company, according to the suit, also 'engaged in a secret effort to alter' inventory records 'to mislead and defraud' the government."
MEDIA – WASHINGTON TIMES NEEDS HELP, CITY PAPER DELIVERS: The Washington City Paper has decided to lend the Washington Times a helping hand. The City paper discovered that "over the past nine days, the Times hasn't published a single correction." Over the same period the "New York Times churned out at least 50 corrections. And the Washington Post clocked in with more than 25." So, the City Paper has decided "to run the [the Washington Times] corrections box."
Find these and other stories at the CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS.
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Secrets Exposed, Lies Revealed
Exposing previous White House denials as lies, journalist Bob Woodward this weekend revealed parts of his new book which provide evidence the Bush Administration began plans for an Iraq invasion immediately after 9/11; overhyped intelligence; and appeared to circumvent the Constitution to pursue its goals. In Woodward's account, which includes a three-and-a-half hour interview with President Bush, it is revealed that the President personally ordered plans for the Iraq war to be drawn up in November of 2001. While the White House has called such statements "revisionist history," Woodward's account is consistent with accounts given by Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former Bush State Department official Richard Haass, former British Ambassador Christopher Meyer, and an earlier CBS News report. Woodward's book explores the depth of White House cover-up efforts, showing how the Administration persuaded even top military officials to lie. For instance, at the same time General Tommy Franks was secretly developing the President's Iraq war plan, he was "simultaneously publicly denying that he was ever asked to do any plan." For instance, at the same time General Tommy Franks was secretly developing the President's Iraq war plan, he was "publicly denying that he was ever been asked to do any plan." Just as troubling, Woodward points out that the decision to go to war with Iraq was shared with Saudi Prince Bandar (who has milked his ties to the Bush Administration despite being under the microscope for money laundering) and RNC consultant Karen Hughes before it was shared with Secretary of State Colin Powell.
UNANSWERED – DID THE WHITE HOUSE VIOLATE THE LAW?: Woodward reveals that in July 2002, Bush secretly approved diverting $700 million meant for operations in Afghanistan into war planning for Iraq. Bush kept Congress "totally in the dark on this," which raises serious legal questions reminiscent of Iran-Contra: Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution vests the power of the purse with Congress, and statutes bar the executive from unilaterally moving money out of areas explicitly mandated by spending bills. On CBS's Face the Nation, Rice tried to defend the move, claiming "resources were not taken from Afghanistan." Not only did this response contradict the fact that special forces were pulled out of Afghanistan in 2002 and moved to Iraq, but it did not address legal questions. As CBS anchor Bob Schieffer said, "Dr. Rice, you cannot take money that Congress has appropriated for one purpose and spend it on something else. That's against the law." One other note: In the same supplemental bill, Bush further ignored the will of Congress, blocking a bipartisan, House- and Senate-passed homeland security funding package.
UNANSWERED – MANIPULATING OIL PRICES FOR BUSH CAMPAIGN?: Woodward also reveals that the Saudi Arabian government – the same government with potential ties to terror - "promised Bush that his country would lower oil prices before the November 2 presidential election." Woodward said Bandar specifically wanted Bush to know that the Saudis hope to "fine-tune oil prices" for the 2004 election. Recently, the Saudis led the charge to cut OPEC oil production, which has raised gas prices in America. Was that move meant to artificially raise the price, so that it could be lowered closer to the election?
PROOF - BUSH/CHENEY DELIBERATELY OVERHYPED INTELLIGENCE: According to Woodward's book, the President told aides in December of 2002, "Make sure no one stretches to make our case" about WMD. But a look at the record shows it was Bush and Vice President Cheney who, well before this cautionary statement, were aggressively hyping intelligence. For instance, Bush claimed in October 2002 that Iraq had "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons" – a claim that was rejected at the time by the Air Force intelligence unit most knowledgeable about the issue. He also claimed definitively that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons," despite warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that there was no solid proof. Similarly, Vice President Cheney was even more assertive, claiming without proof in August 2002 "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has WMD. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Even after Bush made his cautionary statement, the overhyping continued, with Cheney saying, "Iraq has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," Bush claiming "We found the WMD ," and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld saying "We know where the WMDs are." See other examples of how the White House ignored warnings that its WMD case for war was weak.
HEALTH CARE
Time To Talk About The Uninsured
According to the Institute of Medicine, the U.S. has a whopping health care problem which affects the entire nation. The swelling numbers of the uninsured in America is a problem which can no longer be ignored or brushed under the carpet as someone else's problem. The United States spends $35 billion every year to treat people with no insurance, while the economy loses between $65 billion and $130 billion in productivity. Over 18,000 25- to 64-year-olds die every year as a result lacking health insurance. Currently, 43.6 million Americans lack health insurance, and the trend is only getting worse. As costs spiral, more and more Americans, many of them children, are left to struggle for basic health care. The IOM has challenged Congress and the President to find a way to insure every American over the next decade.
CONSERVATIVE FOOT DRAGGING: Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson both said the IOM challenge to cover the uninsured was impossible; unbelievably, Thompson even claimed we already have universal coverage. Meanwhile, President Bush's tax credit proposal would potentially "cause more than 1 million people who have employer-based coverage to become uninsured."
LOWER CARE, HIGHER COSTS: Urban Institute researchers found the uninsured receive about half the care of those in private insurance. Since escalated cost causes many uninsured Americans to delay or defer treatment, the care they do get is the most expensive and least efficient, like emergency or hospital care. And according to a study by the California Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, uninsured Americans pay on average 68% more than the federal government for commonly prescribed drugs, such as those used to treat arthritis, high cholesterol and ulcers. And since many of the drugs in the survey treat chronic conditions, the price of refills can really add up quickly. For example, "an uninsured person regularly taking Zocor for high cholesterol...would pay at least $1,672 for a year's supply of Zocor. The government, on the other hand, must pay only $814 for the same quantity...a savings of $858." Which uninsured Americans are paying top dollar? The most expensive cities are Baltimore (at a whopping 84% higher average cost for medications), San Diego, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia.
SOME SUGGESTIONS TO FIX HEALTH CARE: Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed some basic structural changes to the health care system in this week's NY Times Magazine. First, change the way health care is delivered. One way to do this? Give Americans responsibility for keeping custody of their medical records, to create a "personal health record"; doing so would allow Americans to "assume more responsibility for improving their own health and lifestyles." Also, it's time for the medical field to harness technology. It's time to put health files – "test results, lab records, X-rays" – into a computer system accessible in seconds by doctors' offices and emergency rooms and to disseminate research. Finally, it's important to "recognize the larger factors that affect our health – from the environment to public health." A preemptive strike against factors which sicken Americans, like lead in the drinking water, obesity and smog, is more efficient than waiting for the effects to show in illness and injury.
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Justice for All?
As President Bush travels to Pennsylvania to tout his efforts to "expand the government's surveillance and detention powers," twice in the next ten days the Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of those efforts. Since 2001, hundred of detainees have been held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, not as prisoners of war entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, but as so-called "enemy combatants" who, according to the Bush Administration, "may be held and interrogated for as long as the executive branch considers it necessary." Four detainees, two Australian and two British citizens, challenged in court the circumstances of their detention, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court tomorrow. But the detainees are not asking to be set free. Rather, they are merely "asking the Supreme Court to declare that their cases are not, in fact, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts so that they may [at a later time] ask a federal judge to grant them some form of an opportunity to argue for their freedom." The decision, expected to be handed down mid-summer, will "extend well beyond U.S. borders, to allied governments and international public opinion, which often look to the United States as a symbol of freedom and the rule of law."
IGNORING THE LAW PUTS AMERICAN SOLDIERS AT RISK: The Administration claims that granting detainees the ability to contest their detention, "perhaps by producing evidence that they never actually fought against the United States," would compromise U.S. security interests. But, as a new column by American Progress Senior Vice President Mark Agrast notes, "thousands of such status hearings were held in Vietnam and during the first Iraq War." Refusing to provide detainees a forum to argue their innocence "could not only undermine the rule of law but could endanger American service members who are captured behind enemy lines."
ADMINISTRATION CREATED A PARALLEL LEGAL SYSTEM: Next week, the Supreme Court will hear the cases of Yasir Hamdi and Jose Padilla – two U.S. citizens who have been held in a military brig, under interrogation and without access to counsel, for nearly two years. When it became clear the Supreme Court would consider the circumstances of their detention, the Administration provided them limited access to counsel. The Supreme Court will decide if it was legal for the Bush Administration to create "a parallel legal system, separate from ordinary criminal justice and controlled almost exclusively by the executive" branch. Newsweek reports that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued for more American citizens to be detained indefinitely without access to counsel or the court, including six men in Lackawanna, NY, even though "there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist act."
BELATEDLY DISCOVERING THE SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – in an announcement that you wouldn't expect the United States government to need to make – declared Tuesday that "immigrants detained in terrorism investigations can no longer be held indefinitely without evidence." The decision came as a result of an investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General which found that hundreds of immigrants of Middle Eastern descent, detained for months on alleged minor immigration violations, were denied "basic standards of due process" and were subject to "physical abuse and mistreatment." Asa Hutchinson, DHS undersecretary, said that the new procedures are intended to "create a system of 'checks and balances'" – apparently forgetting that the system of checks and balances was created by the Constitution more than 200 years ago. Meanwhile, the 9/11 commission "has concluded that immigration policies promoted as essential to keeping the country safe from future attacks have been largely ineffective, producing little, if any, information leading to the identification or apprehension of terrorists."
IRAQ – IMAGE WORSENING: According to a news analysis by the LA Times, the growing perception across much of Iraq is that "the ground is giving way beneath the Americans." Instead of winning the war for the hearts of the Iraqi people, a series of missteps on the part of the occupation forces leave a different picture. "More and more Iraqis who once resented — but tolerated — Americans now refuse to even talk to them." According to one Iraqi, the recent escalation in violence is indicative of a larger problem: "America won the war on April 9 last year; they lost the war on April 9 this year." As a result, "an increasingly anxious Congress has summoned Bush administration officials to testify this week on their plans for quelling violence in Iraq and for handing power over to Iraqis by June 30."
ECONOMY – THE WAL-MART EFFECT: The NYT writes, Wal-Mart isn't just a discount store, it's practically its own country. The mega-corporation is the largest employer in the world; "If it were an independent nation, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner." However, the company doesn't use its massive influence for good. Unlike General Motors, the most influential company of the mid-20th century, Wal-Mart exerts a negative force on American workers. "G.M. helped build the world's most affluent middle class by paying wages far above the average and by providing generous health and pension plans...G.M.'s wage pattern spurred other companies to raise compensation levels, while Wal-Mart's relatively low wages and benefits — its workers average less than $18,000 a year — were doing just the opposite."
CORRUPTION – TAX BILL IS 'A NEW LEVEL OF SLEAZE': A bill that was supposed to settle a relatively minor trade dispute with Europe has been "packed with $170 billion in tax cuts aimed at cruise-ship operators, foreign dog-race gamblers, NASCAR track owners, bow-and-arrow makers and Oldsmobile dealers." It has gotten so bad that even a tax lobbyists said the bill "has risen to a new level of sleaze." Nevertheless, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) "supports all of the provisions that have been slipped in."
MILITARY – NEW PROBLEMS FOR PENTAGON CONTRACTOR: Northrop Grumman is in more hot water. According to the WSJ, new documents show the weapons company "covered up major accounting irregularities during the late 1980s to stay in the Pentagon's good graces." The documents, "which haven't been made public, form the heart of a U.S. government lawsuit against Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman that could result in penalties of hundreds of millions of dollars." At a time when Pentagon spending is on the rise, the company is under investigation by the Justice Department for, among other things, "falsely inflated, recorded and presented costs that were not actually incurred, including scrapping more parts than it had ordered. The company, according to the suit, also 'engaged in a secret effort to alter' inventory records 'to mislead and defraud' the government."
MEDIA – WASHINGTON TIMES NEEDS HELP, CITY PAPER DELIVERS: The Washington City Paper has decided to lend the Washington Times a helping hand. The City paper discovered that "over the past nine days, the Times hasn't published a single correction." Over the same period the "New York Times churned out at least 50 corrections. And the Washington Post clocked in with more than 25." So, the City Paper has decided "to run the [the Washington Times] corrections box."
Find these and other stories at the CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS.
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Well, if Spain isn't "with us" then as Bush said before, it's "against us". So what is he going to do now? Bomb them? That's the way he talked when he lied to invade Iraq. See, this is the way an idiot digs himself into a hole when he has no idea of what he's doing. American and the world can not afford to have a spoiled rich, inarticulate, religiously pious, dry-drunk, bumbling son of an ex-president causing more danger than security in the White House.
We need the strong, experienced and intelligent guidance of John Kerry. Vote Bush out in November and bring a qualified leader into the White House again.
Bush Bemoans Spanish Troops' Iraq Pullout
WASHINGTON - President Bush scolded Spain's new prime minister Monday for his swift withdrawal of troops from Iraq and told him to avoid actions that give "false comfort to terrorists or enemies of freedom in Iraq."
Bush expressed his views in a five-minute telephone call with Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who on Sunday ordered the 1,300 troops to return home as soon as possible...
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We need the strong, experienced and intelligent guidance of John Kerry. Vote Bush out in November and bring a qualified leader into the White House again.
Bush Bemoans Spanish Troops' Iraq Pullout
WASHINGTON - President Bush scolded Spain's new prime minister Monday for his swift withdrawal of troops from Iraq and told him to avoid actions that give "false comfort to terrorists or enemies of freedom in Iraq."
Bush expressed his views in a five-minute telephone call with Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who on Sunday ordered the 1,300 troops to return home as soon as possible...
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April 19, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES
The Wrong War
By BOB HERBERT
Follow me, said the president. And, tragically, we did.
With his misbegotten war in Iraq, his failure to throw everything we had at Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and his fantasy of using military might as a magic wand to "change the world," President Bush has ushered the American people into a bloody and mind-bending theater of the absurd.
Each act is more heartbreaking than the last. Pfc. Keith Maupin, who was kidnapped near Baghdad on April 9, showed up on a videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera last Friday. He was in the custody of masked gunmen and, understandably, frightened.
"My name is Keith Matthew Maupin," he said, looking nervously into the camera. "I am a soldier from the First Division. I am married with a 10-month-old son."
Private Maupin is 20 years old and should never have been sent into the flaming horror of Iraq. Now we don't know how to get him out.
On the same day that Private Maupin was kidnapped, 20-year-old Specialist Michelle Witmer was killed when her Humvee was attacked in Baghdad. Ms. Witmer's two sisters, Charity and Rachel, were also serving in Iraq. All three women were members of the National Guard.
American troops are enduring the deadliest period since the start of the war. And while they continue to fight courageously and sometimes die, they are fighting and dying in the wrong war.
This is the height of absurdity.
One of the things I remember from my time in the service many years ago was the ubiquitous presence of large posters with the phrase, in big block letters: Know Your Enemy.
This is a bit of military wisdom that seems to have escaped President Bush.
The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda, not Iraq.
All Americans and most of the world would have united behind President Bush for an all-out war against Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The relatives and friends of any troops who lost their lives in that effort would have known clearly and unmistakably what their loved ones had died for.
But Mr. Bush had other things on his mind. With Osama and the top leadership of Al Qaeda still at large, and with the U.S. still gripped by the trauma of Sept. 11, the president turned his attention to Iraq.
Less than two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Bob Woodward's account in his new book, "Plan of Attack," President Bush ordered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to have plans drawn up for a war against Iraq. Mr. Bush insisted that this be done with the greatest of secrecy. The president did not even fully inform his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, or his secretary of state, Colin Powell, about his directive to Mr. Rumsfeld.
Thus began the peeling away of resources crucial to the nation's fight against its most fervent enemy, Al Qaeda.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who at the time was head of the United States Central Command and in charge of the Afghan war, was reported by Mr. Woodward to have uttered a string of obscenities when he was ordered to develop a plan for invading Iraq.
President Bush may truly believe, as he suggested at his press conference last week, that he is carrying out a mission that has been sanctioned by the divine. But he has in fact made the world less safe with his catastrophic decision to wage war in Iraq. At least 700 G.I.'s and thousands of innocent Iraqis, including many women and children, are dead. Untold numbers have been maimed and there is no end to the carnage in sight.
Meanwhile, instead of destroying the terrorists, our real enemies, we've energized them. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a rallying cry for Islamic militants. Qaeda-type terror is spreading, not receding. And Osama bin Laden is still at large.
Even as I write this, reporters from The Times and other news outlets are filing stories about marines dying in ambush and other acts of mayhem and anarchy across Iraq. This was not part of the plan. The administration and its apologists spread fantasies of a fresh dawn of freedom emerging in Iraq and spreading across the Arab world. Instead we are spilling the blood of innocents in a nightmare from which many thousands will never awaken.
__________________________________________________________________________
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES
The Wrong War
By BOB HERBERT
Follow me, said the president. And, tragically, we did.
With his misbegotten war in Iraq, his failure to throw everything we had at Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and his fantasy of using military might as a magic wand to "change the world," President Bush has ushered the American people into a bloody and mind-bending theater of the absurd.
Each act is more heartbreaking than the last. Pfc. Keith Maupin, who was kidnapped near Baghdad on April 9, showed up on a videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera last Friday. He was in the custody of masked gunmen and, understandably, frightened.
"My name is Keith Matthew Maupin," he said, looking nervously into the camera. "I am a soldier from the First Division. I am married with a 10-month-old son."
Private Maupin is 20 years old and should never have been sent into the flaming horror of Iraq. Now we don't know how to get him out.
On the same day that Private Maupin was kidnapped, 20-year-old Specialist Michelle Witmer was killed when her Humvee was attacked in Baghdad. Ms. Witmer's two sisters, Charity and Rachel, were also serving in Iraq. All three women were members of the National Guard.
American troops are enduring the deadliest period since the start of the war. And while they continue to fight courageously and sometimes die, they are fighting and dying in the wrong war.
This is the height of absurdity.
One of the things I remember from my time in the service many years ago was the ubiquitous presence of large posters with the phrase, in big block letters: Know Your Enemy.
This is a bit of military wisdom that seems to have escaped President Bush.
The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda, not Iraq.
All Americans and most of the world would have united behind President Bush for an all-out war against Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The relatives and friends of any troops who lost their lives in that effort would have known clearly and unmistakably what their loved ones had died for.
But Mr. Bush had other things on his mind. With Osama and the top leadership of Al Qaeda still at large, and with the U.S. still gripped by the trauma of Sept. 11, the president turned his attention to Iraq.
Less than two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Bob Woodward's account in his new book, "Plan of Attack," President Bush ordered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to have plans drawn up for a war against Iraq. Mr. Bush insisted that this be done with the greatest of secrecy. The president did not even fully inform his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, or his secretary of state, Colin Powell, about his directive to Mr. Rumsfeld.
Thus began the peeling away of resources crucial to the nation's fight against its most fervent enemy, Al Qaeda.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who at the time was head of the United States Central Command and in charge of the Afghan war, was reported by Mr. Woodward to have uttered a string of obscenities when he was ordered to develop a plan for invading Iraq.
President Bush may truly believe, as he suggested at his press conference last week, that he is carrying out a mission that has been sanctioned by the divine. But he has in fact made the world less safe with his catastrophic decision to wage war in Iraq. At least 700 G.I.'s and thousands of innocent Iraqis, including many women and children, are dead. Untold numbers have been maimed and there is no end to the carnage in sight.
Meanwhile, instead of destroying the terrorists, our real enemies, we've energized them. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a rallying cry for Islamic militants. Qaeda-type terror is spreading, not receding. And Osama bin Laden is still at large.
Even as I write this, reporters from The Times and other news outlets are filing stories about marines dying in ambush and other acts of mayhem and anarchy across Iraq. This was not part of the plan. The administration and its apologists spread fantasies of a fresh dawn of freedom emerging in Iraq and spreading across the Arab world. Instead we are spilling the blood of innocents in a nightmare from which many thousands will never awaken.
__________________________________________________________________________
George Bush can not go to the bathroom without Dick Cheney telling him it's okay. He can't make decisions for himself nor stand up like a man and give testimony (even in private) with the 9/11 Commission. The only reason he keeps Powell around is it looks good but Bush, excuse me, Cheney circumvents him at every chance. And now Powell is pointing out how Bush, I mean, Cheney was wrong about the Iraq War and Powell was right. Cheney didn't have the troops to occupy Iraq adequitely AFTER the war and he never had a plan for dealing with the "peace" AFTER it either.
Vote Kerry. The only way to get out of this mess is with a new broom and a clean sweep of all the inept fumbling of this "Bush" administration.
April 19, 2004 NY TIMES
Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Ties in the Cabinet
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, April 18 — For more than a year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides have tacitly acknowledged that he was concerned before the war about what could go wrong once American forces captured Iraq.
But Mr. Powell's apparent decision to lay out his misgivings even more explicitly to the journalist Bob Woodward for a book has jolted the White House and aggravated long-festering tensions in the Bush cabinet. Moreover, some officials said, the book has created problems for the secretary inside the administration just as the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and President Bush is plunging into his re-election drive.
Mr. Powell has not acknowledged that he cooperated with Mr. Woodward, but the book presents the secretary's reservations in such detail that it leaves little doubt. A spokesman for Mr. Powell said again Sunday that he would not comment on the book, "Plan of Attack."
Critics of Mr. Powell in the hawkish wing of the administration said they were startled by what they saw as his self-serving decision to help fill out a portrait that enhances his reputation as a farsighted analyst, perhaps at the expense of Mr. Bush. Several said the book guaranteed what they expected anyway, that Mr. Powell will not stay as secretary if Mr. Bush is re-elected.
The view expressed Sunday by people in the administration that Mr. Bush comes across as sober-minded and resolute in the book, asking for contingency plans for a war early on but not deciding to wage one until the last minute, saves Mr. Powell from any immediate difficulties that might grow from seeming to betray his confidential relationship to a president who prizes loyalty, several officials said.
"Look, a lot of people have been struck by the degree to which Secretary Powell is using this book as an opportunity — to be fair — to clarify his position on the issues," said an official. "But what this book does is muddy the water internally, which is very unfortunate and unhelpful."
Another official, who like others declined to be identified because of the political sensitivity of their criticism, accused Mr. Powell of having a habit of distancing himself from policies when they go wrong. "It's such a soap opera with him," this official said.
Democrats seized on Mr. Powell's portrayal, saying it would give them ammunition to criticize the administration for going to war without broad international backing or adequate planning for an occupation.
Throughout the day Sunday, Senator John Kerry brought up the Woodward book, mentioning it twice in his interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC and once at an outdoor rally at the University of Miami.
"Here we have a book by a reputable writer," Mr. Kerry told several thousand students at the afternoon campus rally. "We learn that the president even misled members of his own administration."
Asked if material in Mr. Woodward's book would be grist for his party, Jano Cabrera, the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview: "Absolutely. It's one thing for us to assert it. It's another thing for it to be stated as fact by his secretary of state."
And Steve Murphy, who managed the presidential campaign of Representative Richard A. Gephardt, said: "The strongest criticism of Bush is that he did not have a plan for the aftermath of the war. And that was exactly what Powell was pointing out to him. He is a credible source. This intensifies the backdrop between Bush and Kerry."
People close to Mr. Powell said Sunday that they had no doubt he would weather any criticism from within over his apparent cooperation with Mr. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post. Polls show that he is one of the most popular and best-known figures in government. The people close to him note that most people following the situation closely knew that he had misgivings about the war.
"Is the secretary going to be undercut for having been right?" asked an official close to Mr. Powell. "I don't think so. Undercut compared to who? Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? These are people who have some real problems right now. They're not reading Bob Woodward's book. They're reading the dispatches from the field."
Other officials close to Mr. Powell say his strained relations with Mr. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and Vice President Cheney are common currency among Washington insiders, though they say the suggestion that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are barely on speaking terms is highly exaggerated.
"I don't think there will be much change in his dealings with Cheney and Rumsfeld," said one person close to Mr. Powell. "People already thought it was this bad. It doesn't change things for them to find out that it really was. They know how to deal with each other, and they've been through quite a bit together."
When asked on "Fox News Sunday" about Mr. Woodward's contention that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are so distant on policy matters that they do not talk, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, described the men's relationship as "friendly."
"I can tell you," she said, "I've had lunch on a number of occasions with Vice President Cheney and with Colin Powell, and they are more than on speaking terms. They're friendly."
But another official said Mr. Powell's dealings internally with Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld especially had made life difficult for people inside the administration.
"The day-to-day nattering of the Defense Department trying to take over the business of diplomacy at every level, it's just difficult to be on the inside," said an administration official who defends Mr. Powell's actions. "Every day is difficult. The byplay at the meetings is difficult."
Mr. Powell's standing around the world was less easy to measure this weekend. But a European diplomat said he thought the secretary's standing in Europe especially would only be enhanced because he would be seen as sharing the view of many there that the administration had been overly optimistic about subduing dissidents in Iraq.
For the people long familiar with Mr. Powell's thinking, his misgivings about an American occupation of Iraq, and his insistence on getting full international backing for American actions, goes back many years. So, they note, does his fighting with Mr. Cheney.
For example, Mr. Powell's memoir, "My American Journey," published in 1995 after he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he had opposed a final push to oust Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf war on the ground that an occupation would provoke a counterinsurgency and criticism among Americans.
In addition, many accounts of the planning for the first gulf war say that Mr. Cheney, then secretary of defense, opposed going to the United Nations or Congress for backing to remove Iraq from Kuwait, fearing that failure would weaken the first President Bush's administration's ability to go to war.
In 2002, Mr. Cheney was openly disdainful of Mr. Powell's insistence on getting approval of the United Nations Security Council before going to war, spreading consternation at the State Department. Mr. Powell won that argument, and President Bush authorized a bid to get a Security Council resolution supporting war.
Mr. Powell's memoir also recalls an exchange in the early 1990's, in which Mr. Powell accused Mr. Cheney — jokingly, he insisted — of being surrounded by "right-wing nuts like you." In the last year, the Woodward book says, Mr. Powell referred privately to the civilian conservatives in the Pentagon loyal to Mr. Cheney as the Gestapo.
The Woodward book also attributes to Mr. Powell the belief that although he had misgivings about going to war, it was his obligation to support the president once Mr. Bush decided to do so.
Mr. Bush told Mr. Woodward that he did not ask the secretary's opinion on whether to go to war because he thought he knew what that opinion would be: "no."
But a senior aide to Mr. Powell asserted this weekend that the secretary was not as opposed to war as some people presume, no matter what the implications in the book.
"The portrait of Powell in the Woodward book is pretty consistent with what everybody knows," the official said. "We were with the president if we had to do this. We set up an exit ramp for Saddam, and he didn't take it. Powell in the end was very comfortable knowing that."
Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Washington for this article and Jodi Wilgoren from Miami.
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Vote Kerry. The only way to get out of this mess is with a new broom and a clean sweep of all the inept fumbling of this "Bush" administration.
April 19, 2004 NY TIMES
Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Ties in the Cabinet
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, April 18 — For more than a year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides have tacitly acknowledged that he was concerned before the war about what could go wrong once American forces captured Iraq.
But Mr. Powell's apparent decision to lay out his misgivings even more explicitly to the journalist Bob Woodward for a book has jolted the White House and aggravated long-festering tensions in the Bush cabinet. Moreover, some officials said, the book has created problems for the secretary inside the administration just as the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and President Bush is plunging into his re-election drive.
Mr. Powell has not acknowledged that he cooperated with Mr. Woodward, but the book presents the secretary's reservations in such detail that it leaves little doubt. A spokesman for Mr. Powell said again Sunday that he would not comment on the book, "Plan of Attack."
Critics of Mr. Powell in the hawkish wing of the administration said they were startled by what they saw as his self-serving decision to help fill out a portrait that enhances his reputation as a farsighted analyst, perhaps at the expense of Mr. Bush. Several said the book guaranteed what they expected anyway, that Mr. Powell will not stay as secretary if Mr. Bush is re-elected.
The view expressed Sunday by people in the administration that Mr. Bush comes across as sober-minded and resolute in the book, asking for contingency plans for a war early on but not deciding to wage one until the last minute, saves Mr. Powell from any immediate difficulties that might grow from seeming to betray his confidential relationship to a president who prizes loyalty, several officials said.
"Look, a lot of people have been struck by the degree to which Secretary Powell is using this book as an opportunity — to be fair — to clarify his position on the issues," said an official. "But what this book does is muddy the water internally, which is very unfortunate and unhelpful."
Another official, who like others declined to be identified because of the political sensitivity of their criticism, accused Mr. Powell of having a habit of distancing himself from policies when they go wrong. "It's such a soap opera with him," this official said.
Democrats seized on Mr. Powell's portrayal, saying it would give them ammunition to criticize the administration for going to war without broad international backing or adequate planning for an occupation.
Throughout the day Sunday, Senator John Kerry brought up the Woodward book, mentioning it twice in his interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC and once at an outdoor rally at the University of Miami.
"Here we have a book by a reputable writer," Mr. Kerry told several thousand students at the afternoon campus rally. "We learn that the president even misled members of his own administration."
Asked if material in Mr. Woodward's book would be grist for his party, Jano Cabrera, the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview: "Absolutely. It's one thing for us to assert it. It's another thing for it to be stated as fact by his secretary of state."
And Steve Murphy, who managed the presidential campaign of Representative Richard A. Gephardt, said: "The strongest criticism of Bush is that he did not have a plan for the aftermath of the war. And that was exactly what Powell was pointing out to him. He is a credible source. This intensifies the backdrop between Bush and Kerry."
People close to Mr. Powell said Sunday that they had no doubt he would weather any criticism from within over his apparent cooperation with Mr. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post. Polls show that he is one of the most popular and best-known figures in government. The people close to him note that most people following the situation closely knew that he had misgivings about the war.
"Is the secretary going to be undercut for having been right?" asked an official close to Mr. Powell. "I don't think so. Undercut compared to who? Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? These are people who have some real problems right now. They're not reading Bob Woodward's book. They're reading the dispatches from the field."
Other officials close to Mr. Powell say his strained relations with Mr. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and Vice President Cheney are common currency among Washington insiders, though they say the suggestion that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are barely on speaking terms is highly exaggerated.
"I don't think there will be much change in his dealings with Cheney and Rumsfeld," said one person close to Mr. Powell. "People already thought it was this bad. It doesn't change things for them to find out that it really was. They know how to deal with each other, and they've been through quite a bit together."
When asked on "Fox News Sunday" about Mr. Woodward's contention that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are so distant on policy matters that they do not talk, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, described the men's relationship as "friendly."
"I can tell you," she said, "I've had lunch on a number of occasions with Vice President Cheney and with Colin Powell, and they are more than on speaking terms. They're friendly."
But another official said Mr. Powell's dealings internally with Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld especially had made life difficult for people inside the administration.
"The day-to-day nattering of the Defense Department trying to take over the business of diplomacy at every level, it's just difficult to be on the inside," said an administration official who defends Mr. Powell's actions. "Every day is difficult. The byplay at the meetings is difficult."
Mr. Powell's standing around the world was less easy to measure this weekend. But a European diplomat said he thought the secretary's standing in Europe especially would only be enhanced because he would be seen as sharing the view of many there that the administration had been overly optimistic about subduing dissidents in Iraq.
For the people long familiar with Mr. Powell's thinking, his misgivings about an American occupation of Iraq, and his insistence on getting full international backing for American actions, goes back many years. So, they note, does his fighting with Mr. Cheney.
For example, Mr. Powell's memoir, "My American Journey," published in 1995 after he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he had opposed a final push to oust Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf war on the ground that an occupation would provoke a counterinsurgency and criticism among Americans.
In addition, many accounts of the planning for the first gulf war say that Mr. Cheney, then secretary of defense, opposed going to the United Nations or Congress for backing to remove Iraq from Kuwait, fearing that failure would weaken the first President Bush's administration's ability to go to war.
In 2002, Mr. Cheney was openly disdainful of Mr. Powell's insistence on getting approval of the United Nations Security Council before going to war, spreading consternation at the State Department. Mr. Powell won that argument, and President Bush authorized a bid to get a Security Council resolution supporting war.
Mr. Powell's memoir also recalls an exchange in the early 1990's, in which Mr. Powell accused Mr. Cheney — jokingly, he insisted — of being surrounded by "right-wing nuts like you." In the last year, the Woodward book says, Mr. Powell referred privately to the civilian conservatives in the Pentagon loyal to Mr. Cheney as the Gestapo.
The Woodward book also attributes to Mr. Powell the belief that although he had misgivings about going to war, it was his obligation to support the president once Mr. Bush decided to do so.
Mr. Bush told Mr. Woodward that he did not ask the secretary's opinion on whether to go to war because he thought he knew what that opinion would be: "no."
But a senior aide to Mr. Powell asserted this weekend that the secretary was not as opposed to war as some people presume, no matter what the implications in the book.
"The portrait of Powell in the Woodward book is pretty consistent with what everybody knows," the official said. "We were with the president if we had to do this. We set up an exit ramp for Saddam, and he didn't take it. Powell in the end was very comfortable knowing that."
Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Washington for this article and Jodi Wilgoren from Miami.
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Sunday, April 18, 2004
A TIMELINE OF MISSED OPPORTUNITES TO PREVENT 9/11 ATTACKS
(click to see NY TIMES graphic)
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(click to see NY TIMES graphic)
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Bush dumped the Hart - Rudman's bipartisan commission on national security three year study and report that warned of a 9/11-terrorist attack in March of 2001. The GOP congress dumped the bill to provide more airport security during the Clinton administration. After the 9/11 attacks almost everything in both the commission's report and the airport security bill (pushed by Al Gore) was rushed into passing. When Clinton lobbed a Tomahawk missile at Bin Laden, the GOP congress said he was playing "wag the dog". Richard Clarke outlined how Bush and his administration was only interested in starting a war in Iraq and exploited the attacks to do so.
George Bush and his cabal of neo-cons are the most disgusting bunch of liars and inept leaders to ever steal the White House in the name of the corporate elite they serve and the pious religious fanatics they stroke.
---Sam
April 18, 2004 NY TIMES
Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JIM DWYER
WASHINGTON, April 17 — Early this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats.
At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking."
For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.
The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.
While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.
The new information produced by the commission so far has led 6 of its 10 members to say or suggest that the attacks could have been prevented, though there is no consensus on when, how or by whom. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, has described failures at every level of government, any of which, if avoided, could have altered the outcome. Mr. Kerrey, a Democrat, said, "My conclusion is that it could have been prevented. That was not my conclusion when I went on the commission."
While the commission was created to diagnose mistakes and to recommend reforms, its examination has powerful political resonance. The panel has reviewed the records of two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Mr. Bush, who is in the midst of a campaign for re-election, said last Sunday that none of the warnings gave any hint of the time, place or date of an assault. "Had I known there was going to be an attack on America I would have moved mountains to stop the attack," he said.
In an intense stretch this month, the commission pried open some of the most closely guarded compartments of government, revealing the flow and details of previously classified information given to two presidents and their senior advisers, and the performance of intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The inquiry has gone beyond the report of a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committee in 2002, which chronicled missteps at the mid-level of bureaucracies. Urged on by a number of families of people killed in the attacks, the Kean commission has used a mix of moral and political leverage to extract presidential communications and testimony. Among the new themes that have fundamentally reshaped the story of the Sept. 11 attacks are:
¶Al Qaeda and its leader, Mr. bin Laden, did not blindside the United States, but were a threat recognized and discussed regularly at the highest levels of government for nearly five years before the attacks, in thousands of reports, often accompanied by urgent warnings from lower-level experts.
¶Presidents Clinton and Bush received regular information about the threat of Al Qaeda and the intention of the bin Laden network to strike inside the United States. Each president made terrorism a stated priority, failed to find a diplomatic solution and viewed military force as a last resort. At the same time, neither grappled with the structural flaws and paralyzing dysfunction that undermined the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the two agencies on which the nation depended for protection from terrorists. By the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton and the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, were barely speaking.
¶Even when the two agencies cooperated, the results were unimpressive. Mr. Kean said that he viewed the reports on the two agencies as indictments. In late August 2001, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, learned that the F.B.I. had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after he had enrolled in a flight school. Mr. Tenet was given a memorandum titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But he testified that he took no action and did not tell President Bush about the case.
During the Clinton years, particularly at the National Security Council, the commission has found, there was uncertainty about whether the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden justified military action. Much of the debate was provoked by Richard A. Clarke, who led antiterrorism efforts under both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush and argued for aggressive action.
"Former officials, including an N.S.C. staffer working for Mr. Clarke, told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands," according to one interim commission report. "Such differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war. Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act upon such beliefs at great cost or at high risk."
In the first eight months of the Bush administration, the commission found, the president and his advisers received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood.
The most striking came in the Aug. 6 memorandum presented in an intelligence briefing the White House says Mr. Bush requested. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the memorandum was declassified this month under pressure from the commission. After referring to a British tip in 1998 that Islamic fundamentalists wanted to hijack a plane, it went on to warn: "Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." Mr. Bush has said the briefing did not provide specific details of when and where an attack might take place.
Mr. Kerrey said that Mr. Bush showed "good instincts" by asking for the material, but said the call from Ms. Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 — which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in the day's first attack — showed that the threats and alarms did not get passed down the line.
"I don't see any evidence that our airports were on heightened alert," he said. "A hijacking was not a bolt out of the blue."
The Clinton Response: A Growing Priority, Hamstrung by Process
Throughout President Clinton's eight years in office, law enforcement and intelligence agencies tracked Al Qaeda through a succession of plots in the United States and overseas. The commission found new evidence that counterterrorism became a priority for the Clinton national security team. But the panel said the effort was stymied by bureaucratic miscommunications, diplomatic failures, intelligence lapses and policy miscalculations.
On the intelligence side, the commission discovered confusion about crucial issues. White House aides believed, for example, that President Clinton had authorized actions to kill Mr. bin Laden, but C.I.A. officers thought they were legally permitted to kill him only during an attempt to capture him.
Throughout the 1990's, the panel found, law enforcement and intelligence experts, often in lower-level jobs, repeatedly warned that Mr. bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. The threat was plainly stated in documents disclosed by the commission. One, in 1998, was titled "Bin Laden Threatening to Attack U.S. Aircraft," and cited the possibility of a strike using antiaircraft missiles. Another 1998 report, referring to Mr. bin Laden as "UBL," said, "UBL Plans for Reprisals Against U.S. Targets, Possibly in U.S." A 1996 review of a plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific uncovered evidence of the Qaeda interest in crashing a hijacked plane into C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.
But the C.I.A.'s efforts to thwart Mr. bin Laden's network through covert action were ineffectual, the commission found. The agency's "Issue Station," which was set up in 1996 to hunt down Mr. bin Laden, had a half-dozen chances to attack the Qaeda chief, but each time agency higher-ups balked. A plan to kill him in February 1999 was called off at the last minute because of concerns that he might be with a prince from the United Arab Emirates, regarded as a useful ally in counterterrorism, the commission reported.
President Clinton tried diplomacy, but that too failed. In 1998, Mr. bin Laden issued a public call for any Muslim to kill any American anywhere in the world. That April, Bill Richardson, the United States representative to the United Nations, went to Afghanistan and asked the Taliban government to surrender Mr. bin Laden to the United States.
Simultaneous Qaeda bombings in August 1998 at American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania galvanized talk of aggressive efforts, but brought no tangible results. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes against a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in the Sudan. The missiles hit their intended targets, but neither Mr. bin Laden nor any other terrorist leader was killed.
In December 1998, Mr. Tenet announced in a memorandm to his senior staff at the C.I.A. that they would henceforth be at war with Al Qaeda. "I want no resources or people spared," he wrote.
In practice, the commission concluded, Mr. Tenet's declaration of war, which the C.I.A. director has frequently cited in his public testimony since the attacks, had "little overall effect."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country's other principal counterterrorism agency, struggled to repackage the tools of an interstate crime-fighting organization against a highly unconventional foreign-based threat to the United States.
One interim panel report described the F.B.I. as a bureaucracy suffocated by outmoded rules and legal barriers that barred criminal investigators from obtaining intelligence data. Agents worked on an aging computer system that kept them from knowing what other agents in their own offices, much less those around the country, were working on. Some F.B.I. analysts hired to assess terror threats were assigned to jobs entering data and answering telephones.
Throughout the 1990's, the bureau focused on investigations of specific terror attacks to bring criminal cases to court. The most successful were handled by its New York office, whose agents were among the most knowledgeable in the world about Al Qaeda.
By late in the decade, the F.B.I. recognized the need to improve its intelligence collection and analysis, but the report said that Mr. Freeh had difficulty reconciling that with its continuing agenda, including the war on drugs. As a result, the bureau's counterterrorism staff was thin. On Sept. 11, 2001, only about 6 percent of the F.B.I.'s agent work force was assigned to terrorism.
In October 2000, two Qaeda suicide bombers in a small boat packed with explosives attacked the Navy destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. President Clinton did not retaliate, but Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, warned his successor, Condoleezza Rice, that "she would be spending more time on terrorism and Al Qaeda than any other issue."
The Bush Review: Alerts, but Breaks in Chain of Command
Warned of the Qaeda threat during the transition, President Bush's national security team started work in March 2001 on a comprehensive strategy to eradicate the terror network. But the effort seemed to plod ahead almost in isolation from the urgent notices by the C.I.A. Most of the threat warnings, but not all, pointed overseas.
At the end of May, Cofer Black, chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, told Ms. Rice that the threat level stood at "7 on a scale of 10, as compared to an 8 during the millennium," the period around January 2000. In response, American embassies were warned to take precautions. The State Department warned Americans traveling overseas. The C.I.A. intensified operations to disrupt terror cells around the world.
Mr. Tenet took his terror warnings directly to Mr. Bush. Ms. Rice said that at least 40 meetings between the C.I.A. director and the president dealt "in one way or other with Al Qaeda or the Al Qaeda threat." Mr. Tenet later said "the system was blinking red," adding that no warning indicated that terrorists would fly hijacked commercial aircraft into buildings in the United States.
On July 5, Ms. Rice and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Clarke to alert top officials of the country's domestic agencies. "Let's make sure they're buttoning down," Ms. Rice said. The F.A.A. issued threat advisories, but neither the agency's top administrator nor Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation, was aware of the increased threat level, said Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member, at a hearing last week.
On July 27, Mr. Clarke informed Ms. Rice that the threat reporting had dropped. But White House officials said that Mr. Bush continued to ask about any evidence of a domestic attack. In August, C.I.A. officials prepared a briefing about the possibility of Qaeda operations inside the United States, including the use of aircraft in terror attacks.
The briefing paper was presented to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6 at his Texas ranch. The memorandum, declassified on April 10 by the White House at the commission's request, included some ominous information. It said that Qaeda operatives had been in the United States for years, might be planning an attack in the United States and could be focusing on a building in Lower Manhattan as a target.
Mr. Bush said the Aug. 6 report was not specific enough to order new actions. "I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America at a time and place, an attack. Of course I knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where and with what?"
The president noted that the memo said the F.B.I. had 70 investigations under way related to Al Qaeda. In addition, the F.B.I. had sent messages to its field offices urging agents to be vigilant. Thomas J. Pickard, the F.B.I.'s acting director from June to August, said he telephoned top agents to advise them of the threat. But the commission found that most F.B.I. personnel "did not recall a heightened sense of threat from Al Qaeda."
The commission found several previously undisclosed intelligence reports to Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and national security aides dating back to April and May, when the volume of warnings began to increase. Mr. Bush was given briefing papers headlined, "Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations," "Bin Laden Threats Are Real" and "Bin Laden's Plans Advancing."
In August 2001, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. came as close as the government ever did to detecting anyone connected to the Sept. 11 plot. That month investigators finally made progress in the fractured effort to track down two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who on Sept. 11 were aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The C.I.A. had investigated the pair off and on since they had been seen at a Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. But they were not placed on a State Department watch list until Aug. 23, after they already were in the United States. Moreover, the C.I.A. failed to tell the F.B.I.'s primary investigators on the Cole case of a key connection between the two men and a Cole suspect until after Sept. 11. "No one apparently felt they needed to inform higher level of management in either the F.B.I. or C.I.A. about the case," one commission report said.
In mid-August, after the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui in Minneapolis, the commission disclosed, Mr. Tenet and his top deputies were sent a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But they took no action on the report.
The commission found several missed opportunities in the Moussaoui investigation that might have detected his connection to a Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that planned the Sept. 11 attacks. "A maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections to the Hamburg cell," one commission report said. The report added that publicity about Mr. Moussaoui's arrest "might have disrupted the plot. But such an effort would have been a race against time."
It was not until Sept. 10 that Mr. Bush's national security aides approved a three-phase strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda. The plan, which was to unfold over three to five years, envisioned a mission to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based; increased diplomatic pressure; and covert action. Military strikes might be used, but only if all other means failed.
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George Bush and his cabal of neo-cons are the most disgusting bunch of liars and inept leaders to ever steal the White House in the name of the corporate elite they serve and the pious religious fanatics they stroke.
---Sam
April 18, 2004 NY TIMES
Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JIM DWYER
WASHINGTON, April 17 — Early this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats.
At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking."
For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.
The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.
While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.
The new information produced by the commission so far has led 6 of its 10 members to say or suggest that the attacks could have been prevented, though there is no consensus on when, how or by whom. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, has described failures at every level of government, any of which, if avoided, could have altered the outcome. Mr. Kerrey, a Democrat, said, "My conclusion is that it could have been prevented. That was not my conclusion when I went on the commission."
While the commission was created to diagnose mistakes and to recommend reforms, its examination has powerful political resonance. The panel has reviewed the records of two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Mr. Bush, who is in the midst of a campaign for re-election, said last Sunday that none of the warnings gave any hint of the time, place or date of an assault. "Had I known there was going to be an attack on America I would have moved mountains to stop the attack," he said.
In an intense stretch this month, the commission pried open some of the most closely guarded compartments of government, revealing the flow and details of previously classified information given to two presidents and their senior advisers, and the performance of intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The inquiry has gone beyond the report of a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committee in 2002, which chronicled missteps at the mid-level of bureaucracies. Urged on by a number of families of people killed in the attacks, the Kean commission has used a mix of moral and political leverage to extract presidential communications and testimony. Among the new themes that have fundamentally reshaped the story of the Sept. 11 attacks are:
¶Al Qaeda and its leader, Mr. bin Laden, did not blindside the United States, but were a threat recognized and discussed regularly at the highest levels of government for nearly five years before the attacks, in thousands of reports, often accompanied by urgent warnings from lower-level experts.
¶Presidents Clinton and Bush received regular information about the threat of Al Qaeda and the intention of the bin Laden network to strike inside the United States. Each president made terrorism a stated priority, failed to find a diplomatic solution and viewed military force as a last resort. At the same time, neither grappled with the structural flaws and paralyzing dysfunction that undermined the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the two agencies on which the nation depended for protection from terrorists. By the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton and the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, were barely speaking.
¶Even when the two agencies cooperated, the results were unimpressive. Mr. Kean said that he viewed the reports on the two agencies as indictments. In late August 2001, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, learned that the F.B.I. had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after he had enrolled in a flight school. Mr. Tenet was given a memorandum titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But he testified that he took no action and did not tell President Bush about the case.
During the Clinton years, particularly at the National Security Council, the commission has found, there was uncertainty about whether the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden justified military action. Much of the debate was provoked by Richard A. Clarke, who led antiterrorism efforts under both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush and argued for aggressive action.
"Former officials, including an N.S.C. staffer working for Mr. Clarke, told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands," according to one interim commission report. "Such differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war. Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act upon such beliefs at great cost or at high risk."
In the first eight months of the Bush administration, the commission found, the president and his advisers received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood.
The most striking came in the Aug. 6 memorandum presented in an intelligence briefing the White House says Mr. Bush requested. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the memorandum was declassified this month under pressure from the commission. After referring to a British tip in 1998 that Islamic fundamentalists wanted to hijack a plane, it went on to warn: "Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." Mr. Bush has said the briefing did not provide specific details of when and where an attack might take place.
Mr. Kerrey said that Mr. Bush showed "good instincts" by asking for the material, but said the call from Ms. Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 — which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in the day's first attack — showed that the threats and alarms did not get passed down the line.
"I don't see any evidence that our airports were on heightened alert," he said. "A hijacking was not a bolt out of the blue."
The Clinton Response: A Growing Priority, Hamstrung by Process
Throughout President Clinton's eight years in office, law enforcement and intelligence agencies tracked Al Qaeda through a succession of plots in the United States and overseas. The commission found new evidence that counterterrorism became a priority for the Clinton national security team. But the panel said the effort was stymied by bureaucratic miscommunications, diplomatic failures, intelligence lapses and policy miscalculations.
On the intelligence side, the commission discovered confusion about crucial issues. White House aides believed, for example, that President Clinton had authorized actions to kill Mr. bin Laden, but C.I.A. officers thought they were legally permitted to kill him only during an attempt to capture him.
Throughout the 1990's, the panel found, law enforcement and intelligence experts, often in lower-level jobs, repeatedly warned that Mr. bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. The threat was plainly stated in documents disclosed by the commission. One, in 1998, was titled "Bin Laden Threatening to Attack U.S. Aircraft," and cited the possibility of a strike using antiaircraft missiles. Another 1998 report, referring to Mr. bin Laden as "UBL," said, "UBL Plans for Reprisals Against U.S. Targets, Possibly in U.S." A 1996 review of a plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific uncovered evidence of the Qaeda interest in crashing a hijacked plane into C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.
But the C.I.A.'s efforts to thwart Mr. bin Laden's network through covert action were ineffectual, the commission found. The agency's "Issue Station," which was set up in 1996 to hunt down Mr. bin Laden, had a half-dozen chances to attack the Qaeda chief, but each time agency higher-ups balked. A plan to kill him in February 1999 was called off at the last minute because of concerns that he might be with a prince from the United Arab Emirates, regarded as a useful ally in counterterrorism, the commission reported.
President Clinton tried diplomacy, but that too failed. In 1998, Mr. bin Laden issued a public call for any Muslim to kill any American anywhere in the world. That April, Bill Richardson, the United States representative to the United Nations, went to Afghanistan and asked the Taliban government to surrender Mr. bin Laden to the United States.
Simultaneous Qaeda bombings in August 1998 at American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania galvanized talk of aggressive efforts, but brought no tangible results. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes against a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in the Sudan. The missiles hit their intended targets, but neither Mr. bin Laden nor any other terrorist leader was killed.
In December 1998, Mr. Tenet announced in a memorandm to his senior staff at the C.I.A. that they would henceforth be at war with Al Qaeda. "I want no resources or people spared," he wrote.
In practice, the commission concluded, Mr. Tenet's declaration of war, which the C.I.A. director has frequently cited in his public testimony since the attacks, had "little overall effect."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country's other principal counterterrorism agency, struggled to repackage the tools of an interstate crime-fighting organization against a highly unconventional foreign-based threat to the United States.
One interim panel report described the F.B.I. as a bureaucracy suffocated by outmoded rules and legal barriers that barred criminal investigators from obtaining intelligence data. Agents worked on an aging computer system that kept them from knowing what other agents in their own offices, much less those around the country, were working on. Some F.B.I. analysts hired to assess terror threats were assigned to jobs entering data and answering telephones.
Throughout the 1990's, the bureau focused on investigations of specific terror attacks to bring criminal cases to court. The most successful were handled by its New York office, whose agents were among the most knowledgeable in the world about Al Qaeda.
By late in the decade, the F.B.I. recognized the need to improve its intelligence collection and analysis, but the report said that Mr. Freeh had difficulty reconciling that with its continuing agenda, including the war on drugs. As a result, the bureau's counterterrorism staff was thin. On Sept. 11, 2001, only about 6 percent of the F.B.I.'s agent work force was assigned to terrorism.
In October 2000, two Qaeda suicide bombers in a small boat packed with explosives attacked the Navy destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. President Clinton did not retaliate, but Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, warned his successor, Condoleezza Rice, that "she would be spending more time on terrorism and Al Qaeda than any other issue."
The Bush Review: Alerts, but Breaks in Chain of Command
Warned of the Qaeda threat during the transition, President Bush's national security team started work in March 2001 on a comprehensive strategy to eradicate the terror network. But the effort seemed to plod ahead almost in isolation from the urgent notices by the C.I.A. Most of the threat warnings, but not all, pointed overseas.
At the end of May, Cofer Black, chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, told Ms. Rice that the threat level stood at "7 on a scale of 10, as compared to an 8 during the millennium," the period around January 2000. In response, American embassies were warned to take precautions. The State Department warned Americans traveling overseas. The C.I.A. intensified operations to disrupt terror cells around the world.
Mr. Tenet took his terror warnings directly to Mr. Bush. Ms. Rice said that at least 40 meetings between the C.I.A. director and the president dealt "in one way or other with Al Qaeda or the Al Qaeda threat." Mr. Tenet later said "the system was blinking red," adding that no warning indicated that terrorists would fly hijacked commercial aircraft into buildings in the United States.
On July 5, Ms. Rice and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Clarke to alert top officials of the country's domestic agencies. "Let's make sure they're buttoning down," Ms. Rice said. The F.A.A. issued threat advisories, but neither the agency's top administrator nor Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation, was aware of the increased threat level, said Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member, at a hearing last week.
On July 27, Mr. Clarke informed Ms. Rice that the threat reporting had dropped. But White House officials said that Mr. Bush continued to ask about any evidence of a domestic attack. In August, C.I.A. officials prepared a briefing about the possibility of Qaeda operations inside the United States, including the use of aircraft in terror attacks.
The briefing paper was presented to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6 at his Texas ranch. The memorandum, declassified on April 10 by the White House at the commission's request, included some ominous information. It said that Qaeda operatives had been in the United States for years, might be planning an attack in the United States and could be focusing on a building in Lower Manhattan as a target.
Mr. Bush said the Aug. 6 report was not specific enough to order new actions. "I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America at a time and place, an attack. Of course I knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where and with what?"
The president noted that the memo said the F.B.I. had 70 investigations under way related to Al Qaeda. In addition, the F.B.I. had sent messages to its field offices urging agents to be vigilant. Thomas J. Pickard, the F.B.I.'s acting director from June to August, said he telephoned top agents to advise them of the threat. But the commission found that most F.B.I. personnel "did not recall a heightened sense of threat from Al Qaeda."
The commission found several previously undisclosed intelligence reports to Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and national security aides dating back to April and May, when the volume of warnings began to increase. Mr. Bush was given briefing papers headlined, "Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations," "Bin Laden Threats Are Real" and "Bin Laden's Plans Advancing."
In August 2001, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. came as close as the government ever did to detecting anyone connected to the Sept. 11 plot. That month investigators finally made progress in the fractured effort to track down two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who on Sept. 11 were aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The C.I.A. had investigated the pair off and on since they had been seen at a Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. But they were not placed on a State Department watch list until Aug. 23, after they already were in the United States. Moreover, the C.I.A. failed to tell the F.B.I.'s primary investigators on the Cole case of a key connection between the two men and a Cole suspect until after Sept. 11. "No one apparently felt they needed to inform higher level of management in either the F.B.I. or C.I.A. about the case," one commission report said.
In mid-August, after the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui in Minneapolis, the commission disclosed, Mr. Tenet and his top deputies were sent a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But they took no action on the report.
The commission found several missed opportunities in the Moussaoui investigation that might have detected his connection to a Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that planned the Sept. 11 attacks. "A maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections to the Hamburg cell," one commission report said. The report added that publicity about Mr. Moussaoui's arrest "might have disrupted the plot. But such an effort would have been a race against time."
It was not until Sept. 10 that Mr. Bush's national security aides approved a three-phase strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda. The plan, which was to unfold over three to five years, envisioned a mission to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based; increased diplomatic pressure; and covert action. Military strikes might be used, but only if all other means failed.
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Saturday, April 17, 2004
APRIL 15, 2004
A NOT-SO-NEUTRAL CORNER
By Ciro Scotti
Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11
The real issue isn't why the U.S wasn't ready for the attack, but why the Administration used the tragedy to invade Iraq
A funny thing happened on my late-night cab ride in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. I had been reading Against All Enemies, the controversial new book by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, with its riveting account of the Bush Administration's extraordinary performance in the hours after the September 11 attacks. I had watched a somber Clarke on 60 Minutes and saw him grimly but eloquently stand his ground on Meet the Press.
So as the taxi whizzed past the new Time Warner Center, it was somewhat surreal to spot Clarke standing on the corner with another man, laughing heartily. It's good that Richard Clarke can laugh once in a while because he has taken on the most serious of tasks: Calling to account a Presidency that failed in its vigilance but more important -- used the death of innocents to lead the country into a war it had been longing to wage.
TEAR DOWN THE CRITICS. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the Clarke superior whom his book buries with faint praise, tried to make a cogent case before the September 11 commission on Apr. 8 that the newly arrived Bush Administration had done a reasonable job of pulling guard duty for the republic. All she really needed to say in her public testimony was: "We were new. We were inexperienced. We didn't have our eye on the ball. We're sorry." But she never did that, and what she did say was largely irrelevant and already forgotten.
As irrelevant and discardable, in fact, are the scurrilous attacks on Clarke by Administration dobermans such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), whose reputation as a classy politician/physician lies shattered on the Capitol floor. On Mar. 26, Frist said he found the Clarke book to be "an appalling act of profiteering, trading on his insider access to highly classified information and capitalizing on the tragedy that befell this nation on September 11, 2001."
The main aim of the Bush disinformation machine seems to be this: Tear down critics of America's preparedness before the attacks, and, above all, keep the discussions focused on September 11. Because no matter how much or how little you believe in the gospel according to Clarke, most reasonable Americans aren't going to blame the Bushies for failing to foresee and prevent the slaughter of civilians by a band of suicidal zealots.
NUMBINGLY CLEAR. Even the Aug. 6, 2001, report to the President entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." will leave many Americans unconvinced that the Bushies were derelict in their duty. Unlucky, maybe. But not derelict. Because September 11, 2001, might just as easily have happened on September 11, 2000, when a different President had been in office for eight years -- not eight months.
The truly damning part about Against All Enemies, however, is what Clarke reveals about the Administration's mindset on Iraq. What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz really have to answer for is the insidious way in which they used the Twin Tower horror to coax the country into supporting an attack on Iraq.
Put Clarke's book together with The Price of Loyalty by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and The Path to War, a brilliant piece of reporting in the current issue of Vanity Fair by Brian Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, and the picture that emerges is numbingly clear: Bush's neoconservative advisers had Iraq in their sights well before his inauguration.
WHY WAR? Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, and a whole procession of acolytes who worship at the altar of Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis had all urged regime change in Iraq in 1998. Some even earlier. But why?
Why was this Administration so hell-bent on taking out Saddam Hussein that it would turn its back on a world offering sympathy and support after September 11? Why was it so adamant in its adventurism that it would gild the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S. -- and then put our troops in harm's way -- when no clear or present danger existed? Those questions demand answers.
Clarke cites five rationales for the invasion: Finishing the job Bush I started, pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia (where they were a counterweight to Iraq but unwelcome), creating a model Arab democracy, opening a new and friendly oil supply line, and safeguarding Israel by eliminating a military threat.
"THE REAL THREAT"? Philip Zelikow, now the executive director of the September 11 commission, served on the National Security Council, was on the Bush transition team, and was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003. According to the Inter Press Service, he said during a war-on-terror forum at the University of Virginia Law School on Sept. 10, 2002: "I'll tell you what the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dares not speak its name because...the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it's not a popular sell."
So to boil all this down, we went to war, sacrificed thousands of human lives, racked up billions in bills, and flouted the rules of international law for three basic reasons: Israel, oil, and the vengeance of a son whose father didn't finish off Saddam and then was targeted for assassination by the Iraqi Horror Show in 1993? When you think that Bill Clinton was impeached and almost tossed out of office for fooling around with a willing intern and then lying about it, his sins seem like very small potatoes. Very small potatoes indeed.
Scotti, senior editor for government and sports business, offers his views in A Not-So-Neutral Corner, only for BusinessWeek Online
________________________________________________________________________
A NOT-SO-NEUTRAL CORNER
By Ciro Scotti
Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11
The real issue isn't why the U.S wasn't ready for the attack, but why the Administration used the tragedy to invade Iraq
A funny thing happened on my late-night cab ride in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. I had been reading Against All Enemies, the controversial new book by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, with its riveting account of the Bush Administration's extraordinary performance in the hours after the September 11 attacks. I had watched a somber Clarke on 60 Minutes and saw him grimly but eloquently stand his ground on Meet the Press.
So as the taxi whizzed past the new Time Warner Center, it was somewhat surreal to spot Clarke standing on the corner with another man, laughing heartily. It's good that Richard Clarke can laugh once in a while because he has taken on the most serious of tasks: Calling to account a Presidency that failed in its vigilance but more important -- used the death of innocents to lead the country into a war it had been longing to wage.
TEAR DOWN THE CRITICS. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the Clarke superior whom his book buries with faint praise, tried to make a cogent case before the September 11 commission on Apr. 8 that the newly arrived Bush Administration had done a reasonable job of pulling guard duty for the republic. All she really needed to say in her public testimony was: "We were new. We were inexperienced. We didn't have our eye on the ball. We're sorry." But she never did that, and what she did say was largely irrelevant and already forgotten.
As irrelevant and discardable, in fact, are the scurrilous attacks on Clarke by Administration dobermans such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), whose reputation as a classy politician/physician lies shattered on the Capitol floor. On Mar. 26, Frist said he found the Clarke book to be "an appalling act of profiteering, trading on his insider access to highly classified information and capitalizing on the tragedy that befell this nation on September 11, 2001."
The main aim of the Bush disinformation machine seems to be this: Tear down critics of America's preparedness before the attacks, and, above all, keep the discussions focused on September 11. Because no matter how much or how little you believe in the gospel according to Clarke, most reasonable Americans aren't going to blame the Bushies for failing to foresee and prevent the slaughter of civilians by a band of suicidal zealots.
NUMBINGLY CLEAR. Even the Aug. 6, 2001, report to the President entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." will leave many Americans unconvinced that the Bushies were derelict in their duty. Unlucky, maybe. But not derelict. Because September 11, 2001, might just as easily have happened on September 11, 2000, when a different President had been in office for eight years -- not eight months.
The truly damning part about Against All Enemies, however, is what Clarke reveals about the Administration's mindset on Iraq. What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz really have to answer for is the insidious way in which they used the Twin Tower horror to coax the country into supporting an attack on Iraq.
Put Clarke's book together with The Price of Loyalty by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and The Path to War, a brilliant piece of reporting in the current issue of Vanity Fair by Brian Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, and the picture that emerges is numbingly clear: Bush's neoconservative advisers had Iraq in their sights well before his inauguration.
WHY WAR? Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, and a whole procession of acolytes who worship at the altar of Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis had all urged regime change in Iraq in 1998. Some even earlier. But why?
Why was this Administration so hell-bent on taking out Saddam Hussein that it would turn its back on a world offering sympathy and support after September 11? Why was it so adamant in its adventurism that it would gild the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S. -- and then put our troops in harm's way -- when no clear or present danger existed? Those questions demand answers.
Clarke cites five rationales for the invasion: Finishing the job Bush I started, pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia (where they were a counterweight to Iraq but unwelcome), creating a model Arab democracy, opening a new and friendly oil supply line, and safeguarding Israel by eliminating a military threat.
"THE REAL THREAT"? Philip Zelikow, now the executive director of the September 11 commission, served on the National Security Council, was on the Bush transition team, and was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003. According to the Inter Press Service, he said during a war-on-terror forum at the University of Virginia Law School on Sept. 10, 2002: "I'll tell you what the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dares not speak its name because...the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it's not a popular sell."
So to boil all this down, we went to war, sacrificed thousands of human lives, racked up billions in bills, and flouted the rules of international law for three basic reasons: Israel, oil, and the vengeance of a son whose father didn't finish off Saddam and then was targeted for assassination by the Iraqi Horror Show in 1993? When you think that Bill Clinton was impeached and almost tossed out of office for fooling around with a willing intern and then lying about it, his sins seem like very small potatoes. Very small potatoes indeed.
Scotti, senior editor for government and sports business, offers his views in A Not-So-Neutral Corner, only for BusinessWeek Online
________________________________________________________________________
Here's two huge differences in John Kerry and George Bush.
(1.) Kerry can do a MEET THE PRESS interview live with Tim Russert while Bush can not.
(2.) Kerry can appear before a congressional panel's interview without someone holding his hand while Bush has to have his Uncle Dick there for the 9/11 Commission interview to carry his water for him.
Kerry Prepares for 'Meet the Press'
Sat Apr 17,12:43 PM ET
MIAMI - John Kerry took Saturday off from campaigning to prepare for a television interview.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Network officials said the show's host, Tim Russert, was going to Miami, where the Massachusetts senator was spending a few days, for the hourlong interview.
Russert went to the White House in February for a similar program with President Bush. That show was taped the day before its broadcast; Kerry's appearance on Sunday will be live.
________________________________________________________________
(1.) Kerry can do a MEET THE PRESS interview live with Tim Russert while Bush can not.
(2.) Kerry can appear before a congressional panel's interview without someone holding his hand while Bush has to have his Uncle Dick there for the 9/11 Commission interview to carry his water for him.
Kerry Prepares for 'Meet the Press'
Sat Apr 17,12:43 PM ET
MIAMI - John Kerry took Saturday off from campaigning to prepare for a television interview.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Network officials said the show's host, Tim Russert, was going to Miami, where the Massachusetts senator was spending a few days, for the hourlong interview.
Russert went to the White House in February for a similar program with President Bush. That show was taped the day before its broadcast; Kerry's appearance on Sunday will be live.
________________________________________________________________
April 17, 2004
Bush Said Iraq Talks Concerned Afghanistan (in other words he LIED)
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bushtold the public that the discussions was about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.
"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals.
A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.
Details of the meeting's focus on Iraq have since emerged in a recent speech by Franks, who now is retired, and in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The book says Franks summarized Afghan operations before turning to planning for war in Iraq — the point of the gathering.
In a Washington speech last month, Franks said he discussed with the president on that day the "growing storm" and the need to revise a long-standing military contingency plan for Iraq.
The meeting occurred while U.S. forces were in the heat of searching through the mountainous region of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had been hiding near Tora Bora.
According to Woodward's book, the meeting of the war cabinet included Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart and, on video screens, Vice President Dick Cheney from Wyoming, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from New Mexico, and, from Washington, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet.
When Bush and Franks spoke to reporters after the meeting, the president began by saying, "Tommy has just come back from the Afghan theater. He gave me a full briefing on what he saw and what he heard. We just got off of a teleconference with the national security team to discuss his trip and to discuss what's taking place in Afghanistan."
Franks said he and his wife recently had had a chance to meet with U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to attend the installation ceremony of an interim government.
"Seeing these great young people and seeing this momentous event just filled me with a desire to be able to brief the president on what's going on over there in the theater, on what our people are doing, how they feel about what they're doing," Franks told reporters.
One reporter reminded Bush that "you've talked about 2002 being a year of war. What can you say to prepare the American people for what that vision is, what they need to be prepared for, as compared to what they've seen in Afghanistan?"
Bush replied: "I hope 2002 is a year of peace, but I'm also realistic. And I know full well that bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm America again; bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm our allies. How do I know that? I receive intelligence reports on a daily basis that indicates that that's his desires."
Bush then mentioned the thwarting of the attempted shoe bomber several days earlier aboard an American Airlines flight.
According to Woodward's book, Franks gave participants in that meeting the first briefing on Iraq war plans. He described options that could allow a war to start with as few as 105,000 U.S. troops, assuming full foreign cooperation with the force growing 230,000 over 60 to 90 days.
The books says Franks presented a list of assumptions that were behind the plan. They included that Iraq would be the main effort of the United States and would get priority on resources, and that the Afghan operation and the global fight against terrorism would provide a noise level under which Iraq operations could proceed. But these efforts would not diminish the Afghan or terrorism efforts.
In the Washington speech a month ago, Franks said he told the president at that Dec. 28 meeting that the existing contingency plan for Iraq had called for sending in a half-million troops, an operation so massive it would require a six-month buildup.
Franks said he told Bush that the long-standing plan needed to be redrawn and if the U.S. military did go in, "We should go all the way to Baghdad."
According to Franks' public account of the Dec. 28 meeting, Bush expressed the hope that "we don't ever have one boot on Iraqi soil except by invitation."
According to Woodward's book, Bush told Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark.
The meeting with Franks on Dec. 28 was apparently the first briefing from him that the president had received since those instructions.
The book says Franks uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon (news - web sites) told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
In his public speech, sponsored by the Nation's Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Franks said the new plan he developed for Iraq refined the objectives to include protecting the infrastructure for Iraq's water supply, its oil supply and guarding against killing large numbers of civilians.
Among the plan's assumptions were that Iraq would launch missiles against Israel and other neighbors, and that allied troops would be hit with weapons of mass destruction, Franks said.
_____________________________________________________________
Bush Said Iraq Talks Concerned Afghanistan (in other words he LIED)
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bushtold the public that the discussions was about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.
"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals.
A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.
Details of the meeting's focus on Iraq have since emerged in a recent speech by Franks, who now is retired, and in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The book says Franks summarized Afghan operations before turning to planning for war in Iraq — the point of the gathering.
In a Washington speech last month, Franks said he discussed with the president on that day the "growing storm" and the need to revise a long-standing military contingency plan for Iraq.
The meeting occurred while U.S. forces were in the heat of searching through the mountainous region of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had been hiding near Tora Bora.
According to Woodward's book, the meeting of the war cabinet included Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart and, on video screens, Vice President Dick Cheney from Wyoming, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from New Mexico, and, from Washington, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet.
When Bush and Franks spoke to reporters after the meeting, the president began by saying, "Tommy has just come back from the Afghan theater. He gave me a full briefing on what he saw and what he heard. We just got off of a teleconference with the national security team to discuss his trip and to discuss what's taking place in Afghanistan."
Franks said he and his wife recently had had a chance to meet with U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to attend the installation ceremony of an interim government.
"Seeing these great young people and seeing this momentous event just filled me with a desire to be able to brief the president on what's going on over there in the theater, on what our people are doing, how they feel about what they're doing," Franks told reporters.
One reporter reminded Bush that "you've talked about 2002 being a year of war. What can you say to prepare the American people for what that vision is, what they need to be prepared for, as compared to what they've seen in Afghanistan?"
Bush replied: "I hope 2002 is a year of peace, but I'm also realistic. And I know full well that bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm America again; bin Laden and his cronies would like to harm our allies. How do I know that? I receive intelligence reports on a daily basis that indicates that that's his desires."
Bush then mentioned the thwarting of the attempted shoe bomber several days earlier aboard an American Airlines flight.
According to Woodward's book, Franks gave participants in that meeting the first briefing on Iraq war plans. He described options that could allow a war to start with as few as 105,000 U.S. troops, assuming full foreign cooperation with the force growing 230,000 over 60 to 90 days.
The books says Franks presented a list of assumptions that were behind the plan. They included that Iraq would be the main effort of the United States and would get priority on resources, and that the Afghan operation and the global fight against terrorism would provide a noise level under which Iraq operations could proceed. But these efforts would not diminish the Afghan or terrorism efforts.
In the Washington speech a month ago, Franks said he told the president at that Dec. 28 meeting that the existing contingency plan for Iraq had called for sending in a half-million troops, an operation so massive it would require a six-month buildup.
Franks said he told Bush that the long-standing plan needed to be redrawn and if the U.S. military did go in, "We should go all the way to Baghdad."
According to Franks' public account of the Dec. 28 meeting, Bush expressed the hope that "we don't ever have one boot on Iraqi soil except by invitation."
According to Woodward's book, Bush told Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark.
The meeting with Franks on Dec. 28 was apparently the first briefing from him that the president had received since those instructions.
The book says Franks uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon (news - web sites) told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
In his public speech, sponsored by the Nation's Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Franks said the new plan he developed for Iraq refined the objectives to include protecting the infrastructure for Iraq's water supply, its oil supply and guarding against killing large numbers of civilians.
Among the plan's assumptions were that Iraq would launch missiles against Israel and other neighbors, and that allied troops would be hit with weapons of mass destruction, Franks said.
_____________________________________________________________
At his press conference George Bush couldn't seem to recall making any mistakes but admits he must have made some. Here's a DNC ad that doesn't try to get into any huge scale lists of mistakes (it would take hours), just the ones with the notes that the GOP had hoped earlier to exploit. The most damaging thing about the press conference was to watch Bush twist under the spotlight and look like a fourth grade child stumped for an answer at the front of the class. Pitiful. It's a national embarrassment that the president of our country is so feeble in a public forum. It's no wonder that he's only had THREE of these press conferences in over three years. Bush just doesn't have the "stuff" to be an effective leader. Hell, all he's good for is hanging out with the Texas Ranger fans at a ballpark and acting like the spoiled son of a president.
But don't take my word for it, view this ad by clicking HERE.
But don't take my word for it, view this ad by clicking HERE.
From my old blogging buddy, Mark. He's as dead on as ever on fighting the lying scum that we face in the White House.
As there are a lot of regulars on the blog tonight, I wanted to make a couple of points about messaging, and about the lies coming out of the Bush camp.
1) Don't let someone goad you into an argument with a faulty premise. Next time you read something savaging Kerry, take a moment to think how the enemy is trying to jerk your chain or frame arguments in ways that are favorable to them.
Case in point: the idea that Kerry's purple hearts were given for 'scratches'. Somehow this gutless line of bull sounds reasonable, but take a minute to consider the context. The very people who are putting out these lies all opted to avoid going anywhere near live fire during Vietnam. Whether Kerry was severely injured or not is immaterail given that the people who injured him WERE TRYING TO KILL HIM.
Also, while these right-wing cowards are trying to imply that Kerry didn't deserve his medals, look what these same political terrorists did to Max Cleland, who had two legs and an arm blown off. They not only compared him to Saddam Hussein in order to drive him out of the senate, but they recently had political war criminal Ann Coulter attempting yet again to diminish his loss in the most despicable way.
Remember: these are not people who are trying to make a valid point. These are the lowest of the yellow, belly-crawling liars in our political system, and they will do or say anything to defeat democracy. They know their candidate is an abject failure, they know he can't run on his record, and they know he started a war we didn't need to fight.
2) Kerry campaigned his way for the past month or so, despite a lot of handwringing that he wasn't fighting back hard enough, and it turns out he was right in what he was doing. Bush hosed 40 million into the toilet and got almost nothing for it, except a hasitly arranged press conference intruding on yet another bass-fishing, brush-clearing, Crawford vacation.
What many of you have learned in the past thirty days is what some of us learned in the last thirty weeks: John Kerry and his closest advisers know how to run a campaign. It may not be incendiary or smashmouth, but they know what they're doing.
The problem now is that the pundits, who always want to be the first to pronounce a winner and a loser, are starting to talk about Kerry winning big. That means people are starting to raise the bar of expectations on Kerry, but only to put it out of reach yet again so they can trash him for not measuring up to their expectations.
Don't let the pundits or Bush's lapdogs in the press fool you. This is going to be a close race, and Bush still holds almost all the cards. He has the bully pulpit, which means he can change the conversation any day of the week. He has more money - still - but more importantly he has major media outlets shilling for him 24/7 for FREE. Bush is also now clearly desperate enough, as witnessed by his mind-blowing flip-flop on American policy toward the Middle-east peace process, to do just about anything to get re-elected. I'm not a conspiracy fan, but you don't need Diebold horror stories to see the possibilites. Loose cannon Dick Cheney and the mercenaries in the VP's office could trigger an incidence in September with Iran or North Korea just to save their own necks, let alone George's.*
You're all very sharp and strong advocates for Kerry. I'm asking you know to become razor sharp. I'm asking you to decide, no matter what, that you're not going to blink in the face of the onslaught of lies and hate that will come spewing from the RNC and Karl Rove's sociopathic mouth. And all the more so should Bush actually be down in the polls going into October.
Don't flinch. Don't give them an inch.
* You think that sounds crazy? I do too. Then again, this White House lied America into a full-blown war and an occupation of a foreign country without so much as planning for the peace. If they'll do that, they'll do anything. Because they already have.
Posted on the official Kerry Blog by Mark from Iowa at April 17, 2004 02:27 AM
______________________________________________________________________________
As there are a lot of regulars on the blog tonight, I wanted to make a couple of points about messaging, and about the lies coming out of the Bush camp.
1) Don't let someone goad you into an argument with a faulty premise. Next time you read something savaging Kerry, take a moment to think how the enemy is trying to jerk your chain or frame arguments in ways that are favorable to them.
Case in point: the idea that Kerry's purple hearts were given for 'scratches'. Somehow this gutless line of bull sounds reasonable, but take a minute to consider the context. The very people who are putting out these lies all opted to avoid going anywhere near live fire during Vietnam. Whether Kerry was severely injured or not is immaterail given that the people who injured him WERE TRYING TO KILL HIM.
Also, while these right-wing cowards are trying to imply that Kerry didn't deserve his medals, look what these same political terrorists did to Max Cleland, who had two legs and an arm blown off. They not only compared him to Saddam Hussein in order to drive him out of the senate, but they recently had political war criminal Ann Coulter attempting yet again to diminish his loss in the most despicable way.
Remember: these are not people who are trying to make a valid point. These are the lowest of the yellow, belly-crawling liars in our political system, and they will do or say anything to defeat democracy. They know their candidate is an abject failure, they know he can't run on his record, and they know he started a war we didn't need to fight.
2) Kerry campaigned his way for the past month or so, despite a lot of handwringing that he wasn't fighting back hard enough, and it turns out he was right in what he was doing. Bush hosed 40 million into the toilet and got almost nothing for it, except a hasitly arranged press conference intruding on yet another bass-fishing, brush-clearing, Crawford vacation.
What many of you have learned in the past thirty days is what some of us learned in the last thirty weeks: John Kerry and his closest advisers know how to run a campaign. It may not be incendiary or smashmouth, but they know what they're doing.
The problem now is that the pundits, who always want to be the first to pronounce a winner and a loser, are starting to talk about Kerry winning big. That means people are starting to raise the bar of expectations on Kerry, but only to put it out of reach yet again so they can trash him for not measuring up to their expectations.
Don't let the pundits or Bush's lapdogs in the press fool you. This is going to be a close race, and Bush still holds almost all the cards. He has the bully pulpit, which means he can change the conversation any day of the week. He has more money - still - but more importantly he has major media outlets shilling for him 24/7 for FREE. Bush is also now clearly desperate enough, as witnessed by his mind-blowing flip-flop on American policy toward the Middle-east peace process, to do just about anything to get re-elected. I'm not a conspiracy fan, but you don't need Diebold horror stories to see the possibilites. Loose cannon Dick Cheney and the mercenaries in the VP's office could trigger an incidence in September with Iran or North Korea just to save their own necks, let alone George's.*
You're all very sharp and strong advocates for Kerry. I'm asking you know to become razor sharp. I'm asking you to decide, no matter what, that you're not going to blink in the face of the onslaught of lies and hate that will come spewing from the RNC and Karl Rove's sociopathic mouth. And all the more so should Bush actually be down in the polls going into October.
Don't flinch. Don't give them an inch.
* You think that sounds crazy? I do too. Then again, this White House lied America into a full-blown war and an occupation of a foreign country without so much as planning for the peace. If they'll do that, they'll do anything. Because they already have.
Posted on the official Kerry Blog by Mark from Iowa at April 17, 2004 02:27 AM
______________________________________________________________________________
AP: Book Alleges Secret Iraq War Plan
Sat Apr 17,12:12 AM ET
By CALVIN WOODWARD and SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON - President Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq in November 2001 while overseeing a divided national security team, including a vice president determined to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, says a new book.
Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack," says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Vice President Dick Cheney developed — as Woodward puts it — an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush dismissed such characterizations of Cheney.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be available in bookstores next week and covers the 16 months leading to the March 2003 invasion.
Bush told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark, Woodward said.
In an interview with the author, Bush said he feared that if news had gotten out about the Iraq plan as America was fighting another conflict, that would cause "enormous international angst and domestic speculation."
"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as saying. "It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."
Asked Friday about that Nov. 21, 2001, meeting with Rumsfeld, the president said, "I can't remember dates that far back" but emphasized "it was Afghanistan that was on my mind and I didn't really start focusing on Iraq 'til later on."
The White House later confirmed the discussion with Rumsfeld but said it did not mean Bush was set on a course of attacking Iraq at that point.
Bush and his aides have denied they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al-Qaida terrorist threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. A commission investigating the attacks just concluded several weeks of extraordinary public testimony, during which former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke contended the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.
Woodward's account indicates some members of the administration, particularly Cheney, were focused on Saddam from the outset of Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al-Qaida the top priority.
Without quoting them directly on the subject, Woodward portrays Cheney and Powell as barely on speaking terms — the vice president being the chief advocate for a war that the secretary of state was not sure needed to be fought.
He recounts the vice president and a defense official making remarks to others about Powell bragging about his popularity, and Powell saying Cheney was preoccupied with an Iraq-al-Qaida link.
"Powell thought Cheney had the fever," Woodward writes. "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. ... Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation."
On the war's origins, the book describes Bush pulling Rumsfeld into a cubbyhole office adjacent to the Situation Room for that November 2001 meeting and asking him what shape the Iraq war plan was in. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush ordered a fresh one.
The book says Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about their planning and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.
Even Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.
The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
Woodward, a Washington Post journalist who wrote an earlier book on Bush's anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says the scope and intensity of the war plan grew even as administration officials were saying publicly that they were pursuing a diplomatic solution.
The book describes a CIA briefing for Bush in December 2002 presenting evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Bush was not sure the public would find the information compelling, Woodward said, but when he turned to Tenet, the CIA chief assured him: "It's a slam-dunk case."
That case fell apart after U.S. forces occupied Iraq and failed to find the stockpiles the administration said had been there.
____________________________________________________________________
Sat Apr 17,12:12 AM ET
By CALVIN WOODWARD and SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON - President Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq in November 2001 while overseeing a divided national security team, including a vice president determined to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, says a new book.
Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack," says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Vice President Dick Cheney developed — as Woodward puts it — an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush dismissed such characterizations of Cheney.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be available in bookstores next week and covers the 16 months leading to the March 2003 invasion.
Bush told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq, and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark, Woodward said.
In an interview with the author, Bush said he feared that if news had gotten out about the Iraq plan as America was fighting another conflict, that would cause "enormous international angst and domestic speculation."
"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as saying. "It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."
Asked Friday about that Nov. 21, 2001, meeting with Rumsfeld, the president said, "I can't remember dates that far back" but emphasized "it was Afghanistan that was on my mind and I didn't really start focusing on Iraq 'til later on."
The White House later confirmed the discussion with Rumsfeld but said it did not mean Bush was set on a course of attacking Iraq at that point.
Bush and his aides have denied they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al-Qaida terrorist threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. A commission investigating the attacks just concluded several weeks of extraordinary public testimony, during which former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke contended the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.
Woodward's account indicates some members of the administration, particularly Cheney, were focused on Saddam from the outset of Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al-Qaida the top priority.
Without quoting them directly on the subject, Woodward portrays Cheney and Powell as barely on speaking terms — the vice president being the chief advocate for a war that the secretary of state was not sure needed to be fought.
He recounts the vice president and a defense official making remarks to others about Powell bragging about his popularity, and Powell saying Cheney was preoccupied with an Iraq-al-Qaida link.
"Powell thought Cheney had the fever," Woodward writes. "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. ... Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation."
On the war's origins, the book describes Bush pulling Rumsfeld into a cubbyhole office adjacent to the Situation Room for that November 2001 meeting and asking him what shape the Iraq war plan was in. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush ordered a fresh one.
The book says Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about their planning and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.
Even Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.
The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
Woodward, a Washington Post journalist who wrote an earlier book on Bush's anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says the scope and intensity of the war plan grew even as administration officials were saying publicly that they were pursuing a diplomatic solution.
The book describes a CIA briefing for Bush in December 2002 presenting evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Bush was not sure the public would find the information compelling, Woodward said, but when he turned to Tenet, the CIA chief assured him: "It's a slam-dunk case."
That case fell apart after U.S. forces occupied Iraq and failed to find the stockpiles the administration said had been there.
____________________________________________________________________
Friday, April 16, 2004
John Kerry's first Purple Heart
With questions lingering over President Bush's service in the Guard, conservatives hope to diminish Kerry's Vietnam heroics -- but they can't erase his real battle record.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Douglas Brinkley
April 17, 2004 | It was Dec. 2, 1968, and Lt. j.g. John Kerry was on a special nighttime covert mission in Vietnam. He had been ordered into a Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay to disrupt a smuggling operation. His vessel was a Boston Whaler, a boat that could float after taking 1,000 rounds of automatic weapons fire. Much of the evening was spent apprehending fishermen in a curfew zone. At approximately 2 a.m., however, they proceeded up an inlet with wild jungle on both sides of the boat. As they approached a bay, Kerry's whaler fired flares into the air. To their horror, not far from them, were a startled group of Viet Cong smugglers trafficking in contraband.
"We opened fire," Kerry told me in a Jan. 30, 2003, interview. "The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach strafing it. Then it was quiet."
Kerry and crewmates blew up the smugglers' beached sampans and then headed back to Cam Ranh Bay. "I never saw where the piece of shrapnel had come from, and the vision of the men running like gazelles haunted me," Kerry continued. "It seemed stupid. My gunner didn't know where the people were when he first started firing. The M-16 bullets had kicked up the sand way to the right of them as he sprayed the beach, slowly walking the line of fire over to where the men had been leaping for cover. I had been shouting directions and trying to un-jam my gun. The third crewman was locked in a personal struggle with the engine, trying to start it. I just shook my head and said, 'Jesus Christ.' It made me wonder if a year of training was worth anything." Kerry, never trying to inflate the incident, called it a "half-ass action." Nevertheless, the escapade introduced Kerry to the V.C. and earned him his first Purple Heart.
As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any U.S. citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple Hearts increased in 1968 as the United States Navy started sending swift boats up rivers in the Mekong Delta. Sailors -- no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships in the Gulf of Tonkin -- were starting to bleed, a lot. Vice Adm. Elmo Zumwalt himself would pin the medal on John Kerry at An Thoi about six weeks after the doctor at the Cam Ranh base took the shrapnel out of the young officer's right arm. "He called me in New York to tell me he had been wounded," his then girlfriend and later wife, Julia Thorne, remembered. "I was worried sick, scared to death that John or one of my brothers was going to die. He reassured me that he was OK."
Now it is 2004, John Kerry is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and a couple of reporters are bringing into question whether he deserved a Purple Heart for that daring action. The Boston Globe and the New York Post have run hurtful stories quoting Kerry's commanding officer that evening, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, now a retiree in Gulf Breeze, Fla., grouching that Kerry's wound wasn't large enough. Hibbard was not even on the Boston Whaler when the firefight erupted. Nevertheless, the New York Post quotes Hibbard -- a proudly registered Republican -- as griping Kerry's injury "didn't look like much of a wound to me."
In the wake of the controversial Bush National Guard story, reporters today, anxious to break a headline, are combing through Kerry's Vietnam past. The name of the game is to find a conservative ex-Vietnam hand to say something negative about Kerry. It's an automatic newsmaker, guaranteed to get picked up by Newsmax.com, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, the New York Post and other conservative outlets. At issue is an attempt to downgrade Kerry's Vietnam War heroism. The major anti-Kerry Vietnam War Internet complaint, it seems, echoes Hibbard: that his minor wounds weren't big enough to warrant Purple Hearts. Unfortunately neither the Boston Globe nor New York Post takes the time to explain to readers that Purple Hearts are not given out to soldiers/sailors for the size of the wound. Only by the grace of God did the hot shrapnel that pierced Kerry's arm not enter his heart or brain or eye.
For the record, Purple Hearts are given for the following enemy-related injuries:
a) Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action.
b) Injury caused by enemy-placed mine or trap.
c) Injury caused by enemy-released chemical, biological or nuclear agent.
d) Injury caused by vehicle or aircraft accident resulting from enemy fire.
e) Concussion injuries caused as a result of enemy-generated explosions.
Examples of injuries or wounds which clearly do not qualify for award of the Purple Heart are as follows:
a) Frostbite or trench foot injuries.
b) Heat stroke.
c) Food poisoning not caused by enemy agents.
d) Chemical, biological, or nuclear agents not released by the enemy.
e) Battle fatigue.
f) Disease not directly caused by enemy agents.
g) Accidents, to include explosive, aircraft, vehicular and other accidental wounding not related to or caused by enemy action.
Given the hurly-burly circumstance of Dec. 2, 1968, Kerry -- and the other men on the mission -- are not sure whether they were hit by enemy fire or if shrapnel from one of the other men on the Boston Whaler injured Kerry. It could have even been Kerry's own M-16 backfiring that caused the shrapnel wound. It doesn't really matter. The requirement makes it clear that you are awarded a Purple Heart for "Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action." Does anybody dispute that Kerry's wound was created by enemy action? As the stipulation also makes clear, Kerry would have been awarded a Purple Heart even if he never bled, if, for example, he had suffered a concussion from a grenade. So to set the record straight: Kerry deserved his first Purple Heart -- period. To say otherwise is to distort the reality of the medal.
Unfortunately, the Boston Globe and New York Post stories omit fully reporting the bylaws. They present Hibbard at face value, downplaying the fact that he is a Republican criticizing a fellow veteran hoping to cause him public embarrassment. According to the Globe, Hibbard -- in classic blowhard fashion -- said Kerry "had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel." Adding further verbal insult, Hibbard apparently claimed: "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." The straight-faced Globe reporter, in fact, claims that Hibbard told him that Kerry's wound resembled a "scrape from a fingernail." Not included in either newspaper account, however, is Kerry's medical report from the incident. He shared it with me last year when I was writing "Tour of Duty." It reads: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and appl. Bacitracin. Ret. to duty." Is shrapnel removed from an arm really like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or a thorn prick? The answer, of course, as any sensible person can surmise, is no.
Which raises the question: Why the medical record omission? Why the cruel attempt publicly to mock Kerry for his wound? Why the media need to play "gotcha" with something as sensitive as a war injury? This Dec. 3 medical report is proof that Kerry had shrapnel taken from his arm. According to Kerry, who should know, the doctor wrapped a clean white bandage around his arm. After the procedure he rightfully put in for a Purple Heart. Kerry clearly met the requirements -- as listed above -- for deserving one. From the hospital room Kerry returned to duty. That's apparently when he held the shrapnel out in his palm for Hibbard to see.
The Globe, however, let Hibbard off the hook, no serious questions asked. On the one hand he claimed Kerry was holding his shrapnel and then he also claims it was a scratch. Are we to believe that following his surgical procedure Kerry went to Hibbard and ripped off his battle dressing to show him the wound that looked like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or is Hibbard simply surmising it was a thorn prick? Worse still, Hibbard now claims that he was opposed to Kerry being awarded the Purple Heart. Really? Then why didn't he fight against it harder? His superficial answer can be found in the Globe: "I do remember some questions, some correspondence about it. I finally said, 'Ok, if that's what happened ... do whatever you want.' After that I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got it. I don't know how." Does this sound like a reliable source? Is that fuzzy-mindedness worth reporting as serious news? Why wasn't Hibbard asked why he stayed quiet for 35 years?
Let me offer Hibbard an answer to his question. The U.S. Navy chose to award Kerry a Purple Heart because he qualified for it. Only a fool -- or an exceedingly modest man -- wouldn't apply for a Purple Heart that was due him. Kerry was neither. But Kerry did not receive it because, as the Post claims, he had "strong ties to the Kennedy machine in Massachusetts (Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Walinsky wrote Kerry's famous 1971 antiwar Washington speech)." Kerry's only tie to the "Kennedy machine" was that as a college student he slapped a "Ted Kennedy for U.S. Senate" bumper sticker on his VW and campaigned for a summer around Cape Cod. As for Walinsky writing Kerry's famous April 22, 1971, speech/testimony -- it's utter nonsense. Walinsky has consistently denied the rumor. At his Boston home Kerry has a file brimming with his various drafts of the speech/testimony. He, in fact, had delivered parts of the speech months beforehand. Why is it so hard to accept the fact that Kerry -- like thousands of other Vietnam Vets -- was awarded a Purple Heart as a small token of appreciation for risking his life for his country?
Back in 1964 Bob Dylan wrote a lyric for the song "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." At one point in it he asks whether nothing in American life is "really sacred." When retired U.S. naval officers, 35 years after the fact, start whining to the press that a war wound wasn't big enough to warrant a Purple Heart -- and the Boston Globe goes along for the ride -- you realize Dylan's prophecy. Today the tabloids truly are king. Call me naive, or too pro-veteran, but it seems to me we should be thanking every Purple Heart recipient for their duty to country, not demanding of them explanations for why their wounds weren't bigger or fatal. Only somebody craven -- or with a political agenda -- could stoop so low. Ridicule Kerry on his liberal Senate record, or so-called aloofism, or even his outspoken Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests, but leave his old battle scars alone.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Douglas Brinkley is Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. His most recent book is "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War."
_______________________________________________________________
With questions lingering over President Bush's service in the Guard, conservatives hope to diminish Kerry's Vietnam heroics -- but they can't erase his real battle record.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Douglas Brinkley
April 17, 2004 | It was Dec. 2, 1968, and Lt. j.g. John Kerry was on a special nighttime covert mission in Vietnam. He had been ordered into a Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay to disrupt a smuggling operation. His vessel was a Boston Whaler, a boat that could float after taking 1,000 rounds of automatic weapons fire. Much of the evening was spent apprehending fishermen in a curfew zone. At approximately 2 a.m., however, they proceeded up an inlet with wild jungle on both sides of the boat. As they approached a bay, Kerry's whaler fired flares into the air. To their horror, not far from them, were a startled group of Viet Cong smugglers trafficking in contraband.
"We opened fire," Kerry told me in a Jan. 30, 2003, interview. "The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach strafing it. Then it was quiet."
Kerry and crewmates blew up the smugglers' beached sampans and then headed back to Cam Ranh Bay. "I never saw where the piece of shrapnel had come from, and the vision of the men running like gazelles haunted me," Kerry continued. "It seemed stupid. My gunner didn't know where the people were when he first started firing. The M-16 bullets had kicked up the sand way to the right of them as he sprayed the beach, slowly walking the line of fire over to where the men had been leaping for cover. I had been shouting directions and trying to un-jam my gun. The third crewman was locked in a personal struggle with the engine, trying to start it. I just shook my head and said, 'Jesus Christ.' It made me wonder if a year of training was worth anything." Kerry, never trying to inflate the incident, called it a "half-ass action." Nevertheless, the escapade introduced Kerry to the V.C. and earned him his first Purple Heart.
As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any U.S. citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple Hearts increased in 1968 as the United States Navy started sending swift boats up rivers in the Mekong Delta. Sailors -- no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships in the Gulf of Tonkin -- were starting to bleed, a lot. Vice Adm. Elmo Zumwalt himself would pin the medal on John Kerry at An Thoi about six weeks after the doctor at the Cam Ranh base took the shrapnel out of the young officer's right arm. "He called me in New York to tell me he had been wounded," his then girlfriend and later wife, Julia Thorne, remembered. "I was worried sick, scared to death that John or one of my brothers was going to die. He reassured me that he was OK."
Now it is 2004, John Kerry is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and a couple of reporters are bringing into question whether he deserved a Purple Heart for that daring action. The Boston Globe and the New York Post have run hurtful stories quoting Kerry's commanding officer that evening, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, now a retiree in Gulf Breeze, Fla., grouching that Kerry's wound wasn't large enough. Hibbard was not even on the Boston Whaler when the firefight erupted. Nevertheless, the New York Post quotes Hibbard -- a proudly registered Republican -- as griping Kerry's injury "didn't look like much of a wound to me."
In the wake of the controversial Bush National Guard story, reporters today, anxious to break a headline, are combing through Kerry's Vietnam past. The name of the game is to find a conservative ex-Vietnam hand to say something negative about Kerry. It's an automatic newsmaker, guaranteed to get picked up by Newsmax.com, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, the New York Post and other conservative outlets. At issue is an attempt to downgrade Kerry's Vietnam War heroism. The major anti-Kerry Vietnam War Internet complaint, it seems, echoes Hibbard: that his minor wounds weren't big enough to warrant Purple Hearts. Unfortunately neither the Boston Globe nor New York Post takes the time to explain to readers that Purple Hearts are not given out to soldiers/sailors for the size of the wound. Only by the grace of God did the hot shrapnel that pierced Kerry's arm not enter his heart or brain or eye.
For the record, Purple Hearts are given for the following enemy-related injuries:
a) Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action.
b) Injury caused by enemy-placed mine or trap.
c) Injury caused by enemy-released chemical, biological or nuclear agent.
d) Injury caused by vehicle or aircraft accident resulting from enemy fire.
e) Concussion injuries caused as a result of enemy-generated explosions.
Examples of injuries or wounds which clearly do not qualify for award of the Purple Heart are as follows:
a) Frostbite or trench foot injuries.
b) Heat stroke.
c) Food poisoning not caused by enemy agents.
d) Chemical, biological, or nuclear agents not released by the enemy.
e) Battle fatigue.
f) Disease not directly caused by enemy agents.
g) Accidents, to include explosive, aircraft, vehicular and other accidental wounding not related to or caused by enemy action.
Given the hurly-burly circumstance of Dec. 2, 1968, Kerry -- and the other men on the mission -- are not sure whether they were hit by enemy fire or if shrapnel from one of the other men on the Boston Whaler injured Kerry. It could have even been Kerry's own M-16 backfiring that caused the shrapnel wound. It doesn't really matter. The requirement makes it clear that you are awarded a Purple Heart for "Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel or other projectile created by enemy action." Does anybody dispute that Kerry's wound was created by enemy action? As the stipulation also makes clear, Kerry would have been awarded a Purple Heart even if he never bled, if, for example, he had suffered a concussion from a grenade. So to set the record straight: Kerry deserved his first Purple Heart -- period. To say otherwise is to distort the reality of the medal.
Unfortunately, the Boston Globe and New York Post stories omit fully reporting the bylaws. They present Hibbard at face value, downplaying the fact that he is a Republican criticizing a fellow veteran hoping to cause him public embarrassment. According to the Globe, Hibbard -- in classic blowhard fashion -- said Kerry "had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel." Adding further verbal insult, Hibbard apparently claimed: "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." The straight-faced Globe reporter, in fact, claims that Hibbard told him that Kerry's wound resembled a "scrape from a fingernail." Not included in either newspaper account, however, is Kerry's medical report from the incident. He shared it with me last year when I was writing "Tour of Duty." It reads: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and appl. Bacitracin. Ret. to duty." Is shrapnel removed from an arm really like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or a thorn prick? The answer, of course, as any sensible person can surmise, is no.
Which raises the question: Why the medical record omission? Why the cruel attempt publicly to mock Kerry for his wound? Why the media need to play "gotcha" with something as sensitive as a war injury? This Dec. 3 medical report is proof that Kerry had shrapnel taken from his arm. According to Kerry, who should know, the doctor wrapped a clean white bandage around his arm. After the procedure he rightfully put in for a Purple Heart. Kerry clearly met the requirements -- as listed above -- for deserving one. From the hospital room Kerry returned to duty. That's apparently when he held the shrapnel out in his palm for Hibbard to see.
The Globe, however, let Hibbard off the hook, no serious questions asked. On the one hand he claimed Kerry was holding his shrapnel and then he also claims it was a scratch. Are we to believe that following his surgical procedure Kerry went to Hibbard and ripped off his battle dressing to show him the wound that looked like a "scrape from a fingernail"? Or is Hibbard simply surmising it was a thorn prick? Worse still, Hibbard now claims that he was opposed to Kerry being awarded the Purple Heart. Really? Then why didn't he fight against it harder? His superficial answer can be found in the Globe: "I do remember some questions, some correspondence about it. I finally said, 'Ok, if that's what happened ... do whatever you want.' After that I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got it. I don't know how." Does this sound like a reliable source? Is that fuzzy-mindedness worth reporting as serious news? Why wasn't Hibbard asked why he stayed quiet for 35 years?
Let me offer Hibbard an answer to his question. The U.S. Navy chose to award Kerry a Purple Heart because he qualified for it. Only a fool -- or an exceedingly modest man -- wouldn't apply for a Purple Heart that was due him. Kerry was neither. But Kerry did not receive it because, as the Post claims, he had "strong ties to the Kennedy machine in Massachusetts (Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Walinsky wrote Kerry's famous 1971 antiwar Washington speech)." Kerry's only tie to the "Kennedy machine" was that as a college student he slapped a "Ted Kennedy for U.S. Senate" bumper sticker on his VW and campaigned for a summer around Cape Cod. As for Walinsky writing Kerry's famous April 22, 1971, speech/testimony -- it's utter nonsense. Walinsky has consistently denied the rumor. At his Boston home Kerry has a file brimming with his various drafts of the speech/testimony. He, in fact, had delivered parts of the speech months beforehand. Why is it so hard to accept the fact that Kerry -- like thousands of other Vietnam Vets -- was awarded a Purple Heart as a small token of appreciation for risking his life for his country?
Back in 1964 Bob Dylan wrote a lyric for the song "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." At one point in it he asks whether nothing in American life is "really sacred." When retired U.S. naval officers, 35 years after the fact, start whining to the press that a war wound wasn't big enough to warrant a Purple Heart -- and the Boston Globe goes along for the ride -- you realize Dylan's prophecy. Today the tabloids truly are king. Call me naive, or too pro-veteran, but it seems to me we should be thanking every Purple Heart recipient for their duty to country, not demanding of them explanations for why their wounds weren't bigger or fatal. Only somebody craven -- or with a political agenda -- could stoop so low. Ridicule Kerry on his liberal Senate record, or so-called aloofism, or even his outspoken Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests, but leave his old battle scars alone.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Douglas Brinkley is Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. His most recent book is "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War."
_______________________________________________________________
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