OK That is it! This is the Official *Bush White House Scandal Thread

I just can't believe it. Every DAY there is a new scandal. I am going to post one of the newest scandals. Please feel free to add one yourself. Perhaps the "lookieloos" that come by and visit us will be brought up to speed.

Here goes mine;

White House Role Is Alleged (Blocking revelation Medicare Bill Costs)


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6339-2004Mar18.html

edit for a t

"If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined."

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA, who declined to recuse himself from a case involving his friend and hunting companion, Vice President Dick Cheney. Printed in The New York Times, Friday March 19, 2004

Perhaps Justice Scalia is seeing the answer that many of us have known for some time, eh! :freak:

Because he and his appointed pResident are major parts of the problem. Opus Dei and Skull & Bones. What a pair. Sheesh!

Conflict of interest is plain here. A no brainer.

Recuse thyself and repent, O Occult Justice. Your Judgement Cometh.

With Heavy-Duty Biblical Intonation, SH

up to 11,800. that little tidbit makes me smile. let it grow and grow and grow, even if he doesn't do it. let it be his legacy: The Dusty Justice (not quite dirty, and from going hunting) HE'S DUSTY!

Senate Democrats Claim Medicare Chief Broke Law
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: March 19, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 18 - Senate Democrats, reacting to disclosures that Thomas A. Scully, the former Medicare administrator, prevented his chief actuary from sharing information with Congress, said Thursday that they believed a federal law had been violated and called on the General Accounting Office to investigate.

In a letter signed by 18 senators, including the minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and John Kerry , the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the lawmakers cited a provision in an appropriations measure that bars using federal money to pay the salary of any employee who "prohibits or prevents, or threatens to prohibit or prevent" another employee from communicating with Congress.

The letter was sent amid a growing furor on Capitol Hill over recent accounts by the actuary, Richard S. Foster, that Mr. Scully threatened to fire him if he disclosed cost estimates of the prescription drug legislation Congress passed last year.

The issue is important because Mr. Foster's estimates were considerably higher than those lawmakers used, and support for the measure, which passed narrowly, could have eroded had the higher figures been widely known.

Mercury Emissions Rules Bent to Benefit Industry, Officials Say


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mercury16mar16,1,...

Political appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency bypassed agency professional staff and a federal advisory panel last year to craft a rule on mercury emissions preferred by the industry and the White House, several longtime EPA officials say.

The EPA staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. At the same time, the proposal to regulate mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants was written using key language provided by utility lobbyists.

The Bush administration has said that the proposed rule would cut mercury emissions by 70 percent in the next 15 years, and is tied to the president's "Clear Skies" initiative. But critics say it would delay reductions in mercury levels for decades at a risk to public health, while saving the power and coal industries billions of dollars.

Studies designed to address such questions are the ones that were not conducted.

EPA veterans say they cannot recall another instance when the agency's technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal.

Democrats Torn Over Probing GOP

Wednesday, March 17, 2004; Page A01

A seven-year ethics truce between congressional Republicans and Democrats has begun to fray under the weight of mounting alleged abuses by House GOP leaders and tensions among Democrats over how aggressively to pursue the matters.

Some Democrats and outside groups think the reported wrongdoings have reached a critical mass that cries out for investigations and reforms. Democratic leaders, however, are wary of breaking the long cease-fire that has protected both parties from the types of ethics charges and countercharges that roiled Congress and toppled two speakers in the 1980s and '90s.

Central to the debate is the House ethics committee, largely dormant since the unwritten truce took effect but rousing in recent days to defend itself against the rain of criticism. Watchdog groups are demanding that the secretive panel show more vigor in pursuing published reports of questionable behavior by lawmakers, and they want an end to the House-approved 1997 rule that bars ethics inquiries based solely on complaints from outsiders.

Some Democratic activists also are seething, convinced their elected officials are letting Republicans flout ethical standards in ways that were unthinkable when the GOP took control of the House in 1994. Republicans had attacked the entrenched Democrats' abuse of the House bank and post office and vowed to end Congress's "cycle of scandal."

The recent allegations touch top lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and several committee chairmen. They involve suggestions of bribery and threats on the House floor, illegal use of campaign funds, misuse of a federal agency for political purposes, conflicts of interest, and strong-arm tactics against lobbyists and campaign contributors.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64604-2004Mar16.html

U.S. Videos, for TV News, Praise Medicare Law


WASHINGTON, March 14 — Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines.

The videos are intended for use in local television news programs. Several include pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation from a crowd cheering as he signed the Medicare law on Dec. 8.

The materials were produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, which called them video news releases, but the source is not identified. Two videos end with the voice of a woman who says, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

But the production company, Home Front Communications, said it had hired her to read a script prepared by the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/politics/15VIDE.html?hp

Edited on Sun Mar-14-04 07:15 PM by joeunderdog
It has been widely reported that Texas Gov. George W. Bush made money over the years with a little help from his friends. But new details show that he served on an energy corporation’s board and was able to realize a huge profit by selling his stock in the corporation because an accounting sleight-of-hand concealed it was losing large sums of money. Shortly after he sold, the stock price plummeted. That profit helped make him a multimillionaire.

snip

Alas, a year later, in an amended 1989 annual report filed on Feb. 5, 1991, the company reported that after “discussions” with the SEC, which insisted that Harken use the traditional “cost recovery’’ method of accounting, it was revising its declared 1989 net loss of $3,300,000 fourfold--to $12,566,000. Harken also filed an amendment to its third quarter report for 1989 revealing that over the first nine months of that year it had lost nearly $4 million, rather than the $4.6 million profit it had declared.
snip

The SEC can prosecute company officers for willfully filing fraudulent reports. But in the Harken case, as in most similarly questionable filings, the investigation was conducted by the agency’s accounting staff, which did not believe there was intent to defraud and therefore did not refer the matter to the SEC’s enforcement division. Instead, the agency directed the company to publicly correct its reports, according to a retired SEC official familiar with aspects of the case.

snip

The corporate fog did not, however, obscure the fact that by the time the SEC directed Harken to recast its 1989 report, Bush already had already sold his stock in the company.

This old story absolutely deserves closer scrutiny, given our new-found passion for prosecuting insider trading--er, ah, at least lies about it, anyway. More about just where Anderson Accounting pioneered and developed Enronian methods, how the nickname "Shrub" was derived out of a company called Arbusto, why it pays to have your father's ex-lawyer be the SEC investigator, and how Martha Stewart is just a small fish in a sea of sharks...
http://www.public-i.org/story_01_040400.htm

The GOP strongman's political machine has stopped at nothing to extend its power. Now it's facing indictments for violating Texas campaign finance laws.

The weekly pen-and-pad press briefings in the office suite of the house majority leader are almost formal events. Thirty to 40 reporters take their seats at a long table and at a second tier of chairs placed against the east and west walls. "The leader" enters, escorted by two aides, Jonathan Grella and Stuart Roy. Roy closes the door at the south end of the elegant dining room and stands beside his boss, who sits at the head of the table; Grella takes his position at the opposite end of the room. Tom DeLay takes his seat, opens with a bit of friendly banter, and begins to work through his agenda. There's so much decorum that DeLay's arrival and departure are almost ceremonial. And there is never any doubt about who is in control. The 56-year-old congressman from Sugar Land, Texas, is smart, authoritative and in charge.

Recently the leader's grip has begun to slip. The first press conference in February ended with a Fox TV news reporter pressing DeLay for answers about the ethics committee's failure to investigate allegations of bribery on the House floor. DeLay didn't respond. The last press conference in February ended with Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Maria Recio asking about a campaign finance investigation in Texas. "That's not on the agenda," DeLay snapped.

Then he went on to answer the question with an unbidden attack on the "vindictive and partisan" district attorney in Austin.

The "vindictive and partisan" D.A. DeLay referred to is Ronnie Earle. For almost six months, Earle and a grand jury have been investigating possible violations of Texas campaign finance law in the 2002 election. Because the state capital lies within the jurisdiction of Travis County, Earle is far more powerful than the D.A.s in larger cities, such as Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. His Public Integrity Unit has a mandate and legislative funding to prosecute public officials who break the law. He's held office for 27 years, and is the only Democrat with statewide prosecutorial authority. His ongoing investigation of two political action committees that spent a combined $3.4 million on 22 Republican Texas House races is now focused on a PAC founded by DeLay and directed by a DeLay operative. "This is an attempt to criminalize politics," said a visibly angry DeLay. Ronnie Earle, he told reporters at his Feb. 24 press conference, is a "runaway prosecutor."

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/12/delay/index.html

there are so many...

here is another scandal:

Outing CIA Agent Valerie Plame (wife of Joseph Wilson)

Candidates and political parties that bank on their opponents’ getting dragged down by scandal usually end up disappointed — think the Democrats in 1984 and the Republicans in 1996. Barring earth-shattering revelations, elections get decided on the incumbent’s management of the economy and foreign affairs.

But for President Bush this year, neither looks to be holding unambiguous election-year advantages. And there are increasing signs a perfect storm of scandals is brewing, one that could end up making a real difference in what is bound to be a down-to-the-wire election this fall.

First up is the Plame investigation...

cont'd ...
http://www.thehill.com/marshall/030404.aspx

http://www.freepress.org/index2.php

Republished in http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
and http://democrats.com /

February 24, 2004

The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called “Golden Finger,” the safe route through the majority black inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP station, just east of downtown, is the place where affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up, get their coffee and New York Times. Those in need of cash visit BP’s Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM machine which provides a paper receipt of the transaction to all customers upon request.

Many of Taft’s and President George W. Bush’s major donors, like Diebold’s current CEO Walden “Wally” O’Dell, reside in Columbus’ northwest suburb Upper Arlington. O’Dell is on record stating that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President” this year. On September 26, 2003, he hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush’s re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O’Dell’s fundraising letter urged those attending to “Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party.” <snip>

If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote. <snip>

State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion.

<snip>One of the law’s stated goals was “Replacement of punch card and lever voting machines.” The new voting machines would be high-tech touch screen computers, but if there’s no paper trail, how do you know if there’s been a computer glitch? How can the results be trusted? And how do you recount to see if the actual votes match the computer’s tally? <snip>

Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as winner of Florida after someone “subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush.” Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 when it was uploaded.” Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents “unauthorized” replacement votes in Volusia County.

Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, “According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush.” The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. <snip>

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles. <snip>

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics.

“On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades to political projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster),” wrote The Independent last November. <snip>

The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.

In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel’s ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel’s first election victory was described as a “stunning upset” by one Nebraska newspaper. <snip>

Like Ohio, the State of Maryland was disturbed by the potential for massive electronic voter fraud. The voters of that state were reassured when the state hired SAIC to monitor Diebold’s system. SAIC’s former CEO is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens served as a military aide to both Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who now works with George H.W. Bush at the controversial Carlyle Group. Robert Gates, former CIA Director and close friend of the Bush family, also served on the SAIC Board. <snip>

Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were “fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies.” The scoop investigation concluded that: “The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold.

Wired News reported that “. . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.” Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes – 18,181.

Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment.

Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control countries by manipulating the election process. “CIA apologists leap up and say, ‘Well, most of these things are not so bloody.’ And that’s true. You’re giving politicians some money so he’ll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it’s still illegal intervention in other country’s affairs, raising the question of whether or not we’re going to have a world in which laws, rules of behavior are respected,” Stockwell wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega’s rise to power in Panama and in Marcos’ attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National Policy. <snip>

Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press (http://freepress.org ), a political science professor, and author of numerous articles and books.

http://www.mediareform.net /

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/49_95/news/4815-1.html (subscription required)

Ending months of speculation, the House ethics committee announced Wednesday that it has begun an official investigation into allegations that unnamed GOP lawmakers improperly pressured Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) to back a Medicare prescription drug bill during a controversial Nov. 22 vote.

The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct voted Wednesday to establish an investigative subcommittee to “conduct a formal inquiry regarding certain allegations related to voting on the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003,” the panel said in a statement released Wednesday. The full ethics panel had met behind closed doors earlier in the day to approve the step, the first time in two years that an investigative subcommittee has been authorized.

The statement added: “The investigative subcommittee will have jurisdiction to conduct a full and complete inquiry into alleged communications received by Representative Nick Smith linking support for the congressional candidacy of his son with Representative Smith’s vote on that legislation.”

The investigative subcommittee will issue a report to the full panel at the end of its inquiry, a document that does not have to be released publicly unless the committee votes to take further action.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=512&ncid=703&e=8&u=/ap...

WASHINGTON - When Congress curtailed Pentagon (news - web sites) research it feared would ensnare innocent Americans in the terrorism fight, it also allowed the Bush administration to eliminate two projects to protect citizens' privacy from futuristic tools. snip

As a result, the government is quietly pressing ahead with research into high-powered computer data-mining technology without the two most advanced privacy protections developed for those terror-fighting tools. snip


The project was the brainchild of retired Adm. John Poindexter, who was driven from the Reagan administration in 1986 over the Iran-Contra scandal. Some 15 years later, he was summoned back by the Bush administration to develop data-mining tools for the fight against terrorism.


Poindexter's new software tools, far more powerful than existing commercial products, would have allowed government agents to quickly scan the private commercial transactions and personal health records of millions of Americans and foreigners for telltale signs of terrorist activity.

more

The CIA had pictures. Why wasn’t the al-Qaida leader captured or killed?

By Lisa Myers
Senior investigative correspondent

NBC News
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4540958
Updated: 6:40 p.m. ET March 17, 2004As the 9/11 commission investigates what Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush might have done to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, one piece of evidence the commission will examine is a videotape secretly recorded by a CIA plane high above Afghanistan. The tape shows a man believed to Osama bin Laden walking at a known al-Qaida camp.

The question for the 9/11 commission: If the CIA was able to get that close to bin Laden before 9/11, why wasn’t he captured or killed? The videotape has remained secret until now.

Over the next three nights, NBC News will present this incredible spy footage and reveal some of the difficult questions it has raised for the 9/11 commission.

In 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing killed six people.

In 1998, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa killed 224.

Probing U.S. ties to Haiti coup


BY RON HOWELL
STAFF WRITER

March 17, 2004

Dodd said he planned to ask the inspector-general of the U.S. Agency for International Development to investigate the International Republican Institute. Two years ago, USAID gave the institute $1.2 million to train Haitians. In the Dominican Republic, IRI then held a series of classes for 600 Haitians, who crossed the border from Haiti, said IRI spokesman Thayer Scott.

Dodd is especially concerned about the involvement in IRI of a hard-line Haitian Aristide opponent named Stanley Lucas.

Lucas had been "undermining" international efforts to get Aristide foes to moderate their positions, Dodd said, citing allegations made two years ago by Brian Dean Curran, then U.S. ambassador to Haiti.....



Dodd asked Noriega for assurances Lucas and other institute officials "had absolutely no involvement or contact with Guy Philippe or other members of the Haitian armed forces or FRAPH," a paramilitary organization.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-wohait1537106...

In Iraq, Shock And Deja Vu
A Year Later, Baghdad in Flames Tells Another Story
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 18, 2004; Page C01


Baghdad's night is our midday, so when a bomb ripped through the Mount Lebanon Hotel yesterday, we saw something eerily reminiscent of last year's shock and awe. The night over Baghdad, illuminated in an orange glow of flames and destruction.

After the Xbox thrills of the initial campaign, the grunt's-eye view given to us by embedded reporters, much of the recent war has come to us as aftermath, the shells of twisted cars or the rubble of ruined buildings, caught after the fact, under the strangely reassuring glare of the morning sun. Men mill around the wreckage, casually, like boys poking a dead animal with sticks. But this war, we were reminded, began at night, like a fireworks show, and here we are again, one year later, watching a faraway world ablaze like a painting by Turner.

Just three days shy of the one-year anniversary, the enemies of occupation hit a hotel housing foreigners in the center of Baghdad. It was so close to Firdaus Square (where a statue of Saddam Hussein provided one of the war's happier, now superseded, images) that it was tempting to believe that the prosecutors of this resistance know full well the power of keeping one eye on death and the other on symbolism. The Bush administration was spending the week talking up the success of war, the distance we've come, the promise we've offered. Again we saw that statue, groaning from its plinth, offering the hope of a simple war.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3034-2004Mar17.html

n/t

The government announced today that it is changing it's emblem from an Eagle to a condom because it more accurately reflects the government's political stance. A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually being screwed!

That had CIA written all over it.

Then of course, the mother of all scandals in my opinion is going to war based on little evidence of WMD while convincing the world otherwise. Also convining Americans that there is a connection between Iraq and 9/11 is beyond disgusting. Beyond unethical.

And wasn't there an issue a while back about the WH trying to change or delete information in an EPA report because they didn't like what it had to say about global warming?

There's just sooo many it's hard to remember them all.

What really worries me now is the shooting of Chen Shui-bian, the President of Taiwan. The two countries that want to stop this man are China and the US. According to a Time article I just read, Chen flat out ignored Bush when Bush warned to not "make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo". So much for the spread of Democracy. There seems to always be negative consequences for countries whose leaders disobey Bush's wishes.

Jeremy Bigwood, a Washington-based freelance journalist who obtained the documents, yesterday told The Independent: "This repeats a pattern started in Nicaragua in the election of 1990 when spent $20 per voter to get rid of Ortega. It's done in the name of democracy but it's rather hypocritical. Venezuela does have a democratically elected President who won the popular vote which is not the case with the US."

More...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=500711

Iraq War Protesters Name Hundreds Lost
Memorial Held Across From White House

By Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 16, 2004; Page B04


They read aloud the names of the dead, one by one.

Standing on a box of a stage in the park across from the White House, a group of antiwar activists, veterans and military family members leaned into two microphones and called out the names of men and women they had never met. Some wiped tears from their eyes, and some simply stepped off the stage after they were done, hands in pockets and heads down.

Officials have barred media coverage of the bodies of troops arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and activists said that the president's decision not to attend funerals of soldiers killed in the war illustrates the administration's reluctance to acknowledge the rising number of dead and wounded.


"These human consequences are being deliberately hidden by the Bush administration," said Gordon Clark, 42, national coordinator of the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, one of the groups sponsoring the procession. Clark said the idea for the demonstration took shape in November in response to the president's absence at funerals for fallen soldiers. "Well, if he will not go to a funeral, perhaps we can bring a funeral to him," said Clark, of Silver Spring.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61443-2004Mar15.html

Bookmarked for future reference.

NYT: Clinton Aides Plan to Tell Panel of Warning Bush Team on Qaeda


By PHILIP SHENON

Published: March 20, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 19 — Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act.

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

snip

What is at issue, Clinton administration officials say, is whether their Bush administration counterparts acted on the warnings, and how quickly. The Clinton administration witnesses say they will offer details of the policy recommendations they made to the incoming Bush aides, but they would not discuss those details before the hearing.

"Until 9/11, counterterrorism was a very secondary issue at the Bush White House," said a senior Clinton official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Remember those first months? The White House was focused on tax cuts, not terrorism. We saw the budgets for counterterrorism programs being cut."


more at
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/politics/20PANE.html?ex=1080363600&e...

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol18/issue45/pols.sci.html

This was when he was Gov...but remember the bodies in Ga...in the pond out back.

Whiff of scandal enlivens capital


Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., during a Capitol Hill news conference Monday at which he demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor


Whiff of scandal enlivens capital

Democrats stand to gain from prolonged investigation of alleged White House leak

ANALYSIS By Tom Curry MSNBC

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — It wasn’t just the autumn chill, it was the whiff of scandal that invigorated the senses of jaded Washingtonians Monday. The question of the day: Had anyone in the White House tried to punish Iraq war opponent Joseph Wilson by leaking his wife’s identity as a CIA employee to columnist Bob Novak?

WILSON, THE RETIRED diplomat whom the CIA had assigned in February 2002 to find out whether Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger, has charged that White House officials had endangered his wife by unmasking her as a CIA weapons analyst.
It was, he said, an attempt to attack him for filing a report disputing an Iraq-Niger connection.

THE ‘WHODUNIT’
The sudden excitement in Washington came down to question of: Which would you read first, a 150-page “whodunit” or a 2,000-page treatise on politics?
The leak furor was the whodunit, an art form to which Washingtonians naturally gravitate. The treatise was the ongoing debate over whether Iraq can be transformed into a stable, non-threatening model Arab democracy.
A less-noticed aspect of the whodunit was another mystery, one which raised questions of potential incompetence in the Bush administration.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/973584.asp?0na=x2204Ab6 -
=========================================================

House Dems demand hearings on EPA air quality assurances after Sept. 11



WASHINGTON (AP)


House Democrats on Wednesday asked for hearings into allegations the Environmental Protection Agency misled New Yorkers about the dangers of debris in the air around the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We do not want the Congress of the United States to be party to a scandal," said the House Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, of California.

Pelosi was joined by Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, whose district includes ground zero, and others in her party in calling for a congressional investigation of the EPA's response to the attacks.

Last month, the EPA's internal watchdog found the agency, at the urging of White House officials, gave misleading assurances there was no health risk from the dust in the air after the twin towers' collapse. ---

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030928/ts_nm/iraq_...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday she knew "nothing of any" White House effort to leak the identity of an undercover CIA officer in July, a charge now under review at the Justice Department.

On the "Fox News Sunday" program, the top aide to President Bush said, "This has been referred to the Justice Department. I think that is the appropriate place for it."

Rice said the White House would cooperate should the Justice Department, headed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, decide to proceed with a criminal investigation of the matter, which centers on the alleged public disclosure of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate a report that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger, but returned to say it was highly doubtful.

more

Ambassador Says White House Adviser Told Press His Wife Was ‘Fair Game’


http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/US/CIAleak031001.html

Oct. 1— The former ambassador who accused the White House of leaking the identity of his CIA officer wife to the press says Washington reporters told him that senior White House adviser Karl Rove said his wife was "fair game."

The ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said he plans to give the names of the reporters to the FBI, which is conducting a full-blown investigation of the possible leak.

"I will be revealing the names of everybody who called me and cited White House sources or cited people specifically," Wilson said in an interview with Nightline's Ted Koppel.

Revealing a CIA officer's identity is a felony — but only if the person who leaked it did so knowing that the officer was undercover.

Wilson has said he believes his wife's identity was revealed in an attempt to punish him for accusing the administration of manipulating intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq.

Senior Federal Prosecutors and F.B.I. Officials Fault Ashcroft Over Leak Inquiry

By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: October 16, 2003


WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 — Several senior criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department and top F.B.I. officials have privately criticized Attorney General John Ashcroft for failing to recuse himself or appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of a C.I.A. operative's identity.

The criticism reflects the first sign of dissension in the department and the F.B.I. as the inquiry nears a critical phase. The attorney general must decide whether to convene a grand jury, which could compel White House officials to testify.

The criminal justice officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, represent a cross section of experienced criminal prosecutors and include political supporters of Mr. Ashcroft at the department's headquarters here and at United States attorneys' offices around the country.

The officials said they feared Mr. Ashcroft could be damaged by continuing accusations that as an attorney general with a long career in Republican partisan politics, he could not credibly lead a criminal investigation that centered on the aides to a Republican president.

more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/politics/16LEAK.html?ex=1066881600&e...

Threat From Saddam Hussein Was Overstated, Senate Committee Report Finds

Friday, October 24, 2003; Page A01

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a blistering report on prewar intelligence on Iraq that is critical of CIA Director George J. Tenet and other intelligence officials for overstating the weapons and terrorism case against Saddam Hussein, according to congressional officials.

The committee staff was surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence documents -- in particular the Oct. 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- summarizing Iraq's capabilities and intentions, according to Republican and Democratic sources. Staff members interviewed more than 100 people who collected and analyzed the intelligence used to back up statements about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities, and its possible links to terrorist groups.

Like a similar but less exhaustive inquiry being completed by the House intelligence committee, the Senate report shifts attention toward the intelligence community and away from White House officials, who have been criticized for exaggerating the Iraqi threat. At stake as the presidential political season approaches, said committee sources and intelligence figures, is who gets blamed for misleading the American public if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq -- the president or his intelligence chief.

Asked about the upcoming report, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the committee, said "the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community." The intelligence was sometimes "sloppy" and inconclusive, he said. "That's a concern I have with the total report" on Iraq.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9230-2003Oct23.html

---------
WASHINGTON — A State Department (search) employee was found dead outside the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., Friday around 5 p.m., Fox News has confirmed.

State Department sources told The Washington Post that John Kokal (search) worked in a unit that dealt with intelligence and research. Sources said he handled classified documents regularly....

......

the man, a white male, was wearing a dress shirt, tie and slacks, but was not wearing shoes....


....not yet known whether the employee jumped or fell. Firemen told Fox News that the D.C. police were handling the investigation and that the death could possibly be a homicide and that the body would not be immediately removed.
----------

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,102563,00.html

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20031201/us_nm/bush_...

White House Version of Mid-Air Exchange Disputed
56 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - British Airways said on Monday that none of its pilots made contact with President Bush (news - web sites)'s plane during its secret flight to Baghdad, contradicting White House reports of a mid-air exchange that nearly prompted Bush to call off his trip.

Honor Verrier, a spokeswoman for British Airways in North America, said two BA aircraft were in the area at the time and neither radioed the president's plane to ask if it was Air Force One.

"We have spoken to the British Airways captains who were in the area at the time and neither made comments to Air Force One nor did they hear any other aircraft make the statement over the radio," Verrier said in response to a question from Reuters.

The White House had no immediate comment on the discrepancy.

Bush aides recounted with excitement last week the moment during the flight to Baghdad when they said a BA pilot thought he spotted the president's blue and white Boeing 747 from his cockpit.

Fact-checkers blamed for Bush's uranium speech

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/12/24/white.house.uranium/index.ht...

No one checked their facts carefully," said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It was a mistake that propagated itself. They should have known better to check and ask more questions about the information."

Time: Confessions of a White House Insider (O'Neill Interview)

Edited on Sun Jan-11-04 08:13 AM by kskiska
A book about Treasury's Paul O'Neill paints a presidency where ideology and politics rule the day

If anyone would listen to him, Paul O'Neill thought, Dick Cheney would. The two had served together during the Ford Administration, and now as the Treasury Secretary fought a losing battle against another round of tax cuts, he figured that his longtime colleague would give him a hearing.

O'Neill had been preaching that a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax cuts would exacerbate it. But others in the White House saw a chance to capitalize on the historic Republican congressional gains in the 2002 elections. Surely, Cheney would not be so smug. He would hear O'Neill out. In an economic meeting in the Vice President's office, O'Neill started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. O'Neill was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms. This is our due."

A month later, Paul O'Neill was fired, ending the rocky two-year tenure of Bush's first Treasury Secretary, who became known for his candid statements and the controversies that followed them. Rarely had a person who spoke so freely been embedded so high in an Administration that valued frank public remarks so little.

(snip)

But the book is blunt, and in person O'Neill can be even more so. Discussing the case for the Iraq war in an interview with TIME, O'Neill, who sat on the National Security Council, says the focus was on Saddam from the early days of the Administration. He offers the most skeptical view of the case for war ever put forward by a top Administration official. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told TIME. "There were allegations and assertions by people.

(snip)

…Weeks after Bush had assured O'Neill that rumored staff changes in the economic team did not mean his job was in peril, Cheney called. "Paul, the President has decided to make some changes in the economic team. And you're part of the change," he told O'Neill. The bloodless way he was cut loose by his old chum shocked O'Neill, Suskind writes, but what came after was even more shocking. Cheney asked him to announce that it was O'Neill's decision to leave Washington to return to private life. O'Neill refused, saying "I'm too old to begin telling lies now."

more…
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040119-574809,00....

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040115-024012-7011r

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The panel set up to investigate why the United States failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, faced angry questions Thursday after revelations that two of its own senior officials were so closely involved in the events under investigation that they have been interviewed as part of the inquiry.

Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director, worked on the Bush-Cheney transition team as the new administration took power, advising his longtime associate and former boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, on the incoming National Security Council.

"He came forward (to answer questions) in case he might have useful information," said Al Felzenberg, the commission spokesman.

The news was greeted with dismay by many of the relatives of the victims who campaigned for the commission to be set up.

"This is beginning to look like a whitewash," Kristen Breitweizer, who lost her husband Ron in tower two of the World Trade Center, told United Press International.

more

Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I. (new 9/11 scandal)

http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage1.asp

Here's my synopsis: A whistleblower claims there is a Turkish spy ring that has inflitrated the translation department of the FBI, yet the FBI doesn't seem to care. This apparently has some connection to 9/11. It appears that nobody except a few Democratic Senators and the 9/11 victim's relatives are interested in investigating this major breach of security.

This whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, has already been in the media before. I recently updated an entry for my 9/11 timeline which summarizes the case:

March 22, 2002: Translator Sibel Edmonds later claims that she is fired by the FBI on this day after repeatedly raising suspicions about a coworker named Jan Dickerson. When Dickerson was hired in November 2001, she had connections to a Turkish intelligence officer and had worked with a Turkish organization, both of which were being investigated by the FBI's own counterintelligence unit. Edmonds claims that Dickerson insisted that she alone translate documents relating to the investigation of this organization and official. When Edmonds reviewed Dickerson's translations, she found information that the Turkish officer had spies inside the State Department and Pentagon was not being translated. Dickerson then tried to recruit Edmonds as a spy, and when she refused threatened to kill Edmonds. After her boss and others in the FBI failed to respond to her complaints, she wrote to the Justice Department's inspector general's office in March: "Investigations are being compromised. Incorrect or misleading translations are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being blocked and circumvented." Edmonds is then fired and she sues the FBI. The FBI eventually concludes Dickerson had left out significant information from her translations. A second FBI whistleblower, John Cole, also claims to know of security lapses in the screening and hiring of FBI translators. In October 2002, at the request of FBI Director Mueller, Attorney General Ashcroft asks a judge to throw out Edmonds's lawsuit against the Justice Department. He says he is applying the state secrets privilege in order "to protect the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States." The supervisor who told her not to make these accusations and also encouraged her to go slow in her translations (see Late September 2001) is later promoted.

Associated Press
Wednesday February 4, 2004
The Guardian

A prominent Israeli MP said yesterday that his country's intelligence services knew claims that Saddam Hussein was capable of swiftly launching weapons of mass destruction were wrong but withheld the information from Washington.

"It was known in Israel that the story that weapons of mass destruction could be activated in 45 minutes was an old wives' tale," Yossi Sarid, a member of the foreign affairs and defence committee which is investigating the quality of Israeli intelligence on Iraq, told the Associated Press yesterday.

"Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario, and it should have," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1140458,00.html

Report: Thousands of Files Were Accessed

Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A01

A three-month investigation by the Senate's top law enforcement officer found a systematic downloading of thousands of Democratic computer files by Republican staffers over the past few years as well as serious flaws in the chamber's computer security system.

The report released yesterday by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle noted that two former Senate GOP staff members -- including the Republicans' top aide on judicial nomination strategy -- were primarily responsible for accessing and leaking computer memos on Democratic plans for blocking some of President Bush's judicial nominations.

Pickle made no recommendations about whether to pursue criminal prosecutions in the case, but he cited several federal laws that might be considered, including statutes involving false statements and receipt of stolen property.

Pickle and his investigators said forensics analyses indicated that 4,670 files had been downloaded between November 2001 and spring 2003 by one of the aides -- "the majority of which appeared to be from folders belonging to Democratic staff" on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said at least 100 of his computer files were also accessed by the GOP aides.

The report identified the two former staffers as Jason Lundell, a nominations clerk who originally accessed the files, and Manuel Miranda, a more senior staff member and later the top aide to Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on judicial nominations. Miranda, the report said, advised Lundell and was said by other aides to have been implicated in leaking the documents to friendly journalists or other parties outside the Senate. Miranda had previously denied leaking the materials.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31803-2004Mar4.html

Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts (NYT)


By JAMES GLANZ NY Times

February 18, 2004

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

The sweeping charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page report today that it said detailed the accusations.

Together, the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/science/18CND-RESE.html

Untold story of Bush's penchant for secrecy (US News & WR)


INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: The untold story of the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy
How the public's business gets done out of the public eye

US News and World Report

The Bush administration has removed from the public domain millions of pages of information on health, safety, and environmental matters, lowering a shroud of secrecy over many critical operations of the federal government.

The administration's efforts to shield the actions of, and the information held by, the executive branch are far more extensive than has been previously documented. And they reach well beyond security issues.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/usinfo/press/secrecy.htm

Press Release Source: Republican National Committee (Reagan Mini-Series)


Letter from Chairman Ed Gillespie to CBS Regarding the Mini-Series 'The Reagans'
Friday October 31, 2:50 pm ET

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031031/dcf037_1.html

I have recently seen reports about the upcoming CBS miniseries "The Reagans" and am concerned that its portrayal of our 40th President and Mrs. Reagan and the Reagan Presidency may not be historically accurate.

A CBS statement describes the series as "programming that informs, entertains and hopefully, stirs meaningful discourse." But if your series contains omissions, exaggerations, distortions or scenes that are fiction masquerading as fact, the American people may come away with a misunderstanding of the Reagans and the Reagan Administrations. Those graduating from college this year were only about five years old when President Reagan left office, and this broadcast will have a significant impact on their understanding of his legacy.

One producer, Neil Meron, said, "This is not a vendetta, this is not revenge. It is about telling a good story in our honest sort of way." I'm not sure "honest sort of way" meets a proper standard for historical accuracy.

<snip>

To avoid any confusion as to what constitutes treating the President, Mrs. Reagan and the Reagan Administrations in an honest sort of way, I respectfully request that you allow a team of historians to review the program for historical accuracy, and a panel of people who actually know the Reagans personally to review it for accuracy in its portrayal of them as individuals before it is aired.

If you're unwilling to do so, I respectfully request that you inform your viewers via a crawl every ten minutes that the program is a fictional portrayal of the Reagans and the Reagan Presidency, and they should not consider it to be historically accurate.

<snip>

OMFG, the bastards continue in effots to rewrite history to portray Howdy Doody as... Whatever the hell it is they want him remembered as.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK4.story&STOR...

"Retroactive legislation moving rapidly through Congress would make it easier for corporate wrongdoers to escape responsibility for defrauding investors, harming the environment and otherwise maximizing profits at the expense of the health and financial well-being of ordinary citizens," says Nan Aron, president of Alliance For
Justice, a nonprofit corporation based in Washington, DC. "In the wake of the worst corporate scandals in fifty years, rather than acting to deter wrongdoing, Congress is poised to encourage more white collar misconduct with passage of a so-called class action reform bill which actually retroactively helps several of our most notorious corporate miscreants escape accountability."

President Bush Wants Senate to Debate the Retroactive House Bill which Lets Ken Lay Off Hook and Usurps Federal Judicial Discretion

This one did, though.

http://www.forrelease.com/D20030826/nytu093.P1.08262003121943.06685.html

appreciate it.

Secret Talks With Iranian Arms Dealer
NY Newsday, August 8 2003


WASHINGTON - Pentagon hardliners pressing for regime change in Iran have held secret and unauthorized meetings in Paris with a controversial arms dealer who was a major figure in the Iran-contra scandal, according to administration officials.

The officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in U.S. arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

...

"They were talking to him about stuff which they weren't officially authorized to do," said a senior administration official. "It was only accidentally that certain parts of our government learned about it."

The official would not identify those "parts" of the government, but a former intelligence official confirmed they are the State Department, the CIA and the White House, itself.

...

He said that the immediate objective of the Pentagon hardliners appears to be to "antagonize Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden U.S. policy against them."

...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0808-12.htm

Commissioner: Bush Deliberately Delayed Inquiry Report Until After Iraq War

Big News Network.com Saturday 26th July, 2003

WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- A member of the independent commission set up to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has accused the Bush administration of deliberately delaying publication of an earlier congressional inquiry into the attacks.

Former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., told United Press International that the White House did not want the report made public before launching military action in Iraq. He said the administration feared publication might undermine the administration's case for war, which was based in part on the allegation that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had supported Osama bin Laden -- and the attendant possibility that Iraq might supply al-Qaida with weapons of mass destruction.

"The administration sold the connection (between Iraq and al-Qaida) to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war," said Cleland. "There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of bin Laden's terrorist followers ... What you've seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends."

Cleland accused the administration of deliberately delaying the report's release to avoid having its case for war undercut.

more.....
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=6aa9e973ce69679a

CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE DOCUMENTS FEATURE IRAQI OILFIELDS MAP


Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org .

<...>

http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.b_PR.shtml

Attention journalists! This admin is BEYOND corrupt. They are nothing but a bunch of crooks and liars.

gonna take a break for a while.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian

As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.


It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior members of the administration created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. snip

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

in China? one of the latest.

also a new one

CIA Did Not OK White House Claim-Hussein Could Launch in 45 Minutes


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17424-2003Jul19.html?na...

The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public "dossier" on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable.

when they did the same to him.

I personally visualize Bush, Cheney, and Rummy laughing hysterically and doing circle jerks in the Oval Office when they consider what they are pulling over on the American public.

The tide is turning.

By the time election day rolls around -- considering boosh's* track record -- this has the potential of becoming the next "thread that never ends."

I swear, the Bush administration seems to operate just like the mafia. If you go against them, they WILL get revenge. It's sickening.

despite knowing Al Qaeda was to blame

Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Lesley Stahl that on September 11, 2001 and the day after - when it was clear Al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday March 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with ,'" he tells Stahl.

more…
http://www.drudgereport.com/flash60.htm

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash5.htm
AUDIT: SECRET SERVICE CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR $3.3 BILLION; COAST GUARD $497 MILLION
Thu Feb 26 2004 08:44:46 ET

More than $3 billion in Secret Service retirement benefits could not be adequately accounted for during a recent independent audit of the Homeland Security Department's books, CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY reports on Thursday.

The audit also showed the Coast Guard could not account for $497 million in "operating materials and supplies," according to a Feb. 13 memo from DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin to Secretary Tom Ridge.

CQ's Justin Rood: "The memo is a summary of a report prepared by independent auditor KPMG on an audit of the agency's financial operations for the final seven months of fiscal 2003."

<snip>

The audit "confirms my concerns about weak financial management controls across ," Rep. Martin Olav Sabo, D-Minn., ranking member of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said in an e-mail.

Bush grants permanent legal immunity to US corporations looting Iraqi oil



World Socialist Web Site


An extraordinary Presidential Executive Order, signed into law by President Bush on May 22 but kept out of the pages of the US media, further underscores the real motivations behind the illegal US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ostensibly drawn up in order to protect Iraq’s oil wealth, Executive Order (EO) 13303, “Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq and Certain Other Property in Which Iraq Has an Interest”, provides unlimited authority for US corporations to loot Iraqi oil and grants them permanent immunity from any legal actions over the consequences.

EO 13303 begins with a declaration that the possibility of future legal claims on Iraq’s oil wealth constitutes “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” It goes on to state that “any ... judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void” with regard to the Development Fund for Iraq, as well as for any commercial operation conducted by US corporations involved in the Iraqi oil industry. -

Halliburton's Deals Greater than Thought


Thursday, August 28, 2003; Page A01

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion out of Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents.

The size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military's increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run its logistical operations. Independent experts estimate that as much as one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to independent contractors.

Services performed by Halliburton, through its Brown and Root subsidiary, include building and managing military bases, logistical support for the 1,200 intelligence officers hunting Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, delivering mail and producing millions of hot meals. Often dressed in Army fatigues with civilian patches on their shoulders, Halliburton employees and contract personnel have become an integral part of Army life in Iraq.

(snip)

But according to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and other critics, the Iraq war and occupation have provided a handful of companies with good political connections, particularly Halliburton, with unprecedented money-making opportunities. "The amount of money is quite staggering, far more than we were originally led to believe," Waxman said. "This is clearly a trend under this administration, and it concerns me because often the privatization of government services ends up costing the taxpayers more money rather than less."

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56429-2003Aug27.html

U.S. Gives No-Bid Contract to Halliburton To Expand Guantanamo Bay


Posted on Democracy Now.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/27/1413258

U.S. Gives No-Bid Contract to Halliburton To Expand Guantanamo Bay Jail Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root has been awarded a no-bid contract to expand the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay. The extra space will allow the U.S. to hold 10 percent more detainees at the base.

Bremer Iraq Effort to Cost Tens of Billions (more $ than oil production)


http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa-bremer.html
August 27, 2003
W.Post: Bremer Iraq Effort to Cost Tens of Billions
By REUTERS



Filed at 0:57 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iraq will need tens of billions of dollars in contributions from overseas in the next year to fund the reconstruction effort, the top U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, said in an interview published on Wednesday.
Bremer told The Washington Post that Iraqi revenue would not be enough to cover the bill for economic needs that he described as "almost impossible to exaggerate."Explaining the huge cost of the project, Bremer said it would cost $2 billion just to meet current electrical demand and an estimated $16 billion over four years to deliver clean water to all Iraqis.The figures, which must be added to the $4 billion the Pentagon spends each month on military operations in Iraq, offer the latest evidence that the price of the Iraqi occupation is growing substantially, The Post reported.
Quick revenues from Iraq's vast oil resources have failed to materialize because of sabotage and looting.

Bremer told the newspaper he hoped to return Iraqi oil production to prewar levels by October 2004. But he noted that even when deliveries return to 2002 levels, the industry would not produce enough revenue to cover the cost of reconstruction.<anip>

He also told the newspaper that it would take years and countless billions of dollars to get Iraq functioning again. ..Bush said it would require "substantial" time ...would try to persuade more countries to join in ....Bremer strongly questioned the wisdom of giving significant responsibility to the United Nations."What exactly is it that happens on the ground that makes things better if the U.N. is in charge of reconstruction?" he asked.

Report Says Limited Cooperation Thwarts a Full Review of Cheney's Energy Task Force
By Siobhan McDonough Associated Press Writer
Published: Aug 26, 2003

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.

Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.

The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said.

The GAO unsuccessfully sued the vice president last year to release information. (snip/...)

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAMSEBLTJD.html

Sources: Pentagon rushed postwar plan

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A classified draft military review on lessons learned from the war in Iraq says planners did not have enough time to prepare for the so-called Phase IV operation -- the rebuilding and reconstruction of Iraq, according to Pentagon sources.

The review of the lessons is one of several being conducted throughout the military.

This particular assessment is an ongoing project of the senior members of the Joint Staff, which serves the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

<snip>

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/09/03/sprj.irq.iraq.reconstruction/index.ht...

$87 billion sought will fall short of rebuilding needs


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-iraqmoney9sep09,1,4...
(need to register)

WASHINGTON — The White House acknowledged Monday that it substantially underestimated the cost of rebuilding Iraq and that even the additional $87 billion it was seeking from a wary Congress would fall far short of what is needed for postwar reconstruction.

Administration officials said President Bush's emergency spending request — which would push the U.S. budget deficit above the half-trillion-dollar mark for the first time — still left a reconstruction funding gap of as much as $55 billion.

...

Greenpeace obtains smoking-gun memo: White House/Exxon link


the email, Myron Ebell of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute writes to Phil Cooney, a senior official at the White House Council for Environmental Quality. He describes his plans to discredit an EPA study on climate change through a lawsuit. He states the need to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish." He notes his group is considering a call for the then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, to resign, and openly suggests that she'd make an appropriate "fall gal" if the administration is serious about getting back into bed with conservatives opposing action on climate change.

His memo to the US government official begins "Thanks for calling and asking for our help." (You can view the entire memo here.)

That statement, and the cosy, conspiratorial tone of the document was enough to make Richard Blumenthal, State Attorney General of Connecticut, and G. Steven Rowe, State Attorney General of Maine, demand an investigation by US Attorney General John Ashcroft into whether Cooney or other officials in the Bush administration solicited the Competitive Enterprise Institute's filing of the new lawsuit, as the memo certainly makes it appear.


http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en//news/details?item_id=30856...

(Military) Wounded billed for hospital food


http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/11/Worldandnation/Wounded_billed_for_ho...

After a grenade exploded inside his Humvee in Iraq, Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Murwin was treated at a military hospital in Germany and spent four weeks at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Part of his left foot was amputated.

His medical care was free, but the government billed him $243 for the food.

Then, just three days after he received his first bill for the hospital food in Germany, he got a stern letter saying the bill was overdue. It warned that his account would be referred to a collection agency.

Murwin, like thousands of other military personnel hospitalized every year, is expected to reimburse the government $8.10 per day for food. That's standard procedure because of a law Congress passed in 1981. But it has angered many military families over the years.

When Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo, and his wife, Beverly, heard about the problem, they personally paid Murwin's tab. Then the congressman introduced a bill to change the rules.

Politicians quietly planning to deregulate the nation's energy system


U.S. Newswire
8/20/03 9:00:00 AM

A provision of the federal energy legislation that a congressional conference committee will consider next month would dramatically reduce the regulatory oversight of the nation's largest energy firms. The section, which has received scant attention as lawmakers and environmental groups focus on issues of oil drilling, proposes to repeal the 1935 Public Utility Holding Companies Act, or PUHCA, which restrains and regulates utility companies.

"It would be obscene to throw out seventy years of consumer protections after everything that has gone wrong in the first decade of deregulation. The repeal of PUHCA would leave America with a few unrestrained power giants controlling our energy system, which would make California and the recent blackouts seem mild compared to the deregulated future politicians have in store for us if they repeal PUHCA," said Heller.

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=104-08202003

www.sfgate.com

Troops in Iraq face pay cut
Pentagon says tough duty bonuses are budget-buster
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Thursday, August 14, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle




Washington -- The Pentagon wants to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who are already contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120- degree-plus heat.

Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the 9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in "imminent danger pay" and $150 a month in "family separation allowances."

The Defense Department supports the cuts, saying its budget can't sustain the higher payments amid a host of other priorities. But the proposed cuts have stirred anger among military families and veterans' groups and even prompted an editorial attack in the Army Times, a weekly newspaper for military personnel and their families that is seldom so outspoken.

Congress made the April pay increases retroactive to Oct. 1, 2002, but they are set to expire when the federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30 unless Congress votes to keep them as part of its annual defense appropriations legislation.

NO ETHICS? NO EXPERIENCE? NO PROBLEM! -- Rall


NEW YORK--WorldCom Inc., recently and hilariously accused of rerouting phone calls to avoid paying connection fees to other phone companies (who was running the joint, frat dudes?), ranks with Enron in the annals of modern corporate debauchery. After an $11 billion accounting scandal sunk the infamous telecommunications conglomerate into bankruptcy, the U.S. General Services Administration banned federal agencies from doing business with WorldCom. So how is a proscribed "company that has demonstrated a flagrant lack of ethics"--the words belong to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), chairperson of the Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee--poised to land a $900 million Pentagon (news - web sites) contract to build a cell phone system for occupied Iraq?


"I was curious about it, because the last time I looked, MCI has never built out a wireless network," comments Len Lauer of Sprint.


Indeed, WorldCom's MCI division never figured out how to build a cell network in the U.S., and ultimately gave up trying. But who needs experience when you have tasty political connections? Before 2000 WorldCom donated equally to Democrats and Republicans in order to land cell service contracts with U.S. occupation armies in Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan (news - web sites). Now it's leveraging a $45 million deal with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) into a Halliburtonesque sweetheart contract to build the first national mobile phone network in Iraq, where more than 2 million new customers are expected to sign up right away.

more................

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=7&u=/03...

Try this one instead:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4505.htm

War Criminals Hire War Criminals To Hunt Down War Criminals


By Chris Floyd

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/08/29/120.html

Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out U.S. tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo -- perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad -- and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

...snip...

For example, the U.S. alliance with Saddam's killers -- yes, the very ones who inflicted all those human rights abuses which, we're now told, was the onliest reason the Dear Leader attacked and destroyed a sovereign nation in an unprovoked war of aggression -- was described demurely as "an unusual compromise." (As opposed to, say, "a moral outrage," or "a putrid stain on America's honor," or "a monstrous copulation of rapacious conquerors with bloodthirsty scum.") However, the Post hastens to assure us that the wise sahibs do recognize the "potential pitfalls" of hooking up with "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment."

It's sink or swim for school kids - Bullets vs. Schoolbooks


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/... /

<snip>
Everyone says teaching our children is a noble task, but the costs of the occupation are now at a level where it makes any claims of caring about public schools a joke. Halliburton, the oil and soldier services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, already has scored $1.7 billion in no-bid, no-ceiling contracts off the war. That would fund the Boston public schools for three years.

The $60 billion cost of the invasion and its immediate aftermath dwarfs the $36 billion American schools were able to spend on construction in 2001. While the war-related work allowed Halliburton to post a profit of $26 million in the second quarter of this year after nearly $500 million of losses last year, the cumulative debt of the nation's school districts rose to $202 billion in 2001.

If the cost of rebuilding Iraq surpasses $411 billion, that will exceed spending for all the nation's public school students in 2001. All for a war that began with lies, ended with the discovery of no weapons of mass destruction and no proof of a revamped nuclear weapons program, and is continuing with the chaos of car bombings and sniper attacks. The commitment to rebuild Iraq is so serious that the White House is giving Bechtel a contract boost of $350 million, sending that company's war work over $1 billion.

As for the rebuilding of education, President Bush's vaunted Leave No Child Behind program, which promises students that they can transfer out of poorly performing schools, is so underfunded that in Chicago there are only 1,000 seats for the 240,000 students who could qualify. Less than half of 1 percent can qualify.

Cynthia Tucker: As jobs melt, rich just chill


http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/index.html

If you are a middle-aged software designer still looking for work a year after a layoff, or a former Enron manager now selling shoes in a department store, or a seamstress laid off when a textile mill shut down, you might think President Bush's program for economic recovery isn't working. You'd be wrong.

The president's economy policy is working just as he planned it. The stock market is bouncing back, sales of Rolexes and Range Rovers are humming right along, and compensation for CEOs is still in the stratosphere. Among the president's friends, there is little anxiety about the kids' trust funds. (Notice how well Halliburton has been doing since the invasion of Iraq?)

Bush's multibillion-dollar tax cuts largely benefited the wealthy while doing little to produce jobs for average workers. Conservatives fiercely defended the tax cuts as redress to rich capitalists who paid most of the taxes and who would create jobs if given appropriate incentives. They neglected to mention that many of those jobs would be created in other countries.

So far, the United States has lost 2.5 million jobs during Bush's tenure, threatening him with the worst record of job losses since Herbert Hoover. The recession may have ended two years ago, but the economic pain continues for many working families. While economists (most of whom have not yet lost their jobs) continue to predict that job growth is right around the corner, hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are so discouraged that they have given up even looking for a job. Others struggle along with part-time work and full-time bills.

I cannot find another one.

Outsourcing War - inside look at Brown & Root


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_37/b3849012.htm

Early on the morning of Aug. 5, a U.S. mail convoy pulled out of the airport in Baghdad and headed north. A U.S. Army Humvee bristling with weaponry led the way, followed by three heavily loaded trucks, each driven by a civilian employee of Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). A second military Humvee brought up the rear. Near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, a bomb detonated under one of the trucks. The military police pried its driver, Fred Bryant Jr., from the wreckage and raced him to a military field hospital. Bryant, 39, died en route, the first KBR combat casualty since the Texas contractor was founded in 1919.

Bryant's death underscores the U.S. military's heavy reliance on private military companies, or PMCs, to wage war in Iraq. By most estimates, civilian contractors are handling as much as 20% to 30% of essential military support services in Iraq. Scores of PMCs are active all across the country, but KBR in particular has become indispensable to the global projection of American military might in this unsettled age. "It is no exaggeration to say that wherever the U.S. military goes, so goes Brown & Root," says P.W. Singer, a Brookings Institution fellow and author of Corporate Warriors. Widely known as Brown & Root, KBR is a unit of oil-services giant Halliburton Co. (HAL ) -- Dick Cheney's old company.

<snip>

But outsourcing is no panacea for America's overextended military. Brown & Root and most other PMCs work strictly in a supporting role. Their employees maintain America's high-tech weapons and train soldiers how to use them but depend heavily on their military customers for protection in combat zones. If security breaks down, as it often has in Iraq, the PMC support system is liable to malfunction, too. Lieutenant General Charles S. Mahan Jr., the Army's top logistics officer, recently complained that so many civilian contractors had refused to deploy to particularly dangerous parts of Iraq that soldiers had to go without fresh food, showers, and toilets for months. Even mail delivery fell weeks behind, Mahan complained in a July 31 interview with Newhouse News Service. "We thought we could depend on industry to perform these kind of functions," Mahan said. But it got "harder and harder to get to go in harm's way."

<snip>

Skeptics, who include many members of the military Establishment, warn that the growing PMC presence on the battlefield exposes America's armed forces to potentially catastrophic risk. As civilians, contract employees are not subject to military command and discipline. Workers who refuse an assignment can be fired by their employers but not tossed into the brig. The Pentagon's only recourse is to sue -- no comfort at all to a commander in the field who has been left in the lurch by vanished contractors. A PMC's ultimate duty is not to its military customers but to its shareholders. "Contractor loyalty to the almighty dollar, as opposed to support for/of the front-line soldier, remains serious question," warned a U.S. Army War College paper last year.

Bush’s bloated defense budget


Military spending could be highest since height of Korean War

HERE ARE THE stark numbers. The original defense budget for fiscal year 2004 was $400 billion. Bush’s supplemental request for Iraq and Afghanistan, which he announced last Sunday on television, is $87 billion, for a total of $487 billion. Let’s be conservative and deduct the $21 billion of the supplemental that’s earmarked for civil reconstruction (even though the Defense Department is running the reconstruction). That leaves $466 billion.
By comparison, in constant 2004 dollars (adjusted for inflation), the U.S. defense budget in 1985, the peak of the Cold War and Ronald Reagan’s rearmament, totaled $453 billion. That was $12 billion to $33 billion less than this year’s budget (depending on whether you count reconstruction). In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, the budget amounted to $428 billion. That’s $38 billion to $59 billion below Bush’s request for this year.

You have to go back more than 50 years, when 50,000 Americans were dying in the big muddy of Korea, to find a president spending more money on the military — and even that year’s budget, $497 billion in constant dollars, wasn’t a lot more than what Bush is asking today.
These are parlous times, but are they that parlous? Do we really need to be spending quite so much money on the military?

http://msnbc.com/news/965843.asp?0cv=CB20

Big lie on Iraq comes full circle


http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel19.html

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie. That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself.

The president has insisted that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, a continuation of the administration's effort to link Iraq to the attack on the World Trade Center. While almost three-quarters of the public believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, the polls after the president's recent speech show that less than half believe that Iraq is the ''central front'' of the war on terrorism. Moreover, the majority believe that the war has increased the risk of terrorism. A shift is occurring in the middle, which is neither clearly pro-Bush nor clearly anti-Bush. The big lie is coming apart.

There is not and never has been any evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack. None. The implication of such involvement was an attempt to deceive, a successful attempt at the big lie. snip

Moreover, the corollary mantra, which says that Americans must make sacrifices to win the war on terror, is also in trouble. Who makes the sacrifices? The rich Americans celebrating their tax ''refunds''? The Republican leadership who have few if any sons and daughters in harm's way? Giant corporations like Dick Cheney's Halliburton or Bechtel? No, the sacrifices will be made mostly by the sons and daughters of the poor and the working class who must fight the war. Jessica Lynch joined the army so she could get money for a college education. Her roommate Lori Piestewa, who was killed in action, joined because she was a Native American single mother who needed the money to raise her two children.

more

Cheney's War Stock



Published on Tuesday, September 23, 2003 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal
Cheney's War Stock
Editorial

Vice President Dick Cheney was not in very good truthful form on NBC's "Meet the Press" a week ago. Asked about polls that showed a majority of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, Cheney said, "I think it's not surprising that people make that connection," adding that the jury was still out whether an actual connection existed. Not true: The intelligence community has dismissed the possibility of a link. At any rate, Cheney's coy and continuing peddling of a baseless connection led President Bush himself to set the record straight a few days later: "No," he told a reporter, "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

Cheney was just flirting with lies regarding Iraq. But lost in the winks and nudges of his appearance on "Meet the Press" was an outright lie regarding his ties to Halliburton, the oil service company he headed in the 1990s: "Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all of my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years."

Really?




http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0923-09.htm

For Sale: Iraq


Riverbend's latest

For Sale: Iraq
For Sale: A fertile, wealthy country with a population of around 25 million… plus around 150,000 foreign troops, and a handful of puppets. Conditions of sale: should be either an American or British corporation (forget it if you’re French)… preferably affiliated with Halliburton. Please contact one of the members of the Governing Council in Baghdad, Iraq for more information.

To hear of the first of the economic reforms announced by Kamil Al-Gaylani, the new Iraqi Finance Minister, you’d think Iraq was a Utopia and the economy was perfect only lacking in… foreign investment. As the BBC so wonderfully summarized it: the sale of all state industries except for oil and other natural resources. Basically, that means the privatization of water, electricity, communications, transportation, health… The BBC calls it a ‘surprise’… why were we not surprised?

After all, the Puppets have been bought- why not buy the stage too? Iraq is being sold- piece by piece. People are outraged. The companies are going to start buying chunks of Iraq. Or, rather, they’re going to start buying the chunks the Governing Council and CPA don’t reward to the ‘Supporters of Freedom’.

more...

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com /

WP: Cheney's Ties to Halliburton



Democrats have aggressively challenged Cheney's claim that he has no financial ties to Halliburton, despite those arrangements.

The Houston-based energy conglomerate has been awarded more than $2 billion in contracts for rebuilding Iraq, including one worth $1.22 billion that was awarded on a noncompetitive basis.

The report, from the law division of the congressional research arm of the Library of Congress, said deferred salary or compensation received from a private corporation -- as well as unexercised stock options -- may represent a continuing financial interest as defined by federal ethics laws.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2233-2003Sep25.html

Bush's big swindle of Americans and Iraqis to pay off corporations


http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2003%20Opinion%20Edito...

Bush is a puppet of the corporate barons, and if anyone doubted that, the following article in today's Washington Post should dispel any question marks. Bush has swindled the American people by awarding massive boondoggles, tax loopholes, and tax cuts, to his corporate paymasters who put this corrupt regime in office-- and to the richest-of-the-rich. Meanwhile, we're being forced to dig into our pockets to enrich these crooks!

"We the People" should be rising up in outrage at the squandering of our hard-earned tax-payer dollars, that are obscenely funnelled to the immoral Bushies, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and, their criminals-in-arms, including Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Big Oil ... and new corporations are set-up by Bush's buddies like Joe Allbaugh's "New Bridge Strategies LLC", and "Iraqi International Law Group (IILG)", a new outfit ready to "help you secure contracts for rebuilding Iraq". And let me also introduce you to the head of IILG, Salem Chalabi, nephew of the embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi. Ahmad Chalabi is wanted in parts of the Arab World for theft and embezzlement, and is a puppet of the corrupt Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz Gang-- all colluding to rape Americans and Iraqis for all we're worth.

The Bush Regime's shell game was exposed by Condi Rice, who in April last year, described September 11 2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities." < http://new.globalfreepress.com/article.pl?sid=03/09/23/0447229 >, Powell and Rice are reportedly to have said that Saddam Hussein was disarmed in the 1990s and posed no threat, early in 2001.

The Bush Regime saw an "enormous opportunity" to lie to the American People, and wage an illegal and immoral incursion into Iraq, in order to destroy their infrastructure, and thereby award lavish (no-bid, cost-plus, no-audit) top-secret contracts to re-build the infrastructure in order to enrich their corporate cronies & buddy-boys. Moreover, they waged that they could (1) get the sleepy-headed American public to foot-the-bill, and (2) then grab the 2nd largest oil reserves for Big Oil: A Double Whammy of Shake-Down of American Taxpayers and Iraqi Oil ... The Biggest Robbery in the History of the World!

<snip>

Military retirement fund looted!


Interesting that the Bush Administrating and house repukes can cry they can't give the retired disabled their retirement because of cost, while stealing the retirement fund.



http://www.military.com/NewContent?file=Youmans_092603

:kick:

Cheers

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Youmans_091603,00.html

Officials Say Classified 9/11 Material Is 'Damning' | L.A. Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-saudi2aug02,1,4474...

Saudi Government Provided Aid to 9/11 Hijackers, Sources Say
By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The 27 pages deleted from a congressional report on Sept. 11 depict a Saudi government that not only provided significant money and aid to the suicide hijackers but also allowed potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to flow to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups through suspect charities and other fronts, according to sources familiar with the document.

One U.S. official who has read the classified section said it describes ``direct involvement of senior (Saudi) government officials in a coordinated and methodical way directly to the hijackers,'' as well as ``very direct, very specific links that cannot be passed off as rogue, isolated or coincidental.''

Said another official: ``It's really damning. What it says is that not only Saudi entities or nationals are implicated in 9/11, but the (Saudi) government'' as well.

snip

However one interprets the 27 pages, all who have read them agreed on one thing: If they are made public, they will prove extremely embarrassing not only to the Saudi government, but the U.S. government as well, particularly the FBI for missing so many clues pointing to Riyadh and for not aggressively investigating them, sources said.

``If this comes out, it will blow the top off the relations with (the Saudi) government because the American people will just be outraged,'' said one source familiar with the report. ``We invaded Iraq for something tangential. And here we have a government whose senior leaders have very direct, very extensive links to the hijackers, to the actual people who got on the planes and flew them into those buildings.

Administration Faces Supoenas From 9/11 Panel


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/national/26KEAN.html?hp

By PHILIP SHENON

Published: October 26, 2003

<snip>
MADISON, N.J., Oct. 25 — The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. "I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he is president. "That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document."
...
Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents — it's disgusting."


</snip>

Leak of Agent's Name Causes Exposure of CIA Front Firm


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40012-2003Oct3.html

By Walter Pincus and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 4, 2003; Page A03

The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The company's identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.

After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame's employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA.

... The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.

more

Amanpour: CNN Practiced Self-Censorship


CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship."

As criticism of the war and its aftermath intensifies, Amanpour joins a chorus of journalists and pundits who charge that the media largely toed the Bush administrationline in covering the war and, by doing so, failed to aggressively question the motives behind the invasion.

On last week's Topic A With Tina Brown on CNBC, Brown, the former Talk magazine editor, asked comedian Al Franken, former Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke and Amanpour if "we in the media, as much as in the administration, drank the Kool-Aid when it came to the war."

Said Amanpour: "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."

<...>

Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti said of Amanpour's comments: "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/mediamix/2003-09-14-media-mix_x...

Less Than Meets the Eye? U.S. Gvt. Sting Operation Criticized as Set up


By Brian Ross
Aug. 13— Administration officials are leaving out key facts and exaggerating the significance of the alleged plot to smuggle a shoulder-launched missile into the United States, law enforcement officials told ABCNEWS. They say there's a lot less than meets the eye.

snip

He, on many occasions, in recorded conversations, referred to Americans as 'bastards' Osama bin Laden as a hero," said Christie.

But what he did not say was just how much of the alleged missile plot was a government setup from start to finish.

For example, Lakhani had no contacts in Russia to buy the missiles before the sting and had no known criminal record for arms dealing, officials told ABCNEWS.

link: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html

Some lost jobs may never return


Study by New York Fed says this ‘recovery’ really is different

<snip>

SINCE PRESIDENT Bush took office, three million jobs have been lost in the United States, 2.5 million of those in the manufacturing sector. Now, a newly-released study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York talks about the structural nature of many of those job losses.

The latest turn in the business cycle has been an economic paradox. Though the recession technically ended in November, 2001, payroll numbers continued to fall. Now, economists at the New York Fed say there is something different about this latest recession and recovery: Many of those jobs are not coming back.

“Unlike previous recessions, almost all of the increase in unemployment has been due to permanent layoffs — not temporary layoffs,” said Erica Groshen, and economist with the New York Fed.

Traditionally, a factory or business will lay off workers in slow periods and rehire them when demand picks back up. But in economic jargon, many of the job losses this time around seem to be structural, not cyclical.

According to the New York Fed’s study, entire industries continued to lose jobs during the first 17 months of the recovery. Among them: Airlines, communications, electronics manufacturers, industrial machinery manufacturers and makers of transportation equipment. While health services and mortgage brokers saw job gains, that’s little consolation if you lost a job in one of the contracting industries.

<snip>

Link: http://www.msnbc.com/news/960489.asp?0cv=CB2

U.S. Patriot Act being used in many nonterrorism cases (NYT)



Eric Lichtblau NYT


The Bush administration, which calls the U.S.A. Patriot Act perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism.

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, U.S. officials said. Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals - terrorists or otherwise. But critics of the administration's antiterrorism tactics assert that such use of the law is evidence the administration has sold the American public a false bill of goods, using terrorism as a guise to pursue a broader law enforcement agenda. Justice Department officials point out that they have employed their newfound authority, including expanded surveillance powers, in many instances against suspected terrorists.

But a new Justice Department report, given to members of Congress this month, also cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly related to terrorism. In them, authorities have used their expanded power to investigate individuals, initiate wiretaps and other surveillance, or seize millions of dollars in tainted assets.

For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail and electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several sensitive nonterrorism investigations," including the tracking of an unidentified fugitive and an investigation into a computer hacker who stole trade secrets, the report said. ---

Condoleezza Rice: U.S. Never Said Saddam Was Behind 9/11


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030917/pl_nm/iraq_...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday the Bush administration had never accused Saddam Hussein of directing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Her statement, in an interview recorded for broadcast on ABC's "Nightline," came despite long-standing administration charges the ousted Iraqi leader was linked to the al Qaeda network accused of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Democrats have accused the administration of creating a "false impression" at the heart of a widespread U.S. public belief that Saddam had a personal role in the attacks.

"We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein ... had either direction or control of 9/11," Rice said when asked about the public perception of a link.


more

and a belated welcome to du

Bush Seeks to Expand Access to Private Data



WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — For months, President Bush's advisers have assured a skittish public that law-abiding Americans have no reason to fear the long reach of the antiterrorism law known as the Patriot Act because its most intrusive measures would require a judge's sign-off.

But in a plan announced this week to expand counterterrorism powers, President Bush adopted a very different tack. In a three-point presidential plan that critics are already dubbing Patriot Act II, Mr. Bush is seeking broad new authority to allow federal agents — without the approval of a judge or even a federal prosecutor — to demand private records and compel testimony.



http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/national/14PATR.html?ex=1064116800&a... ;en=e16be52435464c2a&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Privacy Group Sues for Patriot Act Papers


By TED BRIDIS
Associated Press Writer

October 14, 2003, 5:18 PM EDT


WASHINGTON -- A civil liberties group sued the Justice Department on Tuesday seeking internal documents about lobbying by federal prosecutors to discourage Congress from approving major changes to the Patriot Act.

The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center sought quick release of documents related to an Aug. 14 memorandum from Guy A. Lewis, the director of the executive office for United States Attorneys.

In his August memo, Lewis urged prosecutors "to call personally or meet with ... congressional representatives" to argue against an amendment offered by Rep. C.L. "Butch" Otter, R-Idaho, that would cut federal funds for so-called "sneak and peak" warrants in terror cases.

Such warrants allow the FBI, with a judge's approval, to sneak into a suspect's home, office or vehicle for surveillance without immediately notifying the target of the investigation. They are among the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, which allowed expanded use of such searches.

more..............

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-justice-lobbying,0,39...

Chavez accuses CIA as bombings rock Venezuela



<clips>

Tensions mounted in Venezuela Monday after bombings rocked the capital and an ally of Presi-dent Hugo Chavez accused the CIA of backing opponents trying to oust the beleaguered leader.

Two fuel tankers exploded late Sunday at the capital's municipal airport, 36 hours after the presidential guard barracks and the national telecommunications offices were bombed.

Lawmaker Nicolas Maduro said he would lobby US legislators to open any CIA files on Venezuela.

"Let them declassify the secret documents on CIA involvement and their financing of undercover activities during 2002-2003 because we have hard evidence that the terrorist attacks were planned," he said. He did not mention which US lawmakers would be asked to help.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2003/10/08/2003070877

Lynch: Military manipulated story

PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 — Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.

THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in a “Primetime” interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military’s portrayal of her ordeal.
“They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff,” she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network’s Web site. “It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about,” she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.

More...http://www.msnbc.com/news/990040.asp?vts=110720031242

507th weapon records gone (Jessica Lynch Unit)


http://www.borderlandnews.com/stories/borderland/20030917-22426.shtml

The U.S. Army on Tuesday revealed that all records and documents about the weapons that jammed during the March 23 ambush that led to the death of nine Fort Bliss soldiers were destroyed in the Iraqi attack and that there is no way to trace the weapons' histories.

The Army, responding to an El Paso Times request under the Freedom of Information Act, said any official information about the weapons used by Fort Bliss' 507th Maintenance Company was lost on a supply truck taken into combat.

An official report on the ambush near Nasiriyah said that several weapons, including M-16s, M249 Squad Automatic Weapons and a .50-caliber machine gun, jammed or failed to operate properly during the firefight.

The disclosure that the records were lost shocked, bewildered and further angered relatives of soldiers who were killed in the early morning ambush, which is among the worst losses for the U.S. military during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In addition to the nine Fort Bliss soldiers killed, two from the 3rd Forward Support Battalion were killed, five soldiers were wounded, and seven soldiers were taken prisoner.

"Capt. Troy King (507th commander) stated that he does not have any historical data on weapons involved in the enemy contact," June Bates, Fort Bliss freedom of information officer, said in a written response. "He lost his motorpool truck and all documentation."

US admits cameraman was shot dead at close range


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=435156

The American army admitted yesterday that its soldiers killed an award-winning Reuters cameraman. Mazen Dana, a Palestinian, was shot dead by a US tank crew at close range while trying to film outside Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday, after a mortar attack on the prison.

Mr Dana's colleagues said the tank was 30 metres from him when it opened fire. Television cameras do not look like RPG launchers: at such close range it should have been impossible to confuse the two.

Mr Dana was no novice in war zones. His hometown, Hebron in the West Bank, is a dangerous place. In 2001, he won the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Press Freedom Award for his work in Hebron. He was shot three times in 2000.

Report from Jail Solidarity - N21, 4 pm (today in Miami, FTAA)


http://ftaaimc.org/en/2003/11/1697.shtml

As described by Evan from Chicago Indymedia and transcribed by Catfish from Midwest Unrest

At around 4:00 pm, demonstrators at 14th street and 13th avenue, about a half-block away from the jail, were told they had 15 minutes to leave the area because they were engaged in an illegal gathering.

(snip)

In what seemed to be less than two minutes, as activists were dispersing, a line of riot police moved in and split the fifty so activists into two groups.

The front group of 20-30 demonstrators had a clear path before them and began to run. Police were hitting them in the back with their billy clubs and pushing them in the back with shields. Police fired six shots from a gun loaded with rubber bullets were audible. There were several action medics with this group, all clearly marked with the red cross, at least one of whom was shot in the back with a rubber bullet. The reporter followed this group for a bit and says they all escaped the area.

(snip)

Then the riot police dragged the demonstrators out of the circle one by one. They were handcuffed with plastic ties and stood up in a line. The demonstrators were in visible distress and were drenched with liquid which the reporter believes to be mace. No clouds associated with tear gas were seen.

(snip)

At this point, the riot police began to move towards the press and the reporter ran from the area with two photo journalists from the corporate press.

11/21 Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD attack


From the December edition of Cigar Aficionado, as reported 11/21:


Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.
Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men’s lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.

In the magazine’s December edition, the former commander of the military’s Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of government.

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that “the worst thing that could happen” is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, “... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”

Franks then offered “in a practical sense” what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml