Monday, July 14, 2003
The Best Enemies Money Can Buy
From Hitler To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden – Insider Connections and the Bush Family’s Partnership with Killers of Americans
Brown Brothers, Harriman - BNL- and the Carlyle Group
By Michael C. Ruppert [© Copyright 2001. All Rights Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. May be reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only.]
FTW, Oct. 9, 2001 - Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, major media powerhouses and the increasingly influential alternative media alike have begun to focus attention on Bush family connections and a long history of arming and financing America’s attackers in the months and years prior to the outbreak of war. Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 27 & 28, 2001), ABC News (Oct. 1, 2001), as well as a host of reports from so-called alternative news sources have begun to focus attention on the Bush family’s profit-making role in creating and arming our enemies.
The following is a more comprehensive look at the documented history of these relationships that will also open some new avenues of inquiry for the press, Congress and the American people.
In a world now filled with biowarfare agents, backpack nuclear devices, and chemical weapons like Sarin gas -- where there are people in many countries with reasons to oppose the United States -- the Bush Administration is following predictable strategies in a way that redefines the concept of brinksmanship. Human survival may depend upon the will and the ability of both the Congress and the press to focus on these relationships and to take appropriate action. Moreover – and I am not the first to say this – if a national security priority is to seize the financial assets of those who support terrorists, then perhaps we should start right here at home.
Adolph Hitler
Meticulous research, including U.S. government records from the era, along with contemporaneous news stories from the New York Times and other papers is presented in the 1992 book entitled, “George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography” by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, Published by The Executive Intelligence Review and located at http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm. The following is sourced entirely from Chapter II of this essential work. [Note: Although FTW does not always agree with conclusions reached by the Executive Intelligence Review, or its founder Lyndon La Rouche, we have never found a single flaw in any of their factual research. History is history, no matter who presents it. And this history is essential to understanding our era.]
George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was the Managing Director of the investment bank Brown Brothers, Harriman from the 1920s through the 1940s. It was Brown Brothers, in conjunction with Averell Harriman, the Rockefeller family, Standard Oil, the DuPonts, the Morgans and the Fords who served as the principal funding arm in helping to finance Adolph Hitler’s rise to power starting in 1923. This included direct funding for the SS and SA channeled through a variety of German firms. Prescott Bush, through associations with the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line, Nazi banker Fritz Thyssen (pronounced Tee-sen), Standard Oil of Germany, The German Steel Trust (founded by Dillon Read founder, Clarence Dillon), and I.G. Farben, used the Union Bank Corporation to funnel vast quantities of money to the Nazis and to manage their American interests. The profits from those investments came back to Bush allies on Wall Street. Thyssen is universally regarded as having been Hitler’s private banker and ultimate owner of the Union Bank Corporation.
Early support for Hitler came from Prescott Bush through the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line -- also funded by Brown Bothers -- that funneled large sums of money and weapons to Hitler’s storm troopers in the 1920s.
According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, “In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Company… was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.”
Furthermore, a 1942 U.S. government investigative report that surfaced during 1945 Senate hearings found that the Union Bank, with Prescott Bush on the board, was an “interlocking concern” with the German Steel Trust that had produced:
50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate
36% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany’s galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany’s wire
35% of Nazi Germany’s explosives
The business relationships established by Bush in 1923 continued even after the war started until they became so offensive and overt as to warrant seizure by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.
In 1942, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares.
“… all of which shares are held for the benefit of… members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals… of a designated enemy country.”
“On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.”
“Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father in law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942…”
These seizures of Bush businesses were reported in a number of American papers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Prescott Bush went on to become an influential Republican Senator from Connecticut who went on to be a regular golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower. His attorneys were the lawyers John Foster and Allen Dulles, the later became the CIA Director under Eisenhower.
Saddam Hussein
After becoming President in January 1989, Prescott Bush’s son, George Herbert Walker Bush – father of our current President – authorized a series of programs that not only armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but also provided him with technology that assisted in his development of chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and biological weapons, which he still possesses. Apologists for Bush (the elder) say that, after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s left the region unstable, he was just trying to establish a new balance of power. Not so. Bush directives and policies, including relationships with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the Banca Nacional del Lavoro (BNL) were directly and deliberately responsible for creating the army the U.S. fought in 1991.
A story by Russ W. Baker, in the March/April issue the Colombia Journalism Review (CJR), provided the most compelling overview of Iraqgate that I have seen.
“ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop ‘It is becoming increasingly clear,’ said a grave Ted Koppel, ‘that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy…
“Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage?” Baker poignantly asks.
“ The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nacional del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam’s arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.
“Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-Contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don’t appear to be getting any better at telling them…
“Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology -- ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We’ve learned that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
“And we’ve learned that the obscure Atlanta Branch of Italy’s largest bank, Banca Nacional del Lavoro, relying partly on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.
“… In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh [appointed by George H.W. Bush] blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case…
“… As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, ‘Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the Systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [The U.S., Britain, and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator.”
While Democrat Henry Gonzales, Chairman of the House Banking Committee during the period, stood as the lone voice from the wilderness in raising alarms about Bush’s obvious corruption, the rest of the Congress sheepishly ignored all the signs demanding immediate action. Gonzales’ voice reportedly fell silent after his empty car was machine-gunned in a Washington suburb in what passed for a drive-by shooting.
The CJR continues: “Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990 issue… “That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert decision to arm Iraq,’ Waas wrote, “is the most serious consequence of a U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the advice and consent of the American public…”
The L.A. Times, on Feb 23, 1992, dug deep enough to find secret National Security Decision Directives by the Bush Administration in 1989 ordering closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $1 billion in new aid. The Times’ series, co-authored with Waas, emphasized that, “buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece – that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loans guarantees to Iraq.”
Baker’s CJR report also noted, “On October 3, the [Wall Street] Journal reported [BNL official Christopher] Drogoul’s assertion that the director general of Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Production had told him, ‘We are all in this together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government works very closely with the intelligence service of the Iraqi government.’ Three weeks later, the Journal reported that [Henry] Gonzales ‘produced a phone-book-sized packet of documents’ showing the involvement of U.S. exporting firms… The documents mentioned one… which designed parts for Iraq’s howitzers and was financed through BNL…”
In the wake of highly suspicious anthrax outbreaks in Florida, just miles from where several of the WTC suicides pilots trained, we add one final note. In his 1998 book "Bringing the War Home" author William Thomas writes, “ Under that same [weapons transfer] program, 19 containers of Anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the US Army's high security germ warfare labs.”
The Carlyle Group, the Bushes and bin Laden
The warnings about the Carlyle Group, the nation’s 11th largest defense contractor, and the Bushes came long before the World Trade Center attacks. The Carlyle Group is a closely held corporation, exempt, for that reason, from reporting its affairs to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little is known of what it actually does except that it buys and sells defense contractors. As of October 4, 2001, it has removed its corporate web site from the World Wide Web making further investigation through that channel impossible. Its Directors include Frank Carlucci, former Reagan Secretary of Defense; James Baker, former Bush Secretary of State; and Richard Darman, a former White House aide to Ronald Reagan and Republican Party operative.
On March 3, 2001, just weeks after George W Bush’s inauguration, the conservative Washington lobbying group Judicial Watch issued a press release. It said:
“(Washington, D.C.) Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government abuse and corruption, called on former President George Herbert Walker Bush to resign immediately from the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm, while his son President George W. Bush is in office. Today's New York Times reported that the elder Bush is an "ambassador" for the $12 billion private investment firm and last year traveled to the Middle East on its behalf. The former president also helped the firm in South Korea.
“The New York Times reported that as compensation, the elder Bush is allowed to buy a stake in the Carlyle Group's investments, which include ownership in at least 164 companies throughout the world (thereby by giving the current president an indirect benefit). James Baker, the former Secretary of State who served as President George W. Bush's point man in Florida's election dispute, is a partner in the firm. The firm also gave George W. Bush help in the early 1990's when it placed him on one of its subsidiary's board of directors.
"This is simply inappropriate. Former President Bush should immediately resign from the Carlyle Group because it is an obvious conflict of interest. Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States government," stated Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel.
"Questions are now bound to be raised if the recent Bush Administration change in policy towards Iraq has the fingerprints of the Carlyle Group, which is trying to gain investments from other Arab countries who [sic] would presumably benefit from the new policy," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.”
Judicial Watch noted that “even the Clinton Administration called on the Rodham brothers to stop their business dealings in [The former Soviet Republic of] Georgia because those dealings started to destabilize that country.”
Since the WTC attacks the Wall Street Journal has reported (Sept. 28, 2001) that, “George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm.” The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice in the last three years – 1998 and 2000 -- as a representative of Carlyle, seeking to expand business dealings with one of the wealthiest Saudi families, which some experts argue, has never fully severed its ties with black sheep Osama in spite of current reports in a mainstream press that is afraid of offending the current administration.
The Nation, on March 27, 2000 – in a story co-authored by David Corn and Paul Lashmar – wrote, “In January former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major paid a social call on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah…” This story confirms at least one meeting between the elder Bush and Saudi leaders, including the bin Ladens. That the bin Ladens attended this meeting was confirmed in a subsequent September 27, 2001 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) story. The January 2000 meeting with the bin Ladens was also later confirmed by Bush (the elder’s) Chief of Staff Jean Becker, only after the WSJ presented her with a thank you note sent by Bush to the bin Ladens after that meeting.
James Baker visited the bin Ladens in 1998 and 1999 with Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci.
The WSJ story went on to note, “A Carlyle executive said that the bin Laden family committed $2 million through a London investment arm in 1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. The fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. So far, the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return, the Carlyle executive said.
“But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the family’s overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger…”
In other words, Osama bin Laden’s attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in the U.S. defense budget have just made his family a great big pile of money.
More Bush connections appear in relation to the bin Ladens. The WSJ story also notes that, “During the past several years, the [bin Laden] family’s close ties to the Saudi royal family prompted executives and staff from closely held New York publisher Forbes, Inc. to make two trips to the family headquarters, according to Forbes Chairman Caspar Weinberger, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. ‘We would call on them to get their view of the country and what would be of interest to investors.’”
President G.H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger for his criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1989.
Our current President, George W. Bush has also had -- at minimum -- indirect dealings with Carlyle and the bin Ladens. In 1976 his firm Arbusto Energy was funded with $50,000 from Texas investment banker James R. Bath who was also the U.S. investment counselor for the bin Laden family. In his watershed 1992 book, “The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush,” award winning Texas investigative journalist Pete Brewton dug deeply into Bath’s background, revealing connections with the CIA and major fraudulent activities connected with the Savings & Loan scandal that took $500 billion out of the pockets of American taxpayers. A long-time friend of George W. Bush, Bath was connected to a number of covert financing operations in the Iran-Contra scandal, which also linked to bin Laden friend Adnan Khashoggi. One of the richest men in the world, Khashoggi was the arms merchant at the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi, whose connections to the bin Ladens is more than superficial, got his first business break by acting as middle-man for a large truck purchase by Osama bin Laden’s older brother, Salem.
Another key player in the Bush Administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, left his post as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration after a series of scandals connected to CIA operatives Ed Wilson, Ted Shackley, Richard Secord and Tom Clines placed him at the brink of criminal indictment and jail. Shackley and Secord are veterans of Vietnam operations and have long been linked to opium/heroin smuggling. The Armitage scandals all focused on the illegal provision of weapons and war materiel to potential or actual enemies of the U.S. and to the Contras in Central America.
Armitage, a former Navy SEAL, who reportedly enjoyed combat missions and killing during covert operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, has never been far from the Bush family’s side. Throughout his career, both in and out of government, he has been perpetually connected to CIA drug smuggling operations. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a 1995 Washington Post story, called Armitage, “my white son.” In 1990, then President Bush dispatched Armitage to Russia to aid in its “transition” to capitalism. Armitage’s Russian work for Bush has been frequently connected to the explosion of drug trafficking under the Russian Mafias, which became virtual rulers of the nation afterwards. In the early 1990s Armitage had extensive involvement in Albania at the same time that the Albanian ally, Kosovo Liberation Army was coming to power and consolidating its grip, according to The Christian Science Monitor, on 70% of the heroin entering western Europe. [See FTW Vol. II, No 2 – April 24, 1999]
Armitage and Carlucci are both Board Members of the influential Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council.
The connections continue with Vice President Dick Cheney. Amongst the multitude of oil pipeline construction running through the new war zone is one project – according to a Sept. 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal story – a joint venture in which the bin Laden family joined with the construction firm H.C. Price. A researcher named “Phoenix,” writing for the Internet news site Rumor Mills News Agency located at www.rumormillnews.com, reported that Price subsequently changed its name to Bredero Shaw, Inc. and is now owned by a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, Dresser Industries. It was Dresser industries that gave George H.W. Bush his first post war job in 1948. A check of the relevant corporate web sites has confirmed this.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm, directing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, was Halliburton’s CEO until last year’s election.
And, according to a 2000 story from Harper’s Magazine, in 1990 our current President, through a position as a corporate director of Caterair, owned by the Carlyle Group – at a time when the bin Laden’s were invested in Carlyle – had additional connections to the bin Laden family. In addition, on March 1, 1995, when George W. Bush was Texas governor and a senior Trustee of the university, the University of Texas Endowment voted to place $10 million in investments with the Carlyle Group. As to how much of that money went to the bin Ladens we can only guess. But we do know that there is a long tradition in the Bush family of giving money to those who kill Americans.
Now, as the people of America are beginning to awaken to what is really being unleashed upon them, as a few brave souls are asking who’s going to get all the money the Bush Administration is “borrowing” from government coffers and who’s going to pay for it - the above history is more than ominous.
Considering that during the 1980s, under the pretext of fighting a Sandinista regime in Nicaragua that never once launched an attack on the U.S., these same people oversaw an explosion in U.S. cocaine consumption that went from 80 metric tons in 1979 to 600 metric tons in 1989 - considering that the CIA trained and equipped death squads that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Panama – considering that these same people have brutalized Iraq, leaving portions of it radioactively contaminated by depleted uranium for the next 4 billion years and causing a fivefold increase in the number of childhood leukemia cases amidst a starving population, one can only wonder what they will produce for the world now given the context of the World Trade Center attacks.
From Hitler To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden – Insider Connections and the Bush Family’s Partnership with Killers of Americans
Brown Brothers, Harriman - BNL- and the Carlyle Group
By Michael C. Ruppert [© Copyright 2001. All Rights Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. May be reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only.]
FTW, Oct. 9, 2001 - Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, major media powerhouses and the increasingly influential alternative media alike have begun to focus attention on Bush family connections and a long history of arming and financing America’s attackers in the months and years prior to the outbreak of war. Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 27 & 28, 2001), ABC News (Oct. 1, 2001), as well as a host of reports from so-called alternative news sources have begun to focus attention on the Bush family’s profit-making role in creating and arming our enemies.
The following is a more comprehensive look at the documented history of these relationships that will also open some new avenues of inquiry for the press, Congress and the American people.
In a world now filled with biowarfare agents, backpack nuclear devices, and chemical weapons like Sarin gas -- where there are people in many countries with reasons to oppose the United States -- the Bush Administration is following predictable strategies in a way that redefines the concept of brinksmanship. Human survival may depend upon the will and the ability of both the Congress and the press to focus on these relationships and to take appropriate action. Moreover – and I am not the first to say this – if a national security priority is to seize the financial assets of those who support terrorists, then perhaps we should start right here at home.
Adolph Hitler
Meticulous research, including U.S. government records from the era, along with contemporaneous news stories from the New York Times and other papers is presented in the 1992 book entitled, “George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography” by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, Published by The Executive Intelligence Review and located at http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm. The following is sourced entirely from Chapter II of this essential work. [Note: Although FTW does not always agree with conclusions reached by the Executive Intelligence Review, or its founder Lyndon La Rouche, we have never found a single flaw in any of their factual research. History is history, no matter who presents it. And this history is essential to understanding our era.]
George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was the Managing Director of the investment bank Brown Brothers, Harriman from the 1920s through the 1940s. It was Brown Brothers, in conjunction with Averell Harriman, the Rockefeller family, Standard Oil, the DuPonts, the Morgans and the Fords who served as the principal funding arm in helping to finance Adolph Hitler’s rise to power starting in 1923. This included direct funding for the SS and SA channeled through a variety of German firms. Prescott Bush, through associations with the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line, Nazi banker Fritz Thyssen (pronounced Tee-sen), Standard Oil of Germany, The German Steel Trust (founded by Dillon Read founder, Clarence Dillon), and I.G. Farben, used the Union Bank Corporation to funnel vast quantities of money to the Nazis and to manage their American interests. The profits from those investments came back to Bush allies on Wall Street. Thyssen is universally regarded as having been Hitler’s private banker and ultimate owner of the Union Bank Corporation.
Early support for Hitler came from Prescott Bush through the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line -- also funded by Brown Bothers -- that funneled large sums of money and weapons to Hitler’s storm troopers in the 1920s.
According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, “In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Company… was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.”
Furthermore, a 1942 U.S. government investigative report that surfaced during 1945 Senate hearings found that the Union Bank, with Prescott Bush on the board, was an “interlocking concern” with the German Steel Trust that had produced:
50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate
36% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany’s galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany’s wire
35% of Nazi Germany’s explosives
The business relationships established by Bush in 1923 continued even after the war started until they became so offensive and overt as to warrant seizure by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.
In 1942, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares.
“… all of which shares are held for the benefit of… members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals… of a designated enemy country.”
“On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.”
“Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father in law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942…”
These seizures of Bush businesses were reported in a number of American papers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Prescott Bush went on to become an influential Republican Senator from Connecticut who went on to be a regular golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower. His attorneys were the lawyers John Foster and Allen Dulles, the later became the CIA Director under Eisenhower.
Saddam Hussein
After becoming President in January 1989, Prescott Bush’s son, George Herbert Walker Bush – father of our current President – authorized a series of programs that not only armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but also provided him with technology that assisted in his development of chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and biological weapons, which he still possesses. Apologists for Bush (the elder) say that, after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s left the region unstable, he was just trying to establish a new balance of power. Not so. Bush directives and policies, including relationships with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the Banca Nacional del Lavoro (BNL) were directly and deliberately responsible for creating the army the U.S. fought in 1991.
A story by Russ W. Baker, in the March/April issue the Colombia Journalism Review (CJR), provided the most compelling overview of Iraqgate that I have seen.
“ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop ‘It is becoming increasingly clear,’ said a grave Ted Koppel, ‘that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy…
“Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage?” Baker poignantly asks.
“ The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nacional del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam’s arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.
“Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-Contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don’t appear to be getting any better at telling them…
“Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology -- ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We’ve learned that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
“And we’ve learned that the obscure Atlanta Branch of Italy’s largest bank, Banca Nacional del Lavoro, relying partly on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.
“… In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh [appointed by George H.W. Bush] blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case…
“… As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, ‘Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the Systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [The U.S., Britain, and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator.”
While Democrat Henry Gonzales, Chairman of the House Banking Committee during the period, stood as the lone voice from the wilderness in raising alarms about Bush’s obvious corruption, the rest of the Congress sheepishly ignored all the signs demanding immediate action. Gonzales’ voice reportedly fell silent after his empty car was machine-gunned in a Washington suburb in what passed for a drive-by shooting.
The CJR continues: “Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990 issue… “That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert decision to arm Iraq,’ Waas wrote, “is the most serious consequence of a U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the advice and consent of the American public…”
The L.A. Times, on Feb 23, 1992, dug deep enough to find secret National Security Decision Directives by the Bush Administration in 1989 ordering closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $1 billion in new aid. The Times’ series, co-authored with Waas, emphasized that, “buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece – that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loans guarantees to Iraq.”
Baker’s CJR report also noted, “On October 3, the [Wall Street] Journal reported [BNL official Christopher] Drogoul’s assertion that the director general of Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Production had told him, ‘We are all in this together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government works very closely with the intelligence service of the Iraqi government.’ Three weeks later, the Journal reported that [Henry] Gonzales ‘produced a phone-book-sized packet of documents’ showing the involvement of U.S. exporting firms… The documents mentioned one… which designed parts for Iraq’s howitzers and was financed through BNL…”
In the wake of highly suspicious anthrax outbreaks in Florida, just miles from where several of the WTC suicides pilots trained, we add one final note. In his 1998 book "Bringing the War Home" author William Thomas writes, “ Under that same [weapons transfer] program, 19 containers of Anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the US Army's high security germ warfare labs.”
The Carlyle Group, the Bushes and bin Laden
The warnings about the Carlyle Group, the nation’s 11th largest defense contractor, and the Bushes came long before the World Trade Center attacks. The Carlyle Group is a closely held corporation, exempt, for that reason, from reporting its affairs to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little is known of what it actually does except that it buys and sells defense contractors. As of October 4, 2001, it has removed its corporate web site from the World Wide Web making further investigation through that channel impossible. Its Directors include Frank Carlucci, former Reagan Secretary of Defense; James Baker, former Bush Secretary of State; and Richard Darman, a former White House aide to Ronald Reagan and Republican Party operative.
On March 3, 2001, just weeks after George W Bush’s inauguration, the conservative Washington lobbying group Judicial Watch issued a press release. It said:
“(Washington, D.C.) Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government abuse and corruption, called on former President George Herbert Walker Bush to resign immediately from the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm, while his son President George W. Bush is in office. Today's New York Times reported that the elder Bush is an "ambassador" for the $12 billion private investment firm and last year traveled to the Middle East on its behalf. The former president also helped the firm in South Korea.
“The New York Times reported that as compensation, the elder Bush is allowed to buy a stake in the Carlyle Group's investments, which include ownership in at least 164 companies throughout the world (thereby by giving the current president an indirect benefit). James Baker, the former Secretary of State who served as President George W. Bush's point man in Florida's election dispute, is a partner in the firm. The firm also gave George W. Bush help in the early 1990's when it placed him on one of its subsidiary's board of directors.
"This is simply inappropriate. Former President Bush should immediately resign from the Carlyle Group because it is an obvious conflict of interest. Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States government," stated Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel.
"Questions are now bound to be raised if the recent Bush Administration change in policy towards Iraq has the fingerprints of the Carlyle Group, which is trying to gain investments from other Arab countries who [sic] would presumably benefit from the new policy," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.”
Judicial Watch noted that “even the Clinton Administration called on the Rodham brothers to stop their business dealings in [The former Soviet Republic of] Georgia because those dealings started to destabilize that country.”
Since the WTC attacks the Wall Street Journal has reported (Sept. 28, 2001) that, “George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm.” The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice in the last three years – 1998 and 2000 -- as a representative of Carlyle, seeking to expand business dealings with one of the wealthiest Saudi families, which some experts argue, has never fully severed its ties with black sheep Osama in spite of current reports in a mainstream press that is afraid of offending the current administration.
The Nation, on March 27, 2000 – in a story co-authored by David Corn and Paul Lashmar – wrote, “In January former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major paid a social call on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah…” This story confirms at least one meeting between the elder Bush and Saudi leaders, including the bin Ladens. That the bin Ladens attended this meeting was confirmed in a subsequent September 27, 2001 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) story. The January 2000 meeting with the bin Ladens was also later confirmed by Bush (the elder’s) Chief of Staff Jean Becker, only after the WSJ presented her with a thank you note sent by Bush to the bin Ladens after that meeting.
James Baker visited the bin Ladens in 1998 and 1999 with Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci.
The WSJ story went on to note, “A Carlyle executive said that the bin Laden family committed $2 million through a London investment arm in 1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. The fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. So far, the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return, the Carlyle executive said.
“But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the family’s overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger…”
In other words, Osama bin Laden’s attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in the U.S. defense budget have just made his family a great big pile of money.
More Bush connections appear in relation to the bin Ladens. The WSJ story also notes that, “During the past several years, the [bin Laden] family’s close ties to the Saudi royal family prompted executives and staff from closely held New York publisher Forbes, Inc. to make two trips to the family headquarters, according to Forbes Chairman Caspar Weinberger, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. ‘We would call on them to get their view of the country and what would be of interest to investors.’”
President G.H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger for his criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1989.
Our current President, George W. Bush has also had -- at minimum -- indirect dealings with Carlyle and the bin Ladens. In 1976 his firm Arbusto Energy was funded with $50,000 from Texas investment banker James R. Bath who was also the U.S. investment counselor for the bin Laden family. In his watershed 1992 book, “The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush,” award winning Texas investigative journalist Pete Brewton dug deeply into Bath’s background, revealing connections with the CIA and major fraudulent activities connected with the Savings & Loan scandal that took $500 billion out of the pockets of American taxpayers. A long-time friend of George W. Bush, Bath was connected to a number of covert financing operations in the Iran-Contra scandal, which also linked to bin Laden friend Adnan Khashoggi. One of the richest men in the world, Khashoggi was the arms merchant at the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi, whose connections to the bin Ladens is more than superficial, got his first business break by acting as middle-man for a large truck purchase by Osama bin Laden’s older brother, Salem.
Another key player in the Bush Administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, left his post as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration after a series of scandals connected to CIA operatives Ed Wilson, Ted Shackley, Richard Secord and Tom Clines placed him at the brink of criminal indictment and jail. Shackley and Secord are veterans of Vietnam operations and have long been linked to opium/heroin smuggling. The Armitage scandals all focused on the illegal provision of weapons and war materiel to potential or actual enemies of the U.S. and to the Contras in Central America.
Armitage, a former Navy SEAL, who reportedly enjoyed combat missions and killing during covert operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, has never been far from the Bush family’s side. Throughout his career, both in and out of government, he has been perpetually connected to CIA drug smuggling operations. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a 1995 Washington Post story, called Armitage, “my white son.” In 1990, then President Bush dispatched Armitage to Russia to aid in its “transition” to capitalism. Armitage’s Russian work for Bush has been frequently connected to the explosion of drug trafficking under the Russian Mafias, which became virtual rulers of the nation afterwards. In the early 1990s Armitage had extensive involvement in Albania at the same time that the Albanian ally, Kosovo Liberation Army was coming to power and consolidating its grip, according to The Christian Science Monitor, on 70% of the heroin entering western Europe. [See FTW Vol. II, No 2 – April 24, 1999]
Armitage and Carlucci are both Board Members of the influential Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council.
The connections continue with Vice President Dick Cheney. Amongst the multitude of oil pipeline construction running through the new war zone is one project – according to a Sept. 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal story – a joint venture in which the bin Laden family joined with the construction firm H.C. Price. A researcher named “Phoenix,” writing for the Internet news site Rumor Mills News Agency located at www.rumormillnews.com, reported that Price subsequently changed its name to Bredero Shaw, Inc. and is now owned by a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, Dresser Industries. It was Dresser industries that gave George H.W. Bush his first post war job in 1948. A check of the relevant corporate web sites has confirmed this.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm, directing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, was Halliburton’s CEO until last year’s election.
And, according to a 2000 story from Harper’s Magazine, in 1990 our current President, through a position as a corporate director of Caterair, owned by the Carlyle Group – at a time when the bin Laden’s were invested in Carlyle – had additional connections to the bin Laden family. In addition, on March 1, 1995, when George W. Bush was Texas governor and a senior Trustee of the university, the University of Texas Endowment voted to place $10 million in investments with the Carlyle Group. As to how much of that money went to the bin Ladens we can only guess. But we do know that there is a long tradition in the Bush family of giving money to those who kill Americans.
Now, as the people of America are beginning to awaken to what is really being unleashed upon them, as a few brave souls are asking who’s going to get all the money the Bush Administration is “borrowing” from government coffers and who’s going to pay for it - the above history is more than ominous.
Considering that during the 1980s, under the pretext of fighting a Sandinista regime in Nicaragua that never once launched an attack on the U.S., these same people oversaw an explosion in U.S. cocaine consumption that went from 80 metric tons in 1979 to 600 metric tons in 1989 - considering that the CIA trained and equipped death squads that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Panama – considering that these same people have brutalized Iraq, leaving portions of it radioactively contaminated by depleted uranium for the next 4 billion years and causing a fivefold increase in the number of childhood leukemia cases amidst a starving population, one can only wonder what they will produce for the world now given the context of the World Trade Center attacks.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Bush: 'The wrong man?''
Posted on Wednesday, July 09 @ 10:03:58 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
George W. Bush's combative exhortation to Iraqi resistance fighters to "bring 'em on" by launching more attacks against U.S. troops reminded his supporters why they see him as a war-hero president, what former aide and author David Frum dubbed "The Right Man" to lead the nation through post-Sept. 11 hostilities.
But Bush's tough-guy rhetoric may instead be leading the nation into a maze of dark alleys from which many Americans, especially young soldiers dispatched to a string of conflicts, will never emerge. There is a growing sense that Bush's life experience of underachieving privilege might make him entirely the wrong man for addressing the complex challenges the nation now faces.
Because of his family connections, Bush has never confronted the physical dangers that come with war, nor even the consequences of personal failure as an executive who's made bad decisions. His father's powerful friends have always been there to help, whether keeping Bush out of Vietnam or bailing out his sinking businesses or sparing him from a full vote count in Florida.
Even as a young man, Bush could say one thing and do another. He said he was for the Vietnam War, but accepted a home-side slot in the Texas Air National Guard arranged by his father's friends. He then appears to have shirked even that duty with still-unanswered questions about why he failed a flight physical and whether he went AWOL for a year.
According to the Boston Globe, "In his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly at all. And ... for a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen." [Boston Globe, May, 23, 2000]
In his early-to-mid adulthood, Bush continued to live a kind of risk-free life, benefiting from the generosity of his fathers' friends who bankrolled his failed business ventures and then set him up with sinecure positions on corporate boards. While other businessmen faced genuine risks of failure, Bush lived the charmed life of a n'er-do-well who could only fail up.
When it came to democracy and the fundamental right of American citizens to have their votes count - and be counted - Bush again didn't dare take any risks. He preferred the sure thing of a fix by his father's friends than winning or losing based on the actual ballots cast by voters.
After Election 2000, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount, Bush sent his lawyers to the U.S. Supreme Court to get five Republican justices to stop the counting of votes and hand him the White House. Though the U.S. news media largely spared Bush any political damage for this unprecedented act, many world leaders now roll their eyes when Bush proclaims his commitment to democracy around the globe.
Avoiding Risk
This pattern of avoiding personal risk has carried into his presidency. On Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon outside Washington, Bush was on a political trip to northern Florida. With administration officials claiming that Air Force One might be another target, Bush and his entourage fled west, first to Louisiana and then to Nebraska.
Meanwhile, other Americans held their ground in Washington, showing almost no panic even with the knowledge that a fourth hijacked plane was headed toward the capital. That plane never reached its destination because Americans onboard battled the hijackers for control and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. Hours after the danger had passed, Bush returned to Washington.
Bush didn't take chances either on his victory lap through the Middle East in June. Instead of following the example of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who visited British troops in the Iraqi city of Basra, Bush didn't make even a brief stop inside Iraq, as some political observers believed he would.
Instead Bush chose the much safer environs of a U.S. military base in Qatar, where he spoke in front of cheering U.S. soldiers far from the front lines. "I'm happy to see you and so are the long-suffering people of Iraq," Bush told the soldiers, who were about 500 miles out of eye-shot from Iraq.
After leaving Qatar on June 5, Air Force One flew over Iraq, tilting at 31,000 feet so Bush could look down on the sweltering city of Baghdad. Though far out of range of Iraqi weapons, Bush was surrounded by four F-18 fighter jets.
While Bush's decision to stay out of Iraq may have been justified by the continuing violence, there was an unsettling contrast between Bush taking a peak at Baghdad from 31,000 feet and American soldiers stuck patrolling its baking-hot streets day and night, possibly for the next several years.
Necessary Prudence
Bush's supporters naturally bristle at the suggestion that Bush is anything but a hero. In his defense, they argue that it makes no sense for Bush to put himself in harm's way when he has the larger responsibility as the U.S. head of state and when his Secret Service protectors are demanding that he avoid danger.
In a somewhat contradictory vein, Bush backers also cite his derring-do jet flight in full pilot gear onto the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, as a sign of his personal bravery. The White House has since acknowledged that the carrier was within range of the presidential helicopter, but that Bush wanted to do the jet landing and even took water survival classes in case the jet crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
When judging personal courage, it's also true that no one knows what thoughts go through another person's head or how a person draws that hazy line between prudence and fear. It's clear, too, that no one serving as president is ever out of danger from assassination.
Even as conservatives mocked President Bill Clinton as a cowardly draft dodger and some right-wing extremists fantasized about killing him, Clinton dove into crowds, giving his Secret Service detail fits. Living daily with the knowledge that dangerous people - whether the likes of Tim McVeigh or Osama bin Laden - want you dead is not the choice of a coward.
Right Man?
The larger question is whether Bush's life experiences do make him "the right man" for this moment in American history. Does a lifetime of avoiding consequences for one's decisions and actions make a person better qualified for the complex judgments of war and peace?
There is an argument to be made for that position. One could say that a person who has been insulated from the everyday experiences of the common man is less burdened with second thoughts. Also, lacking a personal sense of the human costs of war may make a leader less hesitant to commit troops to battle than someone who has been in war and has seen friends die.
But the counter-argument is that an incurious individual who has had limited contact with the world may well make judgments that are artificial and dangerous, perhaps driven more by ideology or wishful thinking than by practical assessments of what power can achieve and what reality looks like.
It is increasingly clear, for example, that Bush grossly miscalculated the situation in Iraq. Not only did Bush overstate the dangers from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but he underestimated the task of pacifying Iraq after the initial assault by U.S. forces.
Bush appears to have bought into his administration's own propaganda about how easy the war would be. Initially, the thought was that the "shock and awe" bombing of some government buildings in Baghdad would lead to Saddam Hussein's ouster followed by a rose-petal welcome for U.S. troops and a cooperative transition to a pro-U.S. government in Iraq. Next would come the neo-conservative dream of remaking the Arab world.
Looming Dangers
But the facts soon got in the way of a good story. "Shock and awe" failed to dislodge dictator Hussein. There was no popular uprising even in southern Iraq where the Shiite majority was considered hostile to Hussein's brutal regime. As U.S. troops advanced into Iraq, they encountered no WMD but found the Iraqi resistance stiffer than expected.
Some military analysts saw these developments as warning signs that the United States was heading toward a bloody debacle in Iraq. I cited some of these analysts in an article "Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down," which observed that Bush seemed to be mixing Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking about popular uprisings with a Black Hawk Down risk of putting U.S. forces in cultures that are both hostile and foreign.
Instead of reconsidering his course for the war, however, Bush ordered the invasion to proceed with greater ferocity and less concern about civilian casualties.
Desperate to kill Hussein, Bush ordered the bombing of an Iraqi residential restaurant on the faulty intelligence that Hussein might be eating there. Diners, including children, were ripped apart by the bombs. One mother found her daughter's torso and then her severed head. But U.S. intelligence now believes that Hussein wasn't there. All told, at least several thousand Iraqi civilians died in the U.S.-led invasion.
But victory supposedly cleansed all sins. When U.S. forces toppled Hussein's statue in Baghdad on April 9, triumphant Bush supporters lashed out at the skeptics for questioning his wisdom. Some war critics were accused of treason and became the targets of blacklists aimed at denying them work. This Web site received e-mail demands for retractions and apologies for articles that had contained warnings about the looming dangers.
New Scrutiny
Yet in the weeks that have followed - with first the failure to find any trigger-ready WMD and then the expanding Iraqi attacks on isolated U.S. forces - Bush's Iraq policy has come under greater scrutiny. It is now clear that the war didn't end with the toppled statue or with Bush's May 1 declaration of "Mission Accomplished." The war was just entering a new guerrilla phase.
Some war skeptics, such as former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, had predicted as much. Before Baghdad fell, Wilson wrote that Hussein "is preparing to go underground to fight a guerrilla campaign. ....If our presence is seen as an occupation, rather than a liberation, it is entirely possible that Saddam thinks he can rebound."
Wilson, who served in posts in Africa and Iraq, earlier had played a role in debunking claims - in February 2002 - that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons. Wilson said U.S. and British officials ignored his information as they chose to make the bogus Niger uranium claim a centerpiece in their warnings about Iraq's WMD.
"It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war," Wilson said. "It begs the question, what else are they lying about?" [Washington Post, July 6, 2003]
But Bush continues to show no doubt about his course of action. Rather than rethink the premises of the war in Iraq, Bush says he is determined to prevail. Indeed, that was the context of his "bring 'em on" remark. He was drawing new lines in the sand for American troops to defend.
"There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely," Bush said on July 2 in Washington. "They don't understand what they're talking about, if that's the case. ...There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
To Bush's defenders, this determination is another sign that he is "the right man" to destroy America's enemies. He's not someone who will cut and run.
But to his critics, and increasingly to the U.S. soldiers in Iraq calling for the Pentagon to "get our sorry asses out of here," a different conclusion is emerging. As conditions in Iraq degenerate into violent chaos, this critical view holds that Bush's mix of arrogance about his "gut" judgments and his lack of experience with real-world conditions is elevating - not lowering - the danger that the United States faces.
In this view, the continuing dangers to U.S. troops in Iraq have highlighted that George W. Bush may be "the wrong man" in the wrong place at a very wrong time.
Reprinted from Consortium News:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/
2003/070903a.html
Posted on Wednesday, July 09 @ 10:03:58 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
George W. Bush's combative exhortation to Iraqi resistance fighters to "bring 'em on" by launching more attacks against U.S. troops reminded his supporters why they see him as a war-hero president, what former aide and author David Frum dubbed "The Right Man" to lead the nation through post-Sept. 11 hostilities.
But Bush's tough-guy rhetoric may instead be leading the nation into a maze of dark alleys from which many Americans, especially young soldiers dispatched to a string of conflicts, will never emerge. There is a growing sense that Bush's life experience of underachieving privilege might make him entirely the wrong man for addressing the complex challenges the nation now faces.
Because of his family connections, Bush has never confronted the physical dangers that come with war, nor even the consequences of personal failure as an executive who's made bad decisions. His father's powerful friends have always been there to help, whether keeping Bush out of Vietnam or bailing out his sinking businesses or sparing him from a full vote count in Florida.
Even as a young man, Bush could say one thing and do another. He said he was for the Vietnam War, but accepted a home-side slot in the Texas Air National Guard arranged by his father's friends. He then appears to have shirked even that duty with still-unanswered questions about why he failed a flight physical and whether he went AWOL for a year.
According to the Boston Globe, "In his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly at all. And ... for a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen." [Boston Globe, May, 23, 2000]
In his early-to-mid adulthood, Bush continued to live a kind of risk-free life, benefiting from the generosity of his fathers' friends who bankrolled his failed business ventures and then set him up with sinecure positions on corporate boards. While other businessmen faced genuine risks of failure, Bush lived the charmed life of a n'er-do-well who could only fail up.
When it came to democracy and the fundamental right of American citizens to have their votes count - and be counted - Bush again didn't dare take any risks. He preferred the sure thing of a fix by his father's friends than winning or losing based on the actual ballots cast by voters.
After Election 2000, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount, Bush sent his lawyers to the U.S. Supreme Court to get five Republican justices to stop the counting of votes and hand him the White House. Though the U.S. news media largely spared Bush any political damage for this unprecedented act, many world leaders now roll their eyes when Bush proclaims his commitment to democracy around the globe.
Avoiding Risk
This pattern of avoiding personal risk has carried into his presidency. On Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon outside Washington, Bush was on a political trip to northern Florida. With administration officials claiming that Air Force One might be another target, Bush and his entourage fled west, first to Louisiana and then to Nebraska.
Meanwhile, other Americans held their ground in Washington, showing almost no panic even with the knowledge that a fourth hijacked plane was headed toward the capital. That plane never reached its destination because Americans onboard battled the hijackers for control and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. Hours after the danger had passed, Bush returned to Washington.
Bush didn't take chances either on his victory lap through the Middle East in June. Instead of following the example of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who visited British troops in the Iraqi city of Basra, Bush didn't make even a brief stop inside Iraq, as some political observers believed he would.
Instead Bush chose the much safer environs of a U.S. military base in Qatar, where he spoke in front of cheering U.S. soldiers far from the front lines. "I'm happy to see you and so are the long-suffering people of Iraq," Bush told the soldiers, who were about 500 miles out of eye-shot from Iraq.
After leaving Qatar on June 5, Air Force One flew over Iraq, tilting at 31,000 feet so Bush could look down on the sweltering city of Baghdad. Though far out of range of Iraqi weapons, Bush was surrounded by four F-18 fighter jets.
While Bush's decision to stay out of Iraq may have been justified by the continuing violence, there was an unsettling contrast between Bush taking a peak at Baghdad from 31,000 feet and American soldiers stuck patrolling its baking-hot streets day and night, possibly for the next several years.
Necessary Prudence
Bush's supporters naturally bristle at the suggestion that Bush is anything but a hero. In his defense, they argue that it makes no sense for Bush to put himself in harm's way when he has the larger responsibility as the U.S. head of state and when his Secret Service protectors are demanding that he avoid danger.
In a somewhat contradictory vein, Bush backers also cite his derring-do jet flight in full pilot gear onto the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, as a sign of his personal bravery. The White House has since acknowledged that the carrier was within range of the presidential helicopter, but that Bush wanted to do the jet landing and even took water survival classes in case the jet crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
When judging personal courage, it's also true that no one knows what thoughts go through another person's head or how a person draws that hazy line between prudence and fear. It's clear, too, that no one serving as president is ever out of danger from assassination.
Even as conservatives mocked President Bill Clinton as a cowardly draft dodger and some right-wing extremists fantasized about killing him, Clinton dove into crowds, giving his Secret Service detail fits. Living daily with the knowledge that dangerous people - whether the likes of Tim McVeigh or Osama bin Laden - want you dead is not the choice of a coward.
Right Man?
The larger question is whether Bush's life experiences do make him "the right man" for this moment in American history. Does a lifetime of avoiding consequences for one's decisions and actions make a person better qualified for the complex judgments of war and peace?
There is an argument to be made for that position. One could say that a person who has been insulated from the everyday experiences of the common man is less burdened with second thoughts. Also, lacking a personal sense of the human costs of war may make a leader less hesitant to commit troops to battle than someone who has been in war and has seen friends die.
But the counter-argument is that an incurious individual who has had limited contact with the world may well make judgments that are artificial and dangerous, perhaps driven more by ideology or wishful thinking than by practical assessments of what power can achieve and what reality looks like.
It is increasingly clear, for example, that Bush grossly miscalculated the situation in Iraq. Not only did Bush overstate the dangers from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but he underestimated the task of pacifying Iraq after the initial assault by U.S. forces.
Bush appears to have bought into his administration's own propaganda about how easy the war would be. Initially, the thought was that the "shock and awe" bombing of some government buildings in Baghdad would lead to Saddam Hussein's ouster followed by a rose-petal welcome for U.S. troops and a cooperative transition to a pro-U.S. government in Iraq. Next would come the neo-conservative dream of remaking the Arab world.
Looming Dangers
But the facts soon got in the way of a good story. "Shock and awe" failed to dislodge dictator Hussein. There was no popular uprising even in southern Iraq where the Shiite majority was considered hostile to Hussein's brutal regime. As U.S. troops advanced into Iraq, they encountered no WMD but found the Iraqi resistance stiffer than expected.
Some military analysts saw these developments as warning signs that the United States was heading toward a bloody debacle in Iraq. I cited some of these analysts in an article "Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down," which observed that Bush seemed to be mixing Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking about popular uprisings with a Black Hawk Down risk of putting U.S. forces in cultures that are both hostile and foreign.
Instead of reconsidering his course for the war, however, Bush ordered the invasion to proceed with greater ferocity and less concern about civilian casualties.
Desperate to kill Hussein, Bush ordered the bombing of an Iraqi residential restaurant on the faulty intelligence that Hussein might be eating there. Diners, including children, were ripped apart by the bombs. One mother found her daughter's torso and then her severed head. But U.S. intelligence now believes that Hussein wasn't there. All told, at least several thousand Iraqi civilians died in the U.S.-led invasion.
But victory supposedly cleansed all sins. When U.S. forces toppled Hussein's statue in Baghdad on April 9, triumphant Bush supporters lashed out at the skeptics for questioning his wisdom. Some war critics were accused of treason and became the targets of blacklists aimed at denying them work. This Web site received e-mail demands for retractions and apologies for articles that had contained warnings about the looming dangers.
New Scrutiny
Yet in the weeks that have followed - with first the failure to find any trigger-ready WMD and then the expanding Iraqi attacks on isolated U.S. forces - Bush's Iraq policy has come under greater scrutiny. It is now clear that the war didn't end with the toppled statue or with Bush's May 1 declaration of "Mission Accomplished." The war was just entering a new guerrilla phase.
Some war skeptics, such as former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, had predicted as much. Before Baghdad fell, Wilson wrote that Hussein "is preparing to go underground to fight a guerrilla campaign. ....If our presence is seen as an occupation, rather than a liberation, it is entirely possible that Saddam thinks he can rebound."
Wilson, who served in posts in Africa and Iraq, earlier had played a role in debunking claims - in February 2002 - that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons. Wilson said U.S. and British officials ignored his information as they chose to make the bogus Niger uranium claim a centerpiece in their warnings about Iraq's WMD.
"It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war," Wilson said. "It begs the question, what else are they lying about?" [Washington Post, July 6, 2003]
But Bush continues to show no doubt about his course of action. Rather than rethink the premises of the war in Iraq, Bush says he is determined to prevail. Indeed, that was the context of his "bring 'em on" remark. He was drawing new lines in the sand for American troops to defend.
"There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely," Bush said on July 2 in Washington. "They don't understand what they're talking about, if that's the case. ...There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
To Bush's defenders, this determination is another sign that he is "the right man" to destroy America's enemies. He's not someone who will cut and run.
But to his critics, and increasingly to the U.S. soldiers in Iraq calling for the Pentagon to "get our sorry asses out of here," a different conclusion is emerging. As conditions in Iraq degenerate into violent chaos, this critical view holds that Bush's mix of arrogance about his "gut" judgments and his lack of experience with real-world conditions is elevating - not lowering - the danger that the United States faces.
In this view, the continuing dangers to U.S. troops in Iraq have highlighted that George W. Bush may be "the wrong man" in the wrong place at a very wrong time.
Reprinted from Consortium News:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/
2003/070903a.html
Saturday, July 05, 2003
W. David Jenkins III: 'George, would you PLEASE shut up!'
Contributed by americaheldhostile on Friday, July 04 @ 08:32:50 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By W. David Jenkins III, America Held Hostile
All right already, that is more than enough! What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Have you completely lost your mind? Is there anybody out there keeping an eye on you, kid? I really hate to rant but I just can't let this go.
July 2 - "There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation." - Reuters
July 3 - A day after President Bush asserted that coalition forces in Iraq were prepared to deal with any security threat; American troops came under attack again today, with 10 soldiers wounded in three separate incidents. - New York Times
George, the macho routine - and I do mean "routine" - has got to go. The fact that we have kids getting killed because you lied is a travesty in and of itself. Now, once again, you start up the he-man schtick and people start getting hurt - and worse. Haven't you or any of your people learned a damned thing?
"Bring them on?"
Exactly what is your problem?
Are you bothered by the fact that you were not man enough to actually serve when it was your turn? Are you making up for the fact that you couldn't even fulfill your cushy assignment back in the early '70s because you were a blooming mess and couldn't pass a urine test? What, now you feel the need to talk tough so nobody will question what an actual coward you are? You are a coward, George. We saw that long before 9/11.
Your cowardice is the reason for what we now know as "First Amendment Zones." You know those heavily policed, barricaded, way-out-of-the-way places for people who voice their accurate opinions of you. They're usually placed so far away from where you appear that you can be assured you'll never see or hear any dissent.
And we all know why.
Because you're afraid of confrontation in any form. You've been a scaredy-cat since you stole office! Hiding under canopies and limiting access by the press as well as those who abhor you and know you for the fake that you are. George W. Bush, you have given birth to a new phrase!
"He-Man in Hiding!"
We all learned - well, most of us did - what a pathetic excuse for a "president" you are when you did the old "dead or alive" nonsense when it came to Osama bin Laden. "Smoke 'em out," you said. Mister big man.
Well, President Bounty Hunter, where the hell is he?
Hasn't it ever dawned on you that if you hadn't instructed people like John O'Neill to lay off investigating bin Laden prior to the attack, none of that 9/11 stuff would have happened? Is that why you're hiding over 800 pages of the investigative report by the Senate?
So, Mister Dead-or-Alive…where the hell is Osama?
Oh, you thought we forgot?
Y'know, George, it takes more than just talk to make you a man. It takes more than just talk to make you a leader. Sure, you have the ever-obedient sheep in the liberal media who are stretching things to the max to make you look good. Lucky for you, most of the people who rely on American media for their information are idiots who actually think that that aircraft carrier landing was something to be admired. You need to remember one thing, George.
The world is not your Congress.
Just because most of the representatives in both Houses believed every lie you told doesn't make everybody else just as compliant. Just because the lap dogs at Fox "News" wet themselves every time they mention your name doesn't mean the rest of the world community - including many of us here at home - buy your carefully manufactured machismo. Your testosterone complex is trying our patience and - worst of all - killing people who have ten times more cajones than you could ever hope to have.
For Chrissakes, George, you didn't even have the balls (excuse me) to land in Iraq a few weeks ago. No, you did a fly-over. At least your puppy, Tony Blair, had it in him to walk among the people in Basra. But you? You pathetic chicken. You ran and hid like you did on 9/11, Mr. Tough Guy. You are an embarrassment - and worst of all - you're a dangerous embarrassment. Your bravado is killing people.
"Bring them on!"
You pompous S.O.B. - you spoiled little chicken "stuff" brat. Please, please, please, shut your stupid mouth! Your cowardice is killing Americans. And Iraqis. Your big, stupid mouth is not helping the huge mess your lies have created! The world is not Old West Texas. You're not even Texas! Every time you open your big mouth either somebody gets killed or wounded or the stock market falls. Your big mouth just got ten people wounded! There's no telling what your oral nonsense will produce tomorrow.
Shut up, George! You're killing people, you coward!
*******
Hey guys, I don't know about you but I feel a heck of a lot better now - at least I can breathe. And breathing always allows me to be a little creative.
A few months ago, Americans were told to buy mass quantities of duct tape to protect themselves from those who would do them harm. I know there just have to be many, many rolls of duct tape out there that have gone un-used. And…
I have a great idea.
The next time George W. Bush decides it's time to get macho, somebody - please - oh please, grab a roll of that duct tape and wrap it around his whole head. You'll save a life and protect our national security.
It's the patriotic thing to do, the only thing to do.
Reprinted from America Held Hostile:
http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed070403-1.shtml
Contributed by americaheldhostile on Friday, July 04 @ 08:32:50 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By W. David Jenkins III, America Held Hostile
All right already, that is more than enough! What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Have you completely lost your mind? Is there anybody out there keeping an eye on you, kid? I really hate to rant but I just can't let this go.
July 2 - "There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation." - Reuters
July 3 - A day after President Bush asserted that coalition forces in Iraq were prepared to deal with any security threat; American troops came under attack again today, with 10 soldiers wounded in three separate incidents. - New York Times
George, the macho routine - and I do mean "routine" - has got to go. The fact that we have kids getting killed because you lied is a travesty in and of itself. Now, once again, you start up the he-man schtick and people start getting hurt - and worse. Haven't you or any of your people learned a damned thing?
"Bring them on?"
Exactly what is your problem?
Are you bothered by the fact that you were not man enough to actually serve when it was your turn? Are you making up for the fact that you couldn't even fulfill your cushy assignment back in the early '70s because you were a blooming mess and couldn't pass a urine test? What, now you feel the need to talk tough so nobody will question what an actual coward you are? You are a coward, George. We saw that long before 9/11.
Your cowardice is the reason for what we now know as "First Amendment Zones." You know those heavily policed, barricaded, way-out-of-the-way places for people who voice their accurate opinions of you. They're usually placed so far away from where you appear that you can be assured you'll never see or hear any dissent.
And we all know why.
Because you're afraid of confrontation in any form. You've been a scaredy-cat since you stole office! Hiding under canopies and limiting access by the press as well as those who abhor you and know you for the fake that you are. George W. Bush, you have given birth to a new phrase!
"He-Man in Hiding!"
We all learned - well, most of us did - what a pathetic excuse for a "president" you are when you did the old "dead or alive" nonsense when it came to Osama bin Laden. "Smoke 'em out," you said. Mister big man.
Well, President Bounty Hunter, where the hell is he?
Hasn't it ever dawned on you that if you hadn't instructed people like John O'Neill to lay off investigating bin Laden prior to the attack, none of that 9/11 stuff would have happened? Is that why you're hiding over 800 pages of the investigative report by the Senate?
So, Mister Dead-or-Alive…where the hell is Osama?
Oh, you thought we forgot?
Y'know, George, it takes more than just talk to make you a man. It takes more than just talk to make you a leader. Sure, you have the ever-obedient sheep in the liberal media who are stretching things to the max to make you look good. Lucky for you, most of the people who rely on American media for their information are idiots who actually think that that aircraft carrier landing was something to be admired. You need to remember one thing, George.
The world is not your Congress.
Just because most of the representatives in both Houses believed every lie you told doesn't make everybody else just as compliant. Just because the lap dogs at Fox "News" wet themselves every time they mention your name doesn't mean the rest of the world community - including many of us here at home - buy your carefully manufactured machismo. Your testosterone complex is trying our patience and - worst of all - killing people who have ten times more cajones than you could ever hope to have.
For Chrissakes, George, you didn't even have the balls (excuse me) to land in Iraq a few weeks ago. No, you did a fly-over. At least your puppy, Tony Blair, had it in him to walk among the people in Basra. But you? You pathetic chicken. You ran and hid like you did on 9/11, Mr. Tough Guy. You are an embarrassment - and worst of all - you're a dangerous embarrassment. Your bravado is killing people.
"Bring them on!"
You pompous S.O.B. - you spoiled little chicken "stuff" brat. Please, please, please, shut your stupid mouth! Your cowardice is killing Americans. And Iraqis. Your big, stupid mouth is not helping the huge mess your lies have created! The world is not Old West Texas. You're not even Texas! Every time you open your big mouth either somebody gets killed or wounded or the stock market falls. Your big mouth just got ten people wounded! There's no telling what your oral nonsense will produce tomorrow.
Shut up, George! You're killing people, you coward!
*******
Hey guys, I don't know about you but I feel a heck of a lot better now - at least I can breathe. And breathing always allows me to be a little creative.
A few months ago, Americans were told to buy mass quantities of duct tape to protect themselves from those who would do them harm. I know there just have to be many, many rolls of duct tape out there that have gone un-used. And…
I have a great idea.
The next time George W. Bush decides it's time to get macho, somebody - please - oh please, grab a roll of that duct tape and wrap it around his whole head. You'll save a life and protect our national security.
It's the patriotic thing to do, the only thing to do.
Reprinted from America Held Hostile:
http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed070403-1.shtml
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Robert Scheer: 'Blame Bush in California's fiscal crisis'
Posted on Tuesday, July 01 @ 10:46:38 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
The other day a woman asked me to sign a petition calling for the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. Why, I asked. Because he bankrupted the state, she said. When I begged to differ that it was the Bush administration and its buddies at companies like Enron that had put the state into an economic tailspin, she said she was being paid according to the number of petitions signed and didn't really care. But voters should care because Davis is being used as a fall guy for problems that are beyond his control.
Remember Enron and those other scandals that cost folks their jobs and their 401(k) savings? They were a result of deregulation, the mantra of the Republicans. Deregulation was most disastrous for California's energy market, in which a crisis cost jobs and threw the world's fifth-largest economy into long-term disruption. This was not the normal workings of the market but the result of market manipulation by officials of Enron and other energy companies, some of whom are on their way to trial.
Still out cruising the boulevards is our president's once close friend, Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. A major contributor to Bush family political campaigns and former Enron chief executive, Lay invented the energy trading game. It was made possible by his successful lobbying for the 1992 Energy Policy Act, signed into law by the elder Bush. That law allowed a minor Texas company to mushroom into the world's largest energy titan before it went poof.
Daddy Bush also tended to Enron's rise by appointing Wendy L. Gramm to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which promptly exempted electricity trading from the regulatory oversight covering other commodities. Gramm went on to serve on Enron's board of directors and its so-called auditing committee. Her husband, Phil Gramm, then a GOP senator from Texas, later pushed through legislation further deregulating the industry.
When the younger Bush ran for president, he turned to Lay, who became the single biggest contributor to Bush's campaign. George W. returned the favor big-time by appointing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission members who looked the other way when Enron and its fellow swindler companies were fleecing California. These appointees insisted that California's problems were of its own making and would have to be solved without the imposition of the wholesale energy price caps that would have saved taxpayers from a crushing burden.
Vice President Dick Cheney emerged from secret meetings with Enron executives and stated that the administration considered wholesale price caps a "mistake" because "there isn't anything that can be done short-term to produce more kilowatts this summer." Either Cheney was lying or his Enron buddies were lying to him because, at the time, Enron was routing electricity from California to sell at a higher price in Oregon. Federal price controls would have prevented Enron and the other companies from playing one state against another.
It is disingenuous for California Republicans to now blame Davis rather than their man Bush for the state's economic problems. Only last week, the Republican-dominated FERC banned Enron from selling electricity as punishment for having severely distorted Western energy markets. Enron and 60 other companies were ordered to show why they should not be forced to return their illegally gained profits.
FERC at the same time said California must honor $12 billion in long-term contracts written under duress with the same companies that were gaming the market. The contradiction was acknowledged by commission Chairman Patrick H. Wood III: "I guess people could go, 'Gosh, these are the same parties that show up in those other [market-gaming] cases.' "
Duh! No kidding. They are being rewarded for scamming the state, which contributed to the budget crisis, and schoolchildren will have to pay the price.
Californians provide much more to the federal government in taxes than they get back in services. The feds should bail out the states, which cannot indulge in the red-ink financing that has become a specialty of the Bush administration.
It is absurd to blame current difficulties on any state's governor, Republican or Democrat. It is the Bush administration that has mismanaged a successful economy inherited from Bill Clinton. It is the Bush administration that should bear responsibility for the difficulties being experienced by state governments — and it should at least help California as much as it is helping our newest state, Iraq.
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/
commentary/la-oe-scheer1jul01,1,1035145.column
Posted on Tuesday, July 01 @ 10:46:38 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
The other day a woman asked me to sign a petition calling for the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. Why, I asked. Because he bankrupted the state, she said. When I begged to differ that it was the Bush administration and its buddies at companies like Enron that had put the state into an economic tailspin, she said she was being paid according to the number of petitions signed and didn't really care. But voters should care because Davis is being used as a fall guy for problems that are beyond his control.
Remember Enron and those other scandals that cost folks their jobs and their 401(k) savings? They were a result of deregulation, the mantra of the Republicans. Deregulation was most disastrous for California's energy market, in which a crisis cost jobs and threw the world's fifth-largest economy into long-term disruption. This was not the normal workings of the market but the result of market manipulation by officials of Enron and other energy companies, some of whom are on their way to trial.
Still out cruising the boulevards is our president's once close friend, Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. A major contributor to Bush family political campaigns and former Enron chief executive, Lay invented the energy trading game. It was made possible by his successful lobbying for the 1992 Energy Policy Act, signed into law by the elder Bush. That law allowed a minor Texas company to mushroom into the world's largest energy titan before it went poof.
Daddy Bush also tended to Enron's rise by appointing Wendy L. Gramm to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which promptly exempted electricity trading from the regulatory oversight covering other commodities. Gramm went on to serve on Enron's board of directors and its so-called auditing committee. Her husband, Phil Gramm, then a GOP senator from Texas, later pushed through legislation further deregulating the industry.
When the younger Bush ran for president, he turned to Lay, who became the single biggest contributor to Bush's campaign. George W. returned the favor big-time by appointing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission members who looked the other way when Enron and its fellow swindler companies were fleecing California. These appointees insisted that California's problems were of its own making and would have to be solved without the imposition of the wholesale energy price caps that would have saved taxpayers from a crushing burden.
Vice President Dick Cheney emerged from secret meetings with Enron executives and stated that the administration considered wholesale price caps a "mistake" because "there isn't anything that can be done short-term to produce more kilowatts this summer." Either Cheney was lying or his Enron buddies were lying to him because, at the time, Enron was routing electricity from California to sell at a higher price in Oregon. Federal price controls would have prevented Enron and the other companies from playing one state against another.
It is disingenuous for California Republicans to now blame Davis rather than their man Bush for the state's economic problems. Only last week, the Republican-dominated FERC banned Enron from selling electricity as punishment for having severely distorted Western energy markets. Enron and 60 other companies were ordered to show why they should not be forced to return their illegally gained profits.
FERC at the same time said California must honor $12 billion in long-term contracts written under duress with the same companies that were gaming the market. The contradiction was acknowledged by commission Chairman Patrick H. Wood III: "I guess people could go, 'Gosh, these are the same parties that show up in those other [market-gaming] cases.' "
Duh! No kidding. They are being rewarded for scamming the state, which contributed to the budget crisis, and schoolchildren will have to pay the price.
Californians provide much more to the federal government in taxes than they get back in services. The feds should bail out the states, which cannot indulge in the red-ink financing that has become a specialty of the Bush administration.
It is absurd to blame current difficulties on any state's governor, Republican or Democrat. It is the Bush administration that has mismanaged a successful economy inherited from Bill Clinton. It is the Bush administration that should bear responsibility for the difficulties being experienced by state governments — and it should at least help California as much as it is helping our newest state, Iraq.
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/
commentary/la-oe-scheer1jul01,1,1035145.column
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
John Moyers: 'In Bush we trust?'
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:11:03 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By John Moyers, TomPaine.com
George W. Bush is a liar. There, I said it -- the "L" word. Someone in Washington had to.
Thanks to AWOL WMD, people all across America have the "L" word on their lips, but here in D.C. it's still a hard one to mouth. Few Washington-based commentators and fewer politicians have done so.
On Sunday, June 22, The New York Times had a chance to be the first big-league outfit to say it plainly. But the headline on Washington-based reporter David E. Rosenbaum's story, "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?" was a tip that the story would pull up short. Rosenbaum considered a narrow question -- whether Mr. Bush has told any neat, tidy, obvious lies -- and concluded he has not (a couple of fibs and distortions, maybe, but no lies).
Whether the president twisted intelligence on WMD "can probably be answered conclusively only by historians when all the evidence and consequences are known," Rosenbaum wrote. (So, our kids get to pay the debt for our imperial aspirations and our tax breaks, and someday they'll be the first to know how it all happened. Great.)
Distance seems to make criticism easier. The Times' Princeton-based columnist Paul Krugman has written that the administration "systematically and brazenly distorts the facts" and is "choosing and exaggerating intelligence" and "misleading the public."
Close, but still no "L" word.
Boston-based William Rivers Pitt isn't daunted: The administration "lied us into a war," writes the high-school teacher who moonlights as a columnist for Truthout.org. "Trust a teacher on this. We can spot liars who have not done their homework a mile away."
A full-page ad in The New York Times last week by MoveOn.org and Win Without War, groups with members across the nation, put it plainly and hoisted the president on his own pointed WMD -- words of mass distortion. Under the headline "MISLEADER" the ad stacked up five of Mr. Bush's pre-war whoppers and noted, "It would be a tragedy if young men and women were sent to die for a lie." (Full disclosure: TomPaine.com liked the ad so much, we paid to run it this week in The Weekly Standard.)
Harley Sorensen, writing on SFGate.com, gets the prize for directness: "Why mince words? These are the facts: 1) President George W. Bush is a liar. 2) Secretary of State Colin Powell is a liar. 3) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a liar. 4) National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is a liar." No mincing there.
So the word is out there in different forms -- lie, lies, lying, liar. When will Mr. Bush's putative opponents in government, the Democrats, decide it's time to tell it like it is?
Democrats have accused the president of "a pattern of deception and deceit" (Sen. Bob Graham), said he's not been "entirely truthful" (Howard Dean), and led us to war based on "unfounded assertions" (Rep. Dennis Kucinich). Strong stuff, but no "L" word.
Opposition worthy of the name would push the GOP-controlled House and Senate hearings beyond the question of what the intelligence community knew about WMD, where it seems stalled.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, could invoke committee rules that would allow his minority party to launch a full investigation. But he won't -- reportedly for fear of being seen as partisan.
If this isn't the time for partisanship -- after all, we're talking about manipulations that led the nation into war -- what is? Rockefeller's timidity is allowing committee Republicans to cover what looks more every day like a lie of literally global magnitude.
Perhaps Dems fear the day when WMD are found (and they will be found, by hook or by crook). But they needn't worry -- even if misleading the nation to war weren't an issue, Mr. Bush's record is full of lies.
The president says he supports our troops -- but he proposed cutting veterans' benefits and sidestepped a law meant to protect the health of soldiers headed for combat. His "leave no child behind" pledge is a fraud -- he's vastly underfunded his own education plan, and he signed the recent tax bill even after his GOP minions sneakily removed provisions benefiting low-income families. Mr. Bush says he's a "compassionate conservative," but only a hard-hearted radical would push his Robin-Hood-in-reverse tax policies. He says he wants to expand national service programs, but he's presiding over a huge cut in AmeriCorps programs. Candidate Bush promised to be "a uniter, not a divider," but his foreign policies have profoundly divided the international community, isolated America and devalued her stock in the eyes of world.
Mr. Bush's administration is built on lies, which means the granddaddy of them all is his promise to restore "honor and integrity" to the Oval Office.
Presidential Brain Karl Rove must be worried. Rove knows that any president's popularity rests more on whether voters think he's a believable and admirable leader than on the substance of issues. George W. Bush has that going for him -- people might not like his policies (if they understand them at all), but they like his swagger and certitude, and they trust him to do what he says.
But that trust could crumble if questions linger about whether the White House deceived us into war. Few of the president's allies could or would defend that -- even GOP-TV (a.k.a. Fox News) would have trouble explaining away that one.
John Moyers is Editor-in-Chief of TomPaine.com.
Reprinted from TomPaine.com:
http://www.tompaine.com/
feature2.cfm/ID/8210
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:11:03 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By John Moyers, TomPaine.com
George W. Bush is a liar. There, I said it -- the "L" word. Someone in Washington had to.
Thanks to AWOL WMD, people all across America have the "L" word on their lips, but here in D.C. it's still a hard one to mouth. Few Washington-based commentators and fewer politicians have done so.
On Sunday, June 22, The New York Times had a chance to be the first big-league outfit to say it plainly. But the headline on Washington-based reporter David E. Rosenbaum's story, "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?" was a tip that the story would pull up short. Rosenbaum considered a narrow question -- whether Mr. Bush has told any neat, tidy, obvious lies -- and concluded he has not (a couple of fibs and distortions, maybe, but no lies).
Whether the president twisted intelligence on WMD "can probably be answered conclusively only by historians when all the evidence and consequences are known," Rosenbaum wrote. (So, our kids get to pay the debt for our imperial aspirations and our tax breaks, and someday they'll be the first to know how it all happened. Great.)
Distance seems to make criticism easier. The Times' Princeton-based columnist Paul Krugman has written that the administration "systematically and brazenly distorts the facts" and is "choosing and exaggerating intelligence" and "misleading the public."
Close, but still no "L" word.
Boston-based William Rivers Pitt isn't daunted: The administration "lied us into a war," writes the high-school teacher who moonlights as a columnist for Truthout.org. "Trust a teacher on this. We can spot liars who have not done their homework a mile away."
A full-page ad in The New York Times last week by MoveOn.org and Win Without War, groups with members across the nation, put it plainly and hoisted the president on his own pointed WMD -- words of mass distortion. Under the headline "MISLEADER" the ad stacked up five of Mr. Bush's pre-war whoppers and noted, "It would be a tragedy if young men and women were sent to die for a lie." (Full disclosure: TomPaine.com liked the ad so much, we paid to run it this week in The Weekly Standard.)
Harley Sorensen, writing on SFGate.com, gets the prize for directness: "Why mince words? These are the facts: 1) President George W. Bush is a liar. 2) Secretary of State Colin Powell is a liar. 3) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a liar. 4) National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is a liar." No mincing there.
So the word is out there in different forms -- lie, lies, lying, liar. When will Mr. Bush's putative opponents in government, the Democrats, decide it's time to tell it like it is?
Democrats have accused the president of "a pattern of deception and deceit" (Sen. Bob Graham), said he's not been "entirely truthful" (Howard Dean), and led us to war based on "unfounded assertions" (Rep. Dennis Kucinich). Strong stuff, but no "L" word.
Opposition worthy of the name would push the GOP-controlled House and Senate hearings beyond the question of what the intelligence community knew about WMD, where it seems stalled.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, could invoke committee rules that would allow his minority party to launch a full investigation. But he won't -- reportedly for fear of being seen as partisan.
If this isn't the time for partisanship -- after all, we're talking about manipulations that led the nation into war -- what is? Rockefeller's timidity is allowing committee Republicans to cover what looks more every day like a lie of literally global magnitude.
Perhaps Dems fear the day when WMD are found (and they will be found, by hook or by crook). But they needn't worry -- even if misleading the nation to war weren't an issue, Mr. Bush's record is full of lies.
The president says he supports our troops -- but he proposed cutting veterans' benefits and sidestepped a law meant to protect the health of soldiers headed for combat. His "leave no child behind" pledge is a fraud -- he's vastly underfunded his own education plan, and he signed the recent tax bill even after his GOP minions sneakily removed provisions benefiting low-income families. Mr. Bush says he's a "compassionate conservative," but only a hard-hearted radical would push his Robin-Hood-in-reverse tax policies. He says he wants to expand national service programs, but he's presiding over a huge cut in AmeriCorps programs. Candidate Bush promised to be "a uniter, not a divider," but his foreign policies have profoundly divided the international community, isolated America and devalued her stock in the eyes of world.
Mr. Bush's administration is built on lies, which means the granddaddy of them all is his promise to restore "honor and integrity" to the Oval Office.
Presidential Brain Karl Rove must be worried. Rove knows that any president's popularity rests more on whether voters think he's a believable and admirable leader than on the substance of issues. George W. Bush has that going for him -- people might not like his policies (if they understand them at all), but they like his swagger and certitude, and they trust him to do what he says.
But that trust could crumble if questions linger about whether the White House deceived us into war. Few of the president's allies could or would defend that -- even GOP-TV (a.k.a. Fox News) would have trouble explaining away that one.
John Moyers is Editor-in-Chief of TomPaine.com.
Reprinted from TomPaine.com:
http://www.tompaine.com/
feature2.cfm/ID/8210
Bridget Gibson: 'Incredible shrinking WMDs'
Contributed by americaheldhostile on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:13:15 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Bridget Gibson, America Held Hostile
"With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed real tears, although at that very moment or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "you know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath." - Fyodor Dostoevsky
On September 20, 2001, George Walker Bush received a letter from the members of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which stated, in part:
Iraq: We agree with Secretary of State Powell's recent statement that Saddam Hussein "is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth¼." It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a "safe zone" in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
From that moment on, we were told by George Walker Bush that there was an "axis of evil" comprised of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. He told us that Iraq had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax, had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, had several mobile biological weapons labs. He told us that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell testified before the United Nations Security Council that "Hussein and his regime have made no effort--no effort--to disarm as required by the international community." He stated, "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
On March 18, 2003, George Walker Bush said "We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities."
The facts do not support George Bush's or Colin Powell's statements. These two men testified before all of the people of our great country and the representatives of other nations falsely.
The document that purported to show the connection of Iraq seeking enriched uranium had been declared a forgery long before George Walker Bush uttered those words in his State of the Union Address in January 2003. The "intelligence" documents that Colin Powell waved in the air were plagiarized from the thesis of a college student that was more than twelve years old.
The proof of their statements has been shown to be false in the weeks following George Walker Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.
On June 21, 2003, George Walker Bush said "The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed. We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes,"
That's a far cry from his earlier testimonies of quantities of WMDs. Now we are looking for papers and documents of past "programs," not actual weapons.
The "mobile biological weapons labs" have been found to be units sold to Iraq by Great Britain for the purpose of inflating artillery balloons with hydrogen.
We have found fertilizer factories, swimming pools and vacuum cleaners.
We have sacrificed the lives of almost two hundred of our best and bravest. We have caused the deaths of approximately 10,000 Iraqi civilians.
We have found no weapons of mass destruction.
We, my friends, have been played for fools. We have been lied to.
Reprinted from America Held Hostile:
http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed062503.shtml
Contributed by americaheldhostile on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:13:15 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Bridget Gibson, America Held Hostile
"With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed real tears, although at that very moment or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "you know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath." - Fyodor Dostoevsky
On September 20, 2001, George Walker Bush received a letter from the members of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which stated, in part:
Iraq: We agree with Secretary of State Powell's recent statement that Saddam Hussein "is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth¼." It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a "safe zone" in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
From that moment on, we were told by George Walker Bush that there was an "axis of evil" comprised of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. He told us that Iraq had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax, had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, had several mobile biological weapons labs. He told us that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell testified before the United Nations Security Council that "Hussein and his regime have made no effort--no effort--to disarm as required by the international community." He stated, "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
On March 18, 2003, George Walker Bush said "We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities."
The facts do not support George Bush's or Colin Powell's statements. These two men testified before all of the people of our great country and the representatives of other nations falsely.
The document that purported to show the connection of Iraq seeking enriched uranium had been declared a forgery long before George Walker Bush uttered those words in his State of the Union Address in January 2003. The "intelligence" documents that Colin Powell waved in the air were plagiarized from the thesis of a college student that was more than twelve years old.
The proof of their statements has been shown to be false in the weeks following George Walker Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.
On June 21, 2003, George Walker Bush said "The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed. We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes,"
That's a far cry from his earlier testimonies of quantities of WMDs. Now we are looking for papers and documents of past "programs," not actual weapons.
The "mobile biological weapons labs" have been found to be units sold to Iraq by Great Britain for the purpose of inflating artillery balloons with hydrogen.
We have found fertilizer factories, swimming pools and vacuum cleaners.
We have sacrificed the lives of almost two hundred of our best and bravest. We have caused the deaths of approximately 10,000 Iraqi civilians.
We have found no weapons of mass destruction.
We, my friends, have been played for fools. We have been lied to.
Reprinted from America Held Hostile:
http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed062503.shtml
Sam Parry: 'Bush's Iraqi albatross'
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:14:19 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sam Parry, Consortium News
Political adviser Karl Rove may have envisioned George W. Bush in his Top Gun costume as a killer 30-second TV spot for Campaign 2004. But the image of a swaggering Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln is turning quickly into a political albatross as U.S. troops continue to die in what's becoming a nasty guerrilla war in Iraq.
Bush's flight-suit scene could become a reminder of Bush's reckless over-confidence in declaring "Mission Accomplished," much as the image of Michael Dukakis sitting in a tank came to represent the Democratic nominee's woeful 1988 presidential campaign. If the Iraqi violence continues at its recent pace, sometime later this year the number of American soldiers killed since May 1, when Bush donned the flight suit, will exceed the 138 soldiers who died during the so-called major combat. As of Friday, the Pentagon put the number of post-May 1 dead at 55.
Having recognized this political danger, the White House pushed Bush out on Saturday in a preemptive strike, laying the groundwork for accusing anyone who questions the open-ended occupation of Iraq as defeatist or unwilling to stand with "the men and women of our military." Former Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond warned that criticism from Democrats would reveal "the huge disconnect between the liberals who control the Democratic Party and the rest of America." [NYT, June 22, 2003]
But the mounting death toll in Iraq is only part of a troubling picture about Bush's leadership that could come back to haunt Republicans in next year's elections. The growing frustrations voiced by exhausted U.S. troops sweltering in Iraq, the crumbling security situation in Afghanistan and the grumbling of the Sept. 11 families over Bush's cover-up of that intelligence failure may turn Bush's expected strong suit - the war on terror - into a very weak hand.
Combined with the loss of nearly three million jobs and record budget deficits - after President Bill Clinton's 22 million new jobs and record surpluses - Bush might reasonably be seen as a very vulnerable incumbent.
Pro-Bush Media
Nevertheless, the prevailing conventional wisdom still holds that Bush is pretty much a shoo-in for a second term, a judgment that is more a testament to conservative domination of the U.S. news media than Bush's record. The pro-Bush side either exercises direct control over important media outlets - such as Fox News, AM talk radio, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times - or can intimidate mainstream journalists who fear career consequences from criticizing Bush.
So, for months now, the public has been conditioned to believe in Bush's invincibility. MSNBC pundit Christopher Matthews pronounced any 2004 Democratic nominee to be "a sacrificial lamb." [The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Nov. 14, 2002] "The Dems are doomed to lose the 2004 presidential election," declared David Frum. [National Review Online, Jan. 14, 2003]
In recent weeks, the cable news networks have framed the central campaign debate with the headline: "Bush - Is He Unbeatable?" They have shied away from asking: "Bush - Does He Deserve a Second Term?"
Largely because of his media advantage, Bush maintains his carefully crafted image as a straight talker - although there's arguably less truth-telling at this White House than there was when Bill Clinton lied about his sex life. Rather than level with the American people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq, Bush exaggerated claims about the imminent threat that was posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Now, as Bush's pre-war assertions about weapons of mass destruction are failing to match the reality that the U.S. troops are finding on the ground, Bush and his top aides have lashed out at critics for engaging in "historical revisionism." Increasingly, Bush is looking like a politician who just won't accept responsibility for his actions and will say or do anything to stay in office. [For details about the Iraq exaggerations, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush & the End of Reason."]
On domestic policy, Bush has left a lengthening trail of broken campaign promises. For instance, he had vowed to pay off the national debt while still affording tax cuts and claiming to set aside $1 trillion of the surplus for unforeseen calamities.
Now, Bush's $3 trillion in tax cuts and the struggling economy are pushing the federal government deeper and deeper into the red. This year's budget is expected to run a record deficit of between $400 billion and $500 billion, with future deficits soaring to $600 billion. Rather than paying off the nation's debt, Bush is passing on a vault of IOUs to future generations. In the next decade, Americans may be faced with the painful choice of savaging Social Security or accepting status as a kind of super banana republic.
Yet the national press corps continues to give Bush a remarkably easy ride.
"Nobody is paying any attention to the budget deficit," Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., complained in an Op-Ed article. "Last month, the House Budget Committee's Democrats forecast a deficit of nearly $500 billion, and the [Washington] Post reported the story on Page A4. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the deficit would balloon to a record $400 billion-plus, and the Post again buried the story on A4. Spending trust funds, such as Social Security, is what keeps the estimate at $400 billion. The actual deficit will be approximately $600 billion."
Hollings noted that when the Republican-controlled Congress raised the deficit ceiling another $1 trillion "so the president could borrow more money to pay for tax cuts," the story slid even deeper into the Post's inside pages, to A8.
"How huge must the deficit grow for this A4 story to make the front page, and for the public to scream for relief?" Hollings wrote. "Across the country, teachers are being laid off, there are more kids per classroom, the school year is shorter, and tuition is up at state colleges. Bus service is being cut off, volunteers are running park systems, prisoners are being released, and subsidies for the working poor are being slashed." [See Hollings's "Delusional on the Deficit," Washington Post, June 19, 2003]
Cuts Likely
The ocean of red ink, which now stretches as far as the eye can see, also means the U.S. government won't have the resources to extend health benefits to the uninsured, fund education programs or pursue other popular policies such as fighting crime and protecting the environment. More likely, the swelling deficits will force deep cuts in existing programs, which has been a stated goal of conservative activists since the Reagan administration and the 1994 Gingrich Revolution.
Right-wing strategist Grover Norquist admitted the strategy when he said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Norquist says his goal is to cut federal programs in half within the next generation.
With the impending retirement of the Baby Boom generation, there is no mention of how the federal government can withstand such cuts while meeting its Social Security and Medicare obligations, not to mention funding discretionary programs like defense, education, transportation, cleaning up the environment and investing in new technologies to help the economy.
In spite of these obvious contradictions, Bush and his right wing supporters are not called to task for their empty promises. With little or no challenge from the news media, Bush is allowed to continue his rhetorical games of voicing support for unattainable goals. He stands in front of backdrops printed with popular slogans about jobs, health care and the environment, or he signs legislation with impressive titles like the No Child Left Behind Act.
Bush's words rarely fit with the reality on the ground, especially given cutbacks forced on the states by the economy and Bush's refusal to provide more than token federal assistance. Many educators, for instance, say that without proper funding, the federal requirements in Bush's education law make teaching harder, not easier, with more and more time focused on preparing students for tests, rather than covering the normal educational material.
On the environmental front, Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative is pushing a proposal Bush calls the "new Clean Air Act of the 21st Century." Environmental groups, however, say the plan weakens existing standards by delaying deadlines for meeting public health standards and allowing power plants to emit even more pollution over the next decade.
Politics was at the forefront, too, when the White House deleted from an environmental report a section that dealt with global warming. Despite the consensus of the scientific community about the threat, global warming doesn't fit with Bush's political spin.
Though the news media mentions many of these facts in passing, the disclosures don't get anything like the traction that criticism of Bill Clinton or Al Gore did. That's because Bush's greatest asset may be the continuation of the same news media dynamic that dominated the late 1990s and the 2000 campaign.
Dedicated media conservatives relentlessly push their themes, often in coordination with the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, mainstream journalists tread carefully around critical stories about Bush out of fear of getting the career-threatening label of "liberal journalist" or having their loyalty questioned for challenging the president in the midst of the war on terror.
By contrast, both the conservative and mainstream elements of the national media can safely poke fun at the Democratic candidates - much as was done to Gore in 2000. In the emerging media script for Campaign 2004, the Democrats are portrayed as grasping wannabees while Bush is a decisive national leader who looks "unbeatable." No national-level journalist will suffer any career punishment by following those themes.
Goring Gore
A study of Election 2000 showed that one of the most effective themes used to undermine Gore's standing with the voters was the media drumbeat about "Lyin' Al" as a serial exaggerator. The survey by pollster Stan Greenberg found that the biggest reason people decided not to vote for Gore was his "exaggerations and untruthfulness." [See the Greenberg survey.]
Though the Lyin' Al attack line was largely based on the media's own lying and exaggeration - Gore never said he "invented" the Internet nor did he claim to have "started" the Love Canal clean-up - conservative and mainstream journalists worked in tandem to denigrate Gore. Meanwhile, lies and distortions from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were virtually ignored. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Protecting Bush-Cheney" and "Al Gore v. the Media."]
It's finally beginning to dawn on Democrats, liberals and progressives that the lies told about Gore in both the mainstream and conservative media - from the New York Times to the Washington Times - allowed history to veer off in its current direction. To a great extent, this development is the liberals' own fault, for failing to invest significant resources in media while conservatives poured billions of dollars into building their own media and in financing pressure groups to attack mainstream reporters. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Democrats' Dilemma."]
Only recently has this recognition of a media imbalance sparked talk by liberal activists about building media outlets. To this date, however, little has been accomplished.
A liberal-oriented talk radio network remains in the planning stages and a cable-TV concept pushed by Gore has been slow in taking shape. Currently, Free Speech TV, which broadcasts programming on the Echostar satellite system, including Pacifica's "Democracy Now" with Amy Goodman, is the most advanced project though its audience is tiny compared to those reached by conservative radio and TV.
Bush Weakness
While the media issue is slowly addressed by liberals, the immediate threat to Democrats is that the "theme" of Bush's invincibility may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with voters taking a Bush victory as a foregone conclusion and tuning out whatever the Democratic candidates say.
If, however, the Democrats can get their act together, they may be encouraged by some signs that the American people still aren't thrilled with Bush's leadership. While Bush's favorable poll ratings are in the low 60s, his re-elect numbers have consistently held in the low to mid-40s, considered vulnerable poll territory for an incumbent. It's also hard to calculate how much of Bush's approval ratings derive from the lingering trauma of Sept. 11 and the nation's desire to show a united front against foreign enemies.
When Americans have a chance for the Bush off-ramp in November 2004, will they take it? Will they judge that Bush is incapable of keeping problems under control, that he's better at smashing things, like Iraq's outmatched military and the budget surplus he inherited, than he is at doing the slow, frustrating work of building coalitions and improving the quality of life?
At the top of the list of issues for the 2004 election will be security and the economy. Yet to beat Bush, Democrats will have to come up with a larger vision that competes thematically with the Republican mantra of lower taxes, smaller government and strong defense. For Democrats, the challenge will be to define in simple terms what the role of government should be, what it can do, what are its limitations and how that relates to the American people.
Clinton's construct of opportunity for all, responsibility from all and a community of all captured a vision for the American society in a way that no one has since matched. The Democratic candidate will have to sell a similar framework to win in 2004.
The other good news for the Democrats is that Americans largely agree that government must provide essential services, from maintaining Social Security to providing adequate resources for education, health care, job training, unemployment insurance and environmental protection. By contrast, polls show that Bush's tax cuts are viewed as primarily helping the rich, with limited appeal to the average voter.
Congressional Balance
While the Democrats may still have a real shot at beating Bush, their prospects appear much dimmer in Congress with both the House and Senate likely out of the Democrats' reach.
The Democrats must defend more seats than the Republicans in the Senate, with 19 Democratic seats up against 15 for the Republicans. On top of that, 10 of those seats are in states - Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Indiana - Bush won in the 2000 campaign. In Georgia and possibly Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina, Democratic incumbents may not run for another term leaving open seats in hard-to-win states for Democrats.
By contrast, there are only two vulnerable Republican seats. In Illinois where the incumbent Peter Fitzgerald has decided not to seek reelection, the Democrats have perhaps the best chance of any Senate race to pick up a seat. In Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was appointed to fill her father's seat after he won the governor's race, will have to run on her own for the first time against a likely challenger, Tony Knowles, who is a popular former governor in an otherwise solidly Republican state.
Other than these two seats, the pickings appear slim for Democratic challengers. Barring any surprises between now and election day, the only seats that are even worth mentioning are Kit Bond's seat in Missouri (though the Democrats are having a terrible time finding a candidate), Jim Bunning's seat in Kentucky (where Democratic Gov. Paul Patton's sex scandal appears to have spared Bunning a serious reelection fight), and Arlen Spector's seat in Pennsylvania (only worth mentioning because of a primary challenge from conservative Rep. Pat Toomey).
As for the House, it is too early to say where the national electorate will be. But redistricting has made all but a handful of seats safe for one party or the other, leaving only between 25 to 50 seats up for grabs depending on what the national campaign looks like. The Democrats may have a chance of gaining seats, though likely not enough to take back the House.
Beyond the 2004 campaign, Democrats face expensive and time-consuming challenges as they seek to compete with Republicans. Democrats not only face huge campaign financing disadvantages, but they will have to begin matching the Republican media investments to compete nationally. Democrats cannot continue to rely on the "balance" of the mainstream media, which are cowed in the face of pro-Republican outlets on the right. The Democrats have nothing to compare with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Clear Channel, the Washington Times and dozens of other pro-Republican outlets and publications.
The existence of a national conservative news media permits Republicans to coordinate messages unchallenged across all media levels, which helps feed grassroots efforts to recruit and rally their activist base. The lack of a competing media structure leaves many Democrats feeling isolated and demoralized.
As America begins its quadrennial march toward a national campaign, the troubling direction of the world's preeminent power as it operates consistently on slanted information proves the accuracy of an insight from British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970.
"Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of disinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power," Russell said.
Reprinted from Consortium News:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/
2003/062503a.html
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:14:19 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sam Parry, Consortium News
Political adviser Karl Rove may have envisioned George W. Bush in his Top Gun costume as a killer 30-second TV spot for Campaign 2004. But the image of a swaggering Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln is turning quickly into a political albatross as U.S. troops continue to die in what's becoming a nasty guerrilla war in Iraq.
Bush's flight-suit scene could become a reminder of Bush's reckless over-confidence in declaring "Mission Accomplished," much as the image of Michael Dukakis sitting in a tank came to represent the Democratic nominee's woeful 1988 presidential campaign. If the Iraqi violence continues at its recent pace, sometime later this year the number of American soldiers killed since May 1, when Bush donned the flight suit, will exceed the 138 soldiers who died during the so-called major combat. As of Friday, the Pentagon put the number of post-May 1 dead at 55.
Having recognized this political danger, the White House pushed Bush out on Saturday in a preemptive strike, laying the groundwork for accusing anyone who questions the open-ended occupation of Iraq as defeatist or unwilling to stand with "the men and women of our military." Former Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond warned that criticism from Democrats would reveal "the huge disconnect between the liberals who control the Democratic Party and the rest of America." [NYT, June 22, 2003]
But the mounting death toll in Iraq is only part of a troubling picture about Bush's leadership that could come back to haunt Republicans in next year's elections. The growing frustrations voiced by exhausted U.S. troops sweltering in Iraq, the crumbling security situation in Afghanistan and the grumbling of the Sept. 11 families over Bush's cover-up of that intelligence failure may turn Bush's expected strong suit - the war on terror - into a very weak hand.
Combined with the loss of nearly three million jobs and record budget deficits - after President Bill Clinton's 22 million new jobs and record surpluses - Bush might reasonably be seen as a very vulnerable incumbent.
Pro-Bush Media
Nevertheless, the prevailing conventional wisdom still holds that Bush is pretty much a shoo-in for a second term, a judgment that is more a testament to conservative domination of the U.S. news media than Bush's record. The pro-Bush side either exercises direct control over important media outlets - such as Fox News, AM talk radio, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times - or can intimidate mainstream journalists who fear career consequences from criticizing Bush.
So, for months now, the public has been conditioned to believe in Bush's invincibility. MSNBC pundit Christopher Matthews pronounced any 2004 Democratic nominee to be "a sacrificial lamb." [The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Nov. 14, 2002] "The Dems are doomed to lose the 2004 presidential election," declared David Frum. [National Review Online, Jan. 14, 2003]
In recent weeks, the cable news networks have framed the central campaign debate with the headline: "Bush - Is He Unbeatable?" They have shied away from asking: "Bush - Does He Deserve a Second Term?"
Largely because of his media advantage, Bush maintains his carefully crafted image as a straight talker - although there's arguably less truth-telling at this White House than there was when Bill Clinton lied about his sex life. Rather than level with the American people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq, Bush exaggerated claims about the imminent threat that was posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Now, as Bush's pre-war assertions about weapons of mass destruction are failing to match the reality that the U.S. troops are finding on the ground, Bush and his top aides have lashed out at critics for engaging in "historical revisionism." Increasingly, Bush is looking like a politician who just won't accept responsibility for his actions and will say or do anything to stay in office. [For details about the Iraq exaggerations, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush & the End of Reason."]
On domestic policy, Bush has left a lengthening trail of broken campaign promises. For instance, he had vowed to pay off the national debt while still affording tax cuts and claiming to set aside $1 trillion of the surplus for unforeseen calamities.
Now, Bush's $3 trillion in tax cuts and the struggling economy are pushing the federal government deeper and deeper into the red. This year's budget is expected to run a record deficit of between $400 billion and $500 billion, with future deficits soaring to $600 billion. Rather than paying off the nation's debt, Bush is passing on a vault of IOUs to future generations. In the next decade, Americans may be faced with the painful choice of savaging Social Security or accepting status as a kind of super banana republic.
Yet the national press corps continues to give Bush a remarkably easy ride.
"Nobody is paying any attention to the budget deficit," Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., complained in an Op-Ed article. "Last month, the House Budget Committee's Democrats forecast a deficit of nearly $500 billion, and the [Washington] Post reported the story on Page A4. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the deficit would balloon to a record $400 billion-plus, and the Post again buried the story on A4. Spending trust funds, such as Social Security, is what keeps the estimate at $400 billion. The actual deficit will be approximately $600 billion."
Hollings noted that when the Republican-controlled Congress raised the deficit ceiling another $1 trillion "so the president could borrow more money to pay for tax cuts," the story slid even deeper into the Post's inside pages, to A8.
"How huge must the deficit grow for this A4 story to make the front page, and for the public to scream for relief?" Hollings wrote. "Across the country, teachers are being laid off, there are more kids per classroom, the school year is shorter, and tuition is up at state colleges. Bus service is being cut off, volunteers are running park systems, prisoners are being released, and subsidies for the working poor are being slashed." [See Hollings's "Delusional on the Deficit," Washington Post, June 19, 2003]
Cuts Likely
The ocean of red ink, which now stretches as far as the eye can see, also means the U.S. government won't have the resources to extend health benefits to the uninsured, fund education programs or pursue other popular policies such as fighting crime and protecting the environment. More likely, the swelling deficits will force deep cuts in existing programs, which has been a stated goal of conservative activists since the Reagan administration and the 1994 Gingrich Revolution.
Right-wing strategist Grover Norquist admitted the strategy when he said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Norquist says his goal is to cut federal programs in half within the next generation.
With the impending retirement of the Baby Boom generation, there is no mention of how the federal government can withstand such cuts while meeting its Social Security and Medicare obligations, not to mention funding discretionary programs like defense, education, transportation, cleaning up the environment and investing in new technologies to help the economy.
In spite of these obvious contradictions, Bush and his right wing supporters are not called to task for their empty promises. With little or no challenge from the news media, Bush is allowed to continue his rhetorical games of voicing support for unattainable goals. He stands in front of backdrops printed with popular slogans about jobs, health care and the environment, or he signs legislation with impressive titles like the No Child Left Behind Act.
Bush's words rarely fit with the reality on the ground, especially given cutbacks forced on the states by the economy and Bush's refusal to provide more than token federal assistance. Many educators, for instance, say that without proper funding, the federal requirements in Bush's education law make teaching harder, not easier, with more and more time focused on preparing students for tests, rather than covering the normal educational material.
On the environmental front, Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative is pushing a proposal Bush calls the "new Clean Air Act of the 21st Century." Environmental groups, however, say the plan weakens existing standards by delaying deadlines for meeting public health standards and allowing power plants to emit even more pollution over the next decade.
Politics was at the forefront, too, when the White House deleted from an environmental report a section that dealt with global warming. Despite the consensus of the scientific community about the threat, global warming doesn't fit with Bush's political spin.
Though the news media mentions many of these facts in passing, the disclosures don't get anything like the traction that criticism of Bill Clinton or Al Gore did. That's because Bush's greatest asset may be the continuation of the same news media dynamic that dominated the late 1990s and the 2000 campaign.
Dedicated media conservatives relentlessly push their themes, often in coordination with the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, mainstream journalists tread carefully around critical stories about Bush out of fear of getting the career-threatening label of "liberal journalist" or having their loyalty questioned for challenging the president in the midst of the war on terror.
By contrast, both the conservative and mainstream elements of the national media can safely poke fun at the Democratic candidates - much as was done to Gore in 2000. In the emerging media script for Campaign 2004, the Democrats are portrayed as grasping wannabees while Bush is a decisive national leader who looks "unbeatable." No national-level journalist will suffer any career punishment by following those themes.
Goring Gore
A study of Election 2000 showed that one of the most effective themes used to undermine Gore's standing with the voters was the media drumbeat about "Lyin' Al" as a serial exaggerator. The survey by pollster Stan Greenberg found that the biggest reason people decided not to vote for Gore was his "exaggerations and untruthfulness." [See the Greenberg survey.]
Though the Lyin' Al attack line was largely based on the media's own lying and exaggeration - Gore never said he "invented" the Internet nor did he claim to have "started" the Love Canal clean-up - conservative and mainstream journalists worked in tandem to denigrate Gore. Meanwhile, lies and distortions from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were virtually ignored. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Protecting Bush-Cheney" and "Al Gore v. the Media."]
It's finally beginning to dawn on Democrats, liberals and progressives that the lies told about Gore in both the mainstream and conservative media - from the New York Times to the Washington Times - allowed history to veer off in its current direction. To a great extent, this development is the liberals' own fault, for failing to invest significant resources in media while conservatives poured billions of dollars into building their own media and in financing pressure groups to attack mainstream reporters. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Democrats' Dilemma."]
Only recently has this recognition of a media imbalance sparked talk by liberal activists about building media outlets. To this date, however, little has been accomplished.
A liberal-oriented talk radio network remains in the planning stages and a cable-TV concept pushed by Gore has been slow in taking shape. Currently, Free Speech TV, which broadcasts programming on the Echostar satellite system, including Pacifica's "Democracy Now" with Amy Goodman, is the most advanced project though its audience is tiny compared to those reached by conservative radio and TV.
Bush Weakness
While the media issue is slowly addressed by liberals, the immediate threat to Democrats is that the "theme" of Bush's invincibility may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with voters taking a Bush victory as a foregone conclusion and tuning out whatever the Democratic candidates say.
If, however, the Democrats can get their act together, they may be encouraged by some signs that the American people still aren't thrilled with Bush's leadership. While Bush's favorable poll ratings are in the low 60s, his re-elect numbers have consistently held in the low to mid-40s, considered vulnerable poll territory for an incumbent. It's also hard to calculate how much of Bush's approval ratings derive from the lingering trauma of Sept. 11 and the nation's desire to show a united front against foreign enemies.
When Americans have a chance for the Bush off-ramp in November 2004, will they take it? Will they judge that Bush is incapable of keeping problems under control, that he's better at smashing things, like Iraq's outmatched military and the budget surplus he inherited, than he is at doing the slow, frustrating work of building coalitions and improving the quality of life?
At the top of the list of issues for the 2004 election will be security and the economy. Yet to beat Bush, Democrats will have to come up with a larger vision that competes thematically with the Republican mantra of lower taxes, smaller government and strong defense. For Democrats, the challenge will be to define in simple terms what the role of government should be, what it can do, what are its limitations and how that relates to the American people.
Clinton's construct of opportunity for all, responsibility from all and a community of all captured a vision for the American society in a way that no one has since matched. The Democratic candidate will have to sell a similar framework to win in 2004.
The other good news for the Democrats is that Americans largely agree that government must provide essential services, from maintaining Social Security to providing adequate resources for education, health care, job training, unemployment insurance and environmental protection. By contrast, polls show that Bush's tax cuts are viewed as primarily helping the rich, with limited appeal to the average voter.
Congressional Balance
While the Democrats may still have a real shot at beating Bush, their prospects appear much dimmer in Congress with both the House and Senate likely out of the Democrats' reach.
The Democrats must defend more seats than the Republicans in the Senate, with 19 Democratic seats up against 15 for the Republicans. On top of that, 10 of those seats are in states - Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Indiana - Bush won in the 2000 campaign. In Georgia and possibly Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina, Democratic incumbents may not run for another term leaving open seats in hard-to-win states for Democrats.
By contrast, there are only two vulnerable Republican seats. In Illinois where the incumbent Peter Fitzgerald has decided not to seek reelection, the Democrats have perhaps the best chance of any Senate race to pick up a seat. In Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was appointed to fill her father's seat after he won the governor's race, will have to run on her own for the first time against a likely challenger, Tony Knowles, who is a popular former governor in an otherwise solidly Republican state.
Other than these two seats, the pickings appear slim for Democratic challengers. Barring any surprises between now and election day, the only seats that are even worth mentioning are Kit Bond's seat in Missouri (though the Democrats are having a terrible time finding a candidate), Jim Bunning's seat in Kentucky (where Democratic Gov. Paul Patton's sex scandal appears to have spared Bunning a serious reelection fight), and Arlen Spector's seat in Pennsylvania (only worth mentioning because of a primary challenge from conservative Rep. Pat Toomey).
As for the House, it is too early to say where the national electorate will be. But redistricting has made all but a handful of seats safe for one party or the other, leaving only between 25 to 50 seats up for grabs depending on what the national campaign looks like. The Democrats may have a chance of gaining seats, though likely not enough to take back the House.
Beyond the 2004 campaign, Democrats face expensive and time-consuming challenges as they seek to compete with Republicans. Democrats not only face huge campaign financing disadvantages, but they will have to begin matching the Republican media investments to compete nationally. Democrats cannot continue to rely on the "balance" of the mainstream media, which are cowed in the face of pro-Republican outlets on the right. The Democrats have nothing to compare with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Clear Channel, the Washington Times and dozens of other pro-Republican outlets and publications.
The existence of a national conservative news media permits Republicans to coordinate messages unchallenged across all media levels, which helps feed grassroots efforts to recruit and rally their activist base. The lack of a competing media structure leaves many Democrats feeling isolated and demoralized.
As America begins its quadrennial march toward a national campaign, the troubling direction of the world's preeminent power as it operates consistently on slanted information proves the accuracy of an insight from British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970.
"Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of disinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power," Russell said.
Reprinted from Consortium News:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/
2003/062503a.html
Senator Robert Byrd: 'The road to coverup is the road to ruin'
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:19:15 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By US Senator Robert Byrd
US Senate Floor Remarks - June 24, 2003
Mr. President, last fall, the White House released a national security strategy that called for an end to the doctrines of deterrence and containment that have been a hallmark of American foreign policy for more than half a century.
This new national security strategy is based upon pre-emptive war against those who might threaten our security.
Such a strategy of striking first against possible dangers is heavily reliant upon interpretation of accurate and timely intelligence. If we are going to hit first, based on perceived dangers, the perceptions had better be accurate. If our intelligence is faulty, we may launch pre-emptive wars against countries that do not pose a real threat against us. Or we may overlook countries that do pose real threats to our security, allowing us no chance to pursue diplomatic solutions to stop a crisis before it escalates to war. In either case lives could be needlessly lost. In other words, we had better be certain that we can discern the imminent threats from the false alarms.
Ninety-six days ago [as of June 24], President Bush announced that he had initiated a war to "disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." The President told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." [Address to the Nation, 3/19/03]
The President has since announced that major combat operations concluded on May 1. He said: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Since then, the United States has been recognized by the international community as the occupying power in Iraq. And yet, we have not found any evidence that would confirm the officially stated reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction constituted a grave threat to the United States.
We have heard a lot about revisionist history from the White House of late in answer to those who question whether there was a real threat from Iraq. But, it is the President who appears to me to be intent on revising history. There is an abundance of clear and unmistakable evidence that the Administration sought to portray Iraq as a direct and deadly threat to the American people. But there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence that was presented by the Administration to Congress and the American people when compared against what we have actually discovered in Iraq. This Congress and the people who sent us here are entitled to an explanation from the Administration.
On January 28, 2003, President Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg. 7] Yet, according to news reports, the CIA knew that this claim was false as early as March 2002. In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency has since discredited this allegation.
On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." [Remarks to UN Security Council, 2/5/03, pg. 12] The truth is, to date we have not found any of this material, nor those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.
On February 8, President Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." [Radio Address, 2/8/03] Mr. President, we are all relieved that such weapons were not used, but it has not yet been explained why the Iraqi army did not use them. Did the Iraqi army flee their positions before chemical weapons could be used? If so, why were the weapons not left behind? Or is it that the army was never issued chemical weapons? We need answers.
On March 16, the Sunday before the war began, in an interview with Tim Russert, Vice President Cheney said that Iraqis want "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." He added, "...the vast majority of them would turn [Saddam Hussein] in in a minute if, in fact, they thought they could do so safely." [Meet the Press, 3/16/03, pg. 6] But in fact, Mr. President, today Iraqi cities remain in disorder, our troops are under attack, our occupation government lives and works in fortified compounds, and we are still trying to determine the fate of the ousted, murderous dictator.
On March 30, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, during the height of the war, said of the search for weapons of mass destruction: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." [This Week, 3/30/03, pg. 8] But Baghdad fell to our troops on April 9, and Tikrit on April 14, and the intelligence Secretary Rumsfeld spoke about has not led us to any weapons of mass destruction.
Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or massaged to make Iraq look like an imminent threat to the United States, it is clear that the Administration's rhetoric played upon the well-founded fear of the American public about future acts of terrorism. But, upon close examination, many of these statements have nothing to do with intelligence, because they are at root just sound bites based on conjecture. They are designed to prey on public fear.
The face of Osama bin Laden morphed into that of Saddam Hussein. President Bush carefully blurred these images in his State of the Union Address. Listen to this quote from his State of the Union Address: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg 7] Judging by this speech, not only is the President confusing al Qaeda and Iraq, but he also appears to give a vote of no-confidence to our homeland security efforts. Isn't the White House, the brains behind the Department of Homeland Security? Isn't the Administration supposed to be stopping those vials, canisters, and crates from entering our country, rather than trying to scare our fellow citizens half to death about them?
Not only did the Administration warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, the White House even went so far as to suggest that the time it would take for U.N. inspectors to find solid, 'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons would put the U.S. at greater risk of a nuclear attack from Iraq. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002, by the Los Angeles Times, "We don't want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud." [Los Angeles Times, "Threat by Iraq Grows, U.S. Says," 9/9/02] Talk about hype! Mushroom clouds? Where is the evidence for this? There isn't any.
On September 26, 2002, just two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution to allow the President to invade Iraq, and six weeks before the mid-term elections, President Bush himself built the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the United States. After meeting with members of Congress on that date, the President said: "The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."
These are the President's words. He said that Saddam Hussein is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Have we found any evidence to date of this chilling allegation? No.
But, President Bush continued on that autumn day: "The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX – nerve gas – or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally." [Rose Garden Remarks, 9/26/02]
And yet, seven weeks after declaring victory in the war against Iraq, we have seen nary a shred of evidence to support his claims of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.
Just days before a vote on a resolution that handed the President unprecedented war powers, President Bush stepped up the scare tactics. On October 7, just four days before the October 11 vote in the Senate on the war resolution, the President stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." President Bush continued: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
President Bush also elaborated on claims of Iraq's nuclear program when he said: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' - his nuclear holy warriors.... If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." [Cincinnati Museum Center, 10/7/02, pg. 3-4]
This is the kind of pumped up intelligence and outrageous rhetoric that were given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote for war on October 11, 2002.
We hear some voices say, but why should we care? After all, the United States won the war, didn't it? Saddam Hussein is no more; he is either dead or on the run. What does it matter if reality does not reveal the same grim picture that was so carefully painted before the war? So what if the menacing characterizations that conjured up visions of mushroom clouds and American cities threatened with deadly germs and chemicals were overdone? So what?
Mr. President, our sons and daughters who serve in uniform answered a call to duty. They were sent to the hot sands of the Middle East to fight in a war that has already cost the lives of 194 Americans, thousands of innocent civilians, and unknown numbers of Iraqi soldiers. Our troops are still at risk. Hardly a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are trying to restore order to a country teetering on the brink of anarchy. When are they coming home?
The President told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we any safer today than we were on March 18, 2003? Our nation has been committed to rebuilding a country ravaged by war and tyranny, and the cost of that task is being paid in blood and treasure every day.
It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq. It is in the compelling national interest to know if the intelligence was faulty. It is in the compelling national interest to know if the intelligence was distorted.
Mr. President, Congress must face this issue squarely. Congress should begin immediately an investigation into the intelligence that was presented to the American people about the pre-war estimates of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the way in which that intelligence might have been misused. This is no time for a timid Congress. We have a responsibility to act in the national interest and protect the American people. We must get to the bottom of this matter.
Although some timorous steps have been taken in the past few days to begin a review of this intelligence – I must watch my terms carefully, for I may be tempted to use the words "investigation" or "inquiry" to describe this review, and those are terms which I am told are not supposed to be used – the proposed measures appear to fall short of what the situation requires. We are already shading our terms about how to describe the proposed review of intelligence: cherry-picking words to give the American people the impression that the government is fully in control of the situation, and that there is no reason to ask tough questions. This is the same problem that got us into this controversy about slanted intelligence reports. Word games. Lots and lots of word games.
Well, Mr. President, this is no game. For the first time in our history, the United States has gone to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a threat to our nation. Congress should not be content to use standard operating procedures to look into this extraordinary matter. We should accept no substitute for a full, bipartisan investigation by Congress into the issue of our pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq and its use.
The purpose of such an investigation is not to play pre-election year politics, nor is it to engage in what some might call "revisionist history." Rather it is to get at the truth. The longer questions are allowed to fester about what our intelligence knew about Iraq, and when they knew it, the greater the risk that the people – the American people whom we are elected to serve – will lose confidence in our government.
This looming crisis of trust is not limited to the public. Many of my colleagues were willing to trust the Administration and vote to authorize war against Iraq. Many members of this body trusted so much that they gave the President sweeping authority to commence war. As President Reagan famously said, "Trust, but verify." Despite my opposition, the Senate voted to blindly trust the President with unprecedented power to declare war. While the reconstruction continues, so do the questions, and it is time to verify.
I have served the people of West Virginia in Congress for half a century. I have witnessed deceit and scandal, cover up and aftermath. I have seen Presidents of both parties who once enjoyed great popularity among the people leave office in disgrace because they misled the American people. I say to this Administration: do not circle the wagons. Do not discourage the seeking of truth in these matters.
Mr. President, the American people have questions that need to be answered about why we went to war with Iraq. To attempt to deny the relevance of these questions is to trivialize the people's trust.
The business of intelligence is secretive by necessity, but our government is open by design. We must be straight with the American people. Congress has the obligation to investigate the use of intelligence information by the Administration, in the open, so that the American people can see that those who exercise power, especially the awesome power of preemptive war, must be held accountable. We must not go down the road of cover-up. That is the road to ruin.
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:19:15 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By US Senator Robert Byrd
US Senate Floor Remarks - June 24, 2003
Mr. President, last fall, the White House released a national security strategy that called for an end to the doctrines of deterrence and containment that have been a hallmark of American foreign policy for more than half a century.
This new national security strategy is based upon pre-emptive war against those who might threaten our security.
Such a strategy of striking first against possible dangers is heavily reliant upon interpretation of accurate and timely intelligence. If we are going to hit first, based on perceived dangers, the perceptions had better be accurate. If our intelligence is faulty, we may launch pre-emptive wars against countries that do not pose a real threat against us. Or we may overlook countries that do pose real threats to our security, allowing us no chance to pursue diplomatic solutions to stop a crisis before it escalates to war. In either case lives could be needlessly lost. In other words, we had better be certain that we can discern the imminent threats from the false alarms.
Ninety-six days ago [as of June 24], President Bush announced that he had initiated a war to "disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." The President told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." [Address to the Nation, 3/19/03]
The President has since announced that major combat operations concluded on May 1. He said: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Since then, the United States has been recognized by the international community as the occupying power in Iraq. And yet, we have not found any evidence that would confirm the officially stated reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction constituted a grave threat to the United States.
We have heard a lot about revisionist history from the White House of late in answer to those who question whether there was a real threat from Iraq. But, it is the President who appears to me to be intent on revising history. There is an abundance of clear and unmistakable evidence that the Administration sought to portray Iraq as a direct and deadly threat to the American people. But there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence that was presented by the Administration to Congress and the American people when compared against what we have actually discovered in Iraq. This Congress and the people who sent us here are entitled to an explanation from the Administration.
On January 28, 2003, President Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg. 7] Yet, according to news reports, the CIA knew that this claim was false as early as March 2002. In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency has since discredited this allegation.
On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." [Remarks to UN Security Council, 2/5/03, pg. 12] The truth is, to date we have not found any of this material, nor those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.
On February 8, President Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." [Radio Address, 2/8/03] Mr. President, we are all relieved that such weapons were not used, but it has not yet been explained why the Iraqi army did not use them. Did the Iraqi army flee their positions before chemical weapons could be used? If so, why were the weapons not left behind? Or is it that the army was never issued chemical weapons? We need answers.
On March 16, the Sunday before the war began, in an interview with Tim Russert, Vice President Cheney said that Iraqis want "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." He added, "...the vast majority of them would turn [Saddam Hussein] in in a minute if, in fact, they thought they could do so safely." [Meet the Press, 3/16/03, pg. 6] But in fact, Mr. President, today Iraqi cities remain in disorder, our troops are under attack, our occupation government lives and works in fortified compounds, and we are still trying to determine the fate of the ousted, murderous dictator.
On March 30, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, during the height of the war, said of the search for weapons of mass destruction: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." [This Week, 3/30/03, pg. 8] But Baghdad fell to our troops on April 9, and Tikrit on April 14, and the intelligence Secretary Rumsfeld spoke about has not led us to any weapons of mass destruction.
Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or massaged to make Iraq look like an imminent threat to the United States, it is clear that the Administration's rhetoric played upon the well-founded fear of the American public about future acts of terrorism. But, upon close examination, many of these statements have nothing to do with intelligence, because they are at root just sound bites based on conjecture. They are designed to prey on public fear.
The face of Osama bin Laden morphed into that of Saddam Hussein. President Bush carefully blurred these images in his State of the Union Address. Listen to this quote from his State of the Union Address: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg 7] Judging by this speech, not only is the President confusing al Qaeda and Iraq, but he also appears to give a vote of no-confidence to our homeland security efforts. Isn't the White House, the brains behind the Department of Homeland Security? Isn't the Administration supposed to be stopping those vials, canisters, and crates from entering our country, rather than trying to scare our fellow citizens half to death about them?
Not only did the Administration warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, the White House even went so far as to suggest that the time it would take for U.N. inspectors to find solid, 'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons would put the U.S. at greater risk of a nuclear attack from Iraq. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002, by the Los Angeles Times, "We don't want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud." [Los Angeles Times, "Threat by Iraq Grows, U.S. Says," 9/9/02] Talk about hype! Mushroom clouds? Where is the evidence for this? There isn't any.
On September 26, 2002, just two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution to allow the President to invade Iraq, and six weeks before the mid-term elections, President Bush himself built the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the United States. After meeting with members of Congress on that date, the President said: "The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."
These are the President's words. He said that Saddam Hussein is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Have we found any evidence to date of this chilling allegation? No.
But, President Bush continued on that autumn day: "The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX – nerve gas – or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally." [Rose Garden Remarks, 9/26/02]
And yet, seven weeks after declaring victory in the war against Iraq, we have seen nary a shred of evidence to support his claims of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.
Just days before a vote on a resolution that handed the President unprecedented war powers, President Bush stepped up the scare tactics. On October 7, just four days before the October 11 vote in the Senate on the war resolution, the President stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." President Bush continued: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
President Bush also elaborated on claims of Iraq's nuclear program when he said: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' - his nuclear holy warriors.... If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." [Cincinnati Museum Center, 10/7/02, pg. 3-4]
This is the kind of pumped up intelligence and outrageous rhetoric that were given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote for war on October 11, 2002.
We hear some voices say, but why should we care? After all, the United States won the war, didn't it? Saddam Hussein is no more; he is either dead or on the run. What does it matter if reality does not reveal the same grim picture that was so carefully painted before the war? So what if the menacing characterizations that conjured up visions of mushroom clouds and American cities threatened with deadly germs and chemicals were overdone? So what?
Mr. President, our sons and daughters who serve in uniform answered a call to duty. They were sent to the hot sands of the Middle East to fight in a war that has already cost the lives of 194 Americans, thousands of innocent civilians, and unknown numbers of Iraqi soldiers. Our troops are still at risk. Hardly a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are trying to restore order to a country teetering on the brink of anarchy. When are they coming home?
The President told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we any safer today than we were on March 18, 2003? Our nation has been committed to rebuilding a country ravaged by war and tyranny, and the cost of that task is being paid in blood and treasure every day.
It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq. It is in the compelling national interest to know if the intelligence was faulty. It is in the compelling national interest to know if the intelligence was distorted.
Mr. President, Congress must face this issue squarely. Congress should begin immediately an investigation into the intelligence that was presented to the American people about the pre-war estimates of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the way in which that intelligence might have been misused. This is no time for a timid Congress. We have a responsibility to act in the national interest and protect the American people. We must get to the bottom of this matter.
Although some timorous steps have been taken in the past few days to begin a review of this intelligence – I must watch my terms carefully, for I may be tempted to use the words "investigation" or "inquiry" to describe this review, and those are terms which I am told are not supposed to be used – the proposed measures appear to fall short of what the situation requires. We are already shading our terms about how to describe the proposed review of intelligence: cherry-picking words to give the American people the impression that the government is fully in control of the situation, and that there is no reason to ask tough questions. This is the same problem that got us into this controversy about slanted intelligence reports. Word games. Lots and lots of word games.
Well, Mr. President, this is no game. For the first time in our history, the United States has gone to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a threat to our nation. Congress should not be content to use standard operating procedures to look into this extraordinary matter. We should accept no substitute for a full, bipartisan investigation by Congress into the issue of our pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq and its use.
The purpose of such an investigation is not to play pre-election year politics, nor is it to engage in what some might call "revisionist history." Rather it is to get at the truth. The longer questions are allowed to fester about what our intelligence knew about Iraq, and when they knew it, the greater the risk that the people – the American people whom we are elected to serve – will lose confidence in our government.
This looming crisis of trust is not limited to the public. Many of my colleagues were willing to trust the Administration and vote to authorize war against Iraq. Many members of this body trusted so much that they gave the President sweeping authority to commence war. As President Reagan famously said, "Trust, but verify." Despite my opposition, the Senate voted to blindly trust the President with unprecedented power to declare war. While the reconstruction continues, so do the questions, and it is time to verify.
I have served the people of West Virginia in Congress for half a century. I have witnessed deceit and scandal, cover up and aftermath. I have seen Presidents of both parties who once enjoyed great popularity among the people leave office in disgrace because they misled the American people. I say to this Administration: do not circle the wagons. Do not discourage the seeking of truth in these matters.
Mr. President, the American people have questions that need to be answered about why we went to war with Iraq. To attempt to deny the relevance of these questions is to trivialize the people's trust.
The business of intelligence is secretive by necessity, but our government is open by design. We must be straight with the American people. Congress has the obligation to investigate the use of intelligence information by the Administration, in the open, so that the American people can see that those who exercise power, especially the awesome power of preemptive war, must be held accountable. We must not go down the road of cover-up. That is the road to ruin.
Bush inherited Clinton-era plans to kill bin Laden. Instead, he did nothing
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:20:09 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Ted Bridis and John Solomon, Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- When President Bush took office in January 2001, the White House was told that Predator drones had recently spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times and officials were urged to arm the unmanned planes with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader. But the administration failed to get drones back into the Afghan skies until after the Sept. 11 attacks later that year, current and former U.S. officials say.
Top administration officials discussed the mission to kill bin Laden as late as one week before the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, but they had not yet resolved a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators and whether the missiles would be sufficiently lethal, officials told the Associated Press.
In the month before that meeting, the Pentagon and CIA successfully tested an armed Predator on at least three occasions -- including once when it destroyed a mock-up home resembling an Afghan structure bin Laden supposedly used, the officials said.
The disappearance in 2001 of U.S. Predators from the skies over Afghanistan is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days -- and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.
In November 2001, a drone helped confirm a high-level al-Qaida meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.
Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information. Two former national security aides also cite some of the discussion inside the Bush White House in a recent book they published on terrorism.
The officials said that within days of President Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000.
The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, had devised in the final days of the Clinton administration to go after al-Qaida after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton officials decided just before Christmas 2000 to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.
Propeller-driven Predators first flew for the military in July 1995 over Bosnia, but early versions couldn't transmit high-quality live video. The Air Force gradually improved camera resolution and first successfully fired a Hellfire missile from a Predator on Feb. 16, 2001.
By summer 2001, the Predator was armed for another test in the Nevada desert that destroyed a mock-up of a home bin Laden was suspected of using in Afghanistan, Clarke told executives in a recent speech at a technology conference.
Some U.S. officials, however, worried that an anti-tank missile with just a 27-pound warhead might not be powerful enough to kill everyone inside a building, and the military worked to modify the warhead to be more lethal, officials said.
Cruise missile warheads, by comparison, weigh 1,000 pounds, and traditional bombs typically range from 500 to 2,000 pounds.
Hellfire missiles were attached to the drone after unarmed Predators flown by the CIA from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan spotted a man that several U.S. intelligence analysts believed was bin Laden, or his trademark Japanese truck, as many as three times in September and October 2000, the officials said.
"They were operating them before the United States military was involved ... and doing a good job," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said, explaining why CIA operated the armed drones in Afghanistan. "And so rather than changing that, we just left it."
During the fall 2000 sightings, the United States was unable to launch a strike with submarine-based cruise missiles in time to kill bin Laden, officials said.
With powerful winter winds over the mountains affecting the drones' flights, the Predators were taken out of action in Afghanistan after October 2000 and retrofitted with weapons. One was repaired after it crashed on landing, sparking debate whether CIA or the Pentagon would pay the damage. Officials said they planned to put the drones back into the air as early as March 2001 after the winds subsided.
Of 11 successful Predator flights sent across the mountains from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan in September and October 2000, three spotted a person that several U.S. intelligence analysts concluded was bin Laden.
The Predators, however, were not put back in the air before Sept. 11.
Officials said the delay was due in part to arming the Predator with enough lethal force and resolving the debate over which agency was legally and practically best equipped to carry out an attack.
The agency wanted to keep it under wraps and catch them by surprise once they were armed, the official explained.
That official noted that during one of the unarmed 2000 Predator flights, MiG jets were scrambled by Afghanistan's then-ruling Taliban government and they tried unsuccessfully to shoot down one of the drones. Another time, al-Qaida operatives spotted a drone and pointed to it, officials said.
A former administration official said U.S. officials watched some of the Predator missions live on a television screen inside CIA headquarters, including the one in which Taliban pilots roared past.
After Clarke's briefing in January, the drone plan was discussed again in late April by national security deputies and the test on the mock-up of bin Laden's home was conducted in July. A Bush administration official said Rice was generally supportive of the idea as part of a broader strategy.
At a White House meeting of Bush's national security principals on Sept. 4, 2001, senior officials discussed several ideas, including use of the drones, as they finalized a plan to accelerate efforts to go after al-Qaida amid signs of a growing threat of a domestic attack.
Among those present were Rice, CIA Director George Tenet, soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Clarke, then Bush's anti-terrorism chief inside the White House.
Though CIA had operated the unmanned Predators in Afghanistan in 2000, Tenet expressed strong reservation about his agency running the armed drones for an attack mission, suggesting it was the purview of the military, according to officials who witnessed or were briefed about the meeting.
"Generally it was understood (inside CIA) that aircraft firing weapons is the province of the military. This was a discussion about what the appropriate agency was to carry out the mission, but it was not a matter of the technology," said one official familiar with Tenet's comments at the meeting.
Defense officials suggested they be given an objective -- kill bin Laden -- and be left to make their own decisions about whether to use a drone or other weapons like cruise missiles and B-1 bombers, officials said.
Targeting bin Laden was legally permitted under secret orders and presidential findings that Clinton had signed.
Officials at the Sept. 4 meeting put off recommending the armed drone as a solution. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al-Qaida from its base in Afghanistan, including re-arming the rebel Northern Alliance.
Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 10:20:09 EDT
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By Ted Bridis and John Solomon, Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- When President Bush took office in January 2001, the White House was told that Predator drones had recently spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times and officials were urged to arm the unmanned planes with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader. But the administration failed to get drones back into the Afghan skies until after the Sept. 11 attacks later that year, current and former U.S. officials say.
Top administration officials discussed the mission to kill bin Laden as late as one week before the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, but they had not yet resolved a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators and whether the missiles would be sufficiently lethal, officials told the Associated Press.
In the month before that meeting, the Pentagon and CIA successfully tested an armed Predator on at least three occasions -- including once when it destroyed a mock-up home resembling an Afghan structure bin Laden supposedly used, the officials said.
The disappearance in 2001 of U.S. Predators from the skies over Afghanistan is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days -- and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.
In November 2001, a drone helped confirm a high-level al-Qaida meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.
Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information. Two former national security aides also cite some of the discussion inside the Bush White House in a recent book they published on terrorism.
The officials said that within days of President Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000.
The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, had devised in the final days of the Clinton administration to go after al-Qaida after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton officials decided just before Christmas 2000 to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.
Propeller-driven Predators first flew for the military in July 1995 over Bosnia, but early versions couldn't transmit high-quality live video. The Air Force gradually improved camera resolution and first successfully fired a Hellfire missile from a Predator on Feb. 16, 2001.
By summer 2001, the Predator was armed for another test in the Nevada desert that destroyed a mock-up of a home bin Laden was suspected of using in Afghanistan, Clarke told executives in a recent speech at a technology conference.
Some U.S. officials, however, worried that an anti-tank missile with just a 27-pound warhead might not be powerful enough to kill everyone inside a building, and the military worked to modify the warhead to be more lethal, officials said.
Cruise missile warheads, by comparison, weigh 1,000 pounds, and traditional bombs typically range from 500 to 2,000 pounds.
Hellfire missiles were attached to the drone after unarmed Predators flown by the CIA from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan spotted a man that several U.S. intelligence analysts believed was bin Laden, or his trademark Japanese truck, as many as three times in September and October 2000, the officials said.
"They were operating them before the United States military was involved ... and doing a good job," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said, explaining why CIA operated the armed drones in Afghanistan. "And so rather than changing that, we just left it."
During the fall 2000 sightings, the United States was unable to launch a strike with submarine-based cruise missiles in time to kill bin Laden, officials said.
With powerful winter winds over the mountains affecting the drones' flights, the Predators were taken out of action in Afghanistan after October 2000 and retrofitted with weapons. One was repaired after it crashed on landing, sparking debate whether CIA or the Pentagon would pay the damage. Officials said they planned to put the drones back into the air as early as March 2001 after the winds subsided.
Of 11 successful Predator flights sent across the mountains from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan in September and October 2000, three spotted a person that several U.S. intelligence analysts concluded was bin Laden.
The Predators, however, were not put back in the air before Sept. 11.
Officials said the delay was due in part to arming the Predator with enough lethal force and resolving the debate over which agency was legally and practically best equipped to carry out an attack.
The agency wanted to keep it under wraps and catch them by surprise once they were armed, the official explained.
That official noted that during one of the unarmed 2000 Predator flights, MiG jets were scrambled by Afghanistan's then-ruling Taliban government and they tried unsuccessfully to shoot down one of the drones. Another time, al-Qaida operatives spotted a drone and pointed to it, officials said.
A former administration official said U.S. officials watched some of the Predator missions live on a television screen inside CIA headquarters, including the one in which Taliban pilots roared past.
After Clarke's briefing in January, the drone plan was discussed again in late April by national security deputies and the test on the mock-up of bin Laden's home was conducted in July. A Bush administration official said Rice was generally supportive of the idea as part of a broader strategy.
At a White House meeting of Bush's national security principals on Sept. 4, 2001, senior officials discussed several ideas, including use of the drones, as they finalized a plan to accelerate efforts to go after al-Qaida amid signs of a growing threat of a domestic attack.
Among those present were Rice, CIA Director George Tenet, soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Clarke, then Bush's anti-terrorism chief inside the White House.
Though CIA had operated the unmanned Predators in Afghanistan in 2000, Tenet expressed strong reservation about his agency running the armed drones for an attack mission, suggesting it was the purview of the military, according to officials who witnessed or were briefed about the meeting.
"Generally it was understood (inside CIA) that aircraft firing weapons is the province of the military. This was a discussion about what the appropriate agency was to carry out the mission, but it was not a matter of the technology," said one official familiar with Tenet's comments at the meeting.
Defense officials suggested they be given an objective -- kill bin Laden -- and be left to make their own decisions about whether to use a drone or other weapons like cruise missiles and B-1 bombers, officials said.
Targeting bin Laden was legally permitted under secret orders and presidential findings that Clinton had signed.
Officials at the Sept. 4 meeting put off recommending the armed drone as a solution. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al-Qaida from its base in Afghanistan, including re-arming the rebel Northern Alliance.
Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.
