Sunday, November 23, 2003
FBI scrutinizing anti-war protesters
FBI scrutinizing anti-war protesters
Bureau wants anti-terror units to review suspicious activities
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
Washington -- The FBI has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money, and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities such as recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities such as using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
FBI officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence,
not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
In San Francisco -- site of some of the nation's largest protests against the war in Iraq -- a source in the police department told The Chronicle on Saturday he had no knowledge of such a memo. But in March, San Francisco police acknowledged conducting undercover surveillance of protesters,
including videotaping by plainclothes officers at three demonstrations, and said the practice was commonplace, especially if there were a possibility of violence.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued guidelines in July specifying that state and local law enforcement agencies shouldn't spy on political protesters without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. He said the guidelines were needed after U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft authorized federal agents to monitor political and religious groups without evidence of criminal activity, something Lockyer said is prohibited by California's constitution.
The FBI initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the FBI's approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But Bay Area peace activists said the tactic will discourage ordinary citizens from voicing dissent against their government.
"The intent is to have a chilling effect on free speech and the right to demonstrate,'' said Richard Becker, a member of the steering committee of Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, the large coalition of peace groups that has organized many of the protests against the Iraq war. "We believe they intend to use this information to disrupt social movements. They're trying to make a connection between terrorism and people exercising their First Amendment rights.''
Jason Mark, an organizer for San Francisco-based Global Exchange, said the FBI memo is "terrifying and highly disturbing.''
Particularly chilling, he said, was the use of the phrase "training camps'' to describe instruction on nonviolence given to demonstrators. That phrase is often used to describe terrorist training sites.
"What we do is sit people down and teach them how to engage in nonviolence, in the manner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King,'' he said. "The phrase 'training camps' is loaded and nothing short of a slur campaign.''
Some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the well-documented abuses of the 1960s and '70s, when J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and musician John Lennon.
A Chronicle investigation last year documented the FBI's surveillance of Free Speech Movement activists and other politically engaged students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
"The FBI is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover."
The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the FBI to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies under a program known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on FBI investigations of political activities.
Those restrictions were relaxed significantly last year, when Attorney General John Ashcroft issued guidelines giving FBI agents authority to attend political rallies, mosques and any event "that is open to the public."
Ashcroft said the Sept. 11 attacks made it essential that the FBI be allowed to investigate terrorism more aggressively. The bureau's recent strategy in policing demonstrations is an outgrowth of that policy, officials said.
"We're not concerned with individuals who are exercising their constitutional rights," one FBI official said. "But it's obvious that there are individuals capable of violence at these events. We know that there are anarchists that are actively involved in trying to sabotage and commit acts of violence at these different events, and we also know that these large gatherings would be a prime target for terrorist groups."
Civil rights advocates have complained for months that federal officials have surreptitiously sought to suppress the First Amendment rights of antiwar demonstrators.
Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, for instance, have sued the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. And the New York Police Department this year questioned many of those arrested at demonstrations about their political affiliations, before halting the practice and expunging the data in the face of public criticism.
The FBI memorandum, however, appears to offer the first corroboration of a coordinated nationwide effort to collect intelligence regarding demonstrations.
The memorandum, circulated on Oct. 15 -- just 10 days before many thousands gathered in Washington and San Francisco to protest the U.S. occupation of Iraq -- noted that the bureau "possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests" and that "most protests are peaceful events."
But it pointed to violence at protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as evidence of potential disruption. Law enforcement officials said in interviews that they had become particularly concerned about the ability of anti-government groups to exploit demonstrations and promote a violent agenda.
"What a great opportunity for an act of terrorism, when all your resources are dedicated to some big event and you let your guard down," a law enforcement official involved in securing recent demonstrations said.
The memorandum urged local law enforcement officials "to be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts" to counterterrorism task forces run by the FBI. It warned about an array of threats, including homemade bombs and the formation of human chains.
The memorandum also discussed "innovative strategies" used by demonstrators, like the videotaping of arrests as a means of "intimidation" against the police. And it noted that protesters "often use the Internet to recruit, raise funds and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations."
Officials said the FBI treats demonstrations no differently than other large-scale and vulnerable gatherings. The aim, they said, was not to monitor protesters but to gather intelligence.
Critics said they remained worried. "What the FBI regards as potential terrorism," Romero of the ACLU said, "strikes me as civil disobedience."
Chronicle staff writers Tyche Hendricks and Steve Rubenstein contributed to this report.
Bureau wants anti-terror units to review suspicious activities
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
Washington -- The FBI has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money, and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities such as recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities such as using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
FBI officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence,
not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
In San Francisco -- site of some of the nation's largest protests against the war in Iraq -- a source in the police department told The Chronicle on Saturday he had no knowledge of such a memo. But in March, San Francisco police acknowledged conducting undercover surveillance of protesters,
including videotaping by plainclothes officers at three demonstrations, and said the practice was commonplace, especially if there were a possibility of violence.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued guidelines in July specifying that state and local law enforcement agencies shouldn't spy on political protesters without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. He said the guidelines were needed after U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft authorized federal agents to monitor political and religious groups without evidence of criminal activity, something Lockyer said is prohibited by California's constitution.
The FBI initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the FBI's approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But Bay Area peace activists said the tactic will discourage ordinary citizens from voicing dissent against their government.
"The intent is to have a chilling effect on free speech and the right to demonstrate,'' said Richard Becker, a member of the steering committee of Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, the large coalition of peace groups that has organized many of the protests against the Iraq war. "We believe they intend to use this information to disrupt social movements. They're trying to make a connection between terrorism and people exercising their First Amendment rights.''
Jason Mark, an organizer for San Francisco-based Global Exchange, said the FBI memo is "terrifying and highly disturbing.''
Particularly chilling, he said, was the use of the phrase "training camps'' to describe instruction on nonviolence given to demonstrators. That phrase is often used to describe terrorist training sites.
"What we do is sit people down and teach them how to engage in nonviolence, in the manner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King,'' he said. "The phrase 'training camps' is loaded and nothing short of a slur campaign.''
Some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the well-documented abuses of the 1960s and '70s, when J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and musician John Lennon.
A Chronicle investigation last year documented the FBI's surveillance of Free Speech Movement activists and other politically engaged students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
"The FBI is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover."
The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the FBI to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies under a program known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on FBI investigations of political activities.
Those restrictions were relaxed significantly last year, when Attorney General John Ashcroft issued guidelines giving FBI agents authority to attend political rallies, mosques and any event "that is open to the public."
Ashcroft said the Sept. 11 attacks made it essential that the FBI be allowed to investigate terrorism more aggressively. The bureau's recent strategy in policing demonstrations is an outgrowth of that policy, officials said.
"We're not concerned with individuals who are exercising their constitutional rights," one FBI official said. "But it's obvious that there are individuals capable of violence at these events. We know that there are anarchists that are actively involved in trying to sabotage and commit acts of violence at these different events, and we also know that these large gatherings would be a prime target for terrorist groups."
Civil rights advocates have complained for months that federal officials have surreptitiously sought to suppress the First Amendment rights of antiwar demonstrators.
Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, for instance, have sued the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. And the New York Police Department this year questioned many of those arrested at demonstrations about their political affiliations, before halting the practice and expunging the data in the face of public criticism.
The FBI memorandum, however, appears to offer the first corroboration of a coordinated nationwide effort to collect intelligence regarding demonstrations.
The memorandum, circulated on Oct. 15 -- just 10 days before many thousands gathered in Washington and San Francisco to protest the U.S. occupation of Iraq -- noted that the bureau "possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests" and that "most protests are peaceful events."
But it pointed to violence at protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as evidence of potential disruption. Law enforcement officials said in interviews that they had become particularly concerned about the ability of anti-government groups to exploit demonstrations and promote a violent agenda.
"What a great opportunity for an act of terrorism, when all your resources are dedicated to some big event and you let your guard down," a law enforcement official involved in securing recent demonstrations said.
The memorandum urged local law enforcement officials "to be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts" to counterterrorism task forces run by the FBI. It warned about an array of threats, including homemade bombs and the formation of human chains.
The memorandum also discussed "innovative strategies" used by demonstrators, like the videotaping of arrests as a means of "intimidation" against the police. And it noted that protesters "often use the Internet to recruit, raise funds and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations."
Officials said the FBI treats demonstrations no differently than other large-scale and vulnerable gatherings. The aim, they said, was not to monitor protesters but to gather intelligence.
Critics said they remained worried. "What the FBI regards as potential terrorism," Romero of the ACLU said, "strikes me as civil disobedience."
Chronicle staff writers Tyche Hendricks and Steve Rubenstein contributed to this report.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Richard Perle Admits Invasion was Illegal
War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian
International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.
Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.
Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian
International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.
Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Allies think Bush is "Greatest threat to life on earth"
Is Bush 'biggest threat on earth'?
Suzy Austin November 18, 2003
Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, attacked George Bush yesterday as the 'greatest threat to life on this planet'. He criticised the US President on the eve of his state visit to Britain, saying his policies would 'doom us to extinction'.
Suzy Austin November 18, 2003
Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, attacked George Bush yesterday as the 'greatest threat to life on this planet'. He criticised the US President on the eve of his state visit to Britain, saying his policies would 'doom us to extinction'.
Saturday, November 15, 2003
Reuters AlertNet - US has no evidence Iraq hid banned arms in Syria
US has no evidence Iraq hid banned arms in Syria
15 Nov 2003 00:47:51 GMT
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) - The Bush administration said on Friday it had no evidence that any of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction had been hidden in neighboring Syria.
In an interview with WTVT-TV in Tampa, Florida, White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice defended prewar intelligence on Iraq that Washington used to justify the invasion. Despite U.S. assertions that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological arms, none has been found.
"The American people can be certain that we went to war on solid information, on information that had been gathered over 12 years, on a history of use of weapons of mass destruction, and that we are finding confirmation that this was somebody who hid his activities from the United Nations and intended to continue those programs," Rice said.
A U.S. team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was investigating multiple reports from Iraqis that banned weapons or weapons-related substances were moved across borders into Syria, Iran, and Jordan.
"I've seen reports, as everyone has," Rice said. But she added: "We don't have any evidence at this point that that's what happened."
Washington has accused Damascus of turning a blind eye to militants crossing into Iraq.
Syria has long been on the U.S. State Department's list of states that support terrorism, and Washington accuses it of seeking weapons of mass destruction.
15 Nov 2003 00:47:51 GMT
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) - The Bush administration said on Friday it had no evidence that any of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction had been hidden in neighboring Syria.
In an interview with WTVT-TV in Tampa, Florida, White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice defended prewar intelligence on Iraq that Washington used to justify the invasion. Despite U.S. assertions that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological arms, none has been found.
"The American people can be certain that we went to war on solid information, on information that had been gathered over 12 years, on a history of use of weapons of mass destruction, and that we are finding confirmation that this was somebody who hid his activities from the United Nations and intended to continue those programs," Rice said.
A U.S. team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was investigating multiple reports from Iraqis that banned weapons or weapons-related substances were moved across borders into Syria, Iran, and Jordan.
"I've seen reports, as everyone has," Rice said. But she added: "We don't have any evidence at this point that that's what happened."
Washington has accused Damascus of turning a blind eye to militants crossing into Iraq.
Syria has long been on the U.S. State Department's list of states that support terrorism, and Washington accuses it of seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Free Speech Zones - The Orwellian Mandate of the Bush Administration
No administration before that of George W. Bush has ever been so brazen as to tell the American people that they cannot disagree with the views of the nation's leadership. With the rise of the Bush II administration the American public has also seen a new concept, "Free Speech Zones". The secret service now directs local law enforcement agencies to clear all motorcade routes and areas around where the top White House officials will be of all dissention and move the dissenters to "Free Speech Zones" generally about 1/2 mile from the event
ABC News
The Salt Lake City Tribune - 09 Nov 2003
American Civil Liberties Union - 23 Sep 2003
American Free Press - 12 April 2004
Conservative Truth - 17 Nov 2002
ABC News
The Salt Lake City Tribune - 09 Nov 2003
American Civil Liberties Union - 23 Sep 2003
American Free Press - 12 April 2004
Conservative Truth - 17 Nov 2002
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts
An act of ‘betrayal’
In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts
By Karen Jowers
Times staff writer
Commissaries and the Defense Department’s stateside schools are in the crosshairs of Pentagon budget cutters, and military advocates, families and even base commanders are up in arms.
Defense officials notified the services in mid-October that they intend to close 19 commissaries and may close 19 more, mostly in remote areas.
At the same time, the Pentagon is finishing a study to determine whether to close or transfer control of the 58 schools it operates on 14 military installations in the continental United States.
The two initiatives are the latest in a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty.
The roots of all these efforts reach back to the highest levels of the Defense Department.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret of his desire to get the military out of support activities that are not central to its core war-fighting functions, said Joseph Tafoya, director of the Department of Defense Education Activity. As soon as he arrived at the Pentagon three years ago, Tafoya said, Rumsfeld began asking: “Why am I running stores? Why am I in education?”
On Oct. 16, at the headquarters of the Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools in Peachtree City, Ga., Tafoya hosted more than 70 senior officers, school administrators, teachers, military parents and students for a forum on the future of the U.S.-based schools.
“As Marines, we take the short end of the stick in many ways,” said Col. James Lowe, commander of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. “But when it comes to our children, we’re very intolerant about them being shortchanged.”
And shortchanged is exactly how military families and family advocates are feeling, said Joyce Raezer, director of government relations for the National Military Family Association.
“How can leadership be talking about cutting back on quality-of-life benefits right now when the force and everyone supporting the force is at such a high stress level?” Raezer said.
The week the commissary cuts became known, 11 soldiers were killed in Iraq, and as many as 30 failed to show up on scedule for return flights to Baghdad at the end of their two-week R&R visits.
A ‘personal affront’
“Betrayal — write that down and put it in your report,” said Col. John Kidd, garrison commander of Fort Stewart, Ga., testifying at Tafoya’s forum on the need to keep military-run schools on his post. “As a commander, I will fight this tooth and nail. Folks down there are not just militant on this issue. They will march on Washington.”
Lowe, the Quantico base commander, said he never has seen his community more united than it is over the schools issue.
“The very fact that this transfer study is being conducted at this time when Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen and their families are increasingly required to give more of themselves and to go in harm’s way is taken by many as a personal affront,” he said. “It raises serious questions about DoD’s commitment to all quality-of-life issues.”
Tafoya said there is no problem with studying the need to keep the schools, but “I do have a problem with the angst it has caused,” he said. “If we had known about what military families would be going through, we may well not have done [the study]. … I hope we will never have to do this again.”
The study’s recommendations must be submitted by Feb. 15 to Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The timeline for what happens after that is unclear, but officials say no decisions are likely before March or April.
Officials could decide to transfer operational control of some or all schools to local public districts — or simply keep the status quo. Tafoya said any changes would take at least three or four years to implement.
In the first two phases of the $1.6 million DDESS study, which began earlier this year, contractors have:
•Analyzed the operating costs of each school.
•Projected costs of transferring each school to its respective public district outside the gate.
•Assessed the physical condition of each building.
•Surveyed local and state school officials in affected districts.
The physical analysis found that four of the 58 schools need to be replaced; six are in excellent shape; 26 are adequate; 17 are good; and five are in poor condition. The bill for fixing the subpar schools is $121 million, Tafoya said.
School officials will use this data to plan for repairing or replacing the schools, regardless of whether they’re turned over to public districts, he said.
Not just dollars and cents
Commanders and parents urged defense officials to consider not just the dollars involved, but the quality of the education provided by the schools, which consistently rank high in national test scores.
Students at DDESS schools at Fort Benning, Ga., outperform any nearby district, said Brig. Gen. Ben Freakley, commander of the post, which has six elementary schools and one middle school. Some 89 percent of parents surveyed are satisfied with the schools, he said.
“I remind you we’re at war,” Freakley, who served as assistant division commander of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), told Tafoya. “Having just come from Iraq, I know that the last thing soldiers, sailors and airmen want is to be concerned about the education of their children while they’re fighting.”
Freakley said the roughly 1,000 parents who attended a recent Fort Benning town hall meeting are “mad that this is even being suggested at a time of war and deployment.”
He warned against making a decision based on dollars rather than quality of life. “Dollars don’t tell the whole story — they never do,” he said.
Commanders also noted states and local communities are having problems funding their public schools. Col. Larry Ruggley, garrison commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., showed local newspapers with headlines noting a two-week delay in the opening of civilian schools outside the gate because of budget wrangling.
Fort Campbell soldiers will continue to be deployed, Ruggley said. “We look to the stability and support of the school environment on Fort Campbell to take care of the children. It’s all about the soldier we put in harm’s way.”
Col. John Neubauer, commander of Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., said his base’s schools outperform those outside the gate. DDESS students at Maxwell consistently score in the 75th percentile nationally, he said, while “students outside the gate consistently score in the lower half.”
“We have a close relationship with the local community,” he said. “But the state of Alabama refuses to adequately fund education.”
Marine 2nd Lt. Daniel Allen, 32, a former staff sergeant with 14 years in the Corps who is assigned to Camp Lejeune, N.C., said the debate over the DDESS schools comes down to one thing — quality.
He and wife, Shelby, have two children — daughter Mercydes, 11, and son Zachery, 10, both of whom go to DDESS schools on Lejuene.
“All that matters is quality,” Allen said. “Once education [quality] starts falling, that’s when you start asking, ‘Is this best for my kids?’.”
Impact on retention
Lt. Gen. William Lennox, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., urged defense officials not to overlook the potential impact on recruiting and retention that this study could have.
Lennox was disappointed that senior Pentagon leaders who would make the decisions about the future of DDESS were not at the forum. He said the study probably is the top concern among families at West Point.
“I dare say I would lose 50 percent of those who want to teach because they wouldn’t want to put their kids in jeopardy,” he said. “I would be transferring 800 students into a 600-student [public] school, and have no voting representation in the school board.”
He showed a video clip from a town hall meeting held at West Point in which parents said the No. 1 reason they love living at West Point is the schools. Said one soldier: “We choose not to invest in a home [off post] because our equity is in our children.”
The same is true at Quantico, said Lt. Gen. Edward Hanlon, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
“To win battles, you’d better have a good family foundation,” he said.
The DDESS schools were started after World War II, when President Truman desegregated the armed forces. The military needed them because so many bases were in the segregated south, where black soldiers’ children couldn’t get the education they deserved.
Race continues to be an issue for some commanders. Segregation “still exists in the deep South,” said Kidd, the Fort Stewart commander. “If that was a prime situation for the [creation] of DDESS, then that need is not yet met.”
Safety and security also are at issue. “My peers and I feel much safer from violence and drugs,” said Drexel Heard, a student at Camp Lejeune High School in North Carolina. “At DDESS, safety is right up there with education.”
For DDESS students, one of the most reassuring aspects of the schools is their strong sense of community. Christie McCrum, a high school senior at Fort Campbell, Ky., said teachers at her school are intimately familiar with the stresses often placed upon military families.
McCrum said words can’t express the pain she endured being separated from her father during his long deployments. Her teachers “know what to say when you’re crying your eyes out and need to step out in the hallway,” she said.
Caroline Myers, stateside director of the Federal Education Association, which represents DDESS teachers, remembers a little girl named Elizabeth who came into her second-grade class at Fort Benning the morning after the 1991 Persian Gulf War began.
“She walked in, looked at me, ran into my arms and said, ‘My mommy said my daddy might die,’” Myers said.
Myers took the girl to talk to the school counselor. When she returned, “I said, ‘Elizabeth, we have to cross our fingers they’ll be OK,’” Myers recalled. “I had 20 children in the class. … Eight had parents deployed. Elizabeth crossed her fingers and walked back to her seat. I looked across the room, and 20 children had their fingers crossed.”
Commissary concerns
With the Navy community at Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., already concerned about their schools, news that their commissary also is under scrutiny for possible closure comes as a double whammy.
“The commissary is busy all the time when it’s open,” said Maggie Coulson, the wife of a Navy captain. “They’ve got good prices, which is important for our younger service members.”
The small base is an hour’s drive from the next-closest commissaries at Quantico and Andrews Air Force Base, Md., she said. “If we lose that and the school, there will not be a whole lot here for us.”
Raezer, of the National Military Family Association, questioned why Defense Commissary Agency officials hadn’t notified her association or other military family advocates about the closures. Although Abell signed a memo about the closures Aug. 29, sources said the commissary agency director didn’t hear about it until Oct. 15, and service officials didn’t hear about it until a few days before that.
Defense officials did not respond to questions about the closures by press time. But previous Defense Department documents cite criteria for operating stores that include having at least 100 active-duty personnel stationed at the base and consideration for the remoteness of the location, with the benchmark being that a store generally should be within 20 miles or 30 minutes’ driving time for personnel assigned in the area.
That puzzles family members at places like Dahlgren and the Army’s White Sands Missile Range, N.M., where driving time is twice that.
“We are so remote, it would make it really difficult” if the store closed, said Patti Gentry, wife of an Army colonel at White Sands. Although two sprawling bases — Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., and Fort Bliss, Texas — actually border White Sands, it’s 45 miles to the commissary at Holloman and more than an hour’s drive to the store at Fort Bliss.
“Even the closest commercial grocery store is 26 miles away, in Las Cruces. It’s desert between here and there,” Gentry said. “It would be awful” if the White Sands store closed.
She noted that a large proportion of the housing area, with more than 330 homes, is populated by enlisted and company-grade officers from all services.
In his Aug. 29 memo to the services and the Commissary Operating Board, Abell referred to funding shortfalls. “I appreciate the difficulty of decisions to close commissary store operations,” he wrote. But “we can no longer justify marginal stores in close proximity to another commissary.”
Previous commissary agency officials developed a formula to measure the operating efficiency of stores, based on, among other things, how much taxpayer money is used to operate a store compared with its total sales.
The Commissary Operating Board recommended cutting off taxpayer funding for the combined commissary/ exchange store at Orlando, Fla. The fate of that store has not been decided. Abell sought recommendations from the Navy on the future of the store, which would have to charge higher prices without taxpayer support.
Abell approved the board’s recommendation to close the stores at Bad Aibling, Germany, this fiscal year, and approved a request from the Army and Air Force to close combined stores at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Fla., and Fort McClellan, Ala. He asked for a report on the combined store at Fort Worth, Texas.
He also asked for plans to close this fiscal year stores at Sagami Depot, Sagamihara and Camp Kure, Japan; Idar Oberstein, Neubreucke and Panzer, Germany; Chinhae, Korea; and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
Based on sales-to-operating-cost ratios, decisions are imminent on store closures at Lakehurst, N.J.; Kelly Barracks, Germany; Hario, Japan; Pusan, South Korea; Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz.; and Dahlgren, Va.
Abell said another 19 stores, including the White Sands store, “do not meet the criteria for continued operation.” For the moment, he is deferring decisions on those but wants to see quarterly reports for each.
Raezer said service members and families in remote areas appear to be the potential big losers in the current round of store closures.
She said the main argument for providing appropriated funds to the commissary agency is to support stores in such remote areas, because they are more costly to operate.
With that need gone or sharply reduced, incentive to privatize the stores could grow.
Commercial grocery chains will not go into such small communities to provide this benefit, Raezer said, adding that divesting the commissary agency of such stores could boost the incentive to privatize the commissary system, an idea that has simmered on the back burner for years.
“What does it do to the benefit if you say some places are too isolated even for the Defense Commissary Agency?” she said. “You’re taking it away from the people who need it the most.”
Marine Corps Times staff writer C. Mark Brinkley contributed to this story from Jacksonville, N.C.
In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts
By Karen Jowers
Times staff writer
Commissaries and the Defense Department’s stateside schools are in the crosshairs of Pentagon budget cutters, and military advocates, families and even base commanders are up in arms.
Defense officials notified the services in mid-October that they intend to close 19 commissaries and may close 19 more, mostly in remote areas.
At the same time, the Pentagon is finishing a study to determine whether to close or transfer control of the 58 schools it operates on 14 military installations in the continental United States.
The two initiatives are the latest in a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty.
The roots of all these efforts reach back to the highest levels of the Defense Department.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret of his desire to get the military out of support activities that are not central to its core war-fighting functions, said Joseph Tafoya, director of the Department of Defense Education Activity. As soon as he arrived at the Pentagon three years ago, Tafoya said, Rumsfeld began asking: “Why am I running stores? Why am I in education?”
On Oct. 16, at the headquarters of the Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools in Peachtree City, Ga., Tafoya hosted more than 70 senior officers, school administrators, teachers, military parents and students for a forum on the future of the U.S.-based schools.
“As Marines, we take the short end of the stick in many ways,” said Col. James Lowe, commander of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. “But when it comes to our children, we’re very intolerant about them being shortchanged.”
And shortchanged is exactly how military families and family advocates are feeling, said Joyce Raezer, director of government relations for the National Military Family Association.
“How can leadership be talking about cutting back on quality-of-life benefits right now when the force and everyone supporting the force is at such a high stress level?” Raezer said.
The week the commissary cuts became known, 11 soldiers were killed in Iraq, and as many as 30 failed to show up on scedule for return flights to Baghdad at the end of their two-week R&R visits.
A ‘personal affront’
“Betrayal — write that down and put it in your report,” said Col. John Kidd, garrison commander of Fort Stewart, Ga., testifying at Tafoya’s forum on the need to keep military-run schools on his post. “As a commander, I will fight this tooth and nail. Folks down there are not just militant on this issue. They will march on Washington.”
Lowe, the Quantico base commander, said he never has seen his community more united than it is over the schools issue.
“The very fact that this transfer study is being conducted at this time when Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen and their families are increasingly required to give more of themselves and to go in harm’s way is taken by many as a personal affront,” he said. “It raises serious questions about DoD’s commitment to all quality-of-life issues.”
Tafoya said there is no problem with studying the need to keep the schools, but “I do have a problem with the angst it has caused,” he said. “If we had known about what military families would be going through, we may well not have done [the study]. … I hope we will never have to do this again.”
The study’s recommendations must be submitted by Feb. 15 to Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The timeline for what happens after that is unclear, but officials say no decisions are likely before March or April.
Officials could decide to transfer operational control of some or all schools to local public districts — or simply keep the status quo. Tafoya said any changes would take at least three or four years to implement.
In the first two phases of the $1.6 million DDESS study, which began earlier this year, contractors have:
•Analyzed the operating costs of each school.
•Projected costs of transferring each school to its respective public district outside the gate.
•Assessed the physical condition of each building.
•Surveyed local and state school officials in affected districts.
The physical analysis found that four of the 58 schools need to be replaced; six are in excellent shape; 26 are adequate; 17 are good; and five are in poor condition. The bill for fixing the subpar schools is $121 million, Tafoya said.
School officials will use this data to plan for repairing or replacing the schools, regardless of whether they’re turned over to public districts, he said.
Not just dollars and cents
Commanders and parents urged defense officials to consider not just the dollars involved, but the quality of the education provided by the schools, which consistently rank high in national test scores.
Students at DDESS schools at Fort Benning, Ga., outperform any nearby district, said Brig. Gen. Ben Freakley, commander of the post, which has six elementary schools and one middle school. Some 89 percent of parents surveyed are satisfied with the schools, he said.
“I remind you we’re at war,” Freakley, who served as assistant division commander of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), told Tafoya. “Having just come from Iraq, I know that the last thing soldiers, sailors and airmen want is to be concerned about the education of their children while they’re fighting.”
Freakley said the roughly 1,000 parents who attended a recent Fort Benning town hall meeting are “mad that this is even being suggested at a time of war and deployment.”
He warned against making a decision based on dollars rather than quality of life. “Dollars don’t tell the whole story — they never do,” he said.
Commanders also noted states and local communities are having problems funding their public schools. Col. Larry Ruggley, garrison commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., showed local newspapers with headlines noting a two-week delay in the opening of civilian schools outside the gate because of budget wrangling.
Fort Campbell soldiers will continue to be deployed, Ruggley said. “We look to the stability and support of the school environment on Fort Campbell to take care of the children. It’s all about the soldier we put in harm’s way.”
Col. John Neubauer, commander of Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., said his base’s schools outperform those outside the gate. DDESS students at Maxwell consistently score in the 75th percentile nationally, he said, while “students outside the gate consistently score in the lower half.”
“We have a close relationship with the local community,” he said. “But the state of Alabama refuses to adequately fund education.”
Marine 2nd Lt. Daniel Allen, 32, a former staff sergeant with 14 years in the Corps who is assigned to Camp Lejeune, N.C., said the debate over the DDESS schools comes down to one thing — quality.
He and wife, Shelby, have two children — daughter Mercydes, 11, and son Zachery, 10, both of whom go to DDESS schools on Lejuene.
“All that matters is quality,” Allen said. “Once education [quality] starts falling, that’s when you start asking, ‘Is this best for my kids?’.”
Impact on retention
Lt. Gen. William Lennox, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., urged defense officials not to overlook the potential impact on recruiting and retention that this study could have.
Lennox was disappointed that senior Pentagon leaders who would make the decisions about the future of DDESS were not at the forum. He said the study probably is the top concern among families at West Point.
“I dare say I would lose 50 percent of those who want to teach because they wouldn’t want to put their kids in jeopardy,” he said. “I would be transferring 800 students into a 600-student [public] school, and have no voting representation in the school board.”
He showed a video clip from a town hall meeting held at West Point in which parents said the No. 1 reason they love living at West Point is the schools. Said one soldier: “We choose not to invest in a home [off post] because our equity is in our children.”
The same is true at Quantico, said Lt. Gen. Edward Hanlon, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
“To win battles, you’d better have a good family foundation,” he said.
The DDESS schools were started after World War II, when President Truman desegregated the armed forces. The military needed them because so many bases were in the segregated south, where black soldiers’ children couldn’t get the education they deserved.
Race continues to be an issue for some commanders. Segregation “still exists in the deep South,” said Kidd, the Fort Stewart commander. “If that was a prime situation for the [creation] of DDESS, then that need is not yet met.”
Safety and security also are at issue. “My peers and I feel much safer from violence and drugs,” said Drexel Heard, a student at Camp Lejeune High School in North Carolina. “At DDESS, safety is right up there with education.”
For DDESS students, one of the most reassuring aspects of the schools is their strong sense of community. Christie McCrum, a high school senior at Fort Campbell, Ky., said teachers at her school are intimately familiar with the stresses often placed upon military families.
McCrum said words can’t express the pain she endured being separated from her father during his long deployments. Her teachers “know what to say when you’re crying your eyes out and need to step out in the hallway,” she said.
Caroline Myers, stateside director of the Federal Education Association, which represents DDESS teachers, remembers a little girl named Elizabeth who came into her second-grade class at Fort Benning the morning after the 1991 Persian Gulf War began.
“She walked in, looked at me, ran into my arms and said, ‘My mommy said my daddy might die,’” Myers said.
Myers took the girl to talk to the school counselor. When she returned, “I said, ‘Elizabeth, we have to cross our fingers they’ll be OK,’” Myers recalled. “I had 20 children in the class. … Eight had parents deployed. Elizabeth crossed her fingers and walked back to her seat. I looked across the room, and 20 children had their fingers crossed.”
Commissary concerns
With the Navy community at Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., already concerned about their schools, news that their commissary also is under scrutiny for possible closure comes as a double whammy.
“The commissary is busy all the time when it’s open,” said Maggie Coulson, the wife of a Navy captain. “They’ve got good prices, which is important for our younger service members.”
The small base is an hour’s drive from the next-closest commissaries at Quantico and Andrews Air Force Base, Md., she said. “If we lose that and the school, there will not be a whole lot here for us.”
Raezer, of the National Military Family Association, questioned why Defense Commissary Agency officials hadn’t notified her association or other military family advocates about the closures. Although Abell signed a memo about the closures Aug. 29, sources said the commissary agency director didn’t hear about it until Oct. 15, and service officials didn’t hear about it until a few days before that.
Defense officials did not respond to questions about the closures by press time. But previous Defense Department documents cite criteria for operating stores that include having at least 100 active-duty personnel stationed at the base and consideration for the remoteness of the location, with the benchmark being that a store generally should be within 20 miles or 30 minutes’ driving time for personnel assigned in the area.
That puzzles family members at places like Dahlgren and the Army’s White Sands Missile Range, N.M., where driving time is twice that.
“We are so remote, it would make it really difficult” if the store closed, said Patti Gentry, wife of an Army colonel at White Sands. Although two sprawling bases — Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., and Fort Bliss, Texas — actually border White Sands, it’s 45 miles to the commissary at Holloman and more than an hour’s drive to the store at Fort Bliss.
“Even the closest commercial grocery store is 26 miles away, in Las Cruces. It’s desert between here and there,” Gentry said. “It would be awful” if the White Sands store closed.
She noted that a large proportion of the housing area, with more than 330 homes, is populated by enlisted and company-grade officers from all services.
In his Aug. 29 memo to the services and the Commissary Operating Board, Abell referred to funding shortfalls. “I appreciate the difficulty of decisions to close commissary store operations,” he wrote. But “we can no longer justify marginal stores in close proximity to another commissary.”
Previous commissary agency officials developed a formula to measure the operating efficiency of stores, based on, among other things, how much taxpayer money is used to operate a store compared with its total sales.
The Commissary Operating Board recommended cutting off taxpayer funding for the combined commissary/ exchange store at Orlando, Fla. The fate of that store has not been decided. Abell sought recommendations from the Navy on the future of the store, which would have to charge higher prices without taxpayer support.
Abell approved the board’s recommendation to close the stores at Bad Aibling, Germany, this fiscal year, and approved a request from the Army and Air Force to close combined stores at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Fla., and Fort McClellan, Ala. He asked for a report on the combined store at Fort Worth, Texas.
He also asked for plans to close this fiscal year stores at Sagami Depot, Sagamihara and Camp Kure, Japan; Idar Oberstein, Neubreucke and Panzer, Germany; Chinhae, Korea; and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
Based on sales-to-operating-cost ratios, decisions are imminent on store closures at Lakehurst, N.J.; Kelly Barracks, Germany; Hario, Japan; Pusan, South Korea; Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz.; and Dahlgren, Va.
Abell said another 19 stores, including the White Sands store, “do not meet the criteria for continued operation.” For the moment, he is deferring decisions on those but wants to see quarterly reports for each.
Raezer said service members and families in remote areas appear to be the potential big losers in the current round of store closures.
She said the main argument for providing appropriated funds to the commissary agency is to support stores in such remote areas, because they are more costly to operate.
With that need gone or sharply reduced, incentive to privatize the stores could grow.
Commercial grocery chains will not go into such small communities to provide this benefit, Raezer said, adding that divesting the commissary agency of such stores could boost the incentive to privatize the commissary system, an idea that has simmered on the back burner for years.
“What does it do to the benefit if you say some places are too isolated even for the Defense Commissary Agency?” she said. “You’re taking it away from the people who need it the most.”
Marine Corps Times staff writer C. Mark Brinkley contributed to this story from Jacksonville, N.C.
Monday, November 10, 2003
War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian
International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian
International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
Sunday, November 09, 2003
Rumsfeld denies he ever made several pre-war statements.
Rumsfeld retreats, disclaims earlier rhetoric
Rumsfeld denies he ever made several pre-war statements.
Published November 09. 2003 7:30AM
BY ERIC ROSENBERG
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON - In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld - with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war - is denying that he ever made such assertions.
In recent testy exchanges with reporters, Rumsfeld interrupted the questioners and attacked the premise of the questions if they dealt with his pre-war comments about weapons of mass destruction and Americans-as-liberators.
For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.
"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' "The News Hour."
"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."
The Americans-as-liberators theme was repeated by other senior administration officials in the weeks preceding the war, including Rumsfeld's No. 2 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - and Vice President Cheney.
But on Sept. 25, - a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier - Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.
"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.
The defense chief quickly cut him off.
"Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."
When testifying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the House Armed Services Committee Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld said Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stocks of biological weapons." including anthrax and botulism toxin and possibly smallpox. His regime has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX and sarin and mustard gas."
Saddam
Saddam "has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons," he later added, repeating the charges the next day before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He repeated that theme in the weeks preceding the war.
Last month, after U.S. weapons hunters reported to the administration and Congress that they have yet to find a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about his earlier statements.
A reporter at a Pentagon news conference asked: "In retrospect, were you a little too far-leaning in your statement that Iraq categorically had caches of weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, given what's been found to date? You painted a picture of extensive stocks" of Iraqi mass-killing weapons.
"Wait," Rumsfeld interjected. "You go back and give me something that talks about extensive stocks. The U.N. reported extensive stocks. That is where that came from. I said what I believed to be the case, and I don't - I'd be surprised if you found the word 'extensive."'
With the weapons hunt in its eighth month, Rumsfeld also has backtracked on his earlier assertions that American troops knew where the forbidden weapons were hidden.
On March 30, 11 days into the war, Rumsfeld said in an ABC News interview when asked about WMDs: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
In comments Sept. 10 before the National Press Club, Rumsfeld conceded that he may have overreached. "I said, 'We know they're in that area," Rumsfeld said. "I should have said, 'I believe we're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area,' and that was our best judgment."
"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld
On March 30, on alleged weapons of mass distruction in Iraq.
"I should have said, 'I believe they're in that area.' "
Rumsfeld denies he ever made several pre-war statements.
Published November 09. 2003 7:30AM
BY ERIC ROSENBERG
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON - In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld - with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war - is denying that he ever made such assertions.
In recent testy exchanges with reporters, Rumsfeld interrupted the questioners and attacked the premise of the questions if they dealt with his pre-war comments about weapons of mass destruction and Americans-as-liberators.
For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.
"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' "The News Hour."
"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."
The Americans-as-liberators theme was repeated by other senior administration officials in the weeks preceding the war, including Rumsfeld's No. 2 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - and Vice President Cheney.
But on Sept. 25, - a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier - Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.
"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.
The defense chief quickly cut him off.
"Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."
When testifying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the House Armed Services Committee Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld said Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stocks of biological weapons." including anthrax and botulism toxin and possibly smallpox. His regime has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX and sarin and mustard gas."
Saddam
Saddam "has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons," he later added, repeating the charges the next day before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He repeated that theme in the weeks preceding the war.
Last month, after U.S. weapons hunters reported to the administration and Congress that they have yet to find a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about his earlier statements.
A reporter at a Pentagon news conference asked: "In retrospect, were you a little too far-leaning in your statement that Iraq categorically had caches of weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, given what's been found to date? You painted a picture of extensive stocks" of Iraqi mass-killing weapons.
"Wait," Rumsfeld interjected. "You go back and give me something that talks about extensive stocks. The U.N. reported extensive stocks. That is where that came from. I said what I believed to be the case, and I don't - I'd be surprised if you found the word 'extensive."'
With the weapons hunt in its eighth month, Rumsfeld also has backtracked on his earlier assertions that American troops knew where the forbidden weapons were hidden.
On March 30, 11 days into the war, Rumsfeld said in an ABC News interview when asked about WMDs: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
In comments Sept. 10 before the National Press Club, Rumsfeld conceded that he may have overreached. "I said, 'We know they're in that area," Rumsfeld said. "I should have said, 'I believe we're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area,' and that was our best judgment."
"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld
On March 30, on alleged weapons of mass distruction in Iraq.
"I should have said, 'I believe they're in that area.' "
Monday, November 03, 2003
Operation Iraqi Lawsuit
Operation Iraqi Lawsuit
By George C. Wilson, National Journal
The United States and Britain, as well as their private contractors engaged in rebuilding Iraq, could face an onslaught of lawsuits - perhaps claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and taking up years of court time. The grounds? That the coalition broke international law in the way it invaded and occupied Iraq, and in the way it is using Iraq's wealth and resources. This warning comes from an international lawyer who has just finished a detailed study of the possible legal consequences of America's first pre-emptive war.
David J. Scheffer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center who was President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war-crimes issues, argues that the United States and Britain have ignored the "short leash" granted by the internationally accepted rules governing the behavior of occupying powers. He contends that they have gone far beyond just patching up Iraq, which he said is allowed under international law, and are now moving onto the forbidden ground of exploiting the oil wealth of the country.
Sooner or later, Scheffer predicts, the U.S. and British governments, as well as their contractors (including Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, the Halliburton conglomerate of Houston), could well be sued by Iraqis arguing that their property, particularly oil, was misused by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Moreover, he says, the future sovereign Iraqi government, as well as the nations that were owed millions of dollars by the former government of Saddam Hussein, could also find grounds for lawsuits.
Scheffer and his legal allies assert that the rebuilding of Iraq is different from the United States' rebuilding of Germany under the Marshall Plan after World War II. Germany in 1945 was in ruins and had no immediate riches to tap. Iraq in 2003, however, has vast oil resources. And although President Bush has declared that Iraq's oil belongs to the Iraqi people, the Coalition Provisional Authority is making decisions on how to exploit that resource and what to do with the income from it. Scheffer questions the legal rights of the occupying powers to make decisions about oil income before a sovereign Iraqi government is formed. Moreover, given the rules of occupation, Scheffer contends that the American and British governments increased their legal liability when they decided to invade Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council. "We have walked into a liability trap" by going it alone, he said of the U.S. government.
Other international lawyers dispute Scheffer's brief, which he is putting into a future article for the American Journal of International Law.
National Journal sent a summary of Scheffer's contentions to the State Department and invited legal experts there to comment. The department declined. But lawyers on the more conservative side of the political spectrum were happy to weigh in against Scheffer's analysis.
David Rivkin, who was a highly placed lawyer in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, said that Ambassador Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq are doing just what the international rules of occupation intended: helping the occupied country. "Is Bremer building a villa for himself and his children?" Rivkin asked rhetorically.
Rivkin also argued that it would be a stretch to hold the United States to the rules of strict liability for its actions in Iraq. "Absolutely nothing" in the international rules of occupation, he said, "imposes strict liability, even where one's actions do not bear the right fruit." Rivkin said, for example, that if the CPA builds a school in Iraq that turns out to be shoddy, the United States would still not be liable for claims. Rivkin did acknowledge, however, that Scheffer was right on one point: The United States would have been less vulnerable to lawsuits if it had invaded and occupied Iraq with the blessing of the United Nations. But, he contended, the lawyerly, if not insulting, wording needed to provide such immunity would never have passed in the Security Council.
Both John Yoo, a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Paul Rosenzweig, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that the United States is for now the sovereign government of Iraq and, as such, could not be sued in U.S. federal court. And, as a sovereign power, they added, the United States would have to consent to being sued in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Rosenzweig called Scheffer's argument "an interesting theoretical exercise" with little chance "of coming to fruition."
Scheffer obviously disagrees. He largely bases his case on the 1949 Geneva Convention IV, and on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 of this year, which lifted the economic sanctions against Iraq and recognized the authority of the coalition forces as an "occupying power."
He argues that Geneva Convention IV limits what the Coalition Provisional Authority and its contractors can legally do in Iraq. "Occupation law was not designed to transform society," Scheffer said. "The fundamental premise of occupation law has been to confine the occupying power to humanitarian objectives that essentially preserve the status quo, not entitle the occupying power to transform the territory it holds. Otherwise, the door would be wide open for abuse by aggressive and benevolent armies alike."
Article 147 of the convention forbids occupying powers from engaging in the "extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." Scheffer says that the article raises several questions: Does the coalition have the right to dig into Iraq's ground for oil and sell it as it sees fit? Did the U.S. military have the right to confiscate and spend the stashes of Iraqi cash it found?
Scheffer disagrees with conservatives who are skeptical that Iraqis would have standing to sue the United States for damages. He says that Iraqis and the future Iraqi government would be armed with the U.N. resolution if they sought redress in a U.S. federal court or through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Scheffer and other lawyers on the more liberal side of the spectrum also raise questions about President Bush's Executive Order 13303 issued on May 22. It seeks to protect Iraq's oil, and the Iraq Development Fund that spends money earned from sales of Iraqi oil, from legal attack by creditors or anyone else. In the executive order, Bush declared a national emergency and stated that any "threat of attachment or other judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum, and petroleum products" would obstruct "the orderly reconstruction of Iraq," and hence was "prohibited and shall be deemed null and void."
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 does indeed give the Coalition Provisional Authority wide latitude in spending the money in the Development Fund. But critics see the sweeping executive order as an attempt by Bush not just to safeguard Iraqi oil money from attachments and lawsuits but also to immunize corporations against liability lawsuits, no matter how they go about extracting and selling Iraqi oil.
The nonprofit human-rights and environment litigation group EarthRights International calls Bush's order "outrageous." And Tom Devine, the legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group, said the order "appears to cancel the rule of law for the oil industry or anyone else who gets possession or control of Iraqi oil or anything of value related to Iraqi oil."
But Taylor Griffin, a Treasury Department spokesman who said he participated in many of the drafting sessions for the executive order, dismissed those interpretations as "bad lawyering." The whole idea, he said, was to make sure that proceeds from Iraqi oil go into the Development Fund to help Iraq and to avoid the risk that the money could be legally attached or claimed before reaching the Iraqi people. There is no attempt to pre-empt federal court suits, he said. Treasury promised last summer to issue rules to clarify Executive Order 13303 but so far has not done so.
Scheffer said that oil companies may "find comfort" in the order because "they are assured of some level of protection in federal court." He cautioned, however, that "it should not be assumed by anyone in the oil industry that orders of this character can immunize either the federal government or oil companies from the full force of occupation law. Would the federal court completely set aside occupation law in deference to this executive order, which has no statutory force whatsoever?" Scheffer doubts it.
Scheffer said he decided to raise these issues about the legal consequences of invading and occupying Iraq to increase awareness that going it alone in pre-emptive warfare "can actually come back and bite you - two, three, four, or five years from now when claims metastasize and become very real for any particular group of people who decide they have been victimized by the occupation." He foresees "a mega-claim, under which an entire class of Iraqi citizens" sues the U.S. and British governments for misusing their oil money. "Even if the Iraqi citizens were defeated in U.S. federal courts," Scheffer argued, "they might be able to persuade the future Iraqi government to pick up the case for them and file it as a reparations claim in the International Court of Justice in The Hague."
If Scheffer is right, stand by for a long war on the legal front in Iraq. Claims against Iran that were generated by the 1979 imprisonment of American hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran are still being argued today in The Hague.
By George C. Wilson, National Journal
The United States and Britain, as well as their private contractors engaged in rebuilding Iraq, could face an onslaught of lawsuits - perhaps claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and taking up years of court time. The grounds? That the coalition broke international law in the way it invaded and occupied Iraq, and in the way it is using Iraq's wealth and resources. This warning comes from an international lawyer who has just finished a detailed study of the possible legal consequences of America's first pre-emptive war.
David J. Scheffer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center who was President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war-crimes issues, argues that the United States and Britain have ignored the "short leash" granted by the internationally accepted rules governing the behavior of occupying powers. He contends that they have gone far beyond just patching up Iraq, which he said is allowed under international law, and are now moving onto the forbidden ground of exploiting the oil wealth of the country.
Sooner or later, Scheffer predicts, the U.S. and British governments, as well as their contractors (including Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, the Halliburton conglomerate of Houston), could well be sued by Iraqis arguing that their property, particularly oil, was misused by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Moreover, he says, the future sovereign Iraqi government, as well as the nations that were owed millions of dollars by the former government of Saddam Hussein, could also find grounds for lawsuits.
Scheffer and his legal allies assert that the rebuilding of Iraq is different from the United States' rebuilding of Germany under the Marshall Plan after World War II. Germany in 1945 was in ruins and had no immediate riches to tap. Iraq in 2003, however, has vast oil resources. And although President Bush has declared that Iraq's oil belongs to the Iraqi people, the Coalition Provisional Authority is making decisions on how to exploit that resource and what to do with the income from it. Scheffer questions the legal rights of the occupying powers to make decisions about oil income before a sovereign Iraqi government is formed. Moreover, given the rules of occupation, Scheffer contends that the American and British governments increased their legal liability when they decided to invade Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council. "We have walked into a liability trap" by going it alone, he said of the U.S. government.
Other international lawyers dispute Scheffer's brief, which he is putting into a future article for the American Journal of International Law.
National Journal sent a summary of Scheffer's contentions to the State Department and invited legal experts there to comment. The department declined. But lawyers on the more conservative side of the political spectrum were happy to weigh in against Scheffer's analysis.
David Rivkin, who was a highly placed lawyer in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, said that Ambassador Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq are doing just what the international rules of occupation intended: helping the occupied country. "Is Bremer building a villa for himself and his children?" Rivkin asked rhetorically.
Rivkin also argued that it would be a stretch to hold the United States to the rules of strict liability for its actions in Iraq. "Absolutely nothing" in the international rules of occupation, he said, "imposes strict liability, even where one's actions do not bear the right fruit." Rivkin said, for example, that if the CPA builds a school in Iraq that turns out to be shoddy, the United States would still not be liable for claims. Rivkin did acknowledge, however, that Scheffer was right on one point: The United States would have been less vulnerable to lawsuits if it had invaded and occupied Iraq with the blessing of the United Nations. But, he contended, the lawyerly, if not insulting, wording needed to provide such immunity would never have passed in the Security Council.
Both John Yoo, a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Paul Rosenzweig, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that the United States is for now the sovereign government of Iraq and, as such, could not be sued in U.S. federal court. And, as a sovereign power, they added, the United States would have to consent to being sued in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Rosenzweig called Scheffer's argument "an interesting theoretical exercise" with little chance "of coming to fruition."
Scheffer obviously disagrees. He largely bases his case on the 1949 Geneva Convention IV, and on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 of this year, which lifted the economic sanctions against Iraq and recognized the authority of the coalition forces as an "occupying power."
He argues that Geneva Convention IV limits what the Coalition Provisional Authority and its contractors can legally do in Iraq. "Occupation law was not designed to transform society," Scheffer said. "The fundamental premise of occupation law has been to confine the occupying power to humanitarian objectives that essentially preserve the status quo, not entitle the occupying power to transform the territory it holds. Otherwise, the door would be wide open for abuse by aggressive and benevolent armies alike."
Article 147 of the convention forbids occupying powers from engaging in the "extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." Scheffer says that the article raises several questions: Does the coalition have the right to dig into Iraq's ground for oil and sell it as it sees fit? Did the U.S. military have the right to confiscate and spend the stashes of Iraqi cash it found?
Scheffer disagrees with conservatives who are skeptical that Iraqis would have standing to sue the United States for damages. He says that Iraqis and the future Iraqi government would be armed with the U.N. resolution if they sought redress in a U.S. federal court or through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Scheffer and other lawyers on the more liberal side of the spectrum also raise questions about President Bush's Executive Order 13303 issued on May 22. It seeks to protect Iraq's oil, and the Iraq Development Fund that spends money earned from sales of Iraqi oil, from legal attack by creditors or anyone else. In the executive order, Bush declared a national emergency and stated that any "threat of attachment or other judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum, and petroleum products" would obstruct "the orderly reconstruction of Iraq," and hence was "prohibited and shall be deemed null and void."
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 does indeed give the Coalition Provisional Authority wide latitude in spending the money in the Development Fund. But critics see the sweeping executive order as an attempt by Bush not just to safeguard Iraqi oil money from attachments and lawsuits but also to immunize corporations against liability lawsuits, no matter how they go about extracting and selling Iraqi oil.
The nonprofit human-rights and environment litigation group EarthRights International calls Bush's order "outrageous." And Tom Devine, the legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group, said the order "appears to cancel the rule of law for the oil industry or anyone else who gets possession or control of Iraqi oil or anything of value related to Iraqi oil."
But Taylor Griffin, a Treasury Department spokesman who said he participated in many of the drafting sessions for the executive order, dismissed those interpretations as "bad lawyering." The whole idea, he said, was to make sure that proceeds from Iraqi oil go into the Development Fund to help Iraq and to avoid the risk that the money could be legally attached or claimed before reaching the Iraqi people. There is no attempt to pre-empt federal court suits, he said. Treasury promised last summer to issue rules to clarify Executive Order 13303 but so far has not done so.
Scheffer said that oil companies may "find comfort" in the order because "they are assured of some level of protection in federal court." He cautioned, however, that "it should not be assumed by anyone in the oil industry that orders of this character can immunize either the federal government or oil companies from the full force of occupation law. Would the federal court completely set aside occupation law in deference to this executive order, which has no statutory force whatsoever?" Scheffer doubts it.
Scheffer said he decided to raise these issues about the legal consequences of invading and occupying Iraq to increase awareness that going it alone in pre-emptive warfare "can actually come back and bite you - two, three, four, or five years from now when claims metastasize and become very real for any particular group of people who decide they have been victimized by the occupation." He foresees "a mega-claim, under which an entire class of Iraqi citizens" sues the U.S. and British governments for misusing their oil money. "Even if the Iraqi citizens were defeated in U.S. federal courts," Scheffer argued, "they might be able to persuade the future Iraqi government to pick up the case for them and file it as a reparations claim in the International Court of Justice in The Hague."
If Scheffer is right, stand by for a long war on the legal front in Iraq. Claims against Iran that were generated by the 1979 imprisonment of American hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran are still being argued today in The Hague.
Saturday, November 01, 2003
Bush Administration Is Closing Seven Veterans Hospitals
In early August 2003, the Bush administration announced it was closing hospitals in its efforts to "restructure" the Department of Veterans Affairs. The administration is closing hospitals in:
Canandaigua, N.Y.
Pittsburgh
Lexington, Ky.
Brecksville, Ohio
Gulfport, Miss.
Livermore, Calif.
Waco, Tex.
Joy Ilem, assistant national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans, "questioned the need for closures and other cutbacks. 'Everyone is aware of the difficulty VA has meeting demand,' Ilem said. 'When we have hundreds of thousands of veterans on waiting lists (for medical appointments), we don't want to see facilities closed due to fiscal problems.'" There are currently 163 VA hospitals in the US. [Associated Press, 8/4/03, 10/28/03; Department of Veterans Affairs]
In mid-August, as Bush vacationed in Texas, a thousand veterans and supporters rallied in Waco, Texas to protest the closing of that VA hospital. The protestors met at the Waco School District football stadium parking lot "for a rally before driving the 22 miles to Crawford," where Bush was vacationing. "Veterans of Foreign Wars State Commander Ron Hornsby told the stadium crowd that the VA commissioner looking at closing hospitals could harm veterans all across the country, not just in Waco. 'We can never repay the veterans -- we hear those words a lot,' Hornsby said. 'At times like this, those words become very hollow, very meaningless.'" More than 1,500 vets joined a similar October rally to protest a VA closing in New York. [San Antonio Express-News, 8/17/03; Associated Press, 10/20/03, 10/28/03]
Canandaigua, N.Y.
Pittsburgh
Lexington, Ky.
Brecksville, Ohio
Gulfport, Miss.
Livermore, Calif.
Waco, Tex.
Joy Ilem, assistant national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans, "questioned the need for closures and other cutbacks. 'Everyone is aware of the difficulty VA has meeting demand,' Ilem said. 'When we have hundreds of thousands of veterans on waiting lists (for medical appointments), we don't want to see facilities closed due to fiscal problems.'" There are currently 163 VA hospitals in the US. [Associated Press, 8/4/03, 10/28/03; Department of Veterans Affairs]
In mid-August, as Bush vacationed in Texas, a thousand veterans and supporters rallied in Waco, Texas to protest the closing of that VA hospital. The protestors met at the Waco School District football stadium parking lot "for a rally before driving the 22 miles to Crawford," where Bush was vacationing. "Veterans of Foreign Wars State Commander Ron Hornsby told the stadium crowd that the VA commissioner looking at closing hospitals could harm veterans all across the country, not just in Waco. 'We can never repay the veterans -- we hear those words a lot,' Hornsby said. 'At times like this, those words become very hollow, very meaningless.'" More than 1,500 vets joined a similar October rally to protest a VA closing in New York. [San Antonio Express-News, 8/17/03; Associated Press, 10/20/03, 10/28/03]
US intelligence is being scapegoated for getting it right on Iraq
Bush's other war
US intelligence is being scapegoated for getting it right on Iraq
Sidney Blumenthal
Saturday November 1, 2003
The Guardian
In Baghdad, the Bush administration acts as though it is astonished by the postwar carnage. Its feigned shock is a consequence of Washington's intelligence wars. In fact, not only was it warned of the coming struggle and its nature - ignoring a $5m state department report on The Future of Iraq - but Bush himself signed another document in which that predictive information is contained.
According to the congressional resolution authorising the use of military force in Iraq, the administration is required to submit to the Congress reports of postwar planning every 60 days. The report, bearing Bush's signature and dated April 14 - previously undisclosed but revealed here - declares: "We are especially concerned that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime will continue to use Iraqi civilian populations as a shield for its regular and irregular combat forces or may attack the Iraqi population in an effort to undermine Coalition goals." Moreover, the report goes on: "Coalition planners have prepared for these contingencies, and have designed the military campaign to minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure."
Yet, on August 25, as the violence in postwar Iraq flared, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that this possibility was not foreseen: "Now was - did we - was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they're still fighting their war?"
"We read their reports," a senate source told me. "Too bad they don't read their own reports."
In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the state department and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative, but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to determine what exactly might be true. For them, this process is at the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet the strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and those creating contrary evidence had to be marginalised, intimidated or have their reputations tarnished.
Twice, in the run-up to the war, Vice-president Cheney veered his motorcade to the George HW Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, where he personally tried to coerce CIA desk-level analysts to fit their work to specification.
If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the Office of Special Plans, a parallel counter-CIA under the direction of the neoconservative deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to "stovepipe" its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or state department intelligence for fear of corruption by scepticism. Instead, the Pentagon's handpicked future leader of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, replaced the CIA as the reliable source of information, little of which turned out to be true - though his deceit was consistent with his record. Chalabi was regarded at the CIA as a mountebank after he had lured the agency to support his "invasion" of Iraq in 1995, a tragicomic episode, but one which hardly discouraged his neoconservative sponsors.
Early last year, before Hans Blix, chief of the UN team to monitor Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, embarked on his mission, Wolfowitz ordered a report from the CIA to show that Blix had been soft on Iraq in the past and thus to undermine him before he even began his work. When the CIA reached an opposite conclusion, Wolfowitz was described by a former state department official in the Washington Post as having "hit the ceiling". Then, according to former assistant secretary of state James Rubin, when Blix met with Cheney at the White House, the vice-president told him what would happen if his efforts on WMDs did not support Bush policy: "We will not hesitate to discredit you." Blix's brush with Cheney was no different from the administration's treatment of the CIA.
Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence á la carte.
In Bush's Washington, politics is the extension of war by other means. Rather than seeking to reform any abuse of intelligence, the Bush administration, through the Republican-dominated senate intelligence committee, is producing a report that will accuse the CIA of giving faulty information.
W hile the CIA is being cast as a scapegoat, FBI agents are meanwhile interviewing senior officials about a potential criminal conspiracy behind the public identification of a covert CIA operative - who, not coincidentally, happens to be the wife of the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of the report on the false Niger yellowcake uranium claims (originating in the Cheney's office). Wilson's irrefutable documentation was carefully shelved at the time in order to put16 false words about Saddam Hussein's nuclear threat in the mouth of George Bush in his state of the union address.
When it comes to responsibility for the degradation of intelligence in developing rationales for the war, Bush is energetically trying not to get the bottom of anything. While he has asserted the White House is cooperating with the investigation into the felony of outing Mrs Wilson, his spokesman has assiduously drawn a fine line between the legal and the political. After all, though Karl Rove - the president's political strategist and senior adviser, indispensable to his re election campaign - unquestionably called a journalist to prod him that Mrs. Wilson was "fair game", his summoning of the furies upon her apparently occurred after her name was already put into the public arena by two other unnamed "senior administration officials".
Rove is not considered to have committed a firing offence so long as he has merely behaved unethically. What Bush is not doing - not demanding that his staff sign affidavits swearing their innocence, or asking his vice-president point-blank what he knows - is glaringly obvious. Damaging national security must be secondary to political necessity.
"It's important to recognise," Wilson remarked to me, "that the person who decided to make a political point or that his political agenda was more important than a national security asset is still there in place. I'm appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president."
Now, postwar, the intelligence wars, if anything, have got more intense. Blame shifting by the administration is the order of the day. The Republican senate intelligence committee report will point the finger at the CIA, but circumspectly not review how Bush used intelligence. The Democrats, in the senate minority, forced to act like a fringe group, held unofficial hearings this week with prominent former CIA agents: rock-ribbed Republicans who all voted for and even contributed money to Bush, but expressed their amazed anger at the assault being waged on the permanent national security apparatus by the Republican president whose father's name adorns the building where they worked. One of them compressed his disillusionment into the single most resonant word an intelligence agent can muster: "betrayal".
US intelligence is being scapegoated for getting it right on Iraq
Sidney Blumenthal
Saturday November 1, 2003
The Guardian
In Baghdad, the Bush administration acts as though it is astonished by the postwar carnage. Its feigned shock is a consequence of Washington's intelligence wars. In fact, not only was it warned of the coming struggle and its nature - ignoring a $5m state department report on The Future of Iraq - but Bush himself signed another document in which that predictive information is contained.
According to the congressional resolution authorising the use of military force in Iraq, the administration is required to submit to the Congress reports of postwar planning every 60 days. The report, bearing Bush's signature and dated April 14 - previously undisclosed but revealed here - declares: "We are especially concerned that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime will continue to use Iraqi civilian populations as a shield for its regular and irregular combat forces or may attack the Iraqi population in an effort to undermine Coalition goals." Moreover, the report goes on: "Coalition planners have prepared for these contingencies, and have designed the military campaign to minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure."
Yet, on August 25, as the violence in postwar Iraq flared, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that this possibility was not foreseen: "Now was - did we - was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they're still fighting their war?"
"We read their reports," a senate source told me. "Too bad they don't read their own reports."
In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the state department and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative, but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to determine what exactly might be true. For them, this process is at the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet the strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and those creating contrary evidence had to be marginalised, intimidated or have their reputations tarnished.
Twice, in the run-up to the war, Vice-president Cheney veered his motorcade to the George HW Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, where he personally tried to coerce CIA desk-level analysts to fit their work to specification.
If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the Office of Special Plans, a parallel counter-CIA under the direction of the neoconservative deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to "stovepipe" its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or state department intelligence for fear of corruption by scepticism. Instead, the Pentagon's handpicked future leader of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, replaced the CIA as the reliable source of information, little of which turned out to be true - though his deceit was consistent with his record. Chalabi was regarded at the CIA as a mountebank after he had lured the agency to support his "invasion" of Iraq in 1995, a tragicomic episode, but one which hardly discouraged his neoconservative sponsors.
Early last year, before Hans Blix, chief of the UN team to monitor Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, embarked on his mission, Wolfowitz ordered a report from the CIA to show that Blix had been soft on Iraq in the past and thus to undermine him before he even began his work. When the CIA reached an opposite conclusion, Wolfowitz was described by a former state department official in the Washington Post as having "hit the ceiling". Then, according to former assistant secretary of state James Rubin, when Blix met with Cheney at the White House, the vice-president told him what would happen if his efforts on WMDs did not support Bush policy: "We will not hesitate to discredit you." Blix's brush with Cheney was no different from the administration's treatment of the CIA.
Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence á la carte.
In Bush's Washington, politics is the extension of war by other means. Rather than seeking to reform any abuse of intelligence, the Bush administration, through the Republican-dominated senate intelligence committee, is producing a report that will accuse the CIA of giving faulty information.
W hile the CIA is being cast as a scapegoat, FBI agents are meanwhile interviewing senior officials about a potential criminal conspiracy behind the public identification of a covert CIA operative - who, not coincidentally, happens to be the wife of the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of the report on the false Niger yellowcake uranium claims (originating in the Cheney's office). Wilson's irrefutable documentation was carefully shelved at the time in order to put16 false words about Saddam Hussein's nuclear threat in the mouth of George Bush in his state of the union address.
When it comes to responsibility for the degradation of intelligence in developing rationales for the war, Bush is energetically trying not to get the bottom of anything. While he has asserted the White House is cooperating with the investigation into the felony of outing Mrs Wilson, his spokesman has assiduously drawn a fine line between the legal and the political. After all, though Karl Rove - the president's political strategist and senior adviser, indispensable to his re election campaign - unquestionably called a journalist to prod him that Mrs. Wilson was "fair game", his summoning of the furies upon her apparently occurred after her name was already put into the public arena by two other unnamed "senior administration officials".
Rove is not considered to have committed a firing offence so long as he has merely behaved unethically. What Bush is not doing - not demanding that his staff sign affidavits swearing their innocence, or asking his vice-president point-blank what he knows - is glaringly obvious. Damaging national security must be secondary to political necessity.
"It's important to recognise," Wilson remarked to me, "that the person who decided to make a political point or that his political agenda was more important than a national security asset is still there in place. I'm appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president."
Now, postwar, the intelligence wars, if anything, have got more intense. Blame shifting by the administration is the order of the day. The Republican senate intelligence committee report will point the finger at the CIA, but circumspectly not review how Bush used intelligence. The Democrats, in the senate minority, forced to act like a fringe group, held unofficial hearings this week with prominent former CIA agents: rock-ribbed Republicans who all voted for and even contributed money to Bush, but expressed their amazed anger at the assault being waged on the permanent national security apparatus by the Republican president whose father's name adorns the building where they worked. One of them compressed his disillusionment into the single most resonant word an intelligence agent can muster: "betrayal".
All articles in this archive are used under "fair use" as they are important to the national discussion of whether or not the people of this country are being deceived by their government. These articles are used as evidence in that discussion.
