Liberation News Service

Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage

NOTE to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta): Those who urge you to define yourself before the Bush cabal defines you are WRONG. You must define the _resident before he defines you. You must define him as a failure on all three counts: (NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC SECURITY and ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY), you must define the _resident is utterly without CREDIBILITY and woefully lacking in the COMPETENCE and CHARACTER to lead this nation...Do not spend your TV $$$ defining yourself, spend it defining Bush -- because articulating the case against Bush will define you -- as a warrior, a man of personal courage, a man of vital intellect and as a man of real compassion.

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/033104D.shtml
Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage
By Editor & Publisher Staff

Sunday 29 March 2004

NEW YORK In the wake of Richard Clarke's dramatic personal apology to the families of 9/11 victims last week -- on behalf of himself and his government -- for failing to prevent the terrorist attacks, one might expect at least a few mea culpas related to the release of false information on the Iraq threat before and after the war.

While the major media, from The New York Times on down, has largely remained silent about their own failings in this area, a young columnist for a small paper in Fredericksburg, Va., has stepped forward.

"The media are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there is one thing they forgot to say: We're sorry," Rick Mercier wrote, in a column published Sunday in The Free Lance-Star.

"Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.

"Maybe we'll do a better job next war."

Mercier admitted that it was "absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post."

Mercier, an editor and writer at the newspaper who writes a column two or three times a month, told E&P that the column was sparked by what he saw as "a need for accountability and reflection" given the seriousness of the current conflict in Iraq and the failure to find WMDs there or a strong Saddam link to al Qaeda. He saw little of that soul-searching in the one-year anniversary coverage. "By neglecting to fully employ their critical-thinking faculties, the media not only failed their readers and viewers, they failed our democracy," Mercier said.

Concluding his column, Mercier declared, "there's no excusing that failure. The only thing that can be said is, Sorry."

-------

Here is the bottom line—Richard Clarke was right, and the Bush administration and the people of the United States would have been better off if his warnings in the early days of 2001 had been heeded.

Another counterterrorism expert, and another
registered Repubican, speaks out and earns his name
scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10158

The War On Clarke

Larry C. Johnson is a member of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity. He served with the CIA from
1985 through 1989 and worked in the State Department's
office of Counter Terrorism from 1989 through 1993. He
also is a registered Republican who contributed
financially to the Bush Campaign in 2000.

Richard Clarke must be wondering if explaining what
the United States did not do in the war on terrorism
is more dangerous than actually fighting the
terrorists. Clarke, the former terrorism czar for both
Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is now
being vilified by a host of Bush officials, including
Dick Cheney and Condeleeza Rice, as a liar.

The attack on Clarke, which consists of leaks, threats
and intimidation tactics, has become the genuine
hallmark of the Bush presidency. Previous victims of
the Bush smear machine include:

Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who challenged the
fantasy spun by Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and
correctly insisted that several hundred thousand
troops would be needed to pacify Iraq.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had provided the Bush
administration with a report that Niger had not
supplied Iraq with uranium yellowcake essential for
building a nuclear device. Not only were his character
and competence called into question, but his family's
security was jeopardized by a White House leak that
his wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative.

Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, who reported
on the Bush administration obsession with Iraq and
talk early on of removing Saddam Hussein.
These smear campaigns were mild compared to the
vicious assault now underway against Richard Clarke.
What is the truth about Richard Clarke?

I was neither a personal friend nor fan of Richard
Clarke when I was in government. Richard Clarke, in my
experience, was arrogant and intense. He probably
still is. (People who know me would suggest that I am
the pot calling the kettle black.) However, Richard
Clarke also is a competent professional who has served
faithfully with Democratic and Republican
administrations since the 1970s.

My first contact with Mr. Clarke came during January
of 1991 in the operations center at State Department.
Clarke, who was the assistant secretary of state for
political military affairs, had been denied space in
the task force area, and my boss, State
Counterterrorism Chief Morris Busby, interceded for
Clarke and carved out space for his PM unit. Our two
groups shared space in the back rooms of the task
force area.

In 1992, Clarke was exiled to the National Security
Council over a flap involving Israel. I was told at
the time that this move was intended to get rid of
him. Those who hoped that banishing Clarke to the
National Security Council would lead to his dismissal
from government did not understand what a formidable
professional he was.

I left government service in 1993 but continued to
keep tabs on Clarke's counterterrorism activities
through friends and former colleagues in the various
policy and intelligence bureaucracies. Some close
friends complained (and still do) that Richard was too
alarmist and too pushy on some issues.

While some can quibble about his personality, there
should be no dispute that Richard Clarke was an
aggressive advocate for a tough response to terrorism.
Unfortunately, politicians in both parties chose to
ignore him on key issues. President Clinton, for
example, sat on the Presidential Decision Directive
39, which laid out his administration's plan for
fighting terrorism, for 28 months after taking office
in January of 1993. Clinton finally signed the
document after the Oklahoma City bombing in April
1995. Clarke pushed to get it done sooner but ran up
against political apathy in the early days of the
Clinton administration.

Clarke was just as pushy with the Bush administration.
In the first months of the Bush presidency a terrorism
issue unrelated to Al Qaeda, which first surfaced
during the Clinton administration, came to the front
burner. Four U.S. oil workers were being held by
individuals tied to Colombian terrorists in the
jungles of Ecuador. The U.S. Embassy requested the
deployment of U.S. counterterrorism forces (civilian
and military) to Ecuador to help find and rescue the
workers. Clarke chaired a meeting of the Counter
Terrorism Support Group (CSG) at the Old Executive
Office Building to consider the matter. He wanted to
grant the request and was backed by the Department of
State, the CIA and the FBI. The Department of Defense,
however, balked. At the end of the day, the Bush
administration, against Clarke's recommendation, chose
to treat terrorism in Ecuador as criminal matter
rather than a military issue. U.S. military forces
stayed at home.

Clarke has told the uncomfortable truth in his book,
and now finds himself the target of the full fury of
angry Bush partisans, who insist that fighting
terrorism was Bush's highest priority. The evidence
shows otherwise. For starters, Clarke presented a memo
to Condi Rice outlining the URGENT (this tag is on the
document) threat presented by Al Qaeda in January
2001. While Dr. Rice insists she made terrorism a top
priority, one of her first decisions in the early days
of 2001 was to downgrade Clarke's position as the
National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism. How is
that making terrorism an elevated priority? It is not.
Richard Clarke also requested in January 2001 that
President Bush convene a meeting of principal Bush
officials (e.g., the secretary of state, secretary of
defense and the attorney general) but this meeting was
postponed by Dr. Rice until Sept. 4, 2001. That
seven-month gap represents time that, in retrospect,
could have been used to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

The Clarke bashers also insist that that no more could
have been done before 9/11 than what was done during
the first eight months of the Bush presidency. Oh? If
that was the case, then why did Bush direct the
airlines to lock cockpit doors after 9/11? Why did the
Bush administration decide to arm pilots, put more air
marshals on planes and federalize the security force
doing screening at airports? Why did the Bush
administration order attacks on Al Qaeda camps in
Afghanistan if, in the words of the Bush spinners, "we
did all that we could do prior to 9/11"? Why did Bush
officials establish emergency financial task forces
comprised of intelligence and law enforcement
officials to hunt down the trails of terrorist
financing if all had been done prior to 9/11? The
uncomfortable facts show that Richard Clarke proposed
many of these measures in the early days of the Bush
presidency. Action was taken only in the aftermath of
9/11.

Here is the bottom line—Richard Clarke was right, and
the Bush administration and the people of the United
States would have been better off if his warnings in
the early days of 2001 had been heeded. Rather than
attack Richard Clarke's character, Republican
operatives should focus their venom on the terrorists
who killed Americans in the World Trade Centers and
the Pentagon. George W. Bush should set the tone and
thank his former terrorism chief, apologize for this
week's ugliness, and focus on getting Osama Bin Laden.
As one American, I say thank you, Richard Clarke.

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Published: Mar 29 2004

The Family Steering Committee Statement Regarding Condoleezza Rice and Release of 28 Pages

Despite the complicity and cowardice of the "US
mainstream news media," the 9/11 Families continue
their heroic struggle to shed light on disturbing
questions that challenge the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE
and CHARACTER of the _resident, the VICE _resident to
serve in high office...Will the 9/11 Commission wimp
out? Will the "US mainstream news media" wake up to
its responsibility to the innocents who lost their
lives on that awful morning and to their familes?
Don't forget the 28 blank pages on the Joint Inquiry
Final Report! Don't forget the White House's refusal
to provide the 9/11 Commission with the details of the
Aug. 6th 2001 PDB!! Don't forget...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.911independentcommission.org/

The Family Steering Committee (FSC) is an independent,
nonpartisan group of individuals who lost loved ones
on September 11, 2001. The FSC does not receive
financial or other support from any outside
organizations.

The Family Steering Committee Statement Regarding Condoleezza Rice and Release of 28 Pages

March 27, 2004

The Family Steering Committee demands the appearance
of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice under
oath in a public hearing immediately. We believe that
testifying before the Commission in a public forum is
Ms. Rice’s moral obligation given her responsibility
as National Security Advisor to protect our nation.
The death of nearly 3000 innocent people warrants such
a moral precedent.

We further request Richard Clarke, Samuel Berger,
Brent Scowcroft, and Deputy National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley also be present, under oath, and made
part of the same panel as Dr. Rice.

We have attached a list of questions that must be
addressed during this hearing. In addition to these
questions, we would also appreciate the reconciliation
of various issues that were raised on behalf of Mr.
Clarke during this past week’s hearings. Furthermore,
we would request the examination and discussion of the
following issues:

1. The draft report of the 2001 NSPD-5
Presidential Commission on Intelligence Reform chaired
by General Brent Scowcroft.

2. Budget requests made by various agencies since
1998 so as to compare those requests within the
agencies from which they originated, within the
Administration, and by Congress.

3. The NSC policy options paper, prepared by
Richard Clarke’s office during Spring 2001 which
proposed a change in US policy regarding
[------------]. (Joint Inquiry Report, Appendix, NSC
Document Request, July 1, 2002, enclosure to
Condoleezza Rice letter dated July 8, 2002)

4. The after-action report on the Millennium
prepared by the National Coordinator for
Counterterrorism’s office.

We would encourage White House counsel to view this
commission for what it is— a quasi-legislative entity.
After all, Chairman Kean is an Executive Branch
appointee to the Commission. Furthermore, the mere
fact that the Commission has gained access—albeit
limited access, to the Presidential Daily Briefings
(something that the Joint Inquiry of Congress was
refused for reasons of Separation of Powers
principles) further supports the notion that this
Commission is not a purely legislative body.

Assuming arguendo that White House counsel continues
to persist that a legal precedent might be presented,
Dr. Rice should testify to set a moral precedent that
is aptly warranted by the murder of 3000 people.
Voluntarily coming forward to testify under oath
during a public hearing without the use of a subpoena
would simply set a rare, refreshing, and appropriate
moral precedent for all of history to judge.

Finally, in light of recent actions on behalf of
Senate Majority Leader Frist, we also request the
de-classification of the infamous 28 blank pages of
the Joint Inquiry Final Report. The Saudi government
stated to the media in August, 2003 that they would
like the 28 pages released. Members of the Joint
Inquiry have stated on the record that the 28 pages
did not include national security secrets.
Nevertheless, the White House continues to refuse to
release said information on grounds of national
security.

One of the underlying themes of this past week’s
hearings was the failure to garner the “will of the
nation.” One way to arouse the will of the nation is
to engage the American people in healthy debate and
dialogue. In order to have the will, the nation must
be properly informed. As such, we encourage the
release of the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry Final
Report that pertains to the foreign sponsorship of
terrorism.

We hope that Senator Frist will show the same zeal to
release the 28 pages as he has shown in de-classifying
Mr. Clarke’s testimony. We request that all witness
testimony to the Joint Inquiry of Congress be
impartially reviewed and declassified if possible. We
abhor the tendency to over-classify information and we
support the release of any material as long such
public release does not legitimately harm national
security.

Questions For Condoleezza Rice
from the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry Appendix

1. As stated in the Appendix of the Joint Inquiry of
Congress’ Final Report:
“Despite the White House decision [to deny access to
the PDBs], the Joint Inquiry was advised by
Intelligence Community representatives of the content
of an August 2001 PDB item that is discussed in the
report. This glimpse into that PDB indicated the
importance of such access
[--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------]*

*National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated in
a May 16, 2002 press briefing that, on August 6, 2001,
the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) included information
about Bin Ladin’s methods of operation from a
historical perspective dating back to 1997. One of the
methods was that Bin Ladin might choose to hijack an
airliner in order to hold passengers hostage to gain
release of one of their operatives. She stated,
however, that the report did not contain specific
warning information, but only a generalized warning,
and did not contain information that al-Qa’ida was
discussing a particular planned attack against a
specific target at any specific time, place, or by any
specific method.” (Joint Inquiry Final Report,
Appendix, "Access Limitations Encountered by the Joint
Inquiry," pages 1-2).

Ms. Rice can you reconcile this intimated discrepancy?

Terrorism as a Policy Priority

1. During your time as National Security Advisor, what
priorities did you establish for U.S. Intelligence
priorities and where did terrorism fit in? How did
this change from the priorities of the Clinton
administration?

2. How were these priorities conveyed to the
intelligence Community? Did the intelligence Community
propose any changes in priority with regard to
counterterrorism or al-Qa’ida? What were they?

3. Prior to September 11, who at the National Security
Council and the U.S. government played a leading role
in setting counterterrorism policy? Who else was
involved in this process? Please describe the process,
the participants and the fora.

4. Prior to September 11, did Congress support the
NSC’s counterterrorism efforts? Did Congress oppose
NSC priorities related to terrorism in any way? Please
provide details of both, as appropriate.

5. Was Richard Clarke, the National Coordinator for
counterterrorism, included all in Principals’ meetings
related to terrorism after January 2002? If not, why
not? How was it determined who would be involved in
such meetings? What was his role in counterterrorism
policy and intelligence prioritization after January
2002?

6. During the transition from the Clinton
administration, did former National Security Adviser
Sandy Berger or other senior Clinton NSC officials
provide any advice, information, warning, or guidance
requiring policy, priorities, or threats from
al-Qa’ida and Bin Ladin? If so, what was the advice,
information, warning, or guidance?

7. Prior to September 11, was the Administration
engaged in a review of counterterrorism policy? What
issues were identified for change? What stage were
plans in? What changes in the role of the intelligence
Community, if any, were planned? What happened to the
review after the September 11 attacks?

8. When the new Administration came into office, was
it aware that Usama bin Ladin had declared war on the
United States in 1998? Who provided this information,
and how was it provided? What was the impact of that
fact on the Administration’s national security
priorities? How did it affect the intelligence
Community’s posture?

9. Prior to September 11, did the President or other
senior officials in the administration make any public
statements or give any speeches on the subject of the
threat of terrorism, or Usama bin Ladin’s terrorist
network in particular? If so, please make copies
available to the (Joint Inquiry Staff)?

Resources

1. Prior to September 11, did the Intelligence
Community come to the new Administration with any
requests for additional counterterrorism resources,
e.g. additional funding? Who made the request, and
what was the nature of the proposal?

2. Did the Intelligence Community ask the
Administration for more resources to fight Usama bin
Ladin and al-Qa’ida? Who made this request?

3. Did the Intelligence Community ever cite a lack of
resources as the basis for not acting? If so, provide
details and the NSC response.

4. When the DCI, Director of NSA, and FBI Director
requested more counterterrorism resources, what was
the stated justification for their requests?

5. What was the NSC’s response to each specific
Intelligence Community request for any increases in
resources for counterterrorism? For al-Qa’ida?

Agency responsiveness and support for policy makers

1. What specific strengths did you observe in
intelligence collection, analysis, and reporting on
Bin Ladin, al-Qa’ida or terrorism in general prior to
September 11? What specific weaknesses? Please provide
specific examples of each.

2. What was the quality of intelligence received by
the NSC? Did the NSC make any efforts to improve this
quality?

3. With respect to Intelligence Community
counterterrorism efforts prior to September 11, how
responsive were the CIA, the FBI, NSA, and DIA?

--Did they provide the President and the National
Security Council with the information needed to make
informed decisions?

--Did the agencies use their authority aggressively?
Did they cite limits or a lack of authority as a basis
for no action?

--Did they shift resources appropriately in response
to NSC direction?

--Did the NSC provide any specific tasking to
Intelligence Community agencies to which they did not
respond? Please provide specific examples.

Threat to the homeland

1. Prior to September 11, including especially
spring/summer 2001, what information did the
Intelligence Community provide to the National
Security Council, orally or in writing, indicating the
possibility of terrorist attacks inside the United
States?

2. Prior to September 11, what information did the
Intelligence Community provide to the National
Security Council on al-Qa’ida activities and
infrastructure inside the United States?

3. Prior to September 11, did the National Security
Council ever consider alerting the American people to
the internal threat from al-Qa’ida? What happened?

4. Did the National Security Council ever consider
enhancing U.S. border controls, e.g., by strengthening
watchlist programs, alerting the FAA or the airlines,
or inspecting cargo containers on a larger scale? If
so, what happened?

5. Prior to September 11, what was the National
Security council’s view regarding how well postured
the FBI was with respect to combating terrorist groups
inside the United States? What steps were taken to
improve the FBI, if any?

6. Prior to September 11, did the Intelligence
Community provide the NSC with any information
regarding the possibility that al-Qa’ida members would
use airplanes as weapons or hijack airplanes in the
United States? What did the NSC do in response to this
information?

Foreign governments

1. Prior to September 11, which foreign governments
were most and least helpful regarding
counterterrorism? How were they helpful or not helpful
in each case?

2. Prior to September 11, were the governments of
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supportive of U.S.
counterterrorism efforts? How responsive were European
allies? What priority was counterterrorism cooperation
in Saudi Arabia relative to military operations
against Iraq, the Middle East peace negotiations, and
other concerns?

3. Did Intelligence Community agencies ask for NSC
assistance in getting foreign governments to take
action against terrorist cells? Did the NSC take any
specific actions to support the Intelligence
Community? What did the NSC do? Did the NSC ask or
instruct the State Department or the Department of
Defense to assist the intelligence Community in this
regard?

4. Prior to September 11, was there any discussion of
increasing information sharing and/or counterterrorism
cooperation with the Sudan?

Use of Force/Overt and Covert

1. Prior to September 11, did the National Security
Council consider the use of military force against
al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan? How? In what form? Why was
it not pursued? Was there sufficient intelligence to
support military options? Was their tasking to gain
further intelligence to support military operations?

2. Prior to September 11, did the National Security
Council issue any tasking to the CIA or the U.S.
military to develop plans involving the covert or
overt use of force?

3. Prior to September 11, did the National Security
Council ever review the CIA’s authorities to conduct
covert action against Bin Ladin or al-Qa’ida? What
problems were identified regarding existing
authorities, [-----------]? Were there any proposals
to change those authorities before September 11th?
What steps were taken?

4. Prior to September 11, was the unarmed Predator
flown in Afghanistan after the Bush Administration
came into office? Were proposals made to the NSC to
fly it? Which participants favored flying it? If it
was not flown, why not?

5. Did the National Security Council support the
development of the armed Predator? Did any
administration official try to expedite the process?
Were any discussions held on this issue at the NSC?
Who participated?

6. Did you consider [------------]? Why or why not?
What impact did you expect?

7. Why was there no military response to the attack on
the USS Cole? Was this considered?

Recommendations

1. What recommendations would you make to improve the
intelligence community’s performance?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statement of the Family Steering Committee
for The 9/11 Independent Commission

March 20, 2004

The Family Steering Committee is deeply disturbed to
learn about Executive Staff Director Philip Zelikow’s
participation in urgent post election briefings,
December 2000, and January 2001, with Sandy Berger and
Condoleezza Rice. In this particular meeting the
Senior Clinton Administration official clearly warned
that Al Qaeda posed the worst Security threat facing
the nation.

It is apparent that Dr. Zelikow should never have been
permitted to be Executive Staff Director of the
Commission. As Executive Staff Director his job has
been to steer the direction of the Commission’s
investigation, an investigation whose mandate includes
understanding why the Bush Administrations failed to
prioritize the Al Qaeda threat. It is abundantly clear
that Dr. Zelikow’s conflicts go beyond just the
transition period.

It is extremely distressing to learn this information
at this late date. This new information clearly calls
into question the integrity of this Commission’s
investigation. The Family Steering Committee
repeatedly expressed concerns over all members’
conflicts requesting that the commission be
forthcoming so as not to taint the validity of the
report. The Family Steering Committee did not know
about Dr. Zelikow’s participation in this intelligence
briefing until today.

As such, the Family Steering Committee is calling for:

1. Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation.

2. Dr. Zelikow’s testimony in public and under
oath.

3. Subpoena of Dr. Zelikow's notes from the
intelligence briefings he attended with Richard Clarke

4. The Commission to apologize to the 9/11
families and America for this massive appearance of
impropriety.

Richard Clarke, Tom Maertens, Roger Cressey, Donald Kerrick, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson, Greg Thielmann, Karen Kwiatkowski and Rand Beers all heard and saw the real stuff happening in this Bush White House.

In this very important piece, the incomparable William
Rivers Pitt has done what the TV news anchors on
SeeBS, SeeNotNews, NotBeSeen and AnythingButSee should
have done for the US electorate by now, i.e. put
Richard Clarke's blockbuster accusations into context
by highlighting the most prominent of those who have
stood up to the _resident and the VICE _resident from
within their own administration and frame the real
question: How bad is their failure? Is it simply
incompetence and wrong-mindedness or is it worse?
Incompetence and wrong-mindedness on national security
would be enough to remove them from office in the
national referendum on CREDIBILITY, CHARACTER and
COMPETENCE this coming November, BUT the LNS fears it
is worse...As Al Gore bellowed that fateful night in
Tennessee: HE BETRAYED THIS COUNTRY...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/033004A.shtml

The Line
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 30 March 2004

Former White House Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard
Clarke has managed to do something that defies modern
political gravity. He has stayed in the news, hour
after hour and day after day. He was hurled many days
ago into the maelstrom of the 24-hour news cycle,
which reports one moment on an incredibly important
story, flings that story out beyond the Oort Cloud the
next moment, and that story is never seen again.
Clarke, somehow, has managed to maintain his position
at the top of the news despite this process we
mistakenly call 'journalism' for longer than any other
ten major recent stories combined.

There are several reasons for this. First of all,
Clarke's accusations are damning. According to him,
the Bush administration ignored the threat of al Qaeda
terrorism completely. After the attacks of September
11, the administration became obsessed with attacking
Iraq, despite the fact that every intelligence
organization in America was telling them Iraq had
nothing to do with it. Clarke maintains that the war
in Iraq is a dangerous distraction from the defense of
the nation, a political war that has nothing to do
with making America safer, and one that has cost us
terribly in blood and treasure. Given the fact that
Clarke was physically in the White House for all this,
and that he has been in the anti-terrorism business
since the days of Ronald Reagan, his accusations have
long, sharp teeth.

There is also the fact that Clarke apologized for
September 11. In the context of a White House that has
battled the assembly of a September 11 investigation
for two years, a White House that has slapped down
every plea from the family members of those who died
on September 11 to get this investigation rolling, a
White House that tried at one point to put the
investigation into the slippery hands of Henry
Kissinger, a White House that has adamantly refused to
hand over relevant data about September 11 to the
commission they never wanted to see in the first
place, a White House that won't allow National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly
before this commission despite her central role in the
administration, a National Security Advisor that would
dance the Macarena on the Capitol dome if it could get
her out of giving that testimony because she knows she
will get clobbered with her own words, and finally a
White House that never got around to saying they were
sorry to the families of the September 11 victims, in
the context of all that, Richard Clarke's heartfelt
apology to those families instantly became the stuff
of political legend.

Another reason Clarke has stayed in the news is
because he does not stand alone. Had he been the only
person to come forth with savage criticism of George
W. Bush and his administration, Karl Rove would have
called out the dogs, and Clarke would have found
himself selling Amway outside of McMurdo Sound before
St. Patrick's Day. Fortunately for Mr. Clarke, and for
the truth, he has joined a long and prestigious line
of people who have come forward to bear witness
against this White House:

* Tom Maertens, who was National Security Council
director for nuclear non-proliferation for both the
Clinton and Bush White House. Maertens' own words tell
the tale: "Clarke was a colleague of mine for 15
months in the White House, under both Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush. Subsequently, I moved to the U.S.
State Department as deputy coordinator for
counterterrorism, and worked with him and his staff
before and after 9/11. The Bush administration did
ignore the threat of terrorism. It was focused on tax
cuts, building a ballistic missile system, withdrawing
from the ABM Treaty and rejecting the Kyoto Protocol.
Clarke's gutsy insider recounting of events related to
9/11 is an important public service. From my
perspective, the Bush administration has practiced the
most cynical, opportunistic form of politics I
witnessed in my 28 years in government: hijacking
legitimate American outrage and patriotism over 9/11
to conduct a pre-ordained war against Saddam Hussein."

* Roger Cressey, Clarke's former deputy. Cressey
backs up one of the most damning charges that has been
leveled against the administration by Clarke: They
blew past al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, focusing
instead on Iraq. Cressey is one of four eyewitnesses
to an exchange between Clarke and Bush which took
place in the White House Situation Room on September
12, 2001. Bush pressed Clarke three times on September
12 to find evidence that Iraq was responsible for the
attacks. According to his book, 'Against All Enemies,'
Clarke protested that al-Qaida, and not Iraq, was
responsible. Bush angrily ordered him to "'look into
Iraq, Saddam,'" and then left the room. According to
Cressey, Condoleezza Rice was also a witness to this
exchange. The word from administration officials is
that Rice can't seem to remember it. This, among
others, is a reason Rice is refusing to testify
publicly before the September 11 commission.

* Donald Kerrick, a three-star General who served
as deputy National Security Advisor under Clinton, and
stayed for several months in the Bush White House.
According to a report by Sidney Blumenthal from March
25, Kerrick wrote Stephen Hadley, his replacement in
the White House, a two-page memo. "It was classified,"
Kerrick told Blumenthal. "I said they needed to pay
attention to al-Qaida and counterterrorism. I said we
were going to be struck again. We didn't know where or
when. They never once asked me a question nor did I
see them having a serious discussion about it. They
didn't feel it was an imminent threat the way the
Clinton administration did. Hadley did not respond to
my memo. I know he had it. I agree with Dick that they
saw those problems through an Iraqi prism. But the
evidence wasn't there." Hadley has since become a
White House front man in the attacks against Rickard
Clarke.

* Paul O'Neill, former Treasury Secretary for
George W. Bush. O'Neill was afforded a position on the
National Security Council because of his job as
Treasury Secretary, and sat in on the Iraq invasion
planning sessions which were taking place months
before the attacks of September 11. "It was all about
finding a way to do it," says O'Neill. "That was the
tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to
do this.'" O'Neill describes the process of
decision-making between Bush and his people as being
"like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind captured
O'Neill's views in a new book titled 'The Price of
Loyalty.' "From the very first instance, it was about
Iraq," says Suskind about his interviews with O'Neill
and his review of 19,000 pages of documentary evidence
provided by O'Neill. "It was about what we can do to
change this regime. Day one, these things were laid
and sealed."

* Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador and career
diplomat who received lavish praise from the first
President Bush for his work in Iraq before the first
Gulf War. Wilson was the man dispatched in February
2002 to Niger to see if charges that Iraq was seeking
uranium from that nation to make nuclear bombs had any
merit. He investigated, returned, and informed the
CIA, the State Department, the office of the National
Security Advisor and the office of Vice President
Cheney that the charges were without merit. Eleven
months later, George W. Bush used the Niger uranium
claim in his State of the Union address to scare the
cheese out of everyone, despite the fact that the
claim had been irrefutably debunked. Wilson went
public, exposing this central bit of evidence to
support the Iraq invasion as the lie it was. A few
days later, Wilson's wife came under attack from the
White House, whose agents used press proxies to
destroy her career in the CIA as a warning to Wilson
and anyone else who might come forward. For the
record, Wilson's wife was a deep-cover agent running a
network which worked to keep weapons of mass
destruction out of the hands of terrorists. The irony
is palpable.

* Greg Thielmann, former Director of the Office
of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Issues in
the State Department. Thielmann, like Ambassador
Wilson, was involved in investigating whether the
Niger uranium claims had any merit. Thielmann told
Newsweek at the beginning of June 2003 that the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research had
concluded the documents used to support the Niger
uranium claims were "garbage." In fact, they were
crude forgeries. Thielmann was stunned to see Bush use
the claims in his State of the Union address eleven
months after the charge had been dispensed with as
nonsense. "When I saw that, it really blew me away,"
Thielmann told Newsweek. He watched Bush use the claim
and said, "Not that stupid piece of garbage. My
thought was, how did that get into the speech?"

* Karen Kwiatkowski, a Lt. Colonel in the Air
Force and a career Pentagon officer. Kwiatkowski
worked in the office of Undersecretary for Policy
Douglas Feith, and worked specifically with the Office
of Special Plans. Kwiatkowski's own words tell her
story: "From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed
firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of
Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the
neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence
nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. I saw a
narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some
executive appointees in the Pentagon used to
manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship
between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S.
intelligence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative
agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully
considered assessments, and through suppression and
distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what
were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the
executive office of the president."

* Rand Beers, who served the Bush administration
on the National Security Council at the White House as
a special assistant to the President for combating
terrorism. Mr. Beers served in government for more
than 30 years working in international narcotics and
law enforcement affairs, intelligence, and
counter-terrorism. He worked for the National Security
Council under presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton.
Because of his position, Beers saw everything. In a
June 25 2003 interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline,
Beers reported that the administration was failing
dramatically to defend the United States against
terrorism. According to Beers, al Qaeda presented a
far greater threat to America than Hussein and Iraq,
and that the Iraq war was a terrible and unnecessary
distraction from what was truly needed to keep the
nation safe.

Rogue journalist Hunter S. Thompson, in a Rolling
Stone article from July 4 1973 titled 'Fear and
Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag,'
described the looming sense of doomed finality which
surrounded the Nixon White House after the existence
of recorded Oval Office conversations became exposed.
The Nixon White House had tried everything to that
point to fend off the Watergate scandal: They denied
everything, then tried to pay off the central figures,
then fired a bunch of people, denied everything again,
and finally released edited transcripts of the White
House tapes in an effort to stem the tide that was
about to flood them out of power.

"There are a hundred or more people wandering
around Washington today," wrote Thompson, "who have
heard the 'real stuff,' as they put it - and despite
their professional caution when the obvious question
arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to
agree on: that nobody who felt shocked, depressed or
angry after reading the edited White House transcripts
should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes,
except under heavy sedation or locked in the trunk of
a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for
any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a
compulsion to do something like drive down to the
White House and throw a bag of live rats over the
fence."

Richard Clarke, Tom Maertens, Roger Cressey,
Donald Kerrick, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson, Greg
Thielmann, Karen Kwiatkowski and Rand Beers all heard
and saw the real stuff happening in this Bush White
House. Wilson has a book coming out in May, in which
he will name the White House operatives who destroyed
his wife's career. There will be more books, from more
people, and the 24-hour news cycle will continue to
ride this tiger.

These people are telling the world about the real
stuff. The Bush/Cheney Re-Election Axis is terrified,
and the Secret Service detail guarding the White House
perimeter might want to cowboy up in preparation for a
rain of rat bags coming over that fence.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

-------

Senator McCain, Senator Cleland, Secretary O'Neill, Ambassador Wilson, General Shinseki, Richard Foster, Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay ... when will the character assassination, retribution, and intimidation end? When will we say enough is enough?

This extraordinary statement by Tom Daschle (D-SD) is
perhaps one of the most compelling signs of a
significant sea-change and of the deep waters
ahead...LNS readers know that we called for Duck-It's
resignation as Minority Leader far more often than we
have found reason to quote him. Indeed, we have dubbed
him Sen. Tom Duck-It (D-SD)...Nevertheless, this
speech on the floor of the US Senate rises to the
gravity of this moment...Let's see if he blinks when the VICE _resident says "Boo!"

Cleanse the White House of the Chickenhawk Coup, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://democrats.senate.gov/~dpc/releases/2004330506.html

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Floor Statement of Sen. Daschle on the Abuse of
Government Power

Mr. President, last week I spoke about the White
House's reaction to Richard Clarke's testimony before
the 9-11 Commission. I am compelled to rise again
today, because the people around the President are
systematically abusing the powers and prerogatives of
government.

We all need to reflect seriously on what's going on.
Not in anger and not in partisanship, but in keeping
with our responsibilities as Senators and with an
abiding respect for the fundamental values of our
democracy.

Richard Clarke did something extraordinary when he
testified before the 9-11 Commission last week. He
didn't try to escape blame, as so many routinely do.
Instead, he accepted his share of responsibility and
offered his perceptions about what happened in the
months and years leading up to September 11.

We can and should debate the facts and interpretations
Clarke has offered. But there can be no doubt that he
has risked enormous damage to his reputation and
professional future to hold both himself and our
government accountable.

The retaliation from those around the President has
been fierce. Mr. Clarke's personal motives have been
questioned and his honesty challenged. He has even
been accused, right here on the Senate floor, of
perjury. Not one shred of proof was given, but that
wasn't the point. The point was to have the perjury
accusation on television and in the newspapers. The
point was to damage Mr. Clarke in any way possible.

This is wrong–and it's not the first time it's
happened.

When Senator McCain ran for President, the Bush
campaign smeared him and his family with vicious,
false attacks. When Max Cleland ran for reelection to
this Senate, his patriotism was attacked. He was
accused of not caring about protecting our nation -- a
man who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, accused
of being indifferent to America's national security.
That was such an ugly lie, it's still hard to fathom
almost two years later.

There are some things that simply ought not be done –
even in politics. Too many people around the President
seem not to understand that, and that line has been
crossed. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told the truth
about the Administration's misleading claims about
Iraq, Niger, and uranium, the people around the
President didn't respond with facts. Instead, they
publicly disclosed that Ambassador Wilson's wife was a
deep-cover CIA agent. In doing so, they undermined
America's national security and put politics first.
They also may well have put the lives of Ambassador
Wilson's wife, and her sources, in danger.

When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed
that the White House was thinking about an Iraq War in
its first weeks in office, his former colleagues in
the Bush Administration ridiculed him from morning to
night, and even subjected him to a fruitless federal
investigation.

When Larry Lindsay, one of President Bush's former top
economic advisors, and General Eric Shinseki, the
former Army Chief of Staff, spoke honestly about the
amount of money and the number of troops the war would
demand, they learned the hard way that the White House
doesn't tolerate candor.

This is not "politics as usual." In nearly all of
these cases, it's not Democrats who are being
attacked.

Senator McCain and Secretary O'Neill are prominent
Republicans, and Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay, Joe
Wilson, and Eric Shinseki all worked for Republican
Administrations.

The common denominator is that these government
officials said things the White House didn't want
said.

The response from those around the President was
retribution and character assassination -- a 21st
Century twist to the strategy of "shooting the
messenger."

If it takes intimidation to keep inconvenient facts
from the American people, the people around the
President don't hesitate. Richard Foster, the chief
actuary for Medicare, found that out. He was told he'd
be fired if he told the truth about the cost of the
Administration's prescription drug plan.

This is no way to run a government.

The White House and its supporters should not be using
the power of government to try to conceal facts from
the American people or to reshape history in an effort
to portray themselves in the best light.

They should not be threatening the reputations and
livelihoods of people simply for asking – or answering
– questions. They should seek to put all information
about past decisions on the table for evaluation so
that the best possible decisions can be made for the
nation's future.

In Mr. Clarke's case, clear and troubling double
standards are being applied.

Last year, when the Administration was being
criticized for the President's misleading statement
about Niger and uranium, the White House unexpectedly
declassified portions of the National Intelligence
Estimate. When the Administration wants to bolster its
public case, there is little that appears too
sensitive to be declassified.

Now, people around the President want to release parts
of Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony in 2002. According
to news reports, the CIA is already working on
declassifying that testimony – at the Administration's
request.

And last week several documents were declassified
literally overnight, not in an effort to provide
information on a pressing policy matter to the
American people, but in an apparent effort to
discredit a public servant who gave 30 years of
service to his American government.

I'll support declassifying Mr. Clarke's testimony
before the Joint Inquiry, but the Administration
shouldn't be selective. Consistent with our need to
protect sources and methods, we should declassify his
entire testimony.

And to make sure that the American people have access
to the full record as they consider this question, we
should also declassify his January 25 memo to Dr.
Rice, the September 4, 2001 National Security
Directive dealing with terrorism, Dr. Rice's testimony
to the 9-11 Commission, the still-classified 28 pages
from the House-Senate inquiry relating to Saudi
Arabia, and a list of the dates and topics of all
National Security Council meetings before September 4,
2001.

I hope this new interest in openness will also include
the Vice President's Energy and Terrorism Task Forces.
While much, if not all, of what these task forces
discussed was unclassified, their proceedings have not
been shared with the public.

There also seems to be a double standard when it comes
to investigations.

In recent days leading congressional Republicans are
now calling for an investigation into Mr. Clarke. As I
mentioned earlier, Secretary O'Neill was also
subjected to an investigation. Clarke and O'Neill
sought legal and classification review of any
information in their books before they were published.

Nonetheless, our colleagues tell us these two should
be investigated, at the same time there has been no
Senate investigation into the leaking of Valerie
Plame's identity as a deep cover CIA agent; no
thorough investigation into whether leading
Administration officials misrepresented the
intelligence regarding threats posed by Iraq; no
Senate hearings into the threat the chief Medicare
Actuary faced for trying to do his job; and no Senate
investigation into the reports of continued
overcharging by Halliburton for its work in Iraq.

There is a clear double standard when it comes to
investigating or releasing information, and that's
just is not right. The American people deserve more
from their leaders.

We're seeing it again now in the shifting reasons the
White House has given for Dr. Rice's refusal to
testify under oath and publicly before the 9-11
Commission.

The people around the President first said it would be
unprecedented for Dr. Rice to testify. But thanks to
the Congressional Research Service, we now know that
previous sitting National Security Advisors have
testified before Congress.

Now the people around the President are saying that
Dr. Rice can't testify because it would violate an
important constitutional principle: the separation of
powers.

We will soon face this debate again when it comes time
for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to meet
with the 9-11 Commission. I believe they should lift
the limitations they have placed on their cooperation
with the Commission and be willing to appear before
the entire Commission for as much time as the
Commission deems productive.

The all-out assault on Richard Clarke has gone on for
more than a week now. Mr. Clarke has been accused of
"profiteering" and possible perjury. It is time for
this to stop.

The Commission should declassify Mr. Clarke's earlier
testimony. All of it. Not just the parts the White
House wants. And Dr. Rice should testify before the
9-11 Commission, and she should be under oath and in
public.

The American people deserve to know the truth -- the
full truth -- about what happened in the years and
months leading up to September 11. Senator McCain,
Senator Cleland, Secretary O'Neill, Ambassador Wilson,
General Shinseki, Richard Foster, Richard Clarke,
Larry Lindsay ... when will the character
assassination, retribution, and intimidation end?
When will we say enough is enough?

The September 11 families – and our entire country –
deserve better. Our democracy depends on it. And our
nation's future security depends on it.

##

Rapid Growth of "Dead Zones" in Oceans Threatens Planet

The US presidential election in November is a national
referendum on whether or not the _resident and the
VICE _resident have the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and
CHARACTER to lead this nation on the vital issues of
NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC and ENVIRONMENTAL
SECURITY...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and Iraq War Lies, Show Up
for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0329-01.htm

Published on Monday, March 29, 2004 by the Agence
France Presse
Rapid Growth of "Dead Zones" in Oceans Threatens Planet

JEJU, South Korea - The spread of oxygen-starved "dead
zones" in the oceans, a graveyard for fish and plant
life, is emerging as a threat to the health of the
planet, experts say. For hundreds of millions of
people who depend on seas and oceans for their
livelihoods, and for many more who rely on a diet of
fish and seafood to survive, the problem is acute.

Some of the oxygen-deprived zones are relatively
small, less than one square kilometer (0.4 square
miles) in size. Others are vast, measuring more than
70,000 square kilometers.

Global distribution of oxygen-depleted coastal zones.
The 146 zones shown are associated with either
majorpopulation concentrations or with watersheds that
deliver large quantities of nutrients to coastal
waters. (Annual – yearly events related to summer or
autumnal stratification; Episodic – events occurring
at irregular intervals greater than one year; Periodic
– events occurring at regular intervals shorter than
one year; Persistent – all-year-round hypoxia)

Pollution, particularly the overuse of nitrogen in
fertilizers, is responsible for the spread of dead
zones, environment ministers and experts from more
than 100 countries were told.

The number of known oxygen-starved areas has doubled
since 1990 to nearly 150, according to the UN
Environmental Program (UNEP), holding is annual
conference here.

"What is clear is that unless urgent action is taken
to tackle the sources of the problem, it is likely to
escalate rapidly," UNEP executive director Klaus
Toepfer said.

"Hundreds of millions of people depend on the marine
environment for food, for their livelihoods and for
their cultural fulfillment."

The world at present gets 17 percent of its animal
protein from fish, UN figures show.

That supply is now endangered on at least two fronts:
overfishing that has depleted stocks in recent decades
and now the challenge of widening dead zones.

The issue was identified as a key emerging problem in
the Global Environment Year Book 2003, a health report
on the planet released at the start of the UNEP's
three-day conference that concludes Wednesday.

The spread of low-level oxygen zones in seas and
oceans, identified as early as in the 1960s, is
closely related to the overuse of fertilizers in
agriculture, whose main ingredient is nitrogen.

On land, nitrogen boosts plant growth. But when it
washes into the sea in rivers and rainwater overrun,
it triggers an explosive bloom of algae.

When these tiny plants growing on the ocean surface
sink to the bottom and decompose, they use up all the
oxygen and suffocate other marine life.

Fossil fuel waste from motor vehicles and power plants
increases nitrogen content in oceans.

With oxygen depletion, fish, oysters and other marine
life eventually die out along with important habitats
such as sea grass beds.

Relatively large zones are found in the Gulf of
Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay off the US East Coast, the
Baltic and Black seas, and parts of the Adriatic.

Others have appeared off South America, Japan, China,
Australia and New Zealand. Some zones are permanent,
while other occur annually or intermittently.

Most of the 160 million tons of nitrogen used as
fertilizer annually ends up in the sea.

UNEP said efforts should focus on cutting back on
overuse of nitrogen to bring the seas back to life.

With a joint accord, European states within the Rhine
River basin successfully cut the amount of nitrogen
entering the North Sea by 37 percent between 1985 and
2000, it said.

The UNEP advocates planting of more forests and
grasslands to soak up excess nitrogen and better
sewage treatment.

Its conference is the first ever held in Asia with
more than 100 ministers and high-level officials
attending from 155 countries.

© Copyright 2004 AFP

###

In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish culture

Here is corroboration (there is much more) of Richard
Clarke's charge (one uttered by both Sen. Bob Graham
D-Fraudida, and Gen. Wesley Clark D-NATO during the
Democratic primary season)that the _resident took
vital resources away from the hunt for Bin Laden and
Al Qaeda and threw them instead into his foolish
military adventure in Iraq...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-03-28-troop-shifts_x.htm?csp=24

Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions
By Dave Moniz and Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In 2002, troops from the 5th Special
Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were
pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in
Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment:
Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in
Spanish cultures.
The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its
capacity to collect, translate and analyze information
coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a
new priority, it took specialists away from the
Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.

Those were just two of the tradeoffs required because
of what the Pentagon and CIA acknowledge is a shortage
of key personnel to fight the war on terrorism. The
question of how much those shifts prevented progress
against al-Qaeda and other terrorists is putting the
Bush administration on the defensive.

Even before the invasion, the wisdom of shifting
resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq
was raised privately by top military officials and
publicly by Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and others. Now
it's being hotly debated again following an
election-year critique of the Bush administration by
its former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke.

"If we catch him (bin Laden) this summer, which I
expect, it's two years too late," Clarke said Sunday
on NBC's Meet the Press. "Because during those two
years when forces were diverted to Iraq ... al-Qaeda
has metamorphosized into a hydra-headed organization
with cells that are operating autonomously, like the
cells that operated in Madrid recently."

The Bush administration says the hunt for bin Laden
continued throughout the war in Iraq. Officials say
it's wrong to speculate that he would have been
captured, or other terrorist attacks prevented, if the
Iraq war hadn't happened. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, speaking on ABC's This Week, called the
example of the Special Forces switch "simplistic."

But the Pentagon tacitly acknowledged a problem last
year, after the Iraq invasion. It created a new
organization, Task Force 121, to better oversee
commando operations in the region and ensure a faster
response when terrorists can be struck.

Now gaps in capability are being closed as the
administration puts record amounts of money into
military and spy agencies. More spy aircraft such as
the Predator drone are arriving. More troops are
getting Arabic training at Fort Bragg in North
Carolina. CIA Director George Tenet said this month
that the agency is filling shortfalls, especially
among translators.

Still, the question lingers: Did opening a second
front hurt the main effort to defeat terrorism?

Bob Andrews, former head of a Pentagon office that
oversaw special operations, says that removing Saddam
Hussein was a good idea but "a distraction." The war
in Iraq, Andrews notes, entailed the largest
deployment of special operations forces — about 10,000
—since the Vietnam War. That's about 25% of all U.S.
commandos.

It also siphoned spy aircraft and light infantry
soldiers. Iraq proved such a drain, one former
Pentagon official notes, that there were no AWACS
radar jets to track drug-trafficking aircraft in South
America.

Saddam was not an immediate threat. "This has been a
real diversion from the longer struggle against
jihadists," especially in the intelligence field, he
says.

Stan Florer, a retired Army colonel and former Green
Beret, agrees that Iraq diverted enormous military and
intelligence assets. But he argues that long-standing
disputes with Saddam needed to be addressed: "This was
tearing at us all the time. It was a bleeding wound
with Saddam calling the shots in the Middle East."

Clarke Challenges Rice to Reveal Secret Emails

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0329-02.htm

Published on Monday, March 29, 2004 by the Guardian/UK

Clarke Challenges Rice to Reveal Secret Emails


Richard Clarke, the former terrorism adviser whose
revelations threaten to torpedo George Bush's
re-election strategy, launched a counterattack
yesterday at a White House that he said was determined
to destroy him.

Former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke's bombshell
allegations about the Sept. 11 attacks have thrust
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice into a
high-profile media role and increased pressure on her
to testify publicly at a U.S. commission probing the
attacks. Photo by William Philpott/Reuters

In a riveting television performance, Mr Clarke called
on his principal critic and former employer, the
national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to
release the entire record of their emails in the
months up to the September 11 terror attacks to prove
his contention that the White House did not then take
the threat of al-Qaida seriously.

He also agreed to Republican demands to declassify
testimony he gave to the Senate two years ago - to
"prove" there were no inconsistencies. "Let's take all
of my emails and all the memos I sent to the national
security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to
September 11 and let's declassify all of them," Mr
Clarke told NBC television.

Mr Clarke's bravura presentation surprised the Bush
administration. The decision to stand his ground could
also be destructive to Ms Rice. She has been under
intense scrutiny for a week - largely for being the
focus of Mr Clarke's charges that the Bush government
did not see al-Qaida as a priority before September
11, but also because she refused to testify before the
commission.

Yesterday, the commission's chairman, Thomas Kean,
called for Ms Rice to testify in public. "We recognize
there are arguments having to do with separation of
powers. We think in a tragedy of this magnitude that
those kind of legal arguments are probably
overridden," he said. But he said he would not force
the issue with a court order.

Even leading Republican figures are criticizing Ms
Rice's refusal to appear, saying it looked as if she
had something to hide. "I think she'd be wise to
testify," said Richard Perle, a former Pentagon
adviser.

Further damage was inflicted yesterday in a Los
Angeles Times report discrediting a prewar claim by
the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had trucks
capable of dispersing dangerous substances such as
anthrax. The report claimed the information came from
a single discredited source and reached US
intelligence agents third-hand.

In Israel, meanwhile, a parliamentary committee
investigating exaggerated prewar claims over Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction concluded that western
agencies had dealt in speculation not facts.

The committee said claims that Saddam was expanding
his armory were based on evaluations shared among
intelligence agencies in Israel, the US, Britain and
elsewhere, that reinforced "dubious interpretations"
of the few facts available.

But the report released yesterday by the foreign
affairs and defense committee said that while there
was a "serious intelligence failure" there was no
evidence of deliberate deception to build a false
case.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

###

No one was explicitly censoring the news, but the political climate, dominated by an Administration which polarized the challenge as "you are with us or against us" led to corporate timidity and self censorship.

It's the Media, Stupid.

Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 204:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0329-13.htm

Published on Monday, March 29, 2004 by
MediaChannel.org
Clarke and the Media Failures of 9-11
by Danny Schecter

NEW YORK, March 29, 2004 -- Please raise your hand if
the name Richard Clarke rang a bell for you three
weeks ago?

How many of us knew who he was or what he did? And who
among us can cite examples of TV stories or
commentators discussing in any detail his contention
that the War on Iraq undermined the war on Terror?

I don't see too many hands and I can't really answer
these questions with appropriate detail to my own
satisfaction. Yes. there were discussions of the
problems with the Iraq war and the lack of priority
paid to the search for Al Qaeda but not the direct
relationship between the two in the way Clarke sees
the issue.

How many times have you seen that issue investigated
in documentaries or hard hitting media stories? How
many stories have there even been on 9-11 issues and
questions before these hearings legitimized the issue?

As Richard Clarke points to intelligence failures and
apologizes to 9-11 families for the government's
inability to prevent the attack, who was going to
raise the issue of the media's failure to discuss
these issues in detail before this past week?

Who in our media will have the courage to apologize
for giving the Administration a soft sell and a big
pass?

Media Failures

Perhaps it takes a silver haired, hawkish hardliner
and Washington insider and Securocrat to finally put
some, but hardly all, of the 9-11 issues on the
agenda. Clarke's difference with Clinton is that he
wanted more bombing. His analysis of the roots of what
he calls Islamic radicalism was superficial. He even
expressed a wish that Fidel Castro be taken out.

This is not new. More liberal critics or people who
reject the Washington cold war foreign policy
consensus are rarely heard or taken seriously. It is
only defectors from the right that seem to get heard
like Treasury Secretary O'Neil. Even Dan Ellseberg who
gave us the Pentagon Papers was credible to the
Beltway crowd because he had worked for the Pentagon
and Rand Corporation.

As anyone who has followed these issues knows, a whole
body of questions being raised on hundreds of
websites, and by independent investigators and groups
of 9-11 families were marginalized and for the most
part ignored. Have a look at 9-11citizenwatch.org for
a sampling.

It seems like you have to be in "the club" to be taken
seriously. The irony of course is that the hearings
only took place because of the persistence of a
handful of outsiders-- activist wives of 9-11 victims
who lobbied for the investigation like crazy and then
walked out in disgust when many of their questions
were sidelined and after national Security Advisor
Condoleeza Rice refused to testify because of a bogus
separation of powers "principle," which she claims
precludes her from testifying before Congress. She
made the same claim in an all too friendly interview
on 60 Minutes.

Neither correspondent Ed Bradley nor other
commentators have pointed out to her that this
Commission was appointed by the President, not the
Congress and only met in a room on the Hill. The
reference to testifying before Congress is misplaced.

What she did say that was interesting was to allude to
the kind of context and background that is missing in
most of the media, "You have to go back into the 70's
and 80's," she said. Her reading of that history was
very selective but at least she cited it. That is
precisely what the 9-11 investigation and the media
coverage has NOT done.

Changing The Subject

Ever since Clarke testified, the Administration has
cleverly changed the subject from the issues he raised
to his own credibility. Is he a partisan? Did he write
different things in a press release he issued for the
White House when he worked for President Bush than in
his book, which challenges the President? Tim Russert
threw every criticism that has been raised about him
to him on Meet The Press this week. Clarke decried the
attack politics but also answered the questions.

It was like a game of ping pong better known as 'they
say/you say."

You have heard this politicizing of his testimony
aided and abetted by virtually every show on the air.
He has been on 15 or more news programs and on most of
them the questions were the same, as commentator Harry
Browne noted on HarryBrowne.org:

"Providing their usual support for big government, TV
and press reporters repeated and discussed statements
Clarke made in 2001 and 2002 -- statements that seemed
to back up the charge that Clarke was an opportunistic
hypocrite.

"But did you notice that every reporter showed us
exactly the same statements from Clarke? Some of the
apparent 'statements' weren't even complete sentences.
Why did everyone who commented on Clarke's apparent
flip-flop focus on exactly the same fragments?

"They did so because those were the only fragments
they had to work with. The quotes were all provided by
the Bush administration -- and they're the only quotes
available. If the reporters had possessed the original
documents, some of them would have picked out other
statements or fragments from those documents.

Attack Dogs Get Air Time A Plenty

Media programs could not do enough to provide a
platform for Administration officials to respond, to
get some heat rather than light going, to "balance"
the issue rather than advance it with tougher
reporting. These interviews aimed to provide Bush
supporters with ammunition, not information.

Notes Browne: "Top administration officials have
already appeared on numerous national news shows.
Condoleezza Rice showed up on all five national
morning shows (on NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and CNN). The
attack dogs said very little about the actual charges,
preferring to attack Clarke personally as a hypocrite
who previously praised President Bush's response to
terrorism."

This reflects a pattern of how controversial issues
that challenge those in power invariably get
personalized and narrowed when they should be
broadened and deepened.

Why The Media Cop-Out?

Why has the media establishment being been unwilling
or unable take on the political establishment? What
accounts for the lack of bravery and determination to
seek the truth?

Some newspapers like The Wall Steet Journal have done
a good job. Independent muckrakers alike Greg Palast
have dug up some dirt. But far too many TV reporters
have opted to become semi-official stenographers with
American flags in their lapel. What were they afraid
of in the years since 9-11 and the advent of a
political season that has finally created some space
for tough journalism.

No one was explicitly censoring the news, but the
political climate, dominated by an Administration
which polarized the challenge as "you are with us or
against us" led to corporate timidity and self
censorship.

With Fox News functioning as "bully boys," to use
Christianne Amanpour's phrase, many networks muzzled
and self-censored themselves.

War correspondent Peter Arnett saw a psychological
subtext. He told me: "Don't forget the American media
is based in NYC, and every reporter in NYC saw the
World Trade Towers collapse and they took it
personally. There was a sense of revenge and fear,
which was reflected in the coverage of Afghanistan and
the War on Terror. As we moved into Iraq, a more
pre-emptive strike, the media maintained this sort of
romance, you might say with government."

Rather "Humbled"

CBS's Dan Rather embodied the kind of personal
schizophrenia that 9-11 produced in many journalists.
Just after 9-11. He went on the Letterman show and
professed his patriotism. He said: "I would willingly
die for my country at a moment's notice and on the
command of my president…."

The following spring in May 2002 he went on BBC's
Newsnight, their "Nightline," and spoke of ways he
pulled his punches because of personal fears. He
invoked the memory of black South Africans necklacing
informers by putting burning tires around their necks.
He must have been a haunted when he explained:

"In some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced
here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of
patriotism put around your neck. It's that fear that
keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the
tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the
tough questions so often. Again, I'm humbled to say I
do not except myself from this criticism."

You can see the interview and read about it on the
BBC's website here.

In England, it was considered big news that an anchor
of Rather's prominence would confess to not asking
tough questions. Almost every newspaper in London put
the story on its front page.

In the U.S. the interview was mostly not covered at
all, and certainly not on Rather's own network. The
only reference to it I saw was a quote in The Los
Angeles Times' Calendar Section

In short, it was buried.

As has much of this issue. 9-11 is not just about
intelligence failures or mismanagement in the White
House. It is about deeper political failures on both
sides of the aisle.

As you watch the get Clarke brigades do their things
on the networks recognize that the same media outlets
that did such a good job covering what happened on
9-11, did a really lousy job of explaining how it
could have happened by failing to systematically
investigate government incompetence -- and even
complicity.

This story is not over yet. We have just touched the
surface. Like the Kennedy Assassination, it is
predicable that more and more Americans will come to
distrust the official narrative.

News Dissector Danny Schechter writes the News
Dissector Blog on Mediachannel.org. His book "Media
Wars" discusses coverage gaps of the 9-11 attack and
news at a time of terror.

© MediaChannel.org, 2004

###

It is the midnight hour for America. The battle over Richard Clarke represents the battle for the future of majority rule in America, for the right of American citizens to receive the truth from their government, and for the right of Americans to...

2+2=4

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/03/edi04023.html

March 26, 2004 SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND
EDITORIAL ARCHIVES
Support BuzzFlash

It's Midnight in America

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

We have moved from Reagan's "Morning in America" to
Bush's "Midnight in America" in less than 20 years.

This is the darkest hour for our nation, when lies,
deception and political vengeance -- at the expense of
our national security -- are the primary skill set of
the executive branch and its subsidiaries: a
Republican controlled Congress and an increasingly
Republican controlled judiciary, with five Supreme
Court votes lined up to side with the GOP on important
partisan issues, like the theft of a presidency.

What happens during this midnight hour will determine
if democracy continues to exist in our country. It
will determine if we will survive as a nation of laws
-- based on our Constitution -- or become a nation
ruled by an extremist, elitist, dishonest one-party
system, whose brazen arrogance is the veil that is
used by them to conceal their chronic incompetence.

The brutal attacks on the character of Richard Clarke
represent the standard Bush defense against the truth:
assassinate and undermine the character of the truth
teller. In so doing, the Bush Cartel has generally
been successful in diverting the media from analyzing
the facts and details of the Bush Administration's
betrayal of America -- and of their incompetence -- by
questioning the motives of the truth tellers, as they
emerge one by one.

As a result, the mainstream media, generally echoing
the White House character assassination message
points, has betrayed America too. It has forgotten
that this was an administration that outed a CIA
operative who specialized in the tracking of illicit
WMDs, just to wreak vengeance on her husband,
Ambassador Joe Wilson, because he had the temerity to
tell the truth about a Bush lie. This is a mainstream
media that has, just within weeks, forgotten that the
recollections of the former Secretary of the Treasury,
Paul O'Neill, corroborate the gist of Clarke's
memories about the White House's obsession with Iraq
at the expense of preventing 9/11 and fighting
Al-Qaeda. This is a media that has forgotten John
DiIulio, who wrote a scathing letter detailing that
the Bush Administration was solely a cynical political
administration, run by "Mayberry Machiavellis," until
the White House junkyard dog squad slimed him into
submission. And others who have dared stand up for the
truth have shared similar fates. These are tactics
worthy of Stalin, not an American president.

Shortly before the Iraq War we wrote this about the
Bush Administration:

In the end the Bush Cartel is banking on making the
kind of impression on the world that a thug makes with
a baseball bat on a car.

It's all about image and firepower. It's how the
playground bully establishes himself. Pick the weakest
guy in the school -- the one nobody likes much anyway
-- and beat the living daylights out of him. Keep all
the kids nervous and on edge. Let them think that you
are a little bit mad and might just beat up on them
for the fun of it. Tell them that you will protect
them from the gang that lives in the next neighborhood
in return for their loyalty. Make an example of anyone
who challenges your leadership by denouncing them and
bloodying them up. Establish a system of stool
pigeons. Rummage through lockers, at your will, for
any signs of betrayal. Issue warnings from
time-to-time about how you have information that the
other gang has plans to rape your mothers and sisters,
and lay waste to your homes -- and that is why you
need to trust in the playground bully from your
school, because he will protect your mothers and
sisters from the gang that few have ever actually
encountered.

It's governance by brazen muscle power, by unfailing
commitment to picking a target to destroy as an
example of your ruthlessness, and your will to use any
means necessary to establish and preserve your
leadership. And if your attack is successful, you will
enjoy the spoils of war -- the second largest oil
reserves in the world. This is all the better, because
you double up your goal of displaying raw, harsh
military power, by combining it with additional
natural resources that reinforce your dominance. You
will be sitting on top of the world, masters of the
universe, controlling almost everything on the
Monopoly board.

And to accomplish this goal, you never blink, you
never apologize, you never let facts get in the way of
your mission. You remain steadfast and focused.
Getting distracted by truth and ethics is a sign of
weakness. And weakness is something you can smell and
feel in a man. [LINK]

The mainstream press is still playing the Clarke
story, for the most part, as if it is a game of whose
spin will prevail -- Clarke's or the White House's --
rather than exploring the validity of Clarke's charges
that the Bush White House failed to seriously try to
prevent 9/11 from occurring. The media covers the
issue as if it is some sort of sporting event.

But it is not. It is a battle for our nation's
security. It is a battle over whether we will be ruled
by a dishonest, deceiving anti-democracy executive
branch of thugs. It is a battle for the truth and for
the preservation of our Constitutional democracy.

At least this battle is out in the open now. The
Democratic nominee for President of the United States
is now challenging the mob-like tactics, credibility
and competence of the Bush Cartel. In what could have
been a BuzzFlash quotation, Kerry charged this
weekend: "It's interesting, every time somebody comes
up and says something that this White House doesn't
like, they don't answer the questions about it or show
the truth about it. They go into character
assassination mode," Kerry said. [The Buffalo News]

Kerry is bringing out in the open the Karl Rove/Lee
Atwater school of gangland political tactics. That,
for the Democrats, counts as a major breakthrough
during this hour of darkness for our Constitutional
democracy. In the same week, Tom Daschle, marking a
milestone, emerged from a record of timid political
leadership to call the Bush administration to account
for its tactics and record -- in three separate
speeches. And West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller
apologized for voting to allow Bush to go to war with
Iraq -- and revealed that Cheney had put pressure on
three senate committee chairmen not to investigate the
Bush administration.

Kerry, Daschle and Rockefeller follow belatedly in the
foot steps of Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Dick Durbin
and a handful of other Democratic Senators -- along
with the likes of people like Henry Waxman, John
Conyers and Jan Schakowsky (to name a few) in the
House of Representatives -- who have led a valiant,
lonely effort to hold the Bush Administration
accountable for its brutal anti-democracy actions and
for its core ineptitude in governing and in combating
terror.

But BuzzFlash holds no grudges. Kerry has broken
through the threshold that leaders of the Democratic
Party previously would not cross. He has publicly
reprimanded the Bush Administration for its gutter
political tactics. He has drawn attention to the gap
between Bush's supposed morality and the actual
immorality of an administration that builds its
governance on a pyramid of lies, deception and zealous
ideology.

Karl Rove knows that the American media lives and dies
by sensational headlines and patriotic visual images,
not details. But it is the details that make up the
foundation of democracy. Rove knows that truth tellers
such as Richard Clarke are a danger because they shed
light on the activities of betrayal that occur in the
dark spider hole from which Dick Cheney rules --
sending instructions by courier to our dauphin prince,
George W. Bush. It is the midnight hour for America.
The battle over Richard Clarke represents the battle
for the future of majority rule in America, for the
right of American citizens to receive the truth from
their government, and for the right of Americans to
have a government that defends them from external and
internal threats.

It is time for America to wake up to a future where
democracy, majority rule, honesty, integrity and
reverence for the Constitution are restored to the
White House.

God knows we deserve it, but it will only be achieved
by increasing the intensity of our efforts. The
backbone of the Bush Cartel's dishonest and cynical
rule must be broken.

The barbarians are no longer at the gates. They are in
the White House.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

BACK TO TOP

"The Bush people keep saying that Clinton was not doing enough [to combat the Al Qaeda threat]," said Ms. Kleinberg. "But ‘nothing’ is less than ‘not enough,’ and nothing is what the Bush administration did."

The "US mainstream news media" TV news show anchors,
White House "correspondents" and Sunday morning
propapunditgandists continue to slight the importance
of the questions for which the 9/11 families are
demanding answers, they continue to ignore the
relationship between these questions and the answers
provided by Richard Clarke. If, in spite, of the
complicity and cowardice of the "US mainstream news
media," the US electorate makes the connection between
the anger of the 9/11 families and the anger of
Richard Clarke, the _ resident is finished. 2+2=4

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage2.asp

Four 9/11 Moms Watch Rumsfeld And Grumble
by Gail Sheehy

In the predawn hours of Tuesday, March 23, Kristen
Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and
Patty Casazza dropped off their collective seven
fatherless children with grandmothers and climbed into
Ms. Breitweiser’s S.U.V. for the race down Garden
State Parkway to the Hart Senate Office Building on
Capitol Hill. It’s a journey that they could now make
blindfolded—but this one was different. On March 23,
testimony was to be heard by the commission
investigating intelligence failures leading up to the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, among others.

These four moms from New Jersey are the World Trade
Center widows whose tireless advocacy produced the
broad investigation into the failures around the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks that now has top officials from
both the Clinton and Bush administrations duking it
out in conflicting testimonies at this week’s
high-drama hearings in the Hart Office Building before
the 9/11 commission.

After two and a half years of seeking truth and
accountability, they had high hopes for this week’s
hearings, which are focused on policy failures.
Instead, packed into the car at 4 a.m. in what has
become a ritual for them, their hearts were heavy.

The Four Moms had submitted dozens of questions they
have been burning to ask at these hearings. Mr.
Rumsfeld is a particular thorn in their sides.

"He needs to answer to his actions on Sept. 11," said
Ms. Kleinberg. "When was he aware that we were under
attack? What did he do about it?"

When the widows had a conference call last week with
the commission staff, they asked that Secretary
Rumsfeld be questioned about his response on the day
of Sept. 11. They were told that this was not a line
of questioning the staff planned to pursue.

They were not especially impressed with his testimony.
In Mr. Rumsfeld’s opening statement, he said he knew
of no intelligence in the months leading up to Sept.
11 indicating that terrorists intended to hijack
commercial airplanes and fly them into the Pentagon or
the World Trade Center.

It was his worst moment at the mike. Commissioner
Richard Ben-Veniste ran through a list of at least a
dozen cases of foiled plots using commercial airliners
to attack key targets in the U.S. and elsewhere. Mr.
Ben-Veniste cited the "Bojinka" plot in 1995, which
envisioned blowing up Western commercial planes in
Asia; that plot was foiled by the government and must
have been on the mind of C.I.A. director George Tenet,
who was having weekly lunches with Mr. Rumsfeld
through 2001. In 1998, an Al Qaeda–connected group
talked about flying a commercial plane into the World
Trade Center.

"So when we had this threatened strike that something
huge was going to happen, why didn’t D.O.D. alert
people on the ground of a potential jihadist
hijacking? Why didn’t it ever get to an actionable
level?" the commissioner asked.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he only remembered hearing threats
of a private aircraft being used. "The decision to fly
a commercial aircraft was not known to me."

Mr. Ben-Veniste came back at him: "We knew from the
Millennium plot [to blow up Los Angeles International
Airport] that Al Qaeda was trying to bomb an American
airport," he said. The Clinton administration foiled
that plot and thought every day about foiling
terrorism, he said. "But as we get into 2001, it was
like everyone was looking at the white truck from the
sniper attacks and not looking in the right direction.
Nobody did a thing about it."

Mr. Rumsfeld backed off with the lame excuse, "I
should say I didn’t know."

He said that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was
"hosting a meeting for some of the members of
Congress."

"Ironically, in the course of the conversation, I
stressed how important it was for our country to be
adequately prepared for the unexpected," he said.

It is still incredible to the moms that their
Secretary of Defense continued to sit in his private
dining room at the Pentagon while their husbands were
being incinerated in the towers of the World Trade
Center. They know this from an account posted on Sept.
11 on the Web site of Christopher Cox, a Republican
Congressman from Orange County who is chairman of the
House Policy Committee.

"Ironically," Mr. Cox wrote, "just moments before the
Department of Defense was hit by a suicide hijacker,
Secretary Rumsfeld was describing to me why … Congress
has got to give the President the tools he needs to
move forward with a defense of America against
ballistic missiles."

At that point, National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice, the Secret Service, the F.A.A., NORAD (our North
American air-defense system), American Airlines and
United Airlines, among others, knew that at least
three planes had been violently hijacked, their
transponders turned off, and that thousands of
American citizens had been annihilated in the World
Trade Center by Middle Eastern terrorists, some of
whom had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. Yet the
nation’s defense chief didn’t think it significant
enough to interrupt his political pitch to a key
Republican in Congress to reactivate the Star Wars
initiative of the Bush I years.

"I’ve been around the block a few times," Mr. Rumsfeld
told the Congressman, according to his own account.
"There will be another event." Mr. Rumsfeld repeated
it for emphasis, Mr. Cox wrote: "There will be another
event."

"Within minutes of that utterance, Rumsfeld’s words
proved tragically prophetic," Mr. Cox wrote.

"Someone handed me a note that a plane had hit one of
the W.T.C. towers," Mr. Rumsfeld testified on March
23. "Later, I was in my office with a C.I.A. briefer
when I was told a second plane had hit the other
tower."

The note didn’t seem to prompt any action on his part.

"Shortly thereafter, at 9:38 a.m., the Pentagon shook
with an explosion of a then-unknown origin," he said.

He had to go to the window of his office to see that
the Pentagon had been attacked? Now the moms were
getting agitated.

"I went outside to determine what had happened," he
testified. "I was not there long, apparently, because
I was told I was back in the Pentagon, with the crisis
action team, by shortly before or after 10 a.m.

"Upon my return from the crash site, and before going
to the Executive Support Center," he continued, "I had
one or more calls in my office, one of which I believe
was the President."

Then commission member Jamie Gorelick, who served as
deputy attorney general and general counsel for the
Department of Defense in the Clinton administration,
had her turn with Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Where were you and your aircraft when a missile was
heading to the Pentagon? Surely that is your
responsibility, to protect our facilities, our
headquarters—the Pentagon. Is there anything we did to
protect that?"

Mr. Rumsfeld said it was a law-enforcement issue.

"When I arrived at the command center, an order had
been given—the command had been given instructions
that their pilots could shoot down any commercial
airlines filled with our people if the plane seemed to
be acting in a threatening manner," he said.

Ms. Gorelick tried to get Mr. Rumsfeld to say whether
the NORAD pilots themselves knew they had authority to
shoot down a plane.

"I do not know what they thought," he answered. "I was
immediately concerned that they knew what they could
do and that we changed the rules of engagement."

One of the hardest things for the families to hear was
how every witness defended how he had done everything
possible to combat the threat of terrorism. No one
said, "We fell short."

Secretary of State Colin Powell complained that the
Bush administration was given no military plan by the
Clinton administration for routing Al Qaeda. He then
described how Condoleezza Rice undertook a complete
reorganization of the failed responses of the Clinton
years—not too much more than a series of meetings that
took up the next eight months.

"Then 9/11 hit, and we had to put together another
plan altogether," said Mr. Powell.

He also claimed that "we did not know the perpetrators
were already in our country and getting ready to
commit the crimes we saw on 9/11."

Some of the widows groaned. In fact, the Moms had
learned, the F.B.I. had 14 open investigations on
supporters of the 9/11 hijackers who were in the U.S.
before 9/11.

And after the Clinton administration foiled the
Millennium plot to blow up LAX, the C.I.A. knew that
two Al Qaeda operatives had a sleeper cell in San
Diego. F.B.I. field officers tried to move the
information up the line, with no success.

What’s more, most of the 9/11 hijackers re-entered the
U.S. between April and June of 2001 with blatantly
suspicious visa applications, which the Four Moms had
already obtained and shown to the commission. The
State Department had 166,000 people on its terrorist
watch list in 2001, but only 12 names had been passed
along to the F.A.A. for inclusion on its "no-fly
list." Mr. Powell had to admit as much, though he said
that State Department consular officers had been given
no information to help them identify terrorist
suspects among the visa applicants.

One of the key questions that the Moms expected to be
put to Mr. Powell was why over 100 members of the
Saudi royal family and many members of the bin Laden
clan were airlifted out of the U.S. in the days
immediately following the terrorist attacks—without
being interviewed by law enforcement—while no other
Americans, including members of the victims’ families,
could take a plane anywhere in the U.S. The State
Department had obviously given its approval. But no
commissioner apparently dared to touch the sacrosanct
Saudi friends of the Bush family.

When Republican commissioner James Thompson asked Mr.
Powell: "Prior to Sept. 11, would it have been
possible to say to the Pakistanis and Saudis, ‘You’re
either with us or against us?’", Mr. Powell simply
ignored the issue of the Saudi exemption and punted on
Pakistan.

Fox in the Chicken House

To the Moms, the problems with the 9/11 commission
were always apparent. But the disappointing testimony
from Mr. Rumsfeld was especially difficult to bear.
The Moms had tried to get their most pressing
questions to the commission to be asked of Mr.
Rumsfeld, but their efforts had foundered at the hands
of Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director.

Indeed, it was only with the recent publication of
Richard Clarke’s memoir of his counterterrorism days
in the White House, Against All Enemies, that the Moms
found out that Mr. Zelikow—who was supposed to present
their questions to Mr. Rumsfeld—was actually one of
the select few in the new Bush administration who had
been warned, nine months before 9/11, that Osama bin
Laden was the No. 1 security threat to the country.
They are now calling for Mr. Zelikow’s resignation.

Ms. Gorelick sees their point.

"This is a legitimate concern," Ms. Gorelick said in
an interview, "and I am not convinced we knew
everything we needed to know when we made the decision
to hire him."

But despite her obvious discomfort at the conflicts of
interest apparently not fully disclosed by Mr. Zelikow
in his deposition by the commission’s attorney, Ms.
Gorelick believes that the time is too short to
replace the staff director.

"We’re just going to have to be very cognizant of the
role that he played and address it in the writing of
our report," she said.

That doesn’t satisfy the Four Moms. They point out
that it is Mr. Zelikow who decides which among the
many people offering information will be interviewed.
Efforts by the families to get the commission to hear
from a raft of administration and intelligence-agency
whistleblowers have been largely ignored at his
behest. And it is Mr. Zelikow who oversees what
investigative material the commissioners will be
briefed on, and who decides the topics for the
hearings. Mr. Zelikow’s statement at the January
hearing sounded to the Moms like a whitewash waiting
to happen:

"This was everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault."

The Moms don’t buy it.

"Why did it take Condi Rice nine months to develop a
counterterrorism policy for Al Qaeda, while it took
only two weeks to develop a policy for regime change
in Iraq?" Ms. Kleinberg asked rhetorically.

Dr. Rice has given one closed-door interview and has
been asked to return for another, but the
commissioners have declined to use their subpoena
power to compel her public testimony. And now, they
say, it is probably too late.

"That strategy may not turn out well for the Bush
administration," Ms. Gorelick said.

Bob Kerrey, the commissioner who replaced Max Cleland,
expressed the same view in a separate interview: "The
risk they run in not telling what they were doing
during that period of time is that other narratives
will prevail."

The Four Moms have enjoyed some victories along the
way. The first was when the White House finally gave
up trying to block an independent investigation; the
commission was created in December 2002. The Moms shot
down to Washington—stopping in traffic to change out
of their Capri pants and into proper pantsuits—to meet
with the new commissioners, who thanked them for
providing the wealth of information they’d been
gathering since losing their husbands on Sept. 11. Ms.
Gorelick expressed amazement at the research the women
had done, and vowed it would be their "road map."

"We were their biggest advocates," said the
husky-voiced Ms. Kleinberg. "They asked us to get them
more funding, and we did. It could have been a great
relationship, but it hasn’t been."

Mr. Zelikow’s idea of how to conduct the
investigation, the Moms said, is to hold everything
close to the vest.

"They don’t tell us or the public anything, and they
won’t until they publish their final report," said Ms.
Casazza. "At which point, they’ll be out of business."

Ms. Kleinberg chimed in: "Why not publish interim
reports, instead of letting us sit around for two
years bleeding for answers?"

"We have lower and lower expectations," said Ms. Van
Auken, whose teenage daughter often accompanies her to
hearings; her son still can’t talk about seeing his
father’s building incinerated.

The irony is that two of the Four Moms voted for
George Bush in 2000, while another is a registered
independent; only one is a Democrat. But until they
felt the teeth of the Bush attack dogs, they were
either apolitical or determinedly nonpartisan. Now
their tone is different.

"The Bush people keep saying that Clinton was not
doing enough [to combat the Al Qaeda threat]," said
Ms. Kleinberg. "But ‘nothing’ is less than ‘not
enough,’ and nothing is what the Bush administration
did."

An unnamed spokesman for the Bush campaign was quoted
as saying of Sept. 11, "We own it." That comment
particularly disturbed the Four Moms.

"They can have it," said Ms. Van Auken. "Can I have my
husband back now? "

"If they want to own 9/11, they also have to own 9/10
and 9/12," said Ms. Kleinberg. "Their argument is that
this was a defining moment in our history. It’s not
the moment of tragedy that defines you, but what you
do afterwards."

If the final report of this 9/11 commission does
indeed turn out to be a whitewash, the Four Moms from
New Jersey have a backup plan. Provided there is a
change of leadership, they will petition the new
President to create an independent 9/11 commission. As
if one never existed before.

The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government "infoganda" (as The Daily Show's Rob Corddry calls it) to fill the vacuum. President George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media...

It's the Media, Stupid.

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=512101

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune |
www.iht.com

Frank Rich: Faux journalism is the White House's new ally
Frank Rich NYT
Friday, March 26, 2004


NEW YORK Real journalism may be reeling, but faux
journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the
cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and
porn. American television is increasingly awash in
fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far
more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news.
Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing after
the success of the faux-anchor Jon Stewart; its new
nightly fake newscast, presided over by a formerly
funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis
Miller, is being promoted with far more zeal than was
ever lavished on CNBC's real "News With Brian
Williams."

Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry
King Live," meanwhile, and you are all too likely to
find Jayson Blair, the lying former reporter of The
New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on
television as he fabricates earnest blather about his
concern for journalistic standards.

Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news
show (Stewart's "The Daily Show") has been in a
booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over
who would first be able to interview the real (I
think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd moments, real
journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending
mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort
out the lies from the truth.

This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush
administration, which has responded to the growing
national appetite for fictionalized news by producing
a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far
as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at
taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the
"reporters" who appeared in television "news" videos
distributed by the Department of Health and Human
Services to local news shows. The point of these spots
- which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news
by more than 50 stations in 40 states - was to hype
the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an
unalloyed godsend to elderly voters. They are part of
a public relations campaign, which, with its $124
million budget, would dwarf most actual news
organizations.

When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The New York
Times, blew the whistle on these television "news"
stories this month, a government spokesman defended
them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions
about this practice needs to do some research on
modern public information tools." The government also
informed us that Ryan was no impostor but an actual
"freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism
Review, investigating further, found that Ryan's past
assignments included serving as a television shill for
pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging
FluMist and Excedrin.

Given that drug companies may also be the principal
beneficiaries of the United States' new Medicare law,
she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic
patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the
sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when
appearing in Levitra ads. As for the mystery of
Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains at
this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not
left a trace on any data bank. Perhaps he is the
creation of Stephen Glass, the serial fantasist who
once ruled the pages of The New Republic.

The more real journalism declines, the easier it is
for such government "infoganda" (as The Daily Show's
Rob Corddry calls it) to fill the vacuum. President
George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by
shutting out the real news media as much as possible.
By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo
press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of
71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the
criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Bush
has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that
he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" - as
he calls the news media - and "speak directly to the
people." To this end, he gave a series of interviews
to regional broadcasters last autumn - a holding
action, no doubt, until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia
could be hired to fill that role. When the president
made an exception last month and took questions from
an actual frontline journalist, NBC television's Tim
Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the
experiment is unlikely to be repeated soon.

There is no point in bothering with actual news people
anyway, when you can make up your own story and make
it stick. No fake news story has become more embedded
in our culture than the administration's account of
its actions on Sept. 11. As The Wall Street Journal
reported on its front page this week - just as the
former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going
public with his parallel account - many of this
story's most familiar details are utter fiction.
Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of
that morning was to put the military on alert is
false. So are the president's claims that he watched
the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on
television that morning. (No such video yet existed.)
Nor was Air Force One under threat as Bush flew around
the country, delaying his return to Washington.

Yet the fake narrative of Sept. 11 has been
scrupulously maintained by the White House for more
than two years. Although the administration has tried
at every juncture to stonewall the Sept. 11
investigative commission, its personnel, including the
president, had all the time in the world for the
producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of
Crisis" The result was a scenario that further rewrote
the history of that day, stirring steroids into false
tales of presidential derring-do. To shore up the Karl
Rove version of Sept. 11 once Richard Clarke went
public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60
Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on
all five morning news shows the next day. The
administration is confident that it can reinstate its
bogus scenario - particularly given that Rice, unlike
Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it
under oath to the Sept. 11 commission.

After Sept. 11, similar fake-news techniques helped
speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The runup to
the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern
public information tools," including 16 words of Tom
Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union
address. John Burns of The New York Times, speaking by
phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage
sponsored by the University of California at
Berkeley's journalism school this month, said of the
real press back then: "We failed the American public
by being insufficiently critical about elements of the
administration's plan to go to war."

What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate
the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated
by the administration's false news reports of
impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To
see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to
www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database
posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237
specific misleading statements about the threat posed
by Iraq" made by Bush and members of his
administration.

As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest
of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by
Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long, the former head of media
relations for the Marine Corps, speaking at the
Berkeley symposium: "Frankly, our job is to win the
war. Part of that is information warfare." He added:
"So we are going to attempt to dominate the
information environment...Overall, we were very happy
with the outcome."

The New York Times

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune

New light on the life and death of John O'Neill

The inspiration for the LNS came in large part from
the story of John O'Neill with whom many I know
served, and for whose memory I have the deepest
respect...Someone at the airport yesterday saw I was
carrying Richard Clarke's book, the person said she
had seen some of the testimony, and asked me if I had
read it yet. "Well, yes, I read it on the plane last
night, but you know I knew most of this story already
and many of us have been waiting three years for some
of it to be told." Of course, we are still waiting for
someone in a position of power or influence to dare
mention John O'Neill's name. The most the NYTwits have ever
mentioned about John O'Neill is that he left his
laptop in a meeting room once. PBS Frontline did a
magnificent documentary on him, and New Yorker
Magazine, but otherwise the Bush cabal's has succeeded
in keeping his story out of the US electorate's
pysche. But thanks to Dick Clarke we are a lot closer.
Indeed, Clarke dedicated his book to all the innocent
who lost their lives on 9/11 but to John O'Neill in
particular....They were friends...There is more to
come...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Uo for Demicracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FC27Aa01.html

New light on the life and death of John O'Neill
By Tom Griffin

LONDON - Former White House counter-terrorism expert
Richard Clarke has rocked the Bush administration with
his criticism of the "war on terror". However, doubts
about the administration's commitment to the fight
against al-Qaeda are not new.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, another
counter-terrorism expert, Irish-American John O'Neill,
became the focus for those concerns. O'Neill had been
one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI)
leading specialists on al-Qaeda, but he was destined
never to play a role in America's response to
September 11. In a supremely ironic twist of fate, he
was himself killed in the World Trade Center attacks.

The story of John O'Neill, Richard Clarke and their
battle against al-Qaeda began at the Twin Towers eight
years earlier, when Islamic fundamentalists made their
first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center with
the 1993 bombing masterminded by Ramzi Yousef.

Yousef was eventually tracked down in Pakistan. The
intelligence ended up on the desk of Richard Clarke on
a Sunday morning. There were only a few hours to act
on it. Clarke rang the FBI in the forlorn hope that
there would be somebody to take the call. Clarke
described what happened next in a 2002 interview.

"I called and John answered the phone. I said, 'Who's
this'? He responded, 'Well, who the hell are you? I'm
John O'Neill'. I explained, 'I'm from the White House.
I do terrorism. I need some help'."

O'Neill had never worked on the case before, but
together with Clarke he manned the phones coordinating
the capture of Yousef before he could slip over the
border into Afghanistan. It was, according to Clarke,
"the beginning of a beautiful friendship".

After the capture of Yousef, O'Neill learned
everything he could about the threat of Islamic
fundamentalist terrorism. He became one of the first
people to understand the "new terrorism" which was
already taking shape.

He set about convincing his colleagues of the threat
with similar determination. "John would come into the
room and there would be a presence about him," Clarke
said. "He would go around the room like it was a ward
meeting and he was an Irish politician."

There were some obstacles that O'Neill's charismatic
persona couldn't overcome, however. That first became
clear after the Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia
in 1996, which killed 19 American soldiers.

According to his friend Chris Isham, O'Neill "felt the
Saudis were definitely playing games and that the
senior officials in the US government just didn't get
it".

Similar problems dogged O'Neill's investigation of the
2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, when he clashed
so severely with US ambassador Barbara Bodine that he
was refused clearance to enter the country.

The level of opposition he faced within the US
government may have contributed to O'Neill's decision
to leave the FBI in July 2001, even though there were
signs of increasing al-Qaeda activity. He took up a
new post as head of security at the World Trade
Center.

He was in his office on the 34th floor of the North
Tower when he was hit by American Airlines Flight 11
at 8.46am on September 11. From there he made his way
to an emergency command center, the last place he was
seen alive, before entering the South Tower where his
body was found.

The career and untimely death of John O'Neill have
given rise to a great deal of speculation about the
source of the obstacles he faced. Its clear that the
turf battles between O'Neill and diplomats anxious to
maintain good relations with Arab states began in the
Bill Clinton years.

There were signs that problems intensified under the
Bush administration. When O'Neill retired, someone
leaked the story to the New York Times, together with
details of an incident when he had lost a briefcase
carrying sensitive documents. O'Neill blamed the
incoming FBI director Tom Pickard for the disclosure.

The most serious allegation against the Bush
administration came in the controversial French book
Bin Laden, la verite interdite (Bin Laden, the
forbidden truth), released shortly after September 11.

Authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie
claimed to have been told by O'Neill that "the main
obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil
corporate interests and the role played by Saudi
Arabia in it".

Brisard and Dasquie drew attention to the strong
business links between members of the Bush
administration and Saudi Arabia through the oil
industry, and even through defense company the Carlyle
Group, between the Bush and Bin Laden families.

Richard Clarke's latest statements do not provide
outright support to the thesis that these links led
the Bush administration to obstruct O'Neill.
Nevertheless, in a CBS interview last weekend, Clarke
portrayed an administration that was remarkably
reluctant to get to grips with al-Qaeda.

In the aftermath of September 11, Clarke claimed: "The
president dragged me into a room with a couple of
other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to
find whether Iraq did this'. Now he never said, 'Make
it up'. But the entire conversation left me in
absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come
back with a report that said Iraq did this."

When Clarke insisted that there was no Iraqi
connection, he claimed that the president responded
"in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should
come back with that answer."

Clarke followed up that interview on Wednesday with
his testimony to America's official September 11
Commission. "By invading Iraq, the president has
greatly undermined the war on terrorism," he told the
bipartisan commission to applause from an audience
which included many relatives of September 11 victims.

Clarke's insider criticisms of the administration have
the potential to be uniquely damaging to a Republican
election campaign built around George W Bush, the "war
president".

Accordingly, the administration has hit back hard,
asking why Clarke did not make similar points in
previous interviews after September 11, given when he
was still a public official.

Those interviews are still so far the only ones in
which Clarke has elaborated on the role of John
O'Neill, and that means that there may yet be further
revelations about the obstacles O'Neill faced, the
reasons he left the FBI and the source of the leak to
the New York Times about his departure.

The Bush administration typically moves swiftly to
rebut its critics. It may yet find itself having to
challenge the memory of a man who died in the twin
towers on September 11.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)

A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/032704A.shtml

"We Should Have Had Orange or Red-Type of Alert in June/July of 2001"
By Eric Boehlert
Salon.com

Friday 26 March 2004

A former FBI translator told the 9/11 commission that
the bureau had detailed information well before Sept.
11, 2001, that terrorists were likely to attack the
U.S. with airplanes.
A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret
security clearance, who has been called "very
credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told
Salon she recently testified to the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept.
11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes
was being plotted.

Referring to the Homeland Security Department's
color-coded warnings instituted in the wake of 9/11,
the former translator, Sibel Edmonds, told Salon, "We
should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or
July of 2001. There was that much information
available." Edmonds is offended by the Bush White
House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind
of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after
reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
where she said, we had no specific information
whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use
airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can
prove it's a lie."

Edmonds' charge comes when the Bush White House
is trying to fend off former counterterrorism chief
Richard A. Clarke's testimony that it did not take
serious measures to combat the threat of Islamic
terrorism, and al-Qaida specifically, in the months
leading up to 9/11.

Edmonds, who is Turkish-American, is a 10-year
U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination
conducted by FBI investigators. She speaks fluent
Farsi, Arabic and Turkish and worked part-time for the
FBI, making $32 an hour for six months, beginning
Sept. 20, 2001. She was assigned to the FBI's
investigation into Sept. 11 attacks and other
counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases, where
she translated reams of documents seized by agents
who, for the previous year, had been rounding up
suspected terrorists.

She says those tapes, often connected to
terrorism, money laundering or other criminal
activity, provide evidence that should have made
apparent that an al- Qaida plot was in the works.
Edmonds cannot talk in detail about the tapes publicly
because she's been under a Justice Department gag
order since 2002.

"President Bush said they had no specific
information about Sept. 11, and that's accurate," says
Edmonds. "But there was specific information about use
of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or
three months beforehand and that several people were
already in the country by May of 2001. They should've
alerted the people to the threat we're facing."

Edmonds testified before 9/11 commission staffers
in February for more than three hours, providing
detailed information about FBI investigations,
documents and dates. This week Edmonds attended the
commission hearings and plans to return in April when
FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify.
"I'm hoping the commission asks him real questions --
like, in April 2001, did an FBI field office receive
legitimate information indicating the use of airplanes
for an attack on major cities? And is it true that
through an FBI informant, who'd been used [by the
Bureau] for 10 years, did you get information about
specific terrorist plans and specific cells in this
country? He couldn't say no," she insists.

Edmonds first made headlines in 2002 when she
blew the whistle on the FBI's translation department,
which was suddenly thrown into the spotlight as
investigators clamored for original terrorist-related
information, often in Arabic. Edmonds made several
reports of serious misconduct, security lapses and
gross incompetence in the FBI translations unit,
including supervisors who told translators to work
slowly during the crucial post-9/11 period to ensure
the agency would get more funds for its next annual
budget. As a result of her reports, Edmonds says she
was harassed at the FBI. She was fired in March 2002.

Litigation followed, and in October 2002,
Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss the
Edmonds case, taking the extraordinary step of
invoking the rarely used state secrets privilege in
order "to protect the foreign policy and national
security interests of the United States." Ashcroft's
move was made at the request of Mueller.

During a 2002 segment on "60 Minutes" exploring
Edmonds' initial charges of FBI internal abuses, Sen.
Grassley was asked if Edmonds is credible. "She's
credible and the reason I feel she's very credible is
because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot
of her story," he said.

The Inspector General's office then launched an
investigation into Edmonds' charges and told her to
expect a finding in the fall of 2002. The report has
yet to be released. Edmonds suspects if it is ever
publicly released Ashcroft will demand that it be
immediately classified. "They're pushing everything
under the blanket of secrecy," she says.

That's why she felt it was so important to appear
before the 9/11 commission: "It's the only hope I have
left to get this issue added to the public domain."

-------

Families of soldiers not amused by Bush's comedy routine

The Emperor has no clothes.

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8278162.htm
Posted on Thu, Mar. 25, 2004

Families of soldiers not amused by Bush's comedy routine

BY KENNETH R. BAZINET

New York Daily News

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - President Bush got some laughs at
a Washington dinner when he spoofed the failure to
find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but some
family members of dead G.I.s said Thursday there was
nothing funny about it.

"Those weapons of mass destruction have to be here
somewhere," Bush joshed as he narrated a slide show of
him looking behind furniture, as if hunting for the
weapons of mass destruction.

"Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here," Bush
joked Wednesday night at the annual dinner of
Washington radio and TV correspondents, an event where
Presidents typically poke fun at the press and
themselves.

George Medina, 43, of Orange County, who lost a son in
Iraq, heard about Bush's remarks when his outraged
daughter, an Army sergeant, called him Thursday. "She
was very upset," Medina said.

"This is disgraceful," Medina continued. "He doesn't
think of all the families that are suffering. It's
unbelievable, how this guy tries to run the country."

His 22-year-old son, Spec. Irving Medina, died Nov. 14
in Baghdad when an explosive device struck his convoy.

Charles Celestin, 28, of Coral Springs, Fla., and
Irving Medina's brother-in-law, blasted the commander
in chief's remarks. "To be poking fun; it's just a
travesty to the soldiers who lost their lives. I think
it's disrespectful," he said.

The camp of Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry last night fired off a statement from Iraq war
veteran Brad Owens, who said he was "insulted" by the
President's comments.

"No weapons of mass destruction have been found and
that is no joke - this is for real. This cheapens the
sacrifice that American soldiers and their families
are dealing with every single day," said Owens, who
served in the Army Reserve.

The dinner performance put the President on the
defensive for the second time this week. The Bush
campaign was already dealing with fallout from
testimony by former presidential aide Richard Clarke,
who has claimed in a new book that Bush and his
cabinet were looking for reasons to attack Iraq within
hours of the 9/11 terror attack despite being told
Saddam Hussein was not linked to it.

The President's dinner act also bombed with Rep.
Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), who called it "out of
line and in poor taste."

"It's disgusting that during his little performance on
stage, the President seemed to forget that people are
dying in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction
he lied about," Nadler said.

Asked whether the comment was appropriate, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was not at the
dinner and so could not comment.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan noted that Bush
ended his remarks at the dinner with a very serious
tribute to U.S. forces serving in Iraq, but "was
poking fun at himself" with the comments about weapons
of mass destruction.

"Anyone who has followed the President's views on this
knows how seriously he takes this issue," Buchan said.

---

© 2004, New York Daily News.

Visit the Daily News online at
"http://www.nydailynews.com/"

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information
Services.

Kerry whacks Bush on WMD comment, responds to president's joke delivered at dinner, asks 'He thinks that's funny?'

The Emperor has no uniform.

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37751

ELECTION 2004
Kerry whacks Bush on WMD comment, responds to president's joke delivered at dinner, asks 'He thinks that's funny?'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: March 25, 2004
5:42 p.m. Eastern

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry hammered
President Bush today for making a joke about the lack
of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at a media
correspondents' dinner in Washington, D.C. last night

During Bush's light-hearted presentation, which
included several slides of him and White House staff,
he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got
to be somewhere," while showing a photo of himself
looking under furniture in the Oval Office.

Shortly thereafter another image is shown and Bush
says, "Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here."

"That's supposed to be funny?" Kerry asked in a
statement published on the Drudge Report.

"If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for
going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more
out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the
president, this is not a joke."

Continued the Massachusetts senator: "Five-hundred
eighty-five American soldiers have been killed in Iraq
in the last year; 3,354 have been wounded, and there's
no end in sight. … George Bush sold us on going to war
with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass
destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now
he thinks that's funny?

"George Bush didn't tell us the truth about the
economy, about job loss, about the true cost of his
deceptive prescription drug plan, or about the
existence of weapons of mass destruction. There's
nothing funny about that."

The statement also included a quote from Brad Owens,
an Iraq war veteran and apparent Kerry supporter.

"George Bush insulted me as a veteran and as a friend
to many still serving in Iraq," Owens said. "This act
lowers the dialogue about weapons of mass destruction.
War is the single most serious event that a President
or government can carry its people into. No weapons of
mass destruction have been found and that is no joke -
this is for real. This cheapens the sacrifice that
American soldiers and their families are dealing with
every single day."

DOJ Asked FBI Translator To Change Pre 9-11 Intercepts

"Out, out damn spot!"

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DOJ Asked FBI Translator To Change Pre 9-11

BREAKING SPECIAL REPORT FROM 9-11 HEARINGS

DOJ Asked FBI Translator To Change Pre 9-11 Intercepts

by Tom Flocco

Washington, DC -- March 24, 2004 --12:15 EST -- FBI
translator Sibel Edmonds was offered a substantial
raise and a full time job to encourage her not to go
public that she had been asked by the Department of
Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the
translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that
had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI
and CIA.

Edmonds, a ten year U.S. citizen who has passed a
polygraph examination, speaks fluent Farsi and Turkish
and had been working part time with the FBI for six
months--commencing in December, 2001.

In a 50 reporter frenzy in front of some 12 news
cameras, Edmonds said "Attorney General John Ashcroft
told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and
National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go
public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11
intercepts."

"I appeared once on CBS 60 Minutes but I have been
silenced by Mr. Ashcroft, the FBI follows me, and I
was threatened with jail in 2002 if I went public,"
Edmonds told tomflocco.com.

When we asked her if it was really true that she had
been bribed by the FBI and DOJ, Edmonds said "You can
interpret it as that."

This writer personally asked Edmonds where the term
"State Secret Privilege" was derived. "The term came
from an October 18, 2002 DOJ memo to me from DOJ
spokesman Barbara Comstock," said Edmonds.

The former FBI translator said "My translations of the
pre 9-11 intercepts included [terrorist] money
laundering, detailed and date specific information
enough to alert the American people, and other issues
dating back to 1999 which I won't go into right now."

Incredibly, Edmonds said "The Senate Judiciary
Committee and the 911 Commission have heard me testify
for lengthy periods of time time (3 hours) about very
specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weapons, and
specific individuals and activities."

This explosive information has been kept under wraps
by the White House, CIA, FBI, and DOJ since Edmonds'
60 Minutes interview segment.

The former FBI translator told tomflocco.com that
"translators before me had ongoing personal
relationships with the subjects or targets of the FBI
and DOJ pre 9-11 investigations--linked to intercepts
and other intelligence--in June - July - August, just
prior to the attacks."

"I also became aware of a [terrorist] criminal
investigation going on since 1998," said Edmonds.

Patty Casazza, one of the 9-11 "Jersey Girls," said
"Sibel Edmonds told me that color coding terrorist
threat alerts for the American people is reflective of
the intercept translations received." Casazza and
Edmonds gave no indication as to whether FBI
translators had doctored or adjusted translations
[used in the decision-making process] for Homeland
Security terrorist threat alerts, for political
reasons.

"This whole situation is outrageous and I am going
public," said Edmonds, adding "I am currently being
advised by counsel. Thank you."

Kristen Breitweiser, 9-11 family member and also one
of the nick-named Jersey girls, arranged to have Ms.
Edmonds address the gathered media right after
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet
testified.

Widow of Soldier in Jessica Lynch Unit Blasts Bush

Three more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what?
Not to destroy Saddam Hussein's WMD. David Kay found
out that Hans Blix and Scott Ritter were right --
they're were none...The _resident, though, thinks it
is an appropriate subject matter for a comedy
routine...At the Radio and Television Correspondents'
Association Dinner, last night, hours after Richard
Clarke confessed personal and governmental failure to
the 9/11 families and asked their forgiveness
(something no one in his administration has done), the
incredible shrinking _resident used the false pretext
for a war that has already taken the lives of close to
600 US soldiers. He showed photos of himself looking
for something out a window and under furniture in the
Oval Office, and said, "Those weapons of mass
destruction have got to be somewhere. No weapons over
there. Maybe under here." Of course, the craven crowd,
who also bear responsibility for the rush to war in
Iraq, laughed. While any of the network news programs
ask the loved ones of those who have died in this
foolish military adventure if they think the
incredible shrinking _resident's remarks were
appropriate? Will any of the network news anchors ask
the families of those who died on 9/11 if they think
the incredible shrinking _resident's conduct was
appropriate only a few hours after Richard Clarke's
scathing critique in sworn testimony? Will any of the
propapunditgandists mention it on the Sunday morning
talk shows? Nah. Meanwhile, here is another name for the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes: Jill Kiehl

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democray in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/032504J.shtml

Widow of Soldier in Jessica Lynch Unit Blasts Bush
By Jim Forsyth
Reuters

Tuesday 23 March 2004

CENTER POINT, Texas (Reuters) - At a ceremony on
Tuesday marking the one-year anniversary of the Iraqi
attack on Pvt. Jessica Lynch's Army unit, the widow of
a soldier who died in the fight blasted President Bush
for "lying to America" to justify the Iraq war.

In bitter comments beside the grave of Army
Specialist James Kiehl, widow Jill Kiehl accused Bush
of fabricating reasons to launch the invasion that
toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

"The evidence that's starting to come out now
feels like he (Bush) was misleading us," Kiehl said,
holding the couple's 10-month-old son Nathaniel, born
seven weeks after his father died.

"It's almost as though he had things fixed so it
would look like he needed to go to war," she said.

James Kiehl, a 22-year-old computer engineer, was
one of 11 members of the 507th Maintenance Company
killed when their convoy took a wrong turn at
Nassiriya in southern Iraq on March 23, 2003 and were
attacked by Iraqi fighters.

Seven others were captured, including Lynch, who
was held for nine days before U.S. troops rescued her
from a hospital.

Several members of the unit, not including Lynch,
attended the ceremony in Center Point, 35 miles
northwest of San Antonio.

Jill Kiehl described herself as "bitter" about
Bush's decision to declare war on Iraq.

"It's upsetting that he (Bush) would have lied to
America to get what he wanted," Kiehl said.

"In a way, it's like he used people. That's how I
feel. I think the reasons for going over there were
bogus and misleading."

Bush justified the invasion on grounds that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Al
Qaeda, the Islamic extremist group blamed for the
Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. So
far, no such weapons have been found and little
evidence of Al Qaeda connections has turned up.

-------

With intimidation in the air, all but a few mainstream journalists tamped down criticisms and lacquered on adulation. A kind of war-mentality sheen covered public surfaces.

Yes, indeed. Further corroboration that "It's the
Media, Stupid."

Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10152
Second Draft

Norman Solomon is the author of The Habits of Highly
Deceptive Media and co-author, with Reese Erlich, of
Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You. He
writes Media Beat, a nationally syndicated column.

For 30 months, 9/11 was a huge political blessing for
George W. Bush. This week, the media halo fell off.

Within the space of a few days, culminating with his
testimony to the Sept. 11 commission Wednesday
afternoon, former counterterrorism chief Richard
Clarke did serious damage to a public-relations scam
that the White House has been running for two and a
half years.

We may forget just how badly President Bush was doing
until Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, a front-page
Philadelphia Inquirer story told of dire political
straits; his negative rating among the nation’s
crucial independent swing voters stood at 53 percent,
according to the latest survey by nonpartisan pollster
John Zogby.

On Sept. 12, Bush’s media stature and poll numbers
were soaring. Suddenly, news outlets all over the
country boosted the president as a great leader,
sometimes likening him to FDR. For many months, the
overall media coverage of President Bush was
reverential.

With intimidation in the air, all but a few mainstream
journalists tamped down criticisms and lacquered on
adulation. A kind of war-mentality sheen covered
public surfaces. Guided by Bush’s top strategist Karl
Rove, the administration strove to exploit the tragedy
of 9/11 at every turn. In the aftermath of the Iraq
invasion, as the extent of prewar lies forced the Bush
administration into a defensive crouch, reliance on
images and rhetoric about 9/11 was more important than
ever. For the Bush team, frequent invocation of 9/11
seemed dependable as a fortified version of
patriotism—the last, and most promising, refuge of
scoundrels.

The anger that we’re now hearing from the White House
is the sound of an administration being hoisted by its
own 9/11 petard.

The Bush estate has bet the political farm on 9/11.
True, the focus of initial television commercials on
Sept. 11 imagery can always be adjusted later. But the
Bush-Cheney campaign must remain inseparably tied to
9/11. The Republican Party’s national convention was
scheduled unusually late on the calendar in
Manhattan—early September—to indelibly link the
Bush-Cheney ticket to Sept. 11.

Hitting the USS Bush at the time of the spring
equinox, the current media gale has not been all that
harsh. But the media upheaval is striking because of
its contrast with the very favorable political climate
that the Bush political vessel has been able to create
and navigate in relation to 9/11 until this spring.

Bush’s prior media problems with Iraq war policy are
helping to compound his 9/11 media debacle of recent
days. Now, with Clarke recounting the administration’s
fixation on Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Sept.
11, there’s extra public outrage about the new
firsthand evidence that Bush was eager to pursue his
discredited Iraq obsession even while the World Trade
Center was on fire.

For the Bush-Cheney-Rove administration, the parallels
and negative synergies between Iraq and 9/11 issues
include the common thread of extreme dishonesty. On
March 22—while a typical Wall Street Journal editorial
sputtered that the Sept. 11 commission had been
hijacked "to provide a vehicle to embarrass the Bush
administration" —the same newspaper’s front page was
featuring a lead article about Sept. 11 events
politely headlined "Government Accounts of 9/11 Reveal
Gaps, Inconsistencies." Based on the article’s
meticulous reporting, a less circumspect headline
could have been: "Bush, Cheney and Top Aides Now
Tangled Up in 9/11 Deceptions."

This week, news departments that were slow on the
uptake quickly found themselves out of step. While the
Washington Post front-paged a major substantive
article March 22 about Clarke’s charges, The New York
Times buried its coverage of the subject on a back
page. (The anemic Times article carried the byline of
Judith Miller, who rendered invaluable prewar service
to the Bush administration by reporting the existence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—based on
anonymous sourcing. Miller’s source turned out to be
the Pentagon’s favorite hand-picked Iraqi exile
"leader," Ahmed Chalabi.) After badly lagging behind
the Post, on March 23 the Times played catch-up on the
Clarke story.

Whether the Bush campaign can regain control of 9/11
as a political football remains to be seen. We should
never forget that real people died on that day, and
real people are still dying in Iraq because of
depraved political games in Washington.

People in positions of enormous power are never more
dangerous than when they see their power seriously
threatened. The counterattacks on Clarke have only
just begun. And during the next several months, the
Bush-Cheney-Rove administration is sure to reach into
its very large bag of media tricks. Whether the
trickery is successful will largely depend on whether
journalists do their civic duty or kowtow to the White
House.

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Published: Mar 25 2004

Well, how can you not feel a sense of urgency when George Tenet is telling you in daily briefings, day after day, that a major al Qaeda attack is coming?

Some of us have waited a long time for what happened yesterday...
Well, since 9/11 itself really. And even though many
important questions are yet to be addressed, yesterday,
Richard Clarke not only spoke truth to power about the
_resident's incompetence on 9/11, he also spoke truth
to power about Iraq...Other than Clarke himself only
Richard Ben-Veniste (who relentless kept bringing up
the affront of _resident's refusal to allow Condeleeza
Rice to testify) and the 9/11 Families (who
walked out in protest when Rice's substitute took the
stand)distinguished these hearings. None of the other
commission members or witnesses (from either side of
the aisle) really understood what was supposed to be
going on in that room...So how does Sen. John F. Kerry handle this explosive political situation? He should say yes, I read Clarke's book, it is compelling, it is vital that the Commission continue it work and that we all wait for its findings, blah blah blah...BUT what our campaign is going to address is the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the _resident, i.e. his fitness to lead this nation. One after another, disturbing revelations about the _resident's CREDIBILITY have surfaced concerning life and death issues: Iraq, 9/11, Medicare, the Economy, and the Environment...Yes, it is time for a regime change here at home...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/24/lkl.00.html

CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Interview With Richard Clarke

Aired March 24, 2004 - 21:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS
FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RICHARD CLARKE, FMR. WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: I believe
the Bush administration in the first eight months
considered terrorism an important issue, but not an
urgent issue.

LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, Richard Clarke, the former
White House counterterrorism chief making the
explosive claims about why President Bush failed to
prevent September 11. Now, new revelations challenge
credibility plus fierce debate over allegations. With
"Newsweek's" Michael Isikoff. He was an eyewitness to
Clarke's testimony today at the hearings. Judith
Miller, the Pulitzer Prize- winning "New York Times"
reporter on the Middle East and terrorism beat.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of the Foreign
Relations and Select Intelligence Committees, and
Democratic Senator Joe Biden ranking member of Foreign
Relations. All next on LARRY KING LIVE.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KING: Our panel will join us later, we begin with
Richard Clarke. He testified before the commission
today. He served as White House counterterrorism czar
for both President Bush and Clinton, served in the
administrations of President Bush No. 1 and Ronald
Reagan and is the author of an extraordinary new book,
"Against All Enemies, Inside America's War on Terror"
published by Free Press Day, you see its cover. Why
did you write this, Dick?

CLARKE: Larry, after I left the government I realized
two things. One, that not a lot of people knew what
happened on 9/11. There was no good account of that.
And the more compelling reason, there was no good
account of why we had failed to stop it. The families,
many of whom I met today at the hearing and other
people were constantly asking, why couldn't the great
United States of America have stopped this attack and
what do we have to do to make sure it never happens
again? I had some of the answers, I thought and they
weren't getting out anywhere else. I really felt I
needed to get it off my chest.

KING: Why did you begin with an apology? What were you
apologizing for and to whom?

CLARKE: I apologized to the families of the victims,
the 3,000 people who died on 9/11. I apologized
personally and I apologized on behalf of the
government because the government failed them. The
government was supposed to protect their loved ones,
supposed to stop these kinds of attacks and despite
extraordinary efforts of some in the CIA and FBI and
State and a few other places, nonetheless, the attacks
took place. So, what I said was, it doesn't really
matter that we tried hard, it matters that we failed.
And I asked them to understand the facts, but I asked
them to accept my apology, more importantly, to
forgive me because I think we all, those of us who
were involved, need to ask them for forgiveness.
They've lost their loved ones.

KING: Isn't all acts of terror a failure of somebody?

CLARKE: Certainly, certainly they are. Few acts of
terror or no acts of terror were ever as extraordinary
as those of 9/11. You know, if you look at the entire
eight years of the Clinton administration, 35
Americans were killed by al Qaeda over eight years.
And 3,000 were killed on 9/11. It's a whole different
class than previous acts of terrorism.

KING: Let's touch a lot of bases here. You spoke in
August and praised the administration, you highlighted
positive aspects that they had done, minimized
negative aspects and then the book seems to counteract
that. Why?

CLARKE: Well, Larry, what you're referring to is
something the White House is trying out today as part
of its continuing program to undermine my credibility.
And, you know, for the Bush White House to be
attempting to undermine my credibility is really sort
of ironic and sort of the pot calling the kettle
black. They're the ones who have the credibility
problem, Larry. You know, they're trying to divert
attention from the issues that I am raising and that
other people are raising in the 9/11 Commission
process.

The issue is -- could the Bush administration have
done more prior to 9/11? The second issue is, what did
it do after 9/11? Did it fight the war on terror well
or did it not? Did it divert attention and actually
hurt the war on terror by fighting an unnecessary
costly diversionary war in Iraq? That's what we should
be talking about and the White House, obviously,
doesn't want to talk about that.

KING: But the question, Dick, was why did you praise
them two years ago?

CLARKE: I didn't praise them. What you're referring to
is this background briefing that the White House
leaked today in violation of the rules on background
briefings. When I was a special assistant to the
president -- here's what happened.

"TIME" magazine came out with a very explosive story
saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done
everything it could have done. That in fact, that the
administration had been handed a plan by me at the
beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda
and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the
cover story on "TIME" and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious
reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help
them out. I was working for the president of the
United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm
not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at
least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize
the positive?

Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There
are three things you can do. You can resign rather
than do it, you can lie and say the administration did
all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay
inside the government and try to continue to change it
from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to
do, give a background briefing to the press and
emphasize those things which they had done. And I
chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what
the White House is sort of saying is they don't
understand why I, as a special assistant to the
president of the United States, didn't criticize the
president to the press. If I had criticized the
president to the press as a special assistant, I would
have been fired within an hour. They know that. This
is part of their whole attempt to get Larry King to
ask Dick Clarke this kind of question. So we're not
talking about the major issue.

KING: We're going to get to that in a minute. But who
told you to do that briefing?

CLARKE: The national security adviser, the press
secretary, the communication's director, they all
talked to me, asked me to do the briefing and were
telling me to spin it in a very positive way.

KING: What do you make of Condoleezza Rice's actions
through this? Her statements about you, the issuing
today of an e-mail you sent her four days before 9/11,
which seems to back up what she thinks. What's your
overview of that?

CLARKE: They're scrambling very hard at the White
House. They've got a lot of people -- the vice
president, the chief of staff, the national security
director, the press secretary, the communication's
director. They have five or six people running around
doing talk shows and trying to refute me and trying to
besmirch me. Larry, I said in the preface of this
book, I knew before I wrote this book that the White
House will let loose the dogs to attack me. That's
what they're doing. That's what they did to Paul
O'Neill when he told the truth and I come back to this
point that all of this is to get us, rather than being
on this show talking about the failures of the Bush
administration, instead talking about the flack that
they're throwing up every day.

KING: Was 9/11 preventable?

CLARKE: Well, we'll never know. But let me compare
9/11 and the period immediately before it to the
millennium rollover and the period immediately before
that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence
reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda
attacks. President Clinton asked his national security
adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the
attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director
and stop the attacks. And every day they went back
from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice
Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to
find out if there was any information. You know, when
you know the United States is going to be attacked,
the top people in the United States government ought
to be working hands-on to prevent it and working
together.

Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of
2001, when we even had more clear indications that
there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask
for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the
attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her
counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney
general had gone back day after day to their
department to the White House, what would they have
shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the
Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that
two of the hijackers had entered the United States.
Now, if that information had been able to be shaken
loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in
response to daily meetings with the White House, if we
had known that those two -- if the attorney general
had known, if the FBI director had known, that those
two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we
could have caught those two. Would that have
stopped...

KING: But who knew -- you knew they were in the United
States, who else knew?

CLARKE: No, I didn't. I didn't know.

KING: We should have known is what you're saying.

CLARKE: The people in the FBI knew. Not the director.

KING: They did know.

CLARKE: Some people in the FBI knew. And if Condi Rice
had been doing her job and holding those daily
meetings, the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a
hands-on attitude to being national security adviser,
when she had information that there was a threat
against the United States, that kind of information
was shaken out in December 1999, it would have been
shaken out in the summer of 2001, if she had been
doing her job.

KING: Let me get a break and be right back with
Richard Clarke. The book, "Against All Enemies: Inside
America's War on Terror." The panel at the bottom of
the hour. Don't go away.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: George
Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the
terrorist threats to the United States of America. And
had my administration had any information that
terrorists were going to attack New York City on
September the 11th, we would have acted.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Richard
Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the
administration that he thought the war on terrorism
was moving in the wrong direction, and he chose not
to. In fact, when he came to me and asked if I would
support him with Tom Ridge to become the deputy
secretary of homeland security, a department which he
now says should never have been -- never have been
created. When he asked me to support him in that job,
he said he supported the president. So frankly, I'm
flabbergasted.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Mr. Clarke, what would you say to the
flabbergasted Dr. Rice?

CLARKE: I'd say, let's get back to the main issue.
Before you went to the break, Larry, you had the
president saying that George Tenet was briefing him
regularly on the threat. He was. George Tenet told me
that, and I saw the briefings. The president was being
told on a regular basis that an al Qaeda threat was
coming, an al Qaeda attack was coming.

Now, what does the president say in his own words to
Bob Woodward in "Bush at War?" He says, Bush
acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that
of his national security team. "I was not on point,"
the president said. "I didn't feel a sense of
urgency."

Well, how can you not feel a sense of urgency when
George Tenet is telling you in daily briefings, day
after day, that a major al Qaeda attack is coming?
That's my point. That's one of my points. The other
point is, which I'd like to get to, that by fighting
the war in Iraq, the president has actually diminished
our ability to fight the war on terrorism.

KING: What do you mean by that? Why does Iraq diminish
the war on terrorism?

CLARKE: In three ways. Number one, it diverts us from
reducing the vulnerabilities here at home, like
protecting the rails from attacks like the one on
Madrid. We're spending $180 billion in Iraq. We should
be spending that money reducing our vulnerabilities to
terrorism here at home, much more than we are. The
railroads, the chemical plants, they are all still
unprotected.

The second way it reduces the war on terrorism is by
inflaming the Islamic world and helping, as Rumsfeld
said in his internal memo, helping create more
terrorists more rapidly than we can capture or kill
them, because of the hatred in the Islamic world
generated against the United States by our needless
invasion of Iraq.

And the third way, of course, was it actually took
troops and intelligence assets away from the hunt for
bin Laden. We'll probably catch bin Laden here
shortly, but it's two years too late. In those two
years, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra, a
multi-headed organization, so that by the time we
catch him now, it won't matter very much, because all
of these al Qaeda-like organizations have grown up
around the world, like the group that attacked in
Madrid.

The point is, the war in Iraq was not necessary. Iraq
was not an imminent threat to the United States. And
by going to war with Iraq, we have greatly reduced our
possibility to prosecute the war on terrorism. That's
what I say in the book.

KING: And the book -- I am sure this book will be read
in a wide variety of sources. The book is "Against All
Enemies."

Dr. Rice said that you asked to be the assistant head
of the new security agency, painting a picture that
you may be in anger over not getting what you wanted
and so this book is your way of getting off. What is
your response to her statement that you wanted that
job?

CLARKE: My response to her statement that, on the one
hand I didn't like the department on the other hand I
did -- is the following. The president of the United
States and Tom Ridge didn't like the idea of the
Department of Homeland Security. They spoke publicly
against the idea of a Department of Homeland Security.
When they were told it was going to pass in the
Congress anyway and it was going to be called the
Lieberman bill, then they changed on a dime overnight
and said it was their idea, and then they said anyone
who opposed it was not patriotic, like Max Cleland.
They said he was not patriotic because he didn't think
there should be a Department of Homeland Security. Max
Cleland, who had lost three of his four limbs fighting
for the United States, they said he was unpatriotic
because he didn't support their stand on homeland
security, which was their own stand just a week
before.

KING: But, Dick, did you want that job?

CLARKE: No, what I said was because I had been doing
all of these things in the homeland security area for
the last 10 years, if they wanted to consider me for
deputy secretary over there, I would be willing to be
considered. But that doesn't change the fact that Tom
Ridge, George Bush, yeah, and me, thought that the
department was not a good idea, that we shouldn't
reorganize everything in the middle of the war on
terrorism.

KING: Did these problems start with Clinton?

CLARKE: Absolutely. And you know, people who haven't
read the book seem to think that I only criticize the
Bush administration. I criticize the Clinton
administration, too. And I did so today in my
testimony before the 9/11 commission. The news media
did not cover that in the evening news, but I did
criticize the Bush administration and the Clinton
administration, I think, equally.

You know, the Clinton administration failed to bomb
the camps that were in Afghanistan that we knew were
there. They bombed them once, Clinton bombed them
once, the public reaction was negative to that.
Remember, wag the dog, everyone said Clinton is just
bombing Afghanistan to divert attention from the
Monica business. And so he didn't bomb them again.

And that was during a time when they were turning out
thousands of terrorists, trained terrorists. It was an
assembly line, those camp in Afghanistan were an
assembly line, a conveyer belt that were sending
terrorists out on a regular basis all over the world.

I thought they should have been blown up. I
recommended it. And it didn't happen. I criticize the
Clinton administration for that. I think there's a lot
of blame to go around, and, as I said several times, I
think I deserve some of that blame. I am willing to
take that blame; I wish the president were willing to
take some, too.

KING: President Clinton on this program said he was in
Australia on 9/11, and he said as soon as he heard of
the incident he said, bin Laden. Does that surprise
you?

CLARKE: Well, no, Bill Clinton was obsessed with
getting bin Laden. Bill Clinton ordered bin Laden
assassinated. He ordered not only bin Laden
assassinated but all of his lieutenants. The CIA
failed him. The CIA couldn't do it, and now the CIA is
trying to say, well, the orders were ambiguous. Let me
tell you, Larry, National Security Adviser Sandy
Berger and myself both talked to George Tenet and
talked to his chief lieutenants and said, are you very
clear what this order is? This is an order to kill bin
Laden. They said, yes, they were very clear.

KING: Is somebody lying?

CLARKE: No, you know, people in this town are too
smart to lie, especially under oath.

KING: So what do you call it?

CLARKE: I call it creative memory sometimes. I call it
interpretation and emphasis sometimes. I think the
American people need to know the truth about what
happened, so that we can make sure it doesn't happen
again. And I think heaven for the family members of
the victims who caused this commission to come into
existence over the objections of the White House and
who have now been able to get it extended over the
objections of the White House.

KING: We'll take a break and be back with some more
moments with Richard, and then we'll have are panel
assemble. Senator Chuck Hagel and Senator Joe Biden,
two very influential United States senators. And tow
terrific journalist, Michael Isikoff and Judith Miller
and they'll react to what Mr. Clarke has had to say.
Back with Richard Clarke right after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: The president, by
word indeed, made clear his interests and his intense
desire to protect the nation from terrorism. He
frequently asked and prodded us to do more. He decided
early on that we needed to be more aggressive in going
after terrorists and especially al Qaeda. As he said
in early spring as we were developing are new
comprehensive strategy, "I'm tried swatting flies. He
wanted a thorough comprehensive, diplomatic, military,
intelligence, law enforcement and financial strategy
going after al Qaeda. (END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: Everything is more
difficult today. it's tougher to recruit. It's tougher
to train. It's tougher to retain. It's tougher to
finance. It's tougher to move things. It's tougher to
communicate with each other for those folks. Someone
asked me is Saddam -- Osama bin Laden masterminding
all of this and I said, you know, who knows?

But if I were in his shoes I would think I would be
spending an awfully lot of time not getting caught.
Most of his time is probably spent not getting caught
and so he's busy and that's a good thing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Richard Clarke is the guest, the book is
"Against All Enemies."

You said you believe he'll be caught soon, why?

CLARKE: We have now shifted the special forces that
speak Arabic and some predators back from Iraq where
they've been for the last year and to Afghanistan
where they should have been in the first place looking
for bin Laden and his lieutenants. These are the
people who caught Saddam Hussein. They're very good, I
know many of them. And I suspect we'll catch bin
Laden, but it is two years too late because al Qaeda
has now morphed during this time. You know, in all of
Afghanistan, we only have 1,100 U.S. troops, that's
fewer U.S. troops in Afghanistan than we have police
in Manhattan. Why because the administration held back
the troops we needed because they wanted to invade
Iraq. That's a clear example of how invading Iraq has
diverted resources on terrorism. It's also inflamed
the Arab world and that will take a generation for us
to get over, even if we're successful in Iraq in
building a Jeffersonian (ph) Democracy, which is going
to be hard, in the meantime by invading an Arab
country and occupying it, when we didn't have to, when
there was no imminent threat against the United States
we have been generating a new al Qaeda-like terrorists
throughout Islamic world and that's the point I think
we should be talking about and not my e-mails.

KING: Dick, we look forward to having you on a lot in
the upcoming months. One other thing, you served four
presidents.

In the issue of security, who was the strongest
president you served?

CLARKE: Well, I think George Bush the first was a
national security expert. He had been CIA director,
had been U.N. director. He was able to build a
multi-nation coalition to fight Iraq the first time,
which is what we should have been doing this time. If
thought we had to go after Iraq, we should have done
what George Bush the first did and build a real and
not this thing we have now. KING: So you give him of
the four the highest marks?

CLARKE: Oh, yes, I think absolutely. George Bush the
first was a real national security professional, but I
must admit, he did not retaliate for the deaths of
Americans on Pam Am 103, and that kind of lack of
retaliation, again, with Ronald Reagan in Beirut when
the terrorists killed the marines there, that lack of
retaliation by Reagan and Bush contributed to the
attitude that bin Laden and others had that they could
attack the United States and get away with it.

KING: You were a proponent of a strong reaction to all
kind of occurrences, right?

CLARKE: Well, I think if you let people get away with
things like that -- then you pay a price in the
future.

KING: You would favor what Israel did with Hamas?

CLARKE: That's a very tough question. I think if
you're an Israeli, perhaps, you do favor it. If you're
a bit more detached as we can be in the United States,
you realize it's just part of a continuing cycle and
that Hamas will now retaliate and kill more Israelis,
perhaps they would have done that anyway. The
Arab/Israeli process is a difficult issue that we
should spend more time on. I wish the administration
were trying to get the Arab states to generate a
Palestinian interlocutor, so that we could have
negotiations. Obviously, we can't negotiate with
Arafat.

KING: Thank you, Dick.

CLARKE: Thank you, Larry.

KING: Richard Clarke, the book is "Against All
Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."

Each and every single one of these attacks, which ranged from one side of the planet to the other, were foiled by the efforts of the Clinton administration. They were able to stop these attacks because of one simple reason: They were paying attention

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/032504A.shtml

September 11 Should Have Been Stopped
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 25 March 2004

"No one anticipated the kinds of strikes that took
place in New York and at the Pentagon." - 'The 9/11
Debate,' Washington Post editorial, 03-24-04

That line from the Washington Post has been
repeated ad nauseam by other newspapers, and across
radio and television. It has achieved the status of
bedrock conventional wisdom, of something axiomatic.
These statements are a paraphrase of National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said on May 17th, 2002,
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these
people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center, that they would try to use an
airplane as a missile - a hijacked airplane as a
missile."

This kind of thinking elevates the attacks to
something mythical, a magic trick, an act of God that
no mere mortal could possibly have interfered with or
anticipated. In fact, it was an operation planned for
years by men who left clear tracks. As such, it could
have been stopped. It should have been stopped. Saying
so, however, interferes with the cultivation of a
national attitude of vengeful victimhood, an attitude
the Bush administration is actively promoting for its
own benefit and political protection. Surely we were
victims of terrorism on September 11, but was this
unavoidable? Are the Washington Post, Condoleezza Rice
and others correct in stating that no one anticipated
these kinds of attacks?

The facts say no.

Ramzi Yousef was one of the planners and
participants in the first bombing of the World Trade
Center in 1993. Yousef's right-hand man, Abdul Hakim
Murad, was captured and interrogated in 1995. During
that interrogation, Murad described a detailed plot to
hijack airplanes and use them as weapons of terrorism.
The primary plan was to commandeer eleven commercial
planes and blow them up over the Pacific Ocean. The
secondary plan was to hijack several planes, which
would be flown into CIA headquarters, the World Trade
Center, the Sears Tower, the White House and a variety
of other targets.

Ramzi Yousef eluded capture until his final
apprehension in Pakistan. During his 1997 trial, the
plot described by Murad resurfaced. FBI agents
testified in the Yousef trial that, "The plan targeted
not only the CIA, but other U.S. government buildings
in Washington, including the Pentagon."

In 1993, the same year as the first World Trade
Center attack, a $150,000 study was undertaken by the
Pentagon to investigate the possibility of airplanes
being used as bombs. A draft document of this was
circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice
Department, and to the Federal Emergency Management
Agency. The circulation of the report was timely.

In 1994, a disgruntled Federal Express employee
invaded the cockpit of a DC10 with the intention of
crashing it into a company building. Again in 1994, a
pilot crashed a small airplane into a tree on the
White House grounds, narrowly missing the building
itself. Also in 1994, an Air France flight was
hijacked by members of a terrorist organization called
the Armed Islamic Group, who intended to crash the
plane into the Eiffel Tower.

The 1993 Pentagon report was followed up in
September 1999 by a report titled 'The Sociology and
Psychology of Terrorism.' This report was prepared for
the American intelligence community by the Federal
Research Division, an adjunct of the Library of
Congress. The report stated, "Suicide bombers
belonging to Al Qaida's martyrdom battalion could
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives
into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the
White House."

Abdul Hakim Murad described plans to use hijacked
commercial airplanes as weapons in 1995. Ramzi
Yousef's trial further exposed the existence of these
plans in 1997. Two reports prepared by the American
government, one from 1993 and another from 1999,
further detailed again the existence and danger of
these plots. The Federal Express employee's hijacking
attempt in 1994, the attempted airplane attack on the
White House in 1994, and the hijacking of the Air
France flight in 1994 by terrorists intending to fly
the plane into the Eiffel Tower, provided a glaring
underscore to the data.

No one anticipated the use of airplanes as weapons
before September 11? Given the facts, the claim from
Condoleezza Rice, carried forward to today by the
mainstream media, seems impossible to believe.

We come, next, to priorities.

A mission statement from the internal FBI
Strategic Plan, dated 5/8/98, describes the FBI's Tier
One priority as 'counterterrorism.' The FBI, under the
Clinton administration, was making counterterrorism
its highest priority. The official annual budget goals
memo from Attorney General Janet Reno to department
heads, dated 4/6/00, detailed how counterterrorism was
her top priority for the Department of Justice. In the
second paragraph, she states, "In the near term as
well as the future, cybercrime and counterterrrorism
are going to be the most challenging threats in the
criminal justice area. Nowhere is the need for an
up-to-date human and technical infrastructure more
critical."

Contrast this with the official annual budget
goals memo from Attorney General Ashcroft, dated
5/10/01, which directly compares to the 4/6/00 Reno
memo. Out of seven strategic goals described, not one
mentions counterterrorism. An internal draft of the
Department of Justice's plans to revamp the official
Department of Justice Strategic Plan, dated 8/9/01,
describes Ashcroft's new priorities for the Department
of Justice. The areas Ashcroft wished to focus on were
highlighted in yellow. Specifically highlighted by
Ashcroft were domestic violent crime and drug
trafficking prevention. Item 1.3, entitled "Combat
terrorist activities by developing maximum
intelligence and investigative capability," was not
highlighted.

There is the internal FBI budget request for 2003
to the Department of Justice, dated late August 2001.
This was not the FBI's total budget request, but was
instead restricted only to the areas where the FBI
specifically requested increases over the previous
year's budget. In this request, the FBI specifically
asked for, among other things, 54 translators to
translate backlog of intelligence gathered, 248
counterterrorism agents and support staff , and 200
professional intelligence researchers. The FBI had
repeatedly stated that it had a serious backlog of
intelligence data it has gathered, but could not
process the data because they did not have the staff
to analyze or translate it into usable information.
Again, this was August 2001.

The official Department of Justice budget request
from Attorney General Ashcroft to OMB Director Mitch
Daniels is dated September 10, 2001. This document
specifically highlights only the programs slated for
above-baseline increases or below-baseline cuts.
Ashcroft outlined the programs he was trying to cut.
Comparing this document to the FBI's request to the
Department of Justice request described above, it is
clear that Ashcroft ignored the FBI's anti-terrorism
requests. Specifically, Ashcroft was planning to
ignore the FBI's specific requests for more
translators, counterintelligence agents and
researchers. It additionally shows Ashcroft was trying
to cut funding for counterterrorism efforts, grants
and other homeland defense programs before the 9/11
attacks.

The difference in priorities is clear. The Clinton
administration was focusing on terrorism and al Qaeda
as its highest priority. This focus was dramatically
reversed by senior officials within the Bush
administration. The idea that no one could have
anticipated the kinds of attacks which came on
September 11 comes into sharper focus. It isn't that
"no one" could have anticipated the threat. It is the
Bush administration itself that could never have
anticipated the threat, because they were paying
little attention to the existence of these threats.

Then, of course, there were the warnings.

FBI agents in Phoenix issued warnings in the
summer of 2001 about suspicious Arab men receiving
aviation training in American flight schools. The
warning was never followed up. An agent in the Arizona
field office commented in his case notes that Zacarias
Moussaoui, arrested in August after suspicious
activity at one of these flight schools, seemed like a
man capable of flying airplanes into the World Trade
Center.

Newspapers in Germany, France, Russia and London
reported in the months before September 11th a
blizzard of warnings delivered to the Bush
administration from all points on the compass. The
German intelligence service, BND, warned American and
Israeli agencies that terrorists were planning to
hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to
attack important American targets. Egypt warned of a
similar plot to use airplanes to attack Bush during
the G-8 summit in Genoa in June of 2001. This warning
was taken so seriously that anti-aircraft missiles
were deployed around Columbus Airport in Italy.

In August of 2001, Russian intelligence services
notified the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots had been
trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself
confirmed that this warning was delivered "in the
strongest possible terms" specifically regarding
threats to airports and government buildings. In that
same month, the Israeli security agency Mossad issued
a warning to both the FBI and CIA that up to 200 bin
Laden followers were planning a major assault on
America, aimed at vulnerable targets. The Los Angeles
Times later confirmed via unnamed U.S. officials that
the Mossad warnings had been received.

On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush received his
Presidential Daily Briefing. According to reports, the
briefing described active plots to attack the United
States by Osama bin Laden. The word "hijacking"
appeared in that briefing. Shortly after this
briefing, George W. Bush departed to Texas for a
month-long vacation.

Richard Clarke, former Director of
Counter-Terrorism for the National Security Council,
has worked on the terrorist threat for the Reagan,
Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations,
amassing a peerless resume in the field. He is now a
central figure in the commission investigating the
September 11 attacks. Clarke has laid bare an ugly
truth: The administration of George W. Bush did not
consider terrorism or the threat of al Qaeda to be a
priority prior to the attacks.

Clarke, along with former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill, who as a member of the National Security
Council was privy to military strategy meetings,
indicate that the Bush administration was obsessed
with an invasion of Iraq from the day it arrived in
Washington. This obsession continued even after the
attacks, despite the fact that the entire intelligence
community flatly declared that Iraq was not involved.

The attacks of September 11 were not mythical, not
a magic trick, not an act of God that no mere mortal
could possibly have interfered with or anticipated.
The warnings, the data, stretch back all the way to
1993. The Bush administration came into power and
absorbed a barrage of warnings about Osama bin Laden
and al Qaeda. Former National Security Advisor Sandy
Berger told Condoleezza Rice that al Qaeda terrorism
would be the single most important problem the Bush
administration would deal with while in office, and
handed her a huge file on the matter. Rice has
admitted that she did not read that file until after
the attacks of September 11 had taken place.

Of course the Bush administration could never have
anticipated an attack like the one that took place on
September 11. They weren't paying attention to the
threat. Had they done so, the attack could have been
stopped. Final proof of this can be found in the
events of December 31, 1999. Al Qaeda planned, and put
into motion, simultaneous attacks against the national
airports in Washington DC and Los Angeles, the Amman
Raddison Hotel in Jordan, several holy sites in
Israel, and the USS The Sullivans at dock in Yemen. In
scope, scale and import, these attacks would have
matched the catastrophe of September 11. Each and
every single one of these attacks, which ranged from
one side of the planet to the other, were foiled by
the efforts of the Clinton administration. They were
able to stop these attacks because of one simple
reason: They were paying attention to the threat.

September 11 could have been stopped. September 11
should have been stopped. The "No one could have
anticipated this" excuse is dangerous nonsense.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

"Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country,'" Clarke said in a "60 Minutes" interview coinciding with the book's release. "We stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda."

2+2=4

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0323-02.htm

Published on Tuesday, March 23, 2004 by Newsday / Long
Island, New York
Bush's 9/11 Myths Endanger US
by Marie Cocco

This is the week the myths may disintegrate.

There are two great myths about 9/11, spun in a
seamless web that took form even as the flames shot
from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and tiny
Shanksville wept.

The first myth - that there was no hint the American
homeland would be targeted by al-Qaida, and nothing
that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -
was propagated that very morning. "No warnings,"
former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told
reporters aboard Air Force One.

To deconstruct this myth, you do not have to listen
this week to the testimony of former Clinton
administration officials before the independent
commission investigating the 9/11 attack. You can
dismiss them as self-serving partisans and ignore
their statements about the screeching alarms they
sounded for the incoming Bush administration.

But you can look at the record and know that of course
our cities and our transportation systems were
targets. The World Trade Center was attacked in 1993.
Through the 1990s, the government thwarted a series of
terrorist plots against the United States - plans to
blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, to attack the
Los Angeles airport, to unleash mayhem in New York
City's subways. These are warnings of plots against
the homeland, are they not?

The second myth - that Iraq is, in the words of
President George W. Bush, "the central front in the
war on terror" - has led America to launch an
occupation of unspecified duration and incalculable
cost.

Bush continues to merge in his speeches - and so in
the public mind - the attacks of 9/11 with the war in
Iraq. Marking the first anniversary of the Iraq
invasion, he unabashedly tied the two. "The
establishment of a free Iraq is our fight," Bush told
assembled diplomats. "The success of a free
Afghanistan is our fight. The war on terror is our
fight."

No one else - not the Spaniards who voted out a
government that supported Bush on Iraq, not the rest
of Europe, not the FBI nor the CIA - believes the two
were one and the same.

"In the absence of any threatening terrorist movement
apart from al-Qaida, many eyes fastened on an old
intransigent evil entity - Saddam's Iraq," former
United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix writes in
his book, "Disarming Iraq." These are the eyes that
peer from the bunker of the Bush White House.

Though the U.S. administration portrayed him as a
feckless bureaucrat, Blix doesn't settle scores. He
lays out the inexorable march toward a war that was
going to take place, with or without inspections, with
or without many allies, with or without terrorists.
With or without weapons of mass destruction.

But Blix does not represent the threat to the White
House embodied in Richard Clarke.

Clarke is an expert in terrorism who worked for four
presidents, dating to Ronald Reagan. His new book,
"Against all Enemies," indicts Bush for propagating
the two myths: That he did everything possible to
fight terrorism before 9/11. And that Iraq is related
to the war on terror.

"Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America
wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an
oil-rich Arab country,'" Clarke said in a "60 Minutes"
interview coinciding with the book's release. "We
stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda."

The White House answers with rhetorical roaring guns.
Condoleezza Rice - the national security adviser who
refuses to testify publicly before the 9/11
investigative commission - pressed her counter-spin in
The Washington Post. The administration claims a key
conversation Clarke says he had with the president
never took place. CBS News and The Washington Post
both report they've verified the conversation.

The public must choose between one who long served
presidents of both parties and an incumbent whose
claim to re-election rests on assertion of robust
leadership against terror.

The myths loom large. It is not unprecedented for a
people to be so fearful they are deluded. But it is
more dangerous than ever.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

###

"The White House Has Played Cover-Up" - Former 9/11 Commission Member Max Cleland Blasts Bush

Another US soldier has been killed in Iraq. For what? Certainly not to end "terrorism," the US-UK invasion and the chaos that it created has only making Al Qaeda and like-minded groups stronger...So will the Israeli assasination of the wheel-chair bound spiritual leader of Hamas, using a US helicopter, as he emerged from a mosque, indeed this STUPID act could be well be the modern equivalent of the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand...But what else would you expect from the _resident and Ariel Sharon? Yesterday, the incredibly shrinking _resident made a remarkable statement, he said that IF he had gotten information that there was going to be an attack on New York City on September 11th that he would have acted. This remarkable statement, his personal *response* to Richard Clarke's detailed and comprehensive condemnation of his leadership in the "war on terror," was played over and over again by the "US mainstream news media," without comment. It is an outrageous statement, it is a ridiculous statement...and it underscores the political vulnerability and the weak-mindedness of this belligerent, disturbed little man...Meanwhile, Medicare will be bankrupt in a decade, in large part, because of the _resident's Medifraud bill. Do you realize the extent of the Medifraud debacle? The bill itself is a gift to the pharmacuetical industry. To it through the Congress, the Bush cabal's Capitol Hill lackeys resorted to procedural dirty tricks (e.g., screwing with the clock) and allegedly offered bribes to at least one GOP congressman on the floor of the House. Weeks after it was signed into law we learned that it would cost over $100 billions more than was estimated. And only recently was it revealed that this discrepancy was indeed a lie, not a mistake, and that the White House's chief number-cruncher for Medicare was threatened that he would be fired if he told the truth to the Congress or to the US electorate.
CREDIBILITY? COMPETENCE? CHARACTER? Yes, Sen. John F. Kerry and his running mate (the LNS is pulling for either Sen. Bob Graham D-Fraudida or Gen. Wesley Clark D-NATO) must run on SECURITY: NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC SECURITY, ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY, SOCIAL SECURITY and yes MEDICAL SECURITY...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/1546256

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
"The White House Has Played Cover-Up" - Former 9/11 Commission Member Max Cleland Blasts Bush

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is holding public hearings today with testimony by top Bush administration officials. We speak with former commission member Max Cleland who was the chief critic of the White House's lack of cooperation in the investigation. [includes rush transcript]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is holding public hearings with testimony by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as their counterparts in the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. Tomorrow testimony will be given by CIA Director George Tenet; Samuel Berger, former assistant to Clinton for national security affairs; and Richard Clarke. National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice has refused to testify publicly.
Yesterday, a group of Democratic senators released a letter sent to the White House, asking President Bush to compel Rice to testify at the hearing. Rice has met with the panel in private, but aides have said she believes it would set a bad precedent for her to testify publicly.

Meanwhile, a pair of public interest groups, The 9-11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch, have called for the resignation of the director of the independent 9-11 commission, Philip Zelikow.

The calls for resignation come after former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke revealed that Zelikow participated in Bush administration briefings on al Qaeda prior to Sept. 11.

To talk about the commission, we are joined by one of its former members, former Georgia senator Max Cleland. After his appointment to the commission in 2002, Cleland became the chief critic of the White House stonewalling over releasing documents and lack of cooperation.

In October last year, Cleland said the Bush administration was purposely stalling the investigation because of the 2004 election. Cleland said, "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

In November, after the White House set conditions for the examination of documents Cleland said, "If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised."

In December 2003, Cleland stepped down from the commission to become a member of the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

Max Cleland, former Georgia senator. In 2002, he was appointed to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. In December 2003, he stepped down from the commission to become a member of the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We welcome former senator Max Cleland to Democracy Now!

MAX CLELAND: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Can you talk about the hearings and why you feel that the 9-11 commission that you served on has been compromised?

MAX CLELAND: Well, first of all, let's look at what Richard Clarke has said. That’s the man in the White House serving four Presidents, three Republicans and one Democrat, the man responsible for monitoring terrorist activity and threats to the United States. He has come out with a scathing indictment of President Bush, saying he has handled the problem terribly because he had an obsession, basically, he and his top advisers, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, with Iraq. Not an obsession with Osama bin Laden and the terrorist cadre that was increasingly being formed in the 1990's that is responsible, we now know, for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors, or an increasing number of attacks and then ultimately the attack on 9-11. And yet this administration has chosen to focus on Iraq, not al Qaeda. Why? I think that is why the 9-11 commission has been dissed because if you really go into it, you really go into 9-11. You realize that this government had more information at its disposal and, in many ways, failed to understand the threat from al Qaeda, or discounted people like George Tenet who, from 1998 on, said that we were at war with al Qaeda. So, what happens here is that the real information that we did have from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. about al Qaeda was relatively dissed and then Cheney and others went to the C.I.A. and said, look, give us the information that we really want. Richard Clarke recounts in his book that the 12th of September, after Condoleezza Rice had put Richard Clarke in charge of the emergency response in the situation room. The next day Richard Clarke goes in the situation room and they're all talking about Iraq, not al Qaeda. Why is that? Why would the President continue to insist without any shred of evidence to connect Saddam Hussein with this attack? And why would Rumsfeld, on the day of the attacks, September 11, as revealed by Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" published two years ago, in his handwritten notes, say put it all together, tie it all together? Because they had a predisposition back to 1992 to go to war with Iraq. Why? Because I think the Neocons, the Right-wing in America, felt that president Bush I got beaten primarily because he didn't take out Saddam Hussein because -- so that became the real litmus test for foreign policy for the Neocons and for the Right wing. And once Bush got elected and Cheney was Vice President and Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense and Wolfowitz was the number two in the Department of Defense, the Cheney-Wolfowitz plan dating from 1992, to take out Saddam Hussein became the operative foreign policy agenda. Item number one. We now know from secretary O'Neill, a Republican, who was Treasury Secretary under George Bush for a while, that within 10 days of the inauguration of President Bush, he was talking about invading Iraq. So, now if we really examine 9-11, we find that this administration, President Bush, has used 9-11 and the tragedy to this country and to the families in this country, the over 3,000 people who were lost, used that as an excuse to go after Saddam Hussein, not a reason to create the war in Iraq. So, they created a war that they were already predisposed to do and 9-11 gave them the excuse. That is why Osama bin Laden is still on the loose. That is why Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cadre are still blowing up people by the hundreds most recently in Spain, which changed that government and now Spain is withdrawing from Iraq.

I mean, we have a killer and killer organization on the loose and this President has chosen another course to pursue because of his own predilections to I guess avenge his father or follow the Neocon path that Saddam Hussein was the real enemy. The real enemy is Al Qaeda and that's what the 9-11 commission will increasingly find in testimony and they will increasingly find that this government had more information about Al Qaeda from the FBI, dating back to 1994 that planes were planned to be used to hit major targets like big buildings. And if you follow the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Al Qaeda in many ways was behind that and why -- why -- they didn't take their eye off the ball.

But this administration took its eye off the ball and, with a war in Iraq, has got our cream of American forces now bogged down there. We're losing two soldiers a day and I think it is a disaster.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia. Max Cleland also served on the 9-11 commission. A pair of public interest groups, the 9-11 Family Steering Committee and the 9-11 Citizens Watch have called for the resignation of the Director of the Independent 9-11 Commission, Phillip Zelikow. It turns out that in Richard Clarke's book, he reveals how Zelikow participated in Bush administration briefings on Al Qaeda prior to 9-11-and they're saying that this compromises him, since the mandate of the commission was to investigate the source of failures. It is now apparent why they said there has been so little effort to assign individual culpability. We can now see that trail would lead to the staff Director himself. Your response.

MAX CLELAND: That's not the staff director's fault, it is the White House's fault. It's president Bush's fault. President Bush personally has nixed the effort of the 9-11 Commission to get all the documents in the White House, especially the Presidential daily briefs, which basically tell the Commission and the American people what the President knew and when he knew it in regards to the potential attack on 9-11 and the attack itself and the follow-up. He has personally nixed that information coming to 9-11. That means to me that all of the members of that commission will never get to see the real documents that I think are sensitive. The President, as I think John Kerry mentioned, had time to go to rodeo, but didn't have time to appear fully before the 9-11 commission.

Truth of the matter is, the White House has played cover-up and a slow walk to this game from the beginning. Now after sewing to the wind, they're reaping the whirl wind. Now what they've done is forced the Congress to extend the 9-11 Commission two more months, which kicks the final report in July right before the Democratic National Convention. That's not the Democrats' fault. That's not the 9-11 Commission's fault. That is the fault of the White House, to slow up this thing and it never even held any public hearing for six months.

AMY GOODMAN: Now Senator Cleland, we should say that you are actively campaigning for Senator Kerry.

MAX CLELAND: I am.

AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of being a Commissioner, for the periods you served on the 9-11 Commission, what access to documents did you have?

MAX CLELAND: Well, first of all, not much. While I was there, through December of last year, and I was on the commission from December 15 of the previous year, 2002, to December of this past year, for a year. I was there for a whole year. I was ready to go to work December 15.

AMY GOODMAN: You have 10 seconds.

MAX CLELAND: The commission had to subpoena the F.A.A. for documents, had to subpoena NORAD for documents and they will never get the full story. That is one of the tragedies. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, former Georgia Senator, and former member of the 9-11 Commission, Max Cleland. That does it for the show. Tomorrow, we bring you highlights of today's 9-11 hearings.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.

TODAY'S STORIES

Headlines for March 24, 2004

Desperately Seeking Condi: Rice Avoids 9/11 Commission

Bush & Clinton Officials Defend Pre-9/11 Actions At Hearings

"They're trying to divert attention from the truth here," he said. "... And they've got all sorts of people on the taxpayers' rolls going around attacking me and attacking the book and writing talking points and distributing them to radio talk shows...

For the record...Richard Clarke, like Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta), Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fraudida) and Gen. Wesley Clark (D-NATO), is not equivocating or parsing his words or retreating in the least...Quite the contrary, like JFK, Clark and Kerry, he is sticking it to the Bush cabal...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
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http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/23/bush.clarke/index.html#

Clarke rebuffs White House attacks
Defends allegations that Bush used 9/11 to start Iraq
war

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Former White House counter-terrorism
expert Richard Clarke accused the Bush administration
on Tuesday of going on the offensive against him to
"divert attention from the truth" that the
administration did "virtually nothing about al Qaeda
prior to September 11, 2001."

Clarke, author of the newly released book, "Against
All Enemies," also said the administration focused on
alleged Iraqi ties to the terrorist attacks while
there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship was involved.

"The White House is papering over facts, such as in
the weeks immediately after 9/11, the president signed
a national security directive instructing the Pentagon
to prepare for the invasion of Iraq, even though they
knew at the time -- from me, from the FBI, from the
CIA -- that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11," Clarke
said. (Transcript)

Clarke, a 30-year White House veteran who served under
Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton before
the current president, referred to Bush's own comments
to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, author of
"Bush at War," in which the president said he "didn't
have a sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden or al
Qaeda.

"He is saying that," Clarke said. "President Bush said
that to Bob Woodward. I'm not the first one to say
this."

"They're trying to divert attention from the truth
here," he said. "... And they've got all sorts of
people on the taxpayers' rolls going around attacking
me and attacking the book and writing talking points
and distributing them to radio talk shows and what
not, around the country."

But the facts, Clarke said, are that "the
administration had done nothing about al Qaeda prior
to 9/11 despite the fact that the CIA director [George
Tenet] was telling them virtually every day that there
was a major threat."

On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made various news
media appearances defending the administration, while
other administration officials did the same in news
conferences. In most cases, they tried to turn the
attention back to Clarke and away from an important
issue in the president's reelection campaign --
national security.

Rice -- whom Clarke says ignored his memo requesting
an "urgent" meeting on the al Qaeda threat in January
2001 -- accused Clarke of "retrospective rewriting of
history."

"To somehow suggest that the attack on 9/11 could have
been prevented by a series of meetings -- I have to
tell you that during that period of time, we were at
battle stations," she said.

"The only thing I can say about Dick Clarke is he was
here throughout those eight years going back to 1993
and the first attack on the World Trade Center, in
[1998] when the [U.S.] embassies were hit in east
Africa, in 2000, when the USS Cole was hit," Cheney
told conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

"The question that has to be asked is, 'What were they
doing in those days when he was in charge of
counter-terrorism efforts?'"

Clarke answered Cheney's question Tuesday. During the
Clinton administration, he said, al Qaeda was
responsible for the deaths of "fewer than 50
Americans," and Clinton responded with military
action, covert CIA action and by supporting United
Nations sanctions. "They stopped al Qaeda in Bosnia,"
Clarke said, "They stopped al Qaeda from blowing up
embassies around the world."

"Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, where 300 [U.S.
soldiers] were killed in [a bombing attack in Beirut,]
Lebanon, and there was no retaliation," Clarke said.
"Contrast that with the first Bush administration
where 260 Americans were killed [in the bombing of]
Pan Am [Flight] 103, and there was no retaliation."

"I would argue that for what had actually happened
prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a
great deal," Clarke said. "In fact, so much that when
the Bush people came into office, they thought I was a
little crazy, a little obsessed with this little
terrorist bin Laden. Why wasn't I focused on
Iraqi-sponsored terrorism?"

Clarke also called Rice's contention that he never
offered a plan against al Qaeda "counterfactual."

"We presented the plan to her -- call it a plan or
strategy -- we presented it to her before she was even
sworn into office," Clarke said.

And, he said, there were four witnesses to Bush
telling him to look for links between Iraq and the
September 11 attacks.
z
"This is the president in a very intimidating way,
finger in my face, saying, 'I want paper on Iraq and
this attack,'" Clarke said. "Everyone in the room got
the same impression, and everyone recalls it vividly.
So I'm not making it up. I don't have to make it up."

"It's part of a pattern that this administration --
even before they came into office -- was out to get
Iraq even though Iraq was not threatening the United
States," he said.

White House supporters continued their attacks Tuesday
on Clarke and his book.

Rep. David Dreier, R-California, pointed out that
Clarke, in his interview, praised Clinton and
criticized the three Republicans -- although Clarke's
comments were a direct response to the vice
president's query about Clinton's eight years -- and
suggesting that the timing of Clarke's book is clearly
"presidential politics."

Clarke said it was the White House itself that was
responsible for the book's timing.

"I wrote the book as soon as I retired from
government," Clarke said. "It was finished last fall.
And it sat in the White House for months because as a
former White House official, my book has to be
reviewed by the White House for security purposes."

"They're saying, 'Why is the book coming out at the
beginning of the election?'" Clarke said. "I didn't
want it to come out at the beginning of the election.
I wanted it to come out last year. They're the reason,
because they took so long to clear it."

Finally, Clarke said his comments would not absolve
any administration from culpability in the lead-up to
September 11.

"The message is that the United States' mechanisms --
the CIA, the FBI, the DOD, the White House -- failed
during both the Clinton administration and the Bush
administration," Clarke said.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/23/bush.clarke/index.html

SAVE THIS | EMAIL THIS | Close

Check the box to include the list of links referenced
in the article.

... But between the two obsessions, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, we'd say that Clinton, with Clarke's advice, made the right choice.

Yes, the LNS has focused on the Richard Clarke story
almost exclusively for several days. Well, this few
days is pivotal in our history. We may not, if we fail
here, get this opportunity again...Therefore, we are
documenting it as best we can with "profiles in
courage" that underscore Clarke's powerful message...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0323-06.htm

Published on Tuesday, March 23, 2004 by the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Richard Clarke: His Case is Deep, Compelling
Editorial

Americans are going to be seeing a lot of Richard
Clarke in coming days. He's the former White House
counterterrorism chief whose new book, "Against All
Enemies," criticizes the Bush administration for
ignoring the threat from Al-Qaida before Sept. 11,
2001, and focusing almost immediately after on
attacking Iraq. The body of evidence Clarke marshals
to make his case is deep and compelling. That probably
is why the White House already has ginned up its
efforts to discredit both Clarke and his thesis. Whom
to believe? There are many good reasons to believe
Clarke.

Responding to Clarke's interview on "60 Minutes"
Sunday night, White House spokesman Dan Bartlett
dismissed Clarke's charges as a "red herring,"
something designed to draw attention from the real
issue. But no issue is more "real" than what this
administration did both before and after 9/11. That's
the issue being studied right now by a bipartisan
congressional commission, in front of which Clarke
will testify this week.

Bartlett then loosed a red herring of his own: He said
that Clarke is motivated by politics. "He has chosen
at this critical time, in the middle of a presidential
campaign, to inject himself into the political
debate." Well, yes. Clarke left government a year ago;
that seems a reasonable gestation period for a
detailed nonfiction work on an issue of such
importance. Is Bartlett suggesting the information
Clarke provides should have been withheld from the
American people until safely after the election?

A few facts about Clarke: He's a Republican. He served
30 years in government; for 10 years, under three
Republican presidents and one Democrat, he served in
the White House as one of the nation's most senior
national security advisers. Clarke is not a dove. He
believes in an assertive foreign policy and a vigorous
projection of U.S. military power, which should make
him a natural ally of Vice President Dick Cheney,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz. Indeed, while serving as an assistant
secretary of state in the early 1990s, he worked with
Cheney and Wolfowitz to assemble the coalition that
pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. He argued, with
Wolfowitz, that the war ought to be prolonged until
the Iraqi Republican Guard was destroyed. Finally,
what Clarke has to say about the current Bush
administration's obsession from the start with Iraq is
corroborated by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
in his memoir, "The Price of Loyalty."

As for the substance of Clarke's thesis, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice lays out the basics
in the page opposite. Rice's credibility already has
been substantially damaged by her misstatements and
deceptions concerning the intelligence used to justify
the war in Iraq. She makes too many assertions in this
column to discuss, but consider one for which
independent verification is available:

• Rice writes, "We committed more funding to
counterterrorism and intelligence efforts." The
descriptor "more" is deliciously subjective. Funding
for counterterrorism had increased tenfold during the
Clinton years, although a great deal more was sought.
The additional funds were rejected by the
GOP-controlled Congress, as former FBI Director Louis
Freeh testified in October 2002.

In a memo from 2000, Attorney General Janet Reno
identified counterterrorism as her department's top
priority. Both before and immediately after Sept. 11,
Attorney General John Ashcroft and the White House
downplayed the significance of terrorism. Prior to
Sept. 11, the issue disappeared entirely from the list
of Department of Justice priorities. Moreover, on
Sept. 10, 2001, Ashcroft proposed cutting $65 million
for counterterrorism grants to state and local
governments because applications for the funds were
lagging. Immediately after Sept. 11, the FBI requested
an emergency appropriation of $1.5 billion for
counterterrorism. The White House allowed only $531
million, a third of what the FBI said it needed.

Rice would have Americans believe the Bush
administration came into office eager to confront
terrorism and willing to spend what was necessary to
do that. The record, however, says otherwise -- in
budgets, in priorities, in the well corroborated
obsession the administration had with attacking Saddam
Hussein. As it came into office, the Bush
administration's take on President Bill Clinton was
that he had been too obsessed with Osama bin Laden.
The Bush team didn't intend to do that. But between
the two obsessions, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden,
we'd say that Clinton, with Clarke's advice, made the
right choice.

© Copyright 2004 Star Tribune

###

Criticism of President Bush's motives and decision making in attacking Iraq last year may be acquiring critical mass with voters following criticism by former top counterterrorism official Richard Clarke.

The lead story on every newspaper on the street is Hamas, Hamas, Hamas...But in truth, the real lead story of the day is that the _resident's "war on terrorism" has blown up in his face. Well, actually it has blown up in the faces of a lot of other people...US/Pakistani operation in the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan is coming up empty and the chief US government counter-terrorism expert over the last decade has just denounced the _resident for incompetence before and after 9/11...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4635293

Analysis: Iraq Charges Against Bush Begin to Mount
Tue Mar 23, 2004 10:50 AM ET

By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Criticism of President Bush's motives and decision making in attacking Iraq last year may be acquiring critical mass with voters following criticism by former top counterterrorism official Richard Clarke.

Political consultants and analysts said Clarke's
allegation that Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat
before the Sept. 11 attacks and was obsessed by a
desire to invade Iraq were especially damaging because
they confirmed other previous revelations from policy
insiders.

"Each of these revelations adds to the others so that
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the
message gets reinforced with voters," said Richard
Rosecrance, a political scientist at the University of
California, Los Angeles. Before Clarke, there was
former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who asserted
in a book published in January that Bush began laying
the groundwork for an attack on Iraq from the moment
he took office. Then came the bombshell from former
weapons inspector David Kay that the Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction that Bush launched the war to find
and destroy probably did not exist.

Kay on Tuesday warned that U.S. credibility at home
and abroad was in grave danger and urged the Bush
administration to own up to its intelligence failures.

"We are in grave danger of having destroyed our
credibility internationally and domestically with
regard to warning about future events," he said. "The
answer is to admit you were wrong, and what I find
most disturbing around Washington ... is the belief
... you can never admit you're wrong."

Earlier this month, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans
Blix added to the fire by accusing Bush and British
Prime Minister Tony Blair of "exaggerating the risks
they saw in order to get the political support (for
the war) they would not otherwise have had."

The response from the White House, especially to
Clarke, has been fierce and sometimes personal. It
rejects any suggestion that Bush, running for
re-election this year as a "war president," failed to
take the al Qaeda threat seriously.

"The administration can huff and puff but if there are
enough bricks in the structure, they can't blow the
house down any more," said American University
historian Allan Lichtman.

"Right now, you have quite a number of bricks. It's
not just scaffolding any more," he said.

BAD TIMING

Clarke's bombshell came at an awkward time for Bush.
His presidential re-election campaign was just picking
up momentum after being on the defensive for most of
this year. His attacks on his Democratic opponent,
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, seemed to be finding
the mark.

Now, he is back on the defensive again.

"Bush has chosen national security and his response to
the terrorist attack as a cornerstone of his campaign
and now comes this guy Clarke, their guy, who says
that the administration was intentionally or
unintentionally not paying enough attention to the
terrorist threat," said Rick Davis, a Republican
political consultant.

With the economy struggling, Bush's strongest asset is
his claim to be a strong leader best equipped to
protect the country in a "war on terrorism."

"If people start to doubt that claim and if the
message from Clarke and O'Neill and others begins to
stick, it would seriously weaken Bush on his strongest
point," said Fordham University political scientist
Tom DeLuca.

The administration response has usually been to try to
destroy the reputations of its critics. It suggested
O'Neill had illegally used classified documents and
said he was motivated by sour grapes after having been
forced to resign from the Cabinet. A Treasury probe
has cleared him of misusing documents.

Similarly, White House aides said Clarke was bitter
about having been denied a promotion and "out of the
loop" in the administration. They also said he was a
closet Democrat working as a proxy for Bush's
presidential opponent, John Kerry.

"This administration has shown a tremendous ability to
demonize its opponents. But at some point, people
start to ask themselves, could all these people be
pathological liars? At some point, they can't all be
liars," said Democratic consultant Michael Goldman.

Not only did John Ashcroft completely drop terrorism as a priority — it wasn't even mentioned in his list of seven "strategic goals" — just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in counterterrorism funds.

Credibility? Competence? Character? Yes, the 2004
election is a national referendum on the _resident's
fitness to serve in the office to which is was not
elected in 2000...The Emperor has no uniform...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/23/opinion/23KRUG.html?ex=1081029877&ei=1&en=7402f8a2197b54fd

March 23, 2004
Lifting the Shroud
By PAUL KRUGMAN

rom the day it took office, U.S. News & World Report
wrote a few months ago, the Bush administration
"dropped a shroud of secrecy" over the federal
government. After 9/11, the administration's
secretiveness knew no limits — Americans, Ari
Fleischer ominously warned, "need to watch what they
say, watch what they do." Patriotic citizens were
supposed to accept the administration's version of
events, not ask awkward questions.

But something remarkable has been happening lately:
more and more insiders are finding the courage to
reveal the truth on issues ranging from mercury
pollution — yes, Virginia, polluters do write the
regulations these days, and never mind the science —
to the war on terror.

It's important, when you read the inevitable attempts
to impugn the character of the latest whistle-blower,
to realize just how risky it is to reveal awkward
truths about the Bush administration. When Gen. Eric
Shinseki told Congress that postwar Iraq would require
a large occupation force, that was the end of his
military career. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV
revealed that the 2003 State of the Union speech
contained information known to be false, someone in
the White House destroyed his wife's career by
revealing that she was a C.I.A. operative. And we now
know that Richard Foster, the Medicare system's chief
actuary, was threatened with dismissal if he revealed
to Congress the likely cost of the administration's
prescription drug plan.

The latest insider to come forth, of course, is
Richard Clarke, George Bush's former counterterrorism
czar and the author of the just-published "Against All
Enemies."

On "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the
previously unsayable: that Mr. Bush, the
self-proclaimed "war president," had "done a terrible
job on the war against terrorism." After a few hours
of shocked silence, the character assassination began.
He "may have had a grudge to bear since he probably
wanted a more prominent position," declared Dick
Cheney, who also says that Mr. Clarke was "out of the
loop." (What loop? Before 9/11, Mr. Clarke was the
administration's top official on counterterrorism.)
It's "more about politics and a book promotion than
about policy," Scott McClellan said.

Of course, Bush officials have to attack Mr. Clarke's
character because there is plenty of independent
evidence confirming the thrust of his charges.

Did the Bush administration ignore terrorism warnings
before 9/11? Justice Department documents obtained by
the Center for American Progress, a liberal think
tank, show that it did. Not only did John Ashcroft
completely drop terrorism as a priority — it wasn't
even mentioned in his list of seven "strategic goals"
— just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in
counterterrorism funds.

Did the administration neglect counterterrorism even
after 9/11? After 9/11 the F.B.I. requested $1.5
billion for counterterrorism operations, but the White
House slashed this by two-thirds. (Meanwhile, the Bush
campaign has been attacking John Kerry because he once
voted for a small cut in intelligence funds.)

Oh, and the next time terrorists launch an attack on
American soil, they will find their task made much
easier by the administration's strange reluctance,
even after 9/11, to protect potential targets. In
November 2001 a bipartisan delegation urged the
president to spend about $10 billion on top-security
priorities like ports and nuclear sites. But Mr. Bush
flatly refused.

Finally, did some top officials really want to respond
to 9/11 not by going after Al Qaeda, but by attacking
Iraq? Of course they did. "From the very first moments
after Sept. 11," Kenneth Pollack told "Frontline,"
"there was a group of people, both inside and outside
the administration, who believed that the war on
terrorism . . . should target Iraq first." Mr. Clarke
simply adds more detail.

Still, the administration would like you to think that
Mr. Clarke had base motives in writing his book. But
given the hawks' dominance of the best-seller lists
until last fall, it's unlikely that he wrote it for
the money. Given the assumption by most political
pundits, until very recently, that Mr. Bush was
guaranteed re-election, it's unlikely that he wrote it
in the hopes of getting a political job. And given the
Bush administration's penchant for punishing its
critics, he must have known that he was taking a huge
personal risk.

So why did he write it? How about this: Maybe he just
wanted the public to know the truth.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home |
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"It happens in Iraq as elsewhere - Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid. The terrorism that the war in Iraq was supposed to stop is infinitely more powerful today than it was a year ago." There have been at least as many terrorist operations in the past year as ther

The _resident's Coalition of the Witless is coming
apart at the seams, just as his campaign for
*election* is coming apart at the seams...
There are very dangerous days...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/21/1079823239710.html

The Bush doctrine has been turned on its head
March 22, 2004

The invasion of Iraq has frustrated the fight against
terrorism, writes Paul McGeough in Baghdad.

It is late at night and there is gunfire out in the
city, but Baghdad is eerily quiet for the first
anniversary of the start of the war.

The loudest noise came from Washington: George Bush's
troubled plea for unity in the face of world
terrorism. Disagreements "among old and valued
friends", he said disingenuously, "belong to the
past".

Bush is working to corral his postwar coalition in
Iraq. But, as it frays at the edges, British diplomats
are working up a new attempt to legitimise the Iraq
campaign with a proper United Nations mandate.

Consider:

The Spanish are pulling out unless the UN takes over,
and President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland says he
was "taken for a ride" by the US on Saddam Hussein's
supposed weapons of mass destruction.

The Koreans have baulked at moving 3000 troops to
Kirkuk in the north of Iraq, because they fear for
their security; and when the Japanese arrived in the
south - to protect the Iraqi people - they promptly
wrote a cheque for $US95 million ($126 million) for
the local tribes to protect them from the Iraqi
people.

Honduras is sticking with its plan to withdraw 300
soldiers in July, and when Bush recently met the Dutch
Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende pointedly refused
to say how long he would leave his 1300 troops in
Iraq.

Small beer, perhaps. But it is all symptomatic of
rising anger and tension among the old and valued
friends at the insistence of Bush - who may well be
judged by history to have been the ventriloquist's
doll for the ideologues around him - that his very
necessary war on terrorism did not need to be swamped
by war and its uncertain aftermath in Iraq.

But the old friends just get bolshier. The French
Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was straight
up in his assessment of the first year. "The war in
Iraq was a mistake, I would even say, a blunder. We
cannot fail to see that there are two centres that
feed terrorism today: the first is the Middle East
crisis, the second is Iraq."

Right behind him was the European Commission
President, Romano Prodi. "It happens in Iraq as
elsewhere - Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid. The terrorism
that the war in Iraq was supposed to stop is
infinitely more powerful today than it was a year
ago."

There have been at least as many terrorist operations
in the past year as there were in the previous 12
months, and that is with an estimated two-thirds of
al-Qaeda's known leadership dead or behind bars.

The arch villain - Osama bin Laden - remains free and
his terrorist organisation has morphed into something
even more dangerous than what existed before the
September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Previously, bin Laden's lieutenants went out into the
world, buying into terrorist plots they thought to be
worthwhile investments. Subsequently, the Bush
Administration, with echoes from Tony Blair and John
Howard, has enhanced the myth that it is all - and
only - bin Laden's work.

What seems to have happened is more insidious.

The notion of a bin Laden chain of command has been
superseded by a sort of McDonald's of terrorism,
franchise cells and groups that want to be like
al-Qaeda, carrying a torch for the man in the cave
without ever receiving direct orders. The word simply
goes out in the Arab media and it is absorbed - war
against the US. And when they strike, they pack the
punch by claiming that it was done in the name of
al-Qaeda.

The CIA director, George Tenet, told the US Senate as
much this month when he said: "A serious threat will
remain for the foreseeable future, with or without
al-Qaeda in the picture."

And Blair's special representative for Iraq, Jeremy
Greenstock, almost as though he was surprised by the
outcome, applied the Tenet dictum to Iraq when he
warned of the damage to the country and its people
from terrorism. "Something new has grown in this area.
It has happened in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in
Colombia, in the Middle East peace process and now
it's threatening Western Europe - it's already
happened in Madrid.

"Iraq is a now a theatre where they're trying to
maximise this damage."

Between them, it is an admission that the war in Iraq
has helped al-Qaeda and its followers.

The hotel from which I write, The Palestine, was
crowded with the first of the foreign fighters to
arrive in Iraq in the first week of war last year.
They have long since fanned out around the country and
they are thought to number several hundred, working
with the desperate and the nationalist in Iraq to
capitalise on Arab anger as they challenge the Western
invasion of a Muslim country and, at the same time,
attempt to split the Bush coalition.

In Iraq and elsewhere, they have turned the Bush
doctrine on its head. Just as Bush went after the
terrorists and those who harboured them, and
threatened those who would not support him, the
terrorist attacks in Iraq and beyond have been against
those who have helped Bush.

The protest marches around the world this weekend and
the fraying at the edges of the Iraq coalition,
especially the outcome of the Spanish election, raise
a dire question: is terrorism winning over democracy?

Superficially, maybe.

But something more fundamental is happening, something
very democratic: leaders are being held to account,
because the Bush case for war in Iraq has been proved
to be a lie that was supported by Blair and Howard.

We were told the war was to get rid of Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction - they did not exist. It
was to save us from the link between Saddam and
al-Qaeda - there was none. This was to be a quick war
- the soldiers were to be welcomed with songs and
flowers, but they will be stuck here for years to come
and it might be a civil war that gives birth to the
new Iraq - not Bush's liberation.

Some good has come of it all - Saddam is gone and
Libya has come into line. Syria is nervous. But North
Korea and Iran still play nuclear hardball, and the
Palestine-Israel stalemate continues to pollute daily
life right across the Middle East. And US military
resources and world attention have been distracted
almost totally from the fight against terrorism.

The goal of freedom for all is fine, even if Bush came
to it for the Iraqis 13 years too late and only after
the rest of his spurious case for war fell apart. And
it is not enough to drape the country in the flag; to
insist that "we must support the troops" by not
debating why they are here; and to have the aimless
ra-ra of the State of the Union address. That is the
sort of theatre Saddam engaged in.

Enough has leaked from the White House to confirm that
the war was a decision made before it was justified.
This weekend there was more evidence - Richard Clarke,
Bush's counter-terrorism co-ordinator in September,
2001, told American 60 Minutes that within 24 hours of
the attacks the Administration was convinced that
al-Qaeda was responsible, but the Defence Secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, had complained that "there aren't any
good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good
targets in Iraq".

Rumsfeld obsesses about uncertainty. As explained to
The Atlantic Monthly by one of his deputies, Douglas
Feith: "the need to deal strategically with
uncertainty; the inability to predict the future; the
limits on our knowledge and the limits on our
intelligence". That's a windy way of saying that the
end justifies the means.

But people are not as stupid as the White House would
like. Just as Spanish voters saw what their government
was doing - using the Madrid bombing for an
election-eve smash at ETA, the Basque separatists,
when everything pointed to al-Qaeda - the brutalised
people of Iraq are the same.

They are indeed grateful to be rid of Saddam, but they
loathe this occupation; they deeply resent the
security crisis it has visited on them; and they feel
humiliated by it. And they openly mock the superpower
that said: "It'll all come right."

The US in Iraq is still demonstrating what it cannot
do, not what it can do. Already it is retreating to
the safety of its "hard" bases and talking up the
competence of Iraq's incompetent new security and
emergency services - which have had less training than
the security staff at your local Target store - so
that it can foist the mess on them when sovereignty is
handed over on June 30.

But the US is so entrenched in Iraq that it is hard to
see it being able to devote its full resources to
fighting terrorism any time soon.

So it seems that, when the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States calls, the Bush Administration's national security is not available. But when Rupert Murdoch calls, well, how could Condoleezza Rice refuse?

It's the Media, Stupid.

Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0322-07.htm

Published on Monday, March 22, 2004 by The Nation
When Rupert Murdoch Calls...Condoleezza Rice Answers
by John Nichols

Last Friday, the Bush Administration was busy pumping
up hopes that the war on terrorism was about to yield
a victory: the capture along the border between
Pakistan and Afghanistan of the reputed No. 2 man in
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. As it turned out,
Dr Ayman Al-Zawahri was probably not among the
militants holed up in the heavily fortified compounds
that were assaulted by Pakistani troops and their US
advisors.

But, by most measures, the prospective capture of what
Administration aides described as "a high-value
target" was treated as a very big deal by the Bush
White House. At the same time, Administration aides
were busy trying to hold together the coalition of the
sort-of willing that was cobbled together to support
the invasion of Iraq. With Spain's new prime minister
declaring the occupation "a disaster" and threatening
to withdraw that country's troops from Iraq, and with
Poland's president telling European reporters that his
country was "misled" about the nature of the threat
posed by Iraq, the Administration has its hands full.

Surely, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, a
key player on all the fronts that were in play, had a
very long list of responsibilities. No time for
diversions on Friday, right? Wrong.

Rice took time out of the middle of the day to address
a secretive gathering that included global media mogul
Rupert Murdoch and top executives from television
networks, newspapers and other media properties owned
by Murdoch's News Corp. conglomerate. Rice spoke at
some length via satellite to Murdoch and his cronies,
who had gathered at the posh Ritz Carlton Hotel in
Cancun Mexico, according to reports published in the
British press.

The Guardian newspaper, which sent a reporter to
Cancun, revealed that Rice was asked to address the
group by executives of the Murdoch-controlled Fox
broadcast and cable networks in the US. The Fox
"family" includes, of course, the Fox News cable
channel, which the Guardian correctly describes as
"hugely supportive of President George Bush."

"Although she is not there in person, the presence of
Ms. Rice underlines the importance of Rupert Murdoch's
news operations to the Bush administration, which may
face growing criticism that it led the country into
war on false pretences ahead of November's
presidential election," the Guardian account of the
Cancun gathering explained.

In addition to Fox, Murdoch controls the Bush-friendly
Weekly Standard magazine and New York Post newspaper,
as well as 35 local television stations and the 20th
Century Fox movie studio. Thanks to Bush
Administration appointees to the Federal
Communications Commission, Murdoch's reach is rapidly
expanding in the US. In December, the FCC approved
News Corp.'s $6.6-billion takeover of DirecTV, the
country's leading satellite television firm.

That decision made Murdoch the only media executive
with satellite, cable and broadcast assets in the US.

In other words, Rupert Murdoch is a very powerful
player in the media – and, because of his willingness
to turn his properties into mouthpieces for the
administration, in the politics of the United States.
So it should probably not come as any surprise that,
like the politicians in any number of countries where
Murdoch has come to dominate the discourse, Bush
Administration officials answer Rupert's call – even
when they are supposedly preoccupied with national
security concerns.

Rice's willingness to brief Fox executives is
especially intriguing in light of the fact that she
continues to refuse to brief the bipartisan panel that
is investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
is expected to hear this week from Central
Intelligence Agency director George Tenet, Secretary
of State Colin Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine
Albright; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his
predecessor, William Cohen; and President Bill
Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger. But
Rice has rejected invitations to testify in public.

So it seems that, when the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States calls, the
Bush Administration's national security is not
available. But when Rupert Murdoch calls, well, how
could Condoleezza Rice refuse?

Copyright © 2004 The Nation

The Bush administration has failed in its most critical role: to reduce the terrorist threat to the American people.

Another US soldier has died in Iraq. For what?
White House press secretary Scott McSullen didn't look very comfortable or believable this morning, did he? (Ari Fleischer got out of town just in time.)The CBS 60 Minutes interview with Richard Clarke was a powerful condemnation, a powerful blow to the feigned CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the _resident...It was a moment of TRUTH rare in these troubled times...Clarke proved himself a brave, bright, strong, eloquent and angry man...Not even Ariel Sharon's missiles could save the Bush Cabal from a bad day...Immediately, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fraudida)--one of the LNS favorites, along with Wesley Clark (D-NATO), on the very short list of Kerry VP choices, issued an articulate, authorative statement underscoring the _resident's failure in leadership: "The facts are that within six months of the first bombs falling on Afghanistan, this administration was diverting military and intelligence resources to its planned war in Iraq, which allowed Al Qaeda to regenerate," said Mr. Graham, who was one of the first lawmakers to label the war with Iraq a distraction from the fight against terror. "As the people of Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and most recently Spain have learned painfully well, this president failed to execute the real war on terrorism."
Now, Wes Clark, Hillary Clinton (D-NY), the International Firefighters Association and the 9/11 Families and others have to stand up, just as Bob Graham has, and keep heated attention on Richard Clarke's stunning insights...Yes, there is a lot of other news today...But stay disciplined, stay on message...Here are the talking points provided by John Podesta's Center for American Progress...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=39254

Administration Ignored Real Terrorist Threat

March 22, 2004

The Bush administration has failed in its most critical role: to reduce the terrorist threat to the American people. That's the message from former White House counterrorism expert Richard Clarke whose new memoir says the administration "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings." The administration's singular focus on Saddam Hussein led to "an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide," according to Clarke, who served under four presidents.

The Bush administration downgraded multiple warnings about al Qaeda prior to 9/11. White House officials neglected strong warnings from former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger about the critical threat from al Qaeda, choosing instead to focus on things like missile defense and deposing Saddam Hussein. While the cabinet-rank "principals" were meeting at least weekly on terrorism during the Clinton administration, the first cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda occurred nine months after the Bush administration came to office and one week before the attacks on New York and Washington.
After Sept. 11, 2001, the administration used the terrorist attacks for political and ideological gain. Clarke reveals that on Sept. 12, 2001 President Bush ordered him to, "Look into Iraq, Saddam," despite clear evidence that al Qaeda was behind the attacks and despite the lack of any credible link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The administration immediately used the tragedy and outpouring of public support to shift attention to its decades-long agenda of ousting Saddam Hussein – a critical lapse in judgment that did nothing to stop the ongoing threat from al Qaeda.
The administration's misguided war against Iraq diverted critical focus from al Qaeda. The administration's disingenuous and inept handling of Iraq is now fully exposed. Instead of focusing on bin Laden and al Qaeda, key Bush administration officials chose to follow up on their long-term dream to overthrow Saddam. And the administration deceived the American people by promoting a war in Iraq that has failed to address the real terrorist threat.
Daily Talking Points is a product of the Center for American Progress, a non-partisan research and educational institute committed to progressive principles for a strong, just and free America.

"But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something."

Finally, we have arrived, in this country, on the verge of a public debate on the _resident's pre-9/11 performance in the "war on terrorism." It is hard to accept that we have actually gotten so far...It is not hard to believe that something will happen somewhere in the world to interrupt either the airing of tonight's CBS 60 Minutes or divert attention from the public debate that should follow it...The LNS assumes that Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) will add the pre-9/11 incompetence ("criminal negligence"?) and post-9/11 cover-up, exploitation and misdirection to the indictment filed in the court of public opinion...He MUST...But what will the "US mainstream news media" and its propapunditgandists do? Remember, we are only on the verge...There is the _residential intelligence briefing in August 2001, there are the blacked out pages in the Congressional report on 9/11, there are questions about the Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, who were allowed to flee the US while all air traffic was grounded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there is the long and lucrative business relationship of the Bush Cabal and the Saudi elite in general and the Bin Laden family in particular, there is the PNAC document's wistful hope for "another Pearl Harbor" to legitimize US military action to seize the Arab oil, and YES, there is the story of John O'Neill as documented by PBS Frontline, the New Yorker and the French book, Forbidden Truth...CREDIBILITY? COMPETENCE? CHARACTER? Yes, this campaign will culminate in a national referendum on the _resident's fitness to serve in the office to which he was not elected...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-03-20-clarke_x.htm?csp=24

Posted 3/20/2004 12:30 PM Updated 3/20/2004 8:38 PM

Former counterterror adviser slams White House, Rumsfeld
WASHINGTON (AP) — Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, accuses the Bush administration of failing to recognize the al-Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and then manipulating America into war with Iraq with dangerous consequences.

Former Bush counterterror adviser Richard Clarke says Bush was stuck on Cold War issues.
By Paul Sakuma, AP file

He accuses Bush of doing "a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, writes in a new book going on sale Monday that Bush and his Cabinet were preoccupied during the early months of his presidency with some of the same Cold War issues that had faced his father's administration.

"It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier," Clarke told CBS for an interview Sunday on its 60 Minutes program.

CBS' corporate parent, Viacom Inc., owns Simon & Schuster, publisher for Clarke's book, Against All Enemies.

Clarke acknowledges that, "there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too." He said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Jan. 24, 2001, asking "urgently" for a Cabinet-level meeting "to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack." Months later, in April, Clarke met with deputy cabinet secretaries, and the conversation turned to Iraq.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke said. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something."

The Associated Press first reported in June 2002 that Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions.

The last of those two meetings occurred Sept. 4 as the security council put finishing touches on a proposed national security policy review for the president. That review was finished Sept. 10 and was awaiting Bush's approval when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

Almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Clarke said the president asked him directly to find whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings.

"Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this,'" said Clarke, who told the president that U.S. intelligence agencies had never found a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection,' and in a very intimidating way," Clarke said.

CBS said it asked Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy on the national security council, about the incident, and Hadley said: "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."

CBS responded to Hadley that it found two people it did not identify who recounted the incident independently, and one of them witnessed the conversation.

"I stand on what I said," Hadley told CBS, "but the point I think we're missing in this is, of course the president wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9-11."

Clarke also harshly criticizes Bush over his decision to invade Iraq, saying it helped brew a new wave of anti-American sentiment among supporters of Osama bin Laden. "Bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.' This is part of his propaganda," Clarke said. "So what did we do after 9/11? We invade ... and occupy an oil-rich Arab country, which was doing nothing to threaten us."

Clarke retired early in 2003 after 30 years in government service. He was among the longest-serving White House staffers, transferred in from the State Department in 1992 to deal with threats from terrorism and narcotics.

Clarke previously led the government's secretive Counterterrorism and Security Group, made up of senior officials from the FBI, CIA, Justice Department and armed services, who met several times each week to discuss foreign threats.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

"...but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.

Two more US soliders have died in Iraq. For what?
This presidential election must be defined as a
national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCY and
CHARACTER of the _resident...Richard Clarke's name is
already scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes,
but the LNS has been waiting impatiently for his book,
"Against All Enemies." It is going to shed the harsh
light of eyewitness truth on some very nasty
business...There is no coincidence at all in the fact
that Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta)returns from
his Idaho retreat the day after Clarke's appearance on
60 Minutes this Sunday...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml

Sept. 11: Before And After
March 19, 2004

Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke
tells Correspondent Lesley Stahl that on Sept. 11,
2001, and the day after - when it was clear al Qaeda
had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush
administration was considering bombing Iraq in
retaliation.

Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60
Minutes, Sunday, March 21 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Clarke was surprised that the attention of
administration officials was turning toward Iraq when
he expected the focus to be on al Qaeda and Osama bin
Laden.

"They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were
talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing
the highest government officials, including President
Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the
aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

"Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all
said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan,"
recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any
good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good
targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of
good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing
to do with [the September 11 attacks].'"

Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the
reason for the focus on Iraq.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a
connection [between Iraq and al Qaeda], but the CIA
was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was
sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for
years. For years we've looked and there's just no
connection,'" says Clarke.

Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more
about the current administration's reaction to
terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies."

"Until 9/11, counterterrorism was a very secondary issue at the Bush White House," said a senior Clinton official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/politics/20PANE.html?ei=1&en=1ec310ccde3a774f&ex=1080795019&pagewanted=print&position=

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 20, 2004
Clinton Aides Plan to Tell Panel of Warning Bush Team
on Qaeda
By PHILIP SHENON

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

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

One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke,
who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism
coordinator, said in an interview that the warning
about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more
bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence
briefings that he led.

At the time of the briefings, there was extensive
evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two
months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in
which 17 sailors were killed.

"It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning
given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was
briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in."
Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief
in the early months of the administration, but after
Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the
president's cyberterrorism adviser.

The sworn testimony from the high-ranking Clinton
administration officials — including Secretary of
State Madeleine K. Albright, Defense Secretary William
S. Cohen and Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national
security adviser — is scheduled for Tuesday and
Wednesday.

They are expected to testify along with Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, who will answer for the Bush administration,
as well as George J. Tenet, director of central
intelligence in both administrations.

While Clinton officials have offered similar accounts
in the past, a new public review of how they warned
Mr. Bush's aides about the need to deal quickly with
the Qaeda threat could prove awkward to the White
House, especially in the midst of a presidential
campaign. But given the witnesses' prominence in the
Clinton administration, supporters of Mr. Bush may see
political motives in the testimony of some of them.

The testimony could also prove uncomfortable for the
commission, since Mr. Zelikow is now the executive
director of the bipartisan panel. And the Clinton
administration officials can expect to come under
tough questioning about their own performance in
office and why they did not do more to respond to the
terrorist threat in the late 1990's.

The White House does not dispute that intelligence
briefings about the Qaeda threat occurred during the
transition, and the commission has received extensive
notes and other documentation from the White House and
Clinton administration officials about what was
discussed.

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

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

The White House rejects any suggestion that it failed
to act on the threats of Qaeda terrorism before the
Sept. 11 attacks.

"The president and his team received briefings on the
threat from Al Qaeda prior to taking office, and
fighting terrorism became a top priority when this
administration came into office," Sean McCormack, a
White House spokesman, said. "We actively pursued the
Clinton administration's policies on Al Qaeda until we
could get into place a more comprehensive policy."

Mr. Zelikow, the director of the Miller Center of
Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and a
co-author of a 1995 book with Ms. Rice, has been the
target of repeated criticism from some relatives of
Sept. 11 victims. They have said his membership on the
Bush transition team and his ties to Ms. Rice pose a
serious conflict of interest for the commission, which
is investigating intelligence and law-enforcement
actions before the attacks.

Mr. Clarke said if Mr. Zelikow left any of the White
House intelligence briefings in December 2000 and
January 2001 without understanding the imminent threat
posed by Al Qaeda, "he was deaf."

Mr. Zelikow said in an interview that he has recused
himself from any part of the investigation that
involves the transition, to avoid the appearance of a
conflict of interest. He said his participation in the
Qaeda intelligence briefings was already well known.
"The fact of what occurred in these briefings is not
really disputed," he said.

Ms. Rice has refused a request to testify at the
hearings next week, saying it would violate White
House precedent for an incumbent national security
adviser to appear in public at a hearing of what the
White House considers a legislative body. She has
given a private interview to several members of the
commission.

The commission, known formally as the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, was created by Congress in 2002 over the
initial objections of the Bush administration.

Ms. Albright and Mr. Cohen declined to be interviewed
about their testimony. Mr. Berger refused to discuss
details of his testimony, saying only, "I intend to
talk about what we did in the Clinton administration,
as well as my recommendations for the future."

In the past, Mr. Berger has said that he and his staff
organized the intelligence briefings in December 2000
at which Ms. Rice, Mr. Hadley and Mr. Zelikow were
warned in detail about the Qaeda threat and that on
his departure, he advised Ms. Rice that he believed
the Bush administration would be forced to spend more
time on dealing with Al Qaeda than on any other
subject.

In his testimony, Mr. Clarke is also expected to
discuss what he believed to be the Bush
administration's determination to punish Saddam
Hussein for the Sept. 11 attacks even though there was
no evidence to tie the Iraqi president to Al Qaeda.

The issue is addressed in a new book by Mr. Clarke,
and in an interview to promote the book on "60
Minutes" on CBS-TV scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Clarke
said that the White House considered bombing Iraq in
the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, even when it
became clear that Al Qaeda was responsible.

"I think they wanted to believe there was a
connection, but the C.I.A. was sitting there, the
F.B.I. was sitting there, saying, `We've looked at
this issue for years — for years, we've looked, and
there's just no connection,' " Mr. Clarke said. He
recalled telling Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that
"there are a lot of good targets in a lot of places,
but Iraq had nothing to do" with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The White House has insisted that it acted
aggressively throughout 2001 on the warnings to deal
with the threat from Qaeda terrorists, and that there
was an exhaustive staff review throughout the spring
and summer, with a proposal ready for President Bush
in early September to step up the government's efforts
to destroy the terrorist network.

The Clinton administration witnesses may face
difficult questions at the hearings about why they did
not do more to deal with Qaeda immediately after the
Cole attack and the discovery the previous winter that
Qaeda terrorists had come close to coordinated attacks
timed to the Dec. 31, 1999, festivities for the new
millennium.

"There was no contemplation of any military action
after the millennium plots, and there should have
been," said Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the
commission and a former senator from Nebraska.

"The Cole is even worse, because that was an attack on
a military target," he said. "It was military against
military. It was an Islamic army against our Navy.
Just because you don't have a nation-state as your
adversary doesn't mean you should not consider a
declaration of war."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home |
Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to
Top

Bush Medicare Reform Bill Become a Nightmare for GOP

When will the "US mainstream news media" and its
propapunditgandists give this story the attention it
warrants? There is no more compelling indictment of
the network news shows than their refusal to lead
their broadcasts with it? No, instead they spend their
air time carrying Rove's water in the maligning of
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta)...

Cleanse the White House of the Chickenhawk Coup and
Its Corrupt Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8231107.htm

Posted on Fri, Mar. 19, 2004

Bush Medicare Reform Bill Become a Nightmare for GOP

By William Douglas, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Mar. 19--WASHINGTON - Enactment of a sweeping Medicare
reform law last year was supposed to be the crowning
achievement of President Bush's "compassionate
conservatism" as he readied himself for re-election.

By providing a federally subsidized prescription-drug
benefit for senior citizens, albeit a limited one,
administration officials felt they usurped a major
issue from the Democrats and cut into Democratic
support among seniors age 65 and over -- an especially
important voting bloc in key battleground states such
as Florida.

But less than four months after he signed it into law
on Dec. 8, Bush's Medicare-reform dream has turned
into a nightmare and a potential drag on his bid for
re-election.

-- The Bush administration deliberately didn't tell
Congress that the measure could cost more than $100
billion more than advertised.

-- House Republican leaders abused House rules to push
the measure to a narrow victory. There are also
allegations of threats and bribes that are under
investigation.

-- The Bush administration spent millions of taxpayer
dollars on public service TV ads touting the Medicare
reform law that look suspiciously like Bush campaign
commercials. Those, too, are now under investigation.

-- Polls show that a majority of Americans don't like
the Medicare reforms.

"It's something that's eating away at the credibility
of the administration in an election year on a bill
that he (Bush) thought was a building block for his
re-election," said Stephen Hess, a political analyst
for the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank,
and a former aide to President Eisenhower.

The law's afterglow faded fast once lawmakers learned
it could cost at least $100 billion more than the $395
billion over 10 years that the White House originally
advertised. That White House revelation in late
January riled budget hawks who'd said they wouldn't
vote for the measure if it cost more than $400
billion. The measure probably would have failed if the
higher cost estimate had been known.

Lawmakers got steamed after the nation's top Medicare
actuary, Richard S. Foster, told Knight Ridder that he
had projected the higher cost long before Congress
voted in November. Lawmakers were never told about his
higher cost estimates because he says he was ordered
by his boss, former Medicare Administrator Thomas
Scully, to withhold them from Congress or he would be
fired.

House Democrats, led by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.,
the ranking member of the House Government Reform
Committee, are threatening a lawsuit to force Health
and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to turn
over all of Foster's undisclosed estimates. And
they're not stopping with Thompson.

Waxman and four other senior House Democrats fired off
a letter Friday to White House chief of staff Andrew
Card demanding that the White House disclose its role
in withholding the information from Congress.

"In this case, there appears to have been extensive
White House involvement in the development of the cost
estimates for the prescription drug provisions," the
letter asserts.

In an interview with Knight Ridder, Foster said he was
reasonably sure that Doug Badger, a White House health
policy adviser, was aware of the higher cost
estimates. Foster said Scully hinted that he was being
pressured by Bush administration officials to withhold
the cost projections from Congress.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said earlier this
week that Badger didn't order Scully to muzzle Foster.
Scully, who now works at a local law firm specializing
in health care matters, didn't return a call for
comment.

Duffy said Friday the White House isn't likely to
cooperate with the investigation that the Democrats
are requesting.

The HHS inspector general's office is investigating
Foster's assertion that Scully ordered him to withhold
cost estimates from members of Congress.

Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, called
the Medicare issue "much ado about nothing" on Friday
because Congress relies on cost estimates for
legislation made by the Congressional Budget Office,
not the executive branch. In a Friday interview with
the editorial board of The Miami Herald, Rove refused
to say whether he was involved in the decision to
withhold the high cost estimates.

Democrats hope to get answers Wednesday during a House
Ways and Means Committee hearing on the long-term
financial health of Medicare. However, Foster wasn't
confirmed as a witness Friday; congressional witness
lists are set by the majority party, currently
Republicans.

Foster met Friday with Ways and Means members and
staff from both parties and stood by his cost
estimates while acknowledging that CBO's lower
estimates were professionally executed and could be
correct.

Many lawmakers felt abused when Republican leaders
pushed the bill through the House of Representatives
on Nov. 22 by keeping the vote open for nearly three
hours -- usually votes are allowed only 15 minutes --
and by twisting GOP members' arms until they supported
it.

The House Ethics Committee has launched an
investigation into allegations by Rep. Nick Smith,
R-Mich., that "bribes and special deals were offered"
to induce him to vote for the bill in that period.

Smith, who voted against the bill, has said that
unidentified Republican power brokers offered
"extensive financial support and endorsements for my
son, Brad, who is running for my seat. They also made
threats of working against Brad if I voted no."

HHS Secretary Thompson sat beside Smith on the House
floor, talking to him avidly for about an hour before
the final Nov. 22 vote.

Smith later backed off his bribery claim, but the
Ethics Committee is proceeding anyway.

In addition, the General Accounting Office, the
investigative arm of Congress, is examining whether
HHS television ads touting the new Medicare law --
with pictures of Bush prominent -- constitute illegal
political propaganda. GAO already has concluded that
the ads contain "notable omissions and errors," but
its preliminary judgment was that they are legal.

The ads -- called "video news releases" by the
administration -- feature an actor portraying a
television news reporter and are being offered to
local TV news shows. Critics say the ads are intended
to make viewers think they are watching objective news
reports.

The law provides limited prescription-drug coverage
for about 40 million seniors. It also makes it easier
for cheaper generic drugs to reach the marketplace.

The law's centerpiece is the drug benefit, which will
not be available until 2006. Until then, seniors would
get drug-discount cards that could net savings of 10
percent to 25 percent off market prices.

Under the full drug benefit, seniors would pay a $250
deductible, a $34 monthly premium and 25 percent of
the cost of drugs between $250 and $2,250. Seniors
would encounter a gap in coverage after $2250 until
their out-of-pocket expenses reaches $3,600 or $5,100
in total drug expenses. At that point, they'd pay only
5 percent of their additional drug costs.

A Gallup poll in January revealed public
dissatisfaction with the reforms. Fifty-three percent
of those surveyed said the new prescription drug
benefit didn't go far enough; 27 percent said it was
about right while 9 percent said it went too far.
Eleven percent of the poll's respondents had no
opinion.

The mushrooming controversy is spurring cries of
cover-up from Democrats.

"There is no place for silencing the truth," said Sen.
John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic
presidential candidate. "I believe the American people
deserve real answers on why this administration is
keeping public officials quiet and keeping facts from
the American people. We deserve better than this."

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., echoed the Watergate-era
line this week: "What did the president know and when
did he know it?"

By week's end, congressional Republicans were rallying
behind Bush and the Medicare reforms. They dismissed
complaints about the bill's hidden cost estimates,
ongoing investigations and controversy over the HHS
ads as simply a Democratic scheme to discredit a GOP
triumph.

The controversy "says more about the Democratic attack
machine than it says about the bill," said John
Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
R-Ill.

Independent analysts, including conservatives, weren't
so sanguine.

"This bill will not go down in the annals of good
government," said Robert E Moffitt, the director of
the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage
Foundation. "Now it's a political problem."

-----

© 2004, Knight Ridder. Distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Business News.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© 2004 KRT Wire and wire service sources. All Rights
Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

"If Stern could turn several million Bush supporters away from Bush, that has even more impact than Rush Limbaugh, who's preaching to the choir. So this is pivotal to what is shaping up to be a close election."

Howard Stern has joined a media elite that
includes Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers and Christiana
Amanpour. Stern's name has been scrawled on the John
O'Neill Wall of Heroes. There is an Electoral Uprising
coming in November. We are, therefore, in grave danger
of the Tommy Franks factor kicking in. Remember?
In an interview with Cigar Afficianado, the
_resident's now "retired" General said, with a wink
and a nod, 'Oh,if there is another 9/11 they will
declare martial law." Look it up in the searchable LNS
database at www.mindspace.org\liberation-news-service\

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the US
Mainstream News Media, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/03/18/could_sterns_anti_bush_rants_shock_the_vote/

Could Stern's anti-Bush rants shock the vote?
By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff, 3/18/2004

American liberals have been waiting for a perch on
talk radio, a medium dominated by conservative and
right-wing voices since the 1980s. And on March 31,
the new Air America Radio network will give them a
nascent one, as it premieres in the New York, Los
Angeles, and Chicago markets. Just as "The Daily Show"
brings an openly lefty spin to TV news, Air America
will fly in the face of the right wing with hosts
including Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Marty
Kaplan.

But wait a minute: Is "shock jock" Howard Stern --
stripper aficionado, champion of misfits everywhere,
all-purpose radio provocateur -- already giving
liberals a voice on the airwaves? And is that voice
powerful enough to affect the upcoming presidential
election?

Since the FCC crackdown on media "indecency" in the
wake of Janet Jackson's Nipplegate incident, Stern has
transformed his morning variety show into a rabidly
anti-Bush talk forum. Every weekday, he has been
devoting hours of his broadcast (locally on WBCN-FM,
104.1) to impassioned criticism of President Bush and
support of Senator John Kerry. Railing tirelessly
against the president, Stern has been attacking Bush's
yoking together of church and state, the legitimacy of
his National Guard service, his use of Sept. 11
imagery in his campaign ads, his stances regarding
First Amendment rights, his handling of Iraq, and his
stands on gay marriage and stem-cell research.

"Join me and friends of this show who are outraged,"
Stern said on the air last Friday. "Vote out every
Republican you can find." He has also been urging his
listeners to send money to Kerry's campaign, calling
him "a good man" and praising his record in Vietnam as
well as his later criticism of the Vietnam War.

"With all the talk of liberal talk radio," says
Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers
magazine, "we're seeing emerging from the ranks of
`shock jocks' one of the most potent and articulate
liberal talkers we've seen in years."

Harrison calls Stern's's recent crusade "historic."
"Anytime you have somebody suddenly igniting political
interest with an audience who has the kind of loyalty
factor Stern has, it could turn an election." A large
percentage of Stern's listeners -- some 8 1/2 million
a week -- were leaning in favor of Bush, Harrison
says. "If Stern could turn several million Bush
supporters away from Bush, that has even more impact
than Rush Limbaugh, who's preaching to the choir. So
this is pivotal to what is shaping up to be a close
election."

"On a national level, I don't know how much influence
Stern could have," says Chuck Todd, editor of The
Hotline, a Washington-based daily briefing on
politics. "But we assume too little at our own peril
when it comes to Stern and talk radio in general. . .
. Does Bush really need to worry about him? If New
York were a swing state, we definitely would take this
more seriously. Is Stern's popularity as devoted
outside of New York? We only know it is ratings-wise."

Stern is frequently dismissed, by liberals and
conservatives alike, as a sexist, a racist, and a
narcissist. But he is one of the most influential
entertainers in America, particularly among the
much-sought-after 18-to-25-year-old male demographic.
His show is a critical stop for actors plugging
youth-market movies, and his skits serve as the
blueprint for many reality TV concepts. Last month, in
an effort to borrow some of Stern's mojo, Jay Leno
hired Stern sidekick "Stuttering John" Melendez to be
an announcer and correspondent on "The Tonight Show."

Harrison says that Stern's audience is broader than
most people realize. "They're not just 18-year-old,
beer-drinking yahoos. They're 20- and 30- and
40-something professionals. They're mainstream
American citizens who are well-educated and affluent
and socially active and politically interested, though
not politically active. But they're being motivated.
Wouldn't that be amazing if millions of people vote
who otherwise wouldn't, because of this issue?"

"Some people will dismiss Stern not because they don't
believe he has a following, but because they believe
his listeners don't vote," Todd says. "I would argue
that a swing voter is just that; they swing between
not voting and voting, not between the two parties. So
if he brings some nonvoters to the polls, then that's
a big impact."

Over the years, Stern has occasionally taken political
positions. In the 1994 New York gubernatorial
election, he briefly ran as the Libertarian Party
candidate, before withdrawing and endorsing Republican
George Pataki. "One could argue that he had an effect
on that New York governor's race, that he was an
impact player," Todd

says. And until recently, Stern was supportive of Bush
and the decision to go to war in Iraq. But Stern has
never come out so relentlessly for or against a
politician, and he is best known as someone who would
just as soon joke about flatulence and prostitution as
take on the government. His anti-Bush push began in
earnest after the FCC crackdown on "indecency"
inspired Clear Channel -- which he calls "Fear
Channel" -- to remove his show from six cities the
week of Feb. 23. While those markets form a relatively
small portion of his audience, the punitive action
threw Stern for a loop. And his outrage has boiled to
a head with news that Congress is currently
considering a radical increase in the amount of FCC
indecency fines (from a maximum of $27,500 to
$500,000).

"It's over," Stern said on the air Tuesday. "When the
Senate passes that bill, it's over. The show is over.
. . . We can't do a radio program that's cutting edge
. . . if the government keeps second-guessing
everything we do."

Stern is also maintaining that Clear Channel dropped
him last month not because of indecency but because of
some of his Bush criticism earlier in the year.
"There's a real good argument to be made that I
stopped backing Bush and that's when I got kicked off
Clear Channel," he said on the air earlier this month.

"When he takes that FCC persecution mantle and wraps
it around his political views," says Mark Walsh, CEO
of Air America, "and when he implies that it wasn't
until he started to criticize this president that he
really started getting nailed for `immorality' and
`obscenity,' he throws gasoline on the fire.

"If he says, `I'm being stifled because I have the
temerity to challenge this president,' and `Remember a
year and a half ago when entertainers were chastised
for questioning the war and now I'm getting nailed for
the same thing,' if he starts pounding that drum, I
would contend that a significant portion of his
listenership will take that as gospel truth."

"He is self-aggrandizing if he thinks he's being
singled out here," says Jeffrey Chester, executive
director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a
Washington-based advocacy organization. "Congress is
engaging in this kind of witch hunt generally. I don't
think they're singling out Stern for his alleged
critical comments against the Bush administration."

Whether or not he is being censored for putting down
Bush, the First Amendment issues at stake in his case
remain incendiary. How much is America willing to let
politicians determine what is "decent" and "indecent"?

"It has been this bubbling issue that unites liberals
and conservatives, this free speech stuff," says Todd.
"And it could pop under the right circumstances. It
probably needs a linchpin, the way gay marriage got
its linchpin thanks to the mayor of San Francisco
suddenly issuing marriage licenses. It will need a
seminal moment. Is Stern getting thrown off the air
that moment for this FCC issue? I don't know."

"I'm no fan of Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh and what
I think is the tabloid-esque domination of radio and a
great deal of television," says Chester. "But Congress
is stampeding to censor a whole range of speech."
Chester says it is unclear whether Kerry will indeed
be Stern's "savior," and that "what Stern really
should be doing is trying to get Kerry to be public
and accountable on this."

One thing does seem clear, however. If Stern loses
this battle, his cause will take on added vigor. "Take
Stern off the air because of the government?" says
Harrison. "Take a guy that's a beloved icon and turn
him into a beloved martyr."

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Is Cressey saying that some senior members of the Bush administration viewed Saddam Hussein as a greater threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden? “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

The spiritual struggle within the "US mainstream news
media" continues...If he doesn't blink, Roger Cressey
will have his name scrawed on the John O'Neill Wall of
Heroes...Of course, as the LNS has documented
repeatedly, the Clinton-Gore team had identified Al
Qaeda as the US's #1 threat and, indeed, their
national security team handed the _resident's national
security team a plan to crush Al Qaeda. It was
shelved, along with the pre-9/11 Hart-Rudman
suggestions to establish a Dept. of Homeland Security
(commissioned, yes, by Clinton-Gore)...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4556388/'

Capturing bin Laden: priority before 9/11?
Critics say Bush administration worried about Russia,
China, missile defense, Iraq
By Lisa Myers
Senior investigative correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 7:43 p.m. ET March 18, 2004When the 9/11
commission holds public hearings next week, its
central focus will be the choices that U.S. presidents
made in fighting terrorism before 9/11. Just how
committed to taking on al-Qaida was the Bush
administration before Sept. 11? Some critics,
including one former counter-terrorism insider, now
say there was a surprising lack of urgency.

advertisement

Shortly after taking office, President George W. Bush
ordered a new, more muscular policy to eliminate
al-Qaida. Helping draft that policy: Roger Cressey, a
terrorism expert in both Democratic and Republican
administrations and now an NBC News analyst.

Now Cressey is speaking out for the first time. He
says in the early days of the Bush administration,
al-Qaida simply was not a top priority, “There was not
this sense of urgency. The ticking clock, if you
will, to get it done sooner rather than later.”

Cressey and other witnesses have told the 9/11
commission of long gaps between terrorism meetings and
greater time and energy devoted to Russia, China,
missile defense and Iraq than al-Qaida.

For example: One document shows a key high-level
National Security Council meeting on Iraq on Feb. 1,
2001. Yet, there was no comparable meeting on al-Qaida
until September.

Is Cressey saying that some senior members of the Bush
administration viewed Saddam Hussein as a greater
threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden?
“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It was inconceivable to
them that al-Qaida could be this talented, this
capable without Iraq, in this case, providing them
real support."

That spring, President Bush learned bin Laden was
responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, which
killed 17 sailors. Why was there no retaliation?

“You would think after an attack that almost sank a
U.S. destroyer there would have been [a mandate] for
some type of action. Yet we never saw that from the
Pentagon,” Cressey answered.

Bush administration national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice insists that President Bush wanted to
avenge the Cole, but not with a pinprick retaliatory
strike, “We were concerned that we didn’t have good
military options. That really all we had were options
like using cruise missiles to go after training camps
that had long since been abandoned.”

NBC’s sources say that the camps in Afghanistan were
thriving, that the United States could have hit the
camps and killed lots of terrorists.

Read the transcript
More of the Condoleezza Rice interview

“Even if you’d been fortunate enough to — to get a few
people, it clearly wasn’t going to impress al-Qaida —
al-Qaida had to be eliminated,” Rice added.

Over the summer, the threats of an al-Qaida attack
grew, focused mostly overseas. Finally, on Aug. 1,
Bush’s new policy, designed to eliminate al-Qaida in
three to five years, was ready for a final decision.

INTERACTIVE

• Global dragnet
Key figures and developments in the hunt for al-Qaida


But the Bush team didn’t get together until Sept. 4,
one week before 9/11.

Can the Bush administration be faulted for spending
nine months hashing out a policy? In retrospect,
shouldn’t it have done something?

According to Rice: “We were in office 230-plus days.…
By the time that we got to the summer of 2001, at
least 16 of 19 hijackers were already in the United
States for the — for the final time.”

The 9/11 commission now is looking into whether the
Clinton and Bush administrations missed opportunities
to get bin Laden and al-Qaida, asking what more could
and should have been done to prevent Sept. 11.

More on the missed opportunities:

Tuesday: How close did the United States come to
getting bin Laden?
Wednesday: What more could the Bush administration
have done to get bin Laden?
Lisa Myers is NBC’s senior investigative
correspondent.

© 2004 MSNBC Interactive

Foster: White House Had Role In Withholding Medicare Data HHS Actuary Feels Bush Aide Put Hold on Medicare Data

The stink of the Medifraud is rising and spreading.
The NYTwits and the WASHPs have acknowledged it. How
long can AnythingButSee, SeeBS, NotBeSeen and
SeeNotNews ignore it?

Cleanse the White House of the Bush Cabal and Its
Corrupt Cronies, Overthrow the Chickenhawk Coup, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6339-2004Mar18?language=printer


washingtonpost.com
Foster: White House Had Role In Withholding Medicare Data HHS Actuary Feels Bush Aide Put Hold on Medicare Data

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A02

Richard S. Foster, the government's chief analyst of
Medicare costs who was threatened with firing last
year if he disclosed too much information to Congress,
said last night that he believes the White House
participated in the decision to withhold analyses that
Medicare legislation President Bush sought would be
far more expensive than lawmakers knew.

Foster has said publicly in recent days that he was
warned repeatedly by his former boss, Thomas A.
Scully, the Medicare administrator for three years,
that he would be dismissed if he replied directly to
legislative requests for information about
prescription drug bills pending in Congress. In an
interview last night, Foster went further, saying that
he understood Scully to be acting at times on White
House instructions, probably coming from Bush's senior
health policy adviser.

Foster said that he did not have concrete proof of a
White House role, but that his inference was based on
the nature of several conversations he had with Scully
over data that Congress had asked for and that Foster
wanted to release. "I just remember Tom being upset,
saying he was caught in the middle. It was like he was
getting dumped on," Foster said.

Foster added that he believed, but did not know for
certain, that Scully had been referring to Doug
Badger, the senior health policy analyst. He said that
he concluded that Badger probably was involved because
he was the White House official most steeped in the
administration's negotiations with Congress over
Medicare legislation enacted late last year and
because Badger was intimately familiar with the
analyses his office produced.

The account by Foster, a longtime civil servant who
has been the Medicare program's chief actuary for nine
years, diverges sharply from the explanations of why
cost estimates were withheld that were given this week
by White House spokesmen and Health and Human Services
Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. They suggested that
Scully, who left for jobs with law and investment
firms four months ago, had acted unilaterally and that
he was chastised by his superiors when they learned of
the blocked information and the threat.

Two days ago, Thompson told reporters: "Tom Scully was
running this. Tom Scully was making those decisions."
Thompson said the administration did not have final
cost estimates until late December predicting that the
law would cost $534 billion over 10 years, $139
billion more than the Congressional Budget Office's
prediction. Foster has said his own analyses as early
as last spring showed that the legislation's cost
would exceed $500 billion.

Last night, White House deputy press secretary Trent
Duffy said, "It is my understanding that Mr. Badger
did not in any way ask anyone to withhold information
from Congress or pressure anyone to do the same."
Duffy said he asked Badger this week whether he had
done so and that Badger replied he had not. Duffy said
that Badger was traveling last night and was
unreachable to comment. Calls to his home were not
returned.

Foster suggested the White House had been involved as
new details emerged of the manner in which he had been
threatened. The actuary released an e-mail, dated last
June 20, from Scully's top assistant at the time
regarding one GOP request and two Democratic requests
for information about the impact of provisions of the
Medicare bill on which the House would vote a week
later.

In a bold-faced section of the three-paragraph note --
reported in yesterday's Wall Street Journal --
Scully's assistant, Jeffrey Flick, instructed Foster
to answer the Republican's question but warned him not
to disclose answers to the Democratic queries "with
anyone else until Tom Scully explicitly talks with you
-- authorizing release of information. The
consequences for insubordination are extremely
severe."

The warning came in response to an e-mail Foster had
sent to Scully that same Friday afternoon, 22 minutes
earlier, in which he said the three questions "strike
me as straightforward requests for technical
information that would be useful in assessing drug and
competition provisions in the House reform package."
Foster offered in that e-mail to show Scully his
proposed replies in advance.

Flick, who now oversees the Medicare agency's regional
office in San Francisco, did not return several phone
calls.

Scully was out of town and did not respond to efforts
to reach him via e-mail last night. He said in an
interview this week that he and Foster had disagreed
over how helpful an executive branch employee needed
to be to Congress. He called it "a separation of
powers issue."

In 1997 budget legislation, Congress sought
unsuccessfully to require the Medicare actuary to
respond to all of its requests. Such language was
included in a conference report on the bill but does
not carry the force of law.

Foster said that the e-mail was the only instance in
which he had been explicitly threatened in writing,
but that "there were other instances in which Tom in
an e-mail or just over the phone would clearly be
unhappy and would say less formally something to the
effect, 'If you want to work for the Ways and Means
Committee, I can arrange that.' "

The actuary said that in June 2001, shortly after
Scully arrived, he directed Foster to send weekly
reports of any requests for information he had
received from Capitol Hill or elsewhere in the
administration.

Congressional Democrats yesterday called for the
General Accounting Office to investigate the episode.
Thompson announced Tuesday he had ordered HHS's
inspector general to conduct an inquiry.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Iraq War 'May Have Been a Mistake': Italian Minister

The "US mainstream news media" and its
propapunditgandists spent several days last week
carrying the Bush cabal's water on the phoney
controversy of Sen. John F. Kerry's remarks about how
eager and hopeful world leaders are about regime
change here in the US...Of course, they have ignored
numerous stories that corroborate the remarks...Agence
France Press has been more diligent...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0318-02.htm

Published on Thursday, March 18, 2004 by Agence
France Presse
Iraq War 'May Have Been a Mistake': Italian Minister


ROME - An Italian minister broke ranks with his
pro-war government on Iraq, telling a newspaper that
last year's invasion could have been a mistake, and
was in any case not the best thing to have done.

"The war may have been a mistake. Perhaps there were
ways it could have been avoided," said European
Affairs Minister Rocco Buttiglione in an interview
published Thursday by the daily newspaper Il
Messaggero. "What is certain is that it wasn't the
best thing to do," he added.

"Terrorism cannot be defeated only by the force of
arms, and if we give the impression that weapons play
the dominant role, we will only stir up nationalist
feelings among the Arabs against us," he added.

The statement, the first apparent crack in the unity
of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Iraq, came two
days before the first anniversary of the US-led
invasion, which Berlusconi has strongly backed.

It also came a week after the devastating bomb attacks
in Madrid, which killed over 200 people and injured
around 1,500.

Buttiglione said he didn't believe that democracy in
the Middle East could be achieved through war or
because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been toppled.

"Arab democracy will not be born through the force of
arms or because we have defeated Saddam," he said.

"It can be achieved through a policy of peace,
cultural exchanges, inter-religious dialogue and
development aid," he said.

He added that he favored a stronger UN role in Iraq in
order to give legitimacy to the country's interim
Governing Council and the foreign military presence.

Buttiglione is a member of the Italian Christian
Democratic Party, one of the partners in Berlusconi's
coalition government.

Italy has some 3,000 troops in Iraq.

© 2004 AFP

...the presence of Ms Rice underlines the importance of Rupert Murdoch's news operations to the Bush administration, which may face growing criticism that it led the country into war on false pretences ahead of November's presidential election

It's the Media, Stupid.

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1172627,00.html

Murdoch brings in Bush adviser

G'Day from Cancun: a special commemorative postcard

Lisa O'Carroll
Friday March 19, 2004

Rice: one of President Bush's key advisers

The US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice is
to address the News Corporation thinktank involving
Rupert Murdoch's most senior newspaper executives from
the UK, US and Australia.
Ms Rice joins Conservative leader Michael Howard and
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former director of
communcations - both of whom are flying to Cancun,
Mexico for the four-day event, which started last
night.

The identity of the special guests has not been
publicised and News International in London refused to
comment, but a spokeswoman for Ms Rice confirmed she
would be speaking at 12pm US Eastern Standard Time
today.

She will will deliver her speech by satellite at the
invitation of Mr Murdoch's Fox operation, which
includes Fox News, which has been hugely supportive of
President George Bush and achieved notoriety in the UK
during the Iraq war for its ultra-patriotic reporting.

Although she is not there in person, the presence of
Ms Rice underlines the importance of Rupert Murdoch's
news operations to the Bush administration, which
may face growing criticism that it led the country
into war on false pretences ahead of November's
presidential election.

Earlier this year Ms Rice admitted to intelligence
failures over weapons of mass destruction after former
US weapons hunter David Kay said no evidence of
weapons had been found.

Several hundred News Corporation executives are
believed to be attending the conference at the Mexican
resort, including the News International executive
chairman Les Hinton, Mr Murdoch's right hand man in
London, and the editors of his four national
newspapers - Rebekah Wade of the Sun, Robert Thomson
of the Times, Andy Coulson of the News of the World
and John Witherow of the Sunday Times.

Other executives attending include Trevor Kavanagh,
the political editor of the Sun, and his deputy.
George Pascoe-Watson, Sun columnists Richard
Littlejohn, Victoria Newton and Dominic Mohan, and
William Lewis, the business editor of the Sunday
Times.

The conference, hosted by Mr Murdoch's eldest son
Lachlan, has two central themes - politics and
showbusiness - and will be attended by other news
operations including the New York Post and his
Australian papers including the Telegraph.

Mr Murdoch's News Corp summits are seen as key
opportunities to influence the political bias of his
news outfits.

Tony Blair made headlines in 1995, when the now prime
minister was star guest at the triennial News Corp
conference in the Hayman Islands.

At the time it was seen as a significant move, since
the Labour party had boycotted the Murdoch media
because of the tycoon's treatment of the print unions
in the 1980s.

In recent years Mr Murdoch's UK newspapers, including
the Sun and the Times, have increasingly differed with
the government, particularly over the proposed EU
constitution, which they have painted as a threat to
British sovereignty.

Guy Black, the Tories' new press secretary and the
former director of the Press Complaints Commission, is
a close friend of the Sun editor, Rebekah Wade, who
will be attending.

· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email
editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please
mark clearly "for publication".

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said that his country had been "taken for a ride" about the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Another name for the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...and
yes, another story ignored by the "US mainstream news
media," just as they ignored the carefully worded,
distancing remarks of the Dutch prime minister, even
as he sat next to the _resident answering reporters
questions in the White House the other day...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040318/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_poland_weapons_040318135659
Poland was 'taken for a ride' about Iraq's WMD:
President
2 hours, 36 minutes ago Add Mideast - AFP to My
Yahoo!

WARSAW (AFP) - Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski
said that his country had been "taken for a ride"
about the alleged existence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq (news - web sites).

"That they deceived us about the weapons of mass
destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride,"
Kawsniewski said Thursday.

He argued however that it made no sense to pull US-led
coalition troops out of Iraq.

Poland heads up a 9,000-strong multinational force
patrolling a swathe of Iraq south of Baghdad.

Mysterious Fax Adds to Intrigue Over the Medicare

A developing, blockbuster White House scandal wholly
ignored by SeeBS, AnythingButSee, NotBeSeen and
SeeNotNews...

Cleanse the White House of the Chickenhawk Coup and
their Corrupt Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/18/politics/18MEDI.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position

March 18, 2004
Mysterious Fax Adds to Intrigue Over the Medicare
Bill's Cost
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ROBERT PEAR

ASHINGTON, March 17 — Late one Friday afternoon in
January, after the House of Representatives had
adjourned for the week, Cybele Bjorklund, a House
Democratic health policy aide, heard the buzz of the
fax machine at her desk. Coming over the transom, with
no hint of the sender, was a document she had been
seeking for months: an estimate by Medicare's chief
actuary showing the cost of prescription drug benefits
for the elderly.

Dated June 11, 2003, the document put the cost at
$551.5 billion over 10 years. It appeared to confirm
what Ms. Bjorklund and her bosses on the House Ways
and Means Committee had long suspected: the actuary,
Richard S. Foster, had concluded the legislation would
be far more expensive than Congress's $400 billion
estimate — and had kept quiet while lawmakers voted on
the bill and President Bush signed it into law.

Ms. Bjorklund had been pressing Mr. Foster for his
numbers since June. When he refused, telling her he
could be fired, she said, she confronted his boss,
Thomas A. Scully, then the Medicare administrator. "If
Rick Foster gives that to you," Ms. Bjorklund
remembered Mr. Scully telling her, "I'll fire him so
fast his head will spin." Mr. Scully denies making
such threats.

These conversations among three government employees —
an obscure Congressional aide, a little-known actuary
and a high-level official — remained secret until now,
and Ms. Bjorklund still does not know who sent the
fax. But Mr. Foster went public last week, and details
of his struggle for independence within the Bush
administration are now emerging, raising questions
about whether the White House intentionally withheld
crucial data from lawmakers.

The administration says Democrats, whose Medicare
proposals would have cost nearly $1 trillion, are
exploiting the controversy for political gain at the
expense of the elderly. But some Republicans are
openly questioning the White House, and the Senate
Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said
he saw a "growing scandal over the Medicare drug
bill."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat
and a leading critic of the Medicare bill, put the
issue in stark, Watergate-era terms, saying, "What did
the president know; when did he know it?"

Those questions have not been answered. But interviews
with federal officials, including Mr. Foster and Mr.
Scully, make clear that the actuary's numbers were
circulating within the administration, and possibly on
Capitol Hill, throughout the second half of last year,
as Congress voted on the prescription drug bill, first
in June and again in November.

But the figures were either discounted or ignored, as
lawmakers and the White House grappled with the
political imperative to pass the legislation.

At a hearing on Feb. 10, Tommy G. Thompson, the
secretary of health and human services, told lawmakers
that "we knew all along" that the administration's
cost estimates would be higher, but said he did not
have a final figure, of $534 billion, until Dec. 24,
after the bill was signed into law. Nonetheless, Mr.
Thompson said he and Mr. Scully had shared their
estimates with House and Senate negotiators and with
the White House throughout the legislative process.

"There were individuals in the White House who knew
that our preliminary estimates were higher," Mr.
Thompson testified.

Yet as late as November, Mr. Scully continued to cite
the $400 billion figure, which came from the
Congressional Budget Office. In a letter to The New
York Times published on Nov. 20, Mr. Scully wrote, "We
are spending $400 billion."

One House negotiator, Representative Nancy L. Johnson,
Republican of Connecticut, said she knew of the higher
estimates last year, but discounted them because she
thought Mr. Foster's assumptions were flawed.
"Absolutely, we knew about these numbers," she said.

But Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority
leader, who was also a negotiator, said on Wednesday
that he did not learn of the higher estimates until
January, when he attended a Republican leaders'
retreat. An aide to Mr. DeLay said Joshua B. Bolten,
President Bush's budget director, presented the $534
billion final figure at that meeting.

"The leaders about took his head off," said the aide,
Stuart Roy, adding, "It was very clear that none of
the leaders in that room had ever heard those numbers
before."

Mr. DeLay told reporters on Wednesday that the
actuary's numbers are "irrelevant to the policy that
we passed." In any event, he said, Congress is
required to use the estimates of the Congressional
Budget Office.

But Mr. Foster's figures do have significance. The
Medicare bill was President Bush's highest legislative
priority going into the election year, and
Congressional forecasts about its cost were highly
uncertain. At the same time, conservative lawmakers
were up in arms over the expense, and were threatening
to vote against the measure.

Ultimately, the legislation squeaked through the House
by a final vote of 220 to 215, but only after
Republican leaders kept the roll call open for nearly
three hours while they twisted the arms of
recalcitrant party members. Had the cost estimates
been higher than the Congressional Budget Office
figures, lawmakers of both parties say, it is possible
the Republican-backed bill would have been doomed, or
at least significantly altered.

Democrats, sensing a political opportunity in an
election year, are now calling for hearings. On
Wednesday, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of
California, threatened to sue Mr. Thompson to get
access to Mr. Foster's estimates. Some Republicans are
also demanding answers.

"If anyone was truly pressured by a superior to
withhold information from Congress, that is profoundly
unethical and inappropriate," said Representative
Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican who voted
reluctantly for the bill.

Seeking to quell the furor, Mr. Thompson announced
Tuesday that he had ordered an independent inquiry by
the office of the inspector general in his department.

"We have nothing to hide," the secretary said.

This is not the first time Medicare's chief actuary
has been caught in a political tempest. In 1997,
Republicans, frustrated in their efforts to get
information from the actuary under the Clinton
administration, wrote into law provisions protecting
his independence and stating that he "may be removed
only for cause."

Ms. Bjorklund said Democrats routinely made direct
requests of Mr. Foster, who has held the actuary's job
since 1995. But in an interview on Wednesday, Mr.
Scully said that from the time he took office in 2001,
he disagreed with Mr. Foster over how much
independence the actuary should have.

"Rick felt he was an independent operator," said Mr.
Scully, who resigned in December to join a law firm.
"My view was that the actuary is part of the executive
branch. We had to have some ability to know what he
was doing."

Mr. Foster said that he was told in June 2003 that he
should not respond directly to certain Congressional
requests, and that `the consequences of
insubordination would be very severe." Moreover, he
said, "there was a pattern of withholding information
for what I perceived to be political purposes."

The tensions peaked that month, when, Ms. Bjorklund
said, she learned Republicans were drafting a
provision that would set up competition between
private health plans and the traditional
government-run Medicare program. On June 17, she sent
Mr. Foster an e-mail message asking him to estimate
the proposal's cost. On June 24, still lacking the
information, she telephoned him.

"He said, `I cannot give it to you. I'm afraid I could
be fired,' " Ms. Bjorklund said. After reminding him
that he could be fired only for cause, she said, she
called Mr. Scully, who, she said, declared that he
could fire Mr. Foster for "insubordination — directly
defying my orders."

Mr. Scully remembers a heated conversation, but says
he never threatened to fire Mr. Foster. But the
exchange was so upsetting to Ms. Bjorklund, she said,
that she told her boss, Representative Pete Stark of
California, the senior Democrat on the health
subcommittee of the Ways and Means panel.

The next day, June 25, Mr. Stark put out a news
release about it, without mentioning Mr. Foster by
name. But with the House preparing to vote on the
Medicare bill, Mr. Stark said, his accusations were
lost in the bigger battle. On June 26, just hours
before the vote, Ms. Bjorklund said, she received a
part of the information she had requested from Mr.
Foster, but still no cost estimates.

Over the months that followed, Ms. Bjorklund said, she
continued to ask for the actuary's estimates, without
success. Not until Jan. 30, when the anonymous fax was
sent, did she get a peek at those numbers.

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization. Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

Yes, it was the day for John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta)
to strike back. Indeed, there he stood, nobly, in
front of a crescent of US flags, with the Clinton-Gore
national security team on the stage with him. The
speech was being broadcast live on SeeNotNews. JFK got
a few lines into his opening remarks, SUDDENLY, a hotel in
Baghdad was blown up...SeeNotNews broke away from the
speech to cover the aftermath of the slaughter. They
never went back to JFK. But, of course, they did
managed to break away to cover VICE _resident Cheney's
speech a little awhile later. Chillingly, Cheney
mentioned the bombing that had just occured. Did his
speech have to be revised to include his remarks on
the bombing or were they already scripted in? Yes, my
friends, *they* are trying to shell-shock us all into
submission-- with carnage and chaos...Osama Bin Laden,
the _resident and the VICE _resident have more in
common than business and family relationships, all three
are insane...Remember that there was no Al Qaeda
in Iraq before it was "liberated" by these neo-con wet
dreamers...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20040317/wl_nm/security_spain_truce_dc

Purported Al Qaeda Letter Calls Truce in Spain
Wed Mar 17, 4:56 PM ET Add World - Reuters to My
Yahoo!

By Opheera McDoom

CAIRO (Reuters) - A group claiming to have links with
al Qaeda said on Wednesday it was calling a truce in
its Spanish operations to see if the new Madrid
government would withdraw its troops from Iraq (news -
web sites), a pan-Arab newspaper said.

Reuters Photo

In a statement sent to the Arabic language daily
al-Hayat, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which
claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombings that
killed 201 people, also urged its European units to
stop all operations.

"Because of this decision, the leadership has decided
to stop all operations within the Spanish
territories... until we know the intentions of the new
government that has promised to withdraw Spanish
troops from Iraq," the statement said.

"And we repeat this to all the brigades present in
European lands: Stop all operations."

Skepticism has greeted previous claims of
responsibility by the group for attacks in Turkey and
Iraq. U.S. officials say its links with Osama bin
Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network are
unclear.

An unrelated videotape of a man describing himself as
al Qaeda's European military spokesman also claimed
responsibility for the Madrid bombing, saying it was
in retaliation for outgoing Spanish Prime Minister
Jose Maria Aznar's domestically-unpopular support for
the U.S.-led Iraq war.

In a shock election result three days after the Madrid
bombs, Spain voted in the Socialist party, which has
since said it will probably withdraw its troops from
Iraq.

"The Spanish people... chose peace by choosing the
party that was against the alliance with America," the
statement said.

WE WANT BUSH TO WIN

The statement said it supported President Bush (news -
web sites) in his reelection campaign, and would
prefer him to win in November rather than the
Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites), as
it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish
than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force
rather than with wisdom."

In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he
and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish
blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation
as civilization."

"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

The group said its cells were ready for another attack
and time was running out for allies of the United
States.

"Whose turn is it next? Will it be Japan or America,
or Italy, Britain or Oslo or Australia?" the statement
said, adding Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were also
targets.

The group is named after Muhammed Atef, also known as
Abu Hafs, a close bin Laden aide killed in the
U.S.-led war in Afghanistan (news - web sites).

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns is well known by now. While evidence of man- made environmental damage mounts, the Bush team resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pur

SECURITY is the central issue of this political
struggle: NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC SECURITY *and*
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY...Walter Cronkite continues to
demonstrate the courage of heart and clarity of mind
that compelled us to scrawl his name on the John
O'Neill Wall of Heroes...

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/8187862.htm

Make global warming an issue

Walter Cronkite

is a nationally syndicated columnist

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns is well known by now. While evidence of man- made environmental damage mounts, the Bush team resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pursuers as it retreats. That has been especially true of its handling of the most serious of all environmental issues - global warming.

First, the administration claimed that global warming
was the work of liberal hysterics and had been
discounted by "more sober scientists." Then, it
admitted that it was happening but said there was no
proof humans caused it, or could fix it.

Retreat No. 3 was the White House discovery that, yes,
indeed, some of the warming was due to human activity,
and we should take steps, say, to reduce emissions,
but those steps should be voluntary on the part of
industry.

There are two scientific theories that have been
gaining credence in recent years that challenge the
sanity of that kind of resistance to fact - and make
no mistake about it, global warming is a fact.

Both theories begin with a phenomenon that is taking
place right now. Scientists are beginning to
understand climate as a complex interactive system
that is affected by everything from the emission of
greenhouse gases, to deforestation, to the condition
of Arctic and Antarctic glaciers.

It is a system with a feedback mechanism. For example,
higher temperatures lead to the melting of sea ice,
which exposes more water to the sun. The water absorbs
more solar energy, which accelerates global warming,
and so on. Scientists fear that such feedbacks might
produce a self-sustaining and accelerating warming
that is beyond human control.

The second theory goes by the name of Abrupt Climate
Change. It suggests that catastrophic results of
global warming might not occur gradually, as most have
expected, but quite suddenly - within a few years.
This theory also starts with the melting of glaciers
and sea ice, but involves the dilution of seawater's
salinity - or salt content - that results. That salt
content is a key element in an ocean current that
takes heat from the tropics northward and cold water
southward and in the process moderates temperatures in
the Eastern United States and much of Europe.

The collapse of this so-called conveyor could, in the
worst case, produce a new ice age. The best case would
give us severe winters, increasingly violent storms,
flooding, drought and high winds around the globe,
disrupting food production and energy supplies and
raising sea levels high enough to flood coastal cities
and make them unlivable.

These are not predictions but real possibilities - far
more possible today than scientists had previously
believed. And while the politicos in the White House
continue to stick their heads in the sand, some at the
Pentagon have taken on the task of studying the
national- security implications of Abrupt Climate
Change.

What they came up with was a world whose "carrying
capacity" - the number of people the globe can sustain
- is being progressively lowered, a world where war
becomes the rule, not the exception, and where wars
are no longer fought for ideological, religious, or
geopolitical reasons - but for resources and survival.
This unclassified Pentagon study, completed last fall,
has been released to several news organizations and
was highlighted in the Feb. 9 edition of Fortune
magazine.

One thing we have to keep in mind: While these might
only be worst-case scenarios, many of the conditions
and processes scientists think might trigger them
already are present or under way. Global warming is at
least as important as gay marriage or the cost of
Social Security. And if it is not seriously debated in
the general election, it will measure the
irresponsibility of the entire political class. This
is an issue that cannot, and must not, be ignored any
longer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walter Cronkite (mail@cronkitecolumn.com) appears
regularly.

This is an administration built upon secrecy and deceit. But they have the money and majorities on the FEC and FCC to control the airwaves, so they figure that they can use their tired old formula of picking some trivial issue, whether true or not, and us

This editorial from www.buzzflash.com articulates the
current situation brilliantly...Over the past 48
hours, the "US mainstream news media" has gone back to
its enabling behaviour, allowing the Bush cabal's to
write the script and marginalizing Sen. John F. Kerry,
just showing footage of him shaking hands, etc.
without showing any of his own remarks in his own
words...Here we go...JFK has said that the Bush cabal
is "lying" and "crooked." JFK has said that world
leaders are hoping that he defeats the _resident. When
visciously attacked, he has refused to back down.I
have no doubt that JFK will rise to the challenge, our
concern is that his response will not be allowed to
reach the US electorate...Here we go...There is no
alternative to victory...The _resident LOST the 2000
election, the _resident KNEW enough before 9/11 to
make a difference but he did nothing, and since 9/11
he has exploited tragedy for political gain while
STONEWALLING any real investigation, the _resident
LIED about going to war in Iraq and led us into a
foolish military adventure, the _resident BLEW the US
federal surplus on a giveaway to the wealthiest
Americans and has presided over a JOBLESS "recovery,"
the _resident has not only failed the country, the _resident has
BETRAYED it, as Al Gole bellowed that night in
Tennessee a few weeks. There was no "intelligence
breakdown," the _resident LIED to the US electorate...The _resident has the blood of 500+ US soldiers on his hands, and brought us a $500 billion budget deficit...The election this November must be a national referendum on *his* CREDIBILITY, CHARACTER and COMPETENCE...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/03/edi04018.html
March 17, 2004 SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND
EDITORIAL ARCHIVES

BuzzFlash Message to John Kerry: It's the Golden Hour of Opportunity, Define Bush or Be Defined by Him. There is No Option "B."

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

At a moment like this, we are tempted -- like a
husband or wife who is awaiting a divorce from a
serial philanderer -- to bitterly try and list all the
perfidies, duplicitous comments and betrayals of the
Bush administration. But that would be an
all-consuming, a self-immolating task that would
divert us from the task of helping return America to
majority rule.

Just remember -- as Bush and Cheney personally attack
John Kerry on the issue of credibility -- that this is
the essence of the Bush Administration political
strategy: "If you tell a lie five times, it becomes
the truth."

Political analysts, the ones who really know what they
are talking about, not the multi-millionaire Bush
suck-up celebrity shills on television, say that now
is the time that offers a window of golden opportunity
for Bush and company to define Kerry in the mind of
the swing voter. Since the "perception" of Kerry's
character is still largely unformed in the minds of
many Americans, the goal of the Bush campaign, at this
time, is to -- and we have to gulp hard just to write
this -- portray Kerry as "untrustworthy."

Yes, this is the administration that has made brazen
lying banal [LINK]. And how will they sway voters? By
trying to implant the image in their heads that Kerry
is, well, a liar. It would be a ludicrous farce, if
this dishonest GOP technique weren't so deadly to
Democrats who haven't known how to fight back.

As much as Bush values lying as a prerequisite for
service in his administration (it's telling the truth
that gets people in trouble when they serve under a
Bush), he is also predictable. Character assassination
has always been the trademark of a Bush campaign.
George W. Bush rode shotgun with the infamous Lee
"Willie Horton" Atwater during his father's 1988
campaign, and Karl Rove has specialized in sliming
opponents since his days as a young Republican.

If anyone thinks this is a new strategy born of
desperation, just ask Al Gore, who ended up being
caricatured as a liar by the media because of
Rove/Bush attacks about the pettiest of comments. Gore
didn't fight back against the image, and he didn't
challenge Bush's credibility. As a result, we had an
election that was the equivalent of Ken Lay pointing
and yelling "thief" at a Boy Scout who accidentally
paid one cent less for a candy bar. And in this
analogy, the Boy Scout didn't attack back.

So don't dismiss as absurd the seeming ludicrousness
of the last few days, in which Bush, Cheney and Powell
have "demanded" that Kerry reveal the names of
"foreign leaders" who support him. First of all, it
turns out that the Boston Globe reporter who
originally wrote that Kerry claimed to have the
backing of "foreign leaders" admitted that he
incorrectly transcribed the quotation, and Kerry
actually said, "I've met more leaders" in general
[LINK]. So the Bush administration is now challenging
Kerry on some frivolous word that was never even said
-- and they continue to do so, despite the reporter's
retraction. And, in any case, one can only assume that
Kerry is the preferred candidate of many European
leaders who can't stomach Bush, including the heads of
France, Germany and now Spain.

Meanwhile, we can't get the truth out of the Bush
Administration about 9/11, Cheney's energy task force,
WMDs and other pre-Iraq war claims, the environment,
the cost of the Medicare Bill, the size of the
deficit, the number of jobs lost, the role of the
Saudis and Pakistan in terrorism, Halliburton
contracts, Ken Lay, actions taken under the Patriot
Act, the Florida 2000 recount, collusion between the
executive and judicial branches, failure to support
our Veterans and fully equip our military, and, well,
you name it. You can't get the truth out of the Bush
administration about virtually anything.

This is an administration built upon secrecy and
deceit. But they have the money and majorities on the
FEC and FCC to control the airwaves, so they figure
that they can use their tired old formula of picking
some trivial issue, whether true or not, and using it
to portray their opponent as "untrustworthy."

We share the frustration of our readers. The ability
of the Republican party, which is built upon
deception, division and greed, to paint honorable
opponents as liars is as mind boggling as it is
shameless. They stop at nothing. They have no
scruples. They are fundamentally immoral.

Yet, they portray themselves -- as Rove has done so
successfully with Bush -- as the people with "values"
and "morality."

It's one of the greatest con jobs in history.

But, here's the bottom line.

Now is the defining moment for John Kerry.

This is the time where either he defines Bush as a
liar who has betrayed the nation -- or he will end up
being defined as a liar.

There is no middle ground with the Bush dynasty. They
can't run on their records or their accomplishments,
because their record is one of ruin and their
accomplishments don't exist.

So they use character assassination to stay in power.

Since BuzzFlash began in May of 2000, our mantra for
Democrats and other progressives has been "define or
be defined." Al Gore didn't listen to our advice.

We hope that John Kerry does.

For a month, Kerry had Bush on the ropes. It was a
heartening sign that business as usual (rolling over
for the Republicans) had ended.

But this is, indeed, the golden hour of opportunity.

Show your stuff John. You have no choice. Either
successfully undercut Bush's credibility now, or
you'll end up looking like Pinocchio. Just ask John
McCain and Al Gore.

The Republicans have refined Samurai character attacks
to a fine art. Besides lining their own pockets with
money, it is what they do best.

The barbarians are no longer at the gates.

They are in the White House.

John Kerry, you must pull Excalibur out of the stone
and vanquish the dynasty of deception and deceit,
before they destroy you and your good name.

The future of democracy depends upon your success.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Mr. Limbaugh, For your information, I am one of the widows you are wrongly accusing of being "schooled" by the Democratic Party. My name is Kristen Breitweiser. I am not a Democrat. I voted for President Bush. So did my husband who was killed on 9/11.

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=42

Two 9-11 Widows Respond to Rush Limbaugh Attacks

[PHILADELPHIA -- March 10, 2004 -- (TomFlocco.com) --
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the
subject of current George Bush campaign TV ads with
references to September 11, placed on the air by
Republicans during his nationally broadcast radio show
last Friday. The following two letters were written to
Mr. Limbaugh today by the two 9-11 widows whose voices
were used during his radio broadcast. The
controversial Limbaugh referred to Republican Kristen
Breitweiser and Monica Gabrielle as Democratic
"campaign consultants... not grieving widows...
obsessed with rage and hatred." [The responses and
transcript can be found by clicking on Full Story...
below.]

Anti-Bush 9/11 Families Backed by Heinz Foundation

March 9, 2004,

Listen to Rush...
(…recount just how on the money Friday's program was)

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT 12:36 PM ET

RUSH: I can now begin to take credit for some things
that happened on this program on Friday - A barnburner
of a program. You remember the program opened with
some audio examples that we had found of families,
certain family members, 9-11 victims, all saying the
same things. And I cringed. I couldn't believe that
the Democratic Party would sink this low , to exploit
and capitalize on the misery and loss of families. But
they did it. They found a way. In fact, they found
some family members - and I'm going to say this - they
found some family members who seemed to have more
concern over who the president of this country is than
over the sanctity of the loss of their own family
members. It is beyond the pale that this could happen.
It is beyond the pale, yet people cooperate with it,
and so much more has been learned about this since.

It turns out -- and, by the way, the thing I predicted
to you on Friday about the 9-11 coffins and "no
flag-draped coffins out of Baghdad," that has been
picked up. I told you that was a talking point. I told
you we're going to be seeing it over the weekend and
you did see it over the weekend, and these people are
very easily predictable. Well, it turns out that a lot
of these 9-11 family members are part of a political
organization that is funded in part by Teresa
Heinz-Kerry! Well, this stuff is incestuous! You know,
these people are poisoned. They have literally been
poisoned by their hate. They have been poisoned by
their rage. It is unbelievable, the depths to which
they will sink.

Here, for those of you that weren't here on Friday,
this is the montage. I'm just going to play it one
more time. This is two different women, and they
appeared on four networks: CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC,
and they each have three phrases that they use
verbatim. And these were prepared. These were prepared
by Democratic campaign consultants. In fact, these
women sound like campaign consultants, not grieving
family members, and I was reluctant to make this
charge; it's the first thing that crossed my mind. As
I say, we've now learned all the organizational effort
that's going on behind this and these people are
indeed aligned with the Democratic Party, and it's
just… I do not know this kind of hatred; I don't know
this kind of venom; I don't harbor it; I never have; I
don't know what it's like to be governed by this kind
of rage, and I don't know what life must be like when
it is. I cannot relate. I cannot relate to being
obsessed with rage and hatred. I can relate to being
obsessed with love and infatuation, but I cannot
relate to being obsessed with all this hatred. I just
don't get it. It is unspeakable to me. It is dirty. It
is wounding. I think this stuff is absolutely poison,
the depths -- and Ted Kennedy on Friday goes to the
Council on Foreign Relations and -- I got the story
coming up -- makes all these wild accusations. John
Kerry himself is becoming, if you ask me, a walking
caricature of himself already. I think these people
have no clue.

You know, one of the things I said all during 2002, is
these people have not come to grips with the fact that
they're not the majority anymore, and if they have one
thing in common with Martha Stewart, and this is not
my comment on Martha Stewart , but not the whole
comment, but these people do not have the ability to
know how average Americans see them. They have no
empathy with average Americans. These family members
from 9-11 that are on this political witch hunt, the
Democratic Party, the presidential campaign leaders,
Kerry, all these people, all the Democratic
leadership, media, have no clue how they come across
to real people. And I don't think Martha Stewart did,
either. I think that's one of her one of her problems.

Another of Martha Stewart's problems, in fact, maybe
have been the biggest of her problems was the Clinton
years. She saw all of her buddies get away with what
she tried. And Clinton did. In fact, Bill and Hillary
got away with far more than what Martha Stewart did.
The difference is, Martha Stewart didn't have any love
for her on that jury. She didn't have any love for her
amongst average people, whereas the Clintons did. Just
a minor little point, but nevertheless.

Here, listen to this montage in case you missed it on
Friday, and understand that these family members are
actually part of the Democratic Party machine, as they
do this.

VOICE I: I think for someone like President Bush who
has not cooperated with this commission, who has
stonewalled this commission.

VOICE II: This president and his administration
blocked the creation of the commission, have
stonewalled the commission.

VOICE I: If this was realistic from the morning of
September 11th, it would show President Bush before a
group of school children listening to them read, while
the twin towers were burning.

VOICE II: If he wants to show a picture of 9-11
depicting what he was doing, it should be a picture of
him sitting and reading in a classroom to school
children. That's where he was on 9-11.

VOICE I: And we need to find out why 3,000 people were
murdered on his watch.

VOICE II: Well, you know, this happened on his watch.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to hear some original
thoughts from any of these people, but I don't think
that the Democrats trust them to speak originally. Was
a piece -- I'm looking for it now. I should have put
it in the right order but I didn't. In the Wall Street
Journal yesterday from a woman named Burlingame , was
a little editorial, small little op-ed. And it has
some great lines in it. She's a family member of 9-11
that does not agree with these people and really rips
them to shreds in a very classy way.

END TRANSCRIPT

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_030904/content/see_i_told_you_so.guest.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Response from Kristen Breitweiser]

Mr. Limbaugh,

For your information, I am one of the widows you are
wrongly accusing of being "schooled" by the Democratic
Party.

My name is Kristen Breitweiser. I am not a Democrat.
I voted for President Bush. So did my husband who was
killed on 9/11.

I would encourage you to educate yourself on who I am,
prior to your making erroneous statements about me on
your radio show.

I would also encourage you to visit the website of the
9/11 Family Steering
Committee(911independentcommission.org) of which I am
a founding member.

The members of the Family Steering Committee (a
non-partisan, completely self-funded organization)
have been tireless advocates working to get answers as
to why our loved ones were killed on the morning of
9/11 and why this nation was so very vulnerable to
terrorism on that horrible day. In order to make this
nation safer and to ensure that our loved ones were
not killed in vain, we believe that we must learn from
the tragic failures that occurred leading up to and on
9/11.

The only way we can be safe in the future is to learn
from the past. The only way we can have a thorough
examination of the past is with a cooperative
government. Sadly, President Bush has been our
biggest adversary in trying to find out what happened
on 9/11. And, after voting for him in the last
election, I am gravely disappointed in his behavior in
fighting this commission and their noble efforts to
explain why we as a nation were so vulnerable to
terrorism on 9/11.

I look forward to your apology.

Many thanks,

Kristen Breitweiser.

And, as an aside, you failed to mention the following
actual fact in your show: that Mayor Giuliani, Police
Commissioner Kerik, Former Fire Commissioner
Von-Essen, and 9/11 Widow Deena Burnett were "BOOKED"
BY THE GOP to go on those shows. (See Washington Post
article on Friday). I, on the other hand, was
"booked" by no one other than myself. Frankly, Mr.
Limbaugh, I expected better from you.

************************************************

[Response from Monica Gabrielle]

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,

My name is Monica Gabrielle. I was forwarded a
transcript of your recent radio show. Plain and
simple – I expect an apology for your false statements
and erroneous accusations.

In order to enlighten you:

- NO Democratic or other party member “schooled” me or
prepared my statements! To date, I have been quite
capable of thinking for myself.

- Neither I, nor the Family Steering Committee has
received ANY FUNDING from ANY person or organization.
We are a completely non-partisan, self-funded
organization.

We have worked tirelessly for over 2 years to have the
facts surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the murder of
my husband along with 3,000 other innocent people
brought to light. Until we know why we, as a nation,
were left so utterly exposed, we will remain at risk.
In order to accomplish such a lofty goal, we need to
thoroughly examine what protocols and procedures were
in place prior to and on 9/11. We need to find out
where the breakdowns occurred.

Thus, ALL persons (BOTH political parties, BOTH past
and present administrations) with any relevant
knowledge need to share what they knew, when they knew
it. Only then can we truly find where the failures
occurred and correct them. Can we – as a nation –
demand any less?

Sadly, President Bush and his administration have been
staunchly opposed to any type of investigation into
the murder of 3,000 innocent souls (not to mention the
billions in property damage). This, to me, is
unimaginable. Who wouldn’t want to know how and why
all our defensive postures failed so miserably on
9/11? Who wouldn’t want to know that these “flaws”
have been properly fixed? Who wants to have the same
person/protocol in place today if it didn’t work on
9/11? Who wants to be the victim’s family member
speaking up the next time tragedy strikes?

We, as citizens with the help of the 9/11 Independent
Commission, have an opportunity to examine and
hopefully correct the flaws which led to the horrors
of 9/11 . We need to seize this opportunity –
together – to make us all safer and quell some of the
nightmares.

These are just a few of the issues which should have
been debated on your program. More are available on
our website (www.911independentcommission.org). The
attacking of 9/11 families with false, inflammatory
statements is beneath even you. Unfortunately, it
accomplishes nothing and serves only to avoid the real
issues.

I respectfully await your apology.

Sincerely,

Monica Gabrielle

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

''It divided more than it united, there were no reasons for it. Time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility and the occupation has been managed badly,'' he said.

Yes, a national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCY and CHARACTER of the _resident is coming...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-spain16.html

Spanish leader blasts U.S. policy

March 16, 2004

BY GEIR MOULSON

MADRID, Spain -- Spain's incoming prime minister
launched a verbal attack on President Bush on Monday
and pledged to bring Spanish troops home from Iraq
unless the United Nations takes control there.

A day after his Socialists swept Spain's ruling
conservatives from power in elections overshadowed by
terrorist bombings, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero also
promised to lead a more pro-European government that
would restore ''magnificent relations'' with France
and Germany -- which unlike Spain's outgoing
government both opposed the Iraq war.

In a surprise defeat, Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar's conservatives on Sunday became the first
government that backed Washington in Iraq to be voted
from office.

Countries besides the United States that are assisting
in postwar Iraq, and their troop contributions:

TOP 10 FOREIGN TROOP CONTRIBUTORS TO IRAQ
**United Kingdom -- 8,220
**Italy -- 3,000
**Poland -- 2,500
**Ukraine -- 1,650
**Netherlands -- 1,307
**Spain -- 1,300
**Australia -- 850
**Romania -- 500
**Denmark -- 500
**Thailand -- 451
**Remaining 25 coalition countries: 3,722
Source: Brookings Institution
AP

The election was held amid charges that Aznar made
Spain a target for terrorists by supporting the war,
and that his government concealed possible connections
between the attack and Islamic terrorists for
political gain.

Thursday's train bombings -- the worst terrorist
attacks in Spain's history -- killed 200 people.

Zapatero campaigned on a pledge to order Spain's 1,300
troops home. He made clear Monday he is prepared to
fulfill it.

''I have said clearly in recent months that, unless
there is a change in that the United Nations take
control and the occupiers give up political control,
the Spanish troops will come back, and the limit for
their presence there is June 30,'' Zapatero said. He
described Spain's decision to commit peacekeepers to
Iraq as ''an error.''

The U.N. Security Council has authorized the current
multinational force in which Spain is participating.
But there has been no talk of turning that force,
which is led by the United States, into a
U.N.-controlled peacekeeping force.

Zapatero promised to maintain ''cordial'' relations
with Bush, but he had harsh words on the war in Iraq
in a separate interview.

''It divided more than it united, there were no
reasons for it. Time has shown that the arguments for
it lacked credibility and the occupation has been
managed badly,'' he said. Bush and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair ''will have to engage in
reflection and self-criticism,'' he said. ''You cannot
organize a war with lies.''

Zapatero's rise is "a blow" to Bush, said Nile
Gardiner, a conservative U.S. analyst. "The Spanish
statement has sent the wrong messages to the rest of
Europe. It amounts to a policy of appeasement."

Other governments helping rebuild Iraq pledged Monday
to stay the course. Poland said a pullout would hand a
victory to terrorists.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that all
countries, not just those who supported the campaign
to topple Saddam Hussein, were the targets of
terrorists.

''We are under a threat from Islamic extremism, and so
is almost every other country in the world,'' Straw
told BBC radio. ''No one should believe that somehow
if you say 'I opposed the military action in Iraq,'
that this makes you safer or exempts you as a
potential victim.''

AP

Bombings tied to Morocco, Islamic radicals

BY ANDREW SELSKY AND NICOLAS MARMIE

MADRID, Spain -- Evidence is mounting that the Madrid
bombings may be tied to a bloody attack in Morocco
last year and that Islamic extremists linked to
al-Qaida were behind the bombings, officials said
Monday.

One of five suspects held by Spanish police in
connection with Thursday's attack had traveled to his
home country of Morocco, then left on April 20, 2003
-- almost a month before the May 16 attacks in
Casablanca that killed 45 people, officials said.

The suspect, Jamal Zougam, also has connections to a
key suspect in the Casablanca attacks and possibly to
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Moroccan official said,
speaking on condition of anonymity. Al-Zarqawi is a
key operative working with Osama bin Laden's terror
network.

It appears ''increasingly likely'' Islamic extremists
played a role in the Madrid attacks, though ''a number
of avenues are being pursued,'' said a U.S.
counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition
of anonymity.

Cell phones apparently were used as detonators on the
10 train bombs, and the five suspects were arrested
after a phone and prepaid card were found on a bomb
that failed to explode.

Zougam, two other Moroccans -- including Zougam's half
brother, Mohamed Chaoui, 34 -- and two Indians are
being questioned in the Madrid attack.

In 1983, Zougam's mother took him and Chaoui to Spain.
Years later, as young men, they opened a shop
repairing cell phones in Madrid. In 2002, they were
joined by Mohammed Bekkali, the third Moroccan
suspect.

Meanwhile, a victory against terror was scored Monday
by Saudi security forces. They killed two militants,
including one considered al-Qaida's chief of
operations on the Arabian Peninsula, in a shootout.

AP

Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible,' Says New Report

Remember, 2+2=4
Jim Loeb, www.oneworld.net: "We are quickly moving to
the point where the damage will be irreversible,"
warned Dr. Jonathan Pershing, director of WRI's
Climate, Energy and Pollution Program. "In fact, the
latest scientific reports indicate that global warming
is worsening. Unless we act now, the world will be
locked into temperatures that would cause irreversible
harm."..."Accelerated development of a portfolio of
technologies could stabilize greenhouse gas
concentrations, enhance global energy security, and
eradicate energy poverty," noted David Jhirad, WRI's
vice president for research. "We urgently need the
political will and international cooperation to make
this happen."

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0315-04.htm

Published on Monday, March 15, 2004 by OneWorld.net
Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible,' Says New Report
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON -- Ten years after the ratification of a
United Nations treaty on climate change, greenhouse
gas emissions that lead to global warming are still on
the rise, signaling a "collective failure" of the
industrialized world, according to the
Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), a
leading environmental think-tank.

"We are quickly moving to the point where the damage
will be irreversible," warned Dr. Jonathan Pershing,
director of WRI's Climate, Energy and Pollution
Program. "In fact, the latest scientific reports
indicate that global warming is worsening. Unless we
act now, the world will be locked into temperatures
that would cause irreversible harm."

WRI researchers estimate that greenhouse gas emissions
such as carbon dioxide rose 11 percent over the last
decade, and will grow another 50 percent worldwide by
2020. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international
agreement that sets out specific targets to follow up
on the treaty, 38 industrialized countries were
supposed to reduce their emissions by an average of
seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The administration of former President Bill Clinton
signed the Kyoto Protocol, but President Bush withdrew
the U.S., which currently emits about 25 percent of
the world's greenhouse gases, from negotiations over
Kyoto's implementation.

Russia, which indicated initially that it intended to
ratify the Protocol, remains undecided. As a result
the Protocol--which must be ratified by countries
whose greenhouse emissions totaled more than 55
percent of global emissions in 1990 in order to take
effect--remains in limbo.

WRI decided to make a relatively rare public statement
now, both because the tenth anniversary of the
UNFCCC's ratification will take place next weekend and
because of the growing pessimism surrounding the
international community's ability and will to deal
with the problem.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), which called for voluntary reductions in
greenhouse emissions, was signed by, among others,
then-President George H.W. Bush, at the Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and took formal effect March
21, 1994. Today, 188 countries are signatories.

The Kyoto Protocol grew out of the UNFCCC when it
became clear that plans for voluntary reductions would
not meet the initial targets, and as climate and
atmospheric scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change have become increasingly convinced
that the rise in global temperatures of about one
degree Fahrenheit over the last century is due
primarily to artificial emissions, notably the
combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and
gas.

Studies over the past decade have shown that the
warming trend continues. "The five warmest years in
recorded weather history have taken place over the
last six years," noted WRI's president, Jonathan Lash.

"The ten warmest years in recorded weather history
have taken place since 1987. Whether it's the retreat
of glaciers, the melting of the permafrost in Alaska,
or the increase in severe weather events, the world is
experiencing what the global warming models predict,"
he said.

Europe, the main champion of the Kyoto Protocol,
suffered its hottest year on record last year. Some
15,000 people in France alone died due to heat stress
in combination with pollution, while European
agriculture suffered an estimated $12.5 billion in
losses.

Britain's most influential scientist, Sir David King,
recently excoriated the Bush administration for
withdrawing from the Protocol and ignoring the threat
posed by climate change. "In my view, climate change
is the most severe problem we are facing today," he
wrote in Science magazine, "more serious even than the
threat of terrorism."

Even the Pentagon recently issued a warning that
global warming, if it takes place abruptly, could
result in a catastrophic breakdown in international
security. Based on growing evidence that climate
shifts in the past have taken place with breathtaking
speed, based on the freshening of sea water due to
accelerated melting of glaciers and the polar ice
caps.

Given enough freshening, the Gulf Stream that
currently warms the North Atlantic would be shut off,
triggering an abrupt decline in temperatures that
would bring about a new "Ice Age" in Europe, eastern
Canada, and the northeastern United States and similar
disastrous changes in world weather patterns
elsewhere--all in a period as short as two to three
years.

Wars over access to food, water, and energy would be
likely to break out between states, according to the
report. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic
features of life," according to the report. "Once
again, warfare would define human life."

Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies
have argued that as many as one million plant and
animal species could be rendered extinct due to the
effects of global warming by 2050. A recent report by
the world's largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re,
predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of
disasters like floods, frosts, and famines caused by
global warming could reach $150 billion annually.

"Accelerated development of a portfolio of
technologies could stabilize greenhouse gas
concentrations, enhance global energy security, and
eradicate energy poverty," noted David Jhirad, WRI's
vice president for research. "We urgently need the
political will and international cooperation to make
this happen."

© Copyright 2004 OneWorld.net

###

Liars Lose -- The Lessons of Regime Change in Spain

Understand what really happened in Spain...And take
heart...The forest is moving ever closer to the castle
walls...Yes, it's the Media, Stupid...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0315-13.htm

Published on Monday, March 15, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
Liars Lose -- The Lessons of Regime Change in Spain
by Jeff Cohen

"Political shock in Spain!" blared ABC News on Sunday
night, as regime change came to Madrid. Along with
Tony Blair, Spain's conservative Prime Minister Jose
Maria Aznar had been the staunchest of Bush allies.

One down, two to go.

The deciding issue in Spain's election was government
deceit over war in Iraq and terrorism at home,
especially the bomb blasts that rocked Madrid three
days before the balloting. In a country (like ours)
where major TV channels routinely echo government
propaganda, grassroots activists defeated Aznar's
Popular Party by reaching swing voters and young
voters through mobile phones, the Internet and
creative, nonviolent protests.

For weeks polls had showed Aznar's hand-picked
successor comfortably ahead of Spain's uninspiring
Socialist party, which had been voted out of office in
1996 amid corruption scandals. Then came Thursday's
terror attacks, killing 200 Spaniards and injuring
1500.

The conservative government that had brought Spain
into the Iraq war (despite overwhelming opposition) by
echoing U.S./U.K. lies on WMDs immediately blamed the
Madrid terror attacks on Basque separatists -- before
there was any evidence, and continuing in the face of
evidence pointing to Islamist terrorists. Antiwar
Spaniards had long warned that aligning with the
U.S./U.K would intensify the threat of foreign terror.

By election day, government manipulation had become
the salient issue in the minds of millions of
shell-shocked swing voters. But the seeds of doubt
about Aznar's government had been planted by the
antiwar movement. After all, intelligence on Iraq had
been manipulated; now it seemed Spain was manipulating
the truth about who had murdered hundreds of
Spaniards. It leaked out that, within hours of the
terror attacks, Spain's foreign minister had written
ambassadors: "You should use any opportunity to
confirm [Basque] ETA's responsibility."

In his vivid street-level account from Madrid in the
hours before the election, writer Paul Laverty
described a mass nonviolent revolt. One grandmother
told Laverty that she had voted conservative the last
time, "but I can't vote for these thugs again who led
us into a war nobody wanted. They lied about the
weapons in Iraq, and they're lying again today. How
dare they manipulate the dead?"

With suspicions mounting that the government was
holding back the truth about the terror attacks, and
that mainstream TV couldn't be trusted, "thousands of
mobiles were on the go flashing messages between
friends" about independent news and spontaneous
protests that became massive the night before the
election. In cities across Spain, protesters gathered
outside Popular Party headquarters, chanting: "We want
the truth before we vote," "Our Dead, Your War,"
"Liars, Liars, Liars...Don't play with the Dead."

Then, at a time established through mobile messaging,
came "cacerolada" protests -- banging of pots and pans
-- from balconies and porches and spreading into town
squares. After midnight, Madrid protesters marched to
Atocha train station, near ground zero of the terror
attacks, and the huge crowd went silent for a vigil
and prayers and tears.

On election day, the New York Times quoted a Madrid
voter as saying: "I never would have gone into the
streets for a demonstration like yesterday except that
I felt like they were not telling us everything."

Voter turnout was very high. Late-deciding voters (and
many who hadn't expected to vote at all) swung hard
against the government, and in support of the
Socialists, who campaigned on a pledge to withdraw
Spain's troops from Iraq.

AP quoted a Barcelona voter: "I wasn't planning to
vote, but I am here today because the Popular Party is
responsible for murders here and in Iraq." A law
student told the BBC: "It's the first time I voted. I
feel very happy because the government had to
change...because of the Iraq war." As Prime Minister
Aznar cast his ballot, protesters shouted:
"Manipulator!"

After winning, Socialist Prime Minister-elect Zapatero
called for "self-criticism" by Bush and Blair: "You
can't bomb people just in case...You can't organize a
war on the basis of lies."

There are lessons for Americans seeking regime change
here at home:

A winning issue is government deceit and manipulation;
late deciders can be won over if the Bush
administration's basic honesty is in question. With
enough swing voters questioning Bush's honesty, even a
late-breaking "October Surprise" could backfire
against him. John Kerry was caught on mike accurately
referring to the Bush team as "the most crooked, lying
group I've ever seen" -- if only the Senator would add
some principle and bite to his policy statements.

Take the offensive against the administration for
failing to defend our citizens on the homefront on
Sept. 11 and in Iraq and beyond. Despite all the
pundit blather, Bush has been a "security" failure.
9/11 victims' families need not be alone in expressing
anger at a White House that politically manipulates
9/11 while taking no responsibility for its failure
and stonewalling the investigation. Bush could
continue to lose faith with veterans and their
families for cluelessly sending U.S. soldiers and
National Guard into Iraq unprotected -- as thousands
return home badly wounded to inadequate health and
veterans' services.

Use creativity and all available means of
communication to reach out to undecideds in swing
states until the very last vote is cast. In the weeks
before Nov. 2, disinformation about Kerry will be
flowing furiously in mainstream media while accurate
information about Bush will be blocked. We need to use
everything from email and door-knocking to paid ads
and rock concerts to reach folks who aren't getting
the full story.

Don't cast a risky vote this year for a 3rd party or
independent presidential candidate. In our
winner-take-all elections, only Kerry can retire the
most dangerous and extremist regime in recent U.S.
history. A cautious, mainstream Democrat like Kerry
may be as uninspiring to some of us as the
often-vacillating Socialists are to activists in
Spain. But the demise of Madrid's conservative regime
has electrified peace and progressive activists
worldwide. Imagine the elation we'll feel if Bush is
retired next November.
Jeff Cohen is a columnist, media critic and TV pundit.

###

Kerry Assails Bush Record on Security and Terrorism

Yes, watch what happens now, watch how it
develops...It will all come out before the end: the
Theft of Fraudida, Enron/Halliburton/Harken, the
pre-9/11 incompetency, the post 9/11 incompetency, the
foolish military adventure in the Iraq, the
squandering of the Federal surplus, the mismanagement
of the US economy and so much more...Sen. John F.
Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) does not blink. He is
disciplined and focused. He is pacing himself. And
most importantly, he is both wily and courageous...He
needs a strong running mate who can carry the simple,
powerful message of NATIONAL SECURITY and ECONOMIC
SECURITY and work with him to translate it sound
Electoral College math...There is an Electoral
Uprising swelling...Therefore, my friends, we are
living in very dangerous times...Will they finally
"discover" WMD in Iraq? Will they "capture" Osama bin
Laden? Will any of it matter? Will the "US mainstream
news media" withdraw into denial or will the Bush
cabal's stranglehold continue to weaken?

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/politics/campaign/15CND-KERRY.html?pagewanted=print&position

March 15, 2004
Kerry Assails Bush Record on Security and Terrorism
By DAVID STOUT

ASHINGTON, March 15 — Senator John F. Kerry attacked
President Bush on national security issues today,
asserting that Mr. Bush has played politics with the
battle against terrorism and that the bombings in
Spain show how ineffective his policies have been.

"When it comes to protecting America from terrorism,
this administration is big on bluster and they're
short on action," Mr. Kerry, the Massachusetts senator
and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said.
"But as we saw again last week in Spain, real action
is what we need. The Bush administration is tinkering
while the clock on homeland security is ticking. And
we really don't have a moment of time to waste."

Mr. Kerry's remarks, delivered to a conference of the
International Association of Fire Fighters here,
showed that Mr. Kerry is acutely aware that President
Bush plans to make the war on terrorism a central
theme of his own re-election campaign and to portray
the Democrat as soft on national defense.

Mr. Kerry made only a general allusion today to the
bombings in Madrid. Whether they were the work of
Basque separatists, Al Qaeda or other terrorists has
not yet been determined. But the atrocity has already
had political effects, apparently contributing to the
Spanish Socialists' victory on Sunday over the
center-right party, whose retiring Prime Minister,
Jose Maria Aznar, had supported the war in Iraq
despite the overwhelming opposition of the Spanish
people.

The Bush administration reacted cautiously to the
events in Spain. The White House spokesman, Scott
McClellan, said today that Mr. Bush had called to
congratulate the prime minister-elect, Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero, and had "reiterated our solidarity
with the Spanish people." Both Mr. McClellan and the
State Department said it was premature to discuss Mr.
Zapatero's threat to withdraw Spanish troops from
Iraq.

The President himself did not mention Spain or Senator
Kerry as he campaigned in and around Philadelphia. He
did defend his decision to oust Saddam Hussein as
necessary for American security.

"Nobody wants to march to war," he said. "Now we're
marching to peace."

Vice President Dick Cheney was more pointed.

"The attack in Spain once again reveals the brutality
of our enemy and once again shows that the fight
against terrorism is the responsibility of all free
nations," Mr. Cheney said at a Phoenix luncheon for an
Arizona congressman. "The terrorists are testing the
unity and the resolve of the civilized world, and we
must rise to that task."

"I noticed recently that Senator Kerry has been making
some observations about foreign policy," Mr. Cheney
said a moment later. "He's been telling people that
his ideas have gained strong support, at least among
unnamed foreigners he's been spending time with."

Mr. Cheney went on to describe President Bush as a
leader of vision and determination.

"These are not times for leaders who shift with the
political winds, saying one thing one day and another
the next," Mr. Cheney said.

Mr. Kerry, in his address to the firefighters' union,
showed again that he was unwilling to be pre-empted by
President Bush on security issues. He said the times
demanded "truly dedicating ourselves to homeland
security, not using it as a political prop."

Mr. Kerry asserted that President Bush and his aides
had even demanded that the Department of Homeland
Security regularly set up "photo opportunities" to
show Mr. Bush in flattering settings.

"Ladies and gentlemen, America doesn't need leaders
who play politics with 9/11 or see the war on terror
as just another campaign issue," Mr. Kerry said a
moment later. "Our nation's safety is too important.
And if I am president, we will work toward victory in
the war on terror, knowing that those on the front
lines of this battle are heroes, not political props."

Mr. Kerry's remarks were applauded frequently, and
several of his gibes against President Bush sparked
appreciative laughter. The Senator was addressing a
friendly audience: the firefighters' union backed him
in the primaries, and it has accused the President's
campaign of showing crass television commercials using
the Sept. 11 attacks for political grist.

Administration officials went on television on Sunday
to declare that the war on terrorism is being won,
despite attacks like the Madrid bombings.

"The events in Spain are just more evidence of the
lengths to which these killers will go to try and
intimidate free people," the national security
adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on NBC's "Meet the
Press."

"We are succeeding, because, slowly but surely, their
world is getting smaller, not larger," she said.

Mr. Kerry saw things through a sharply different prism
today. He said Mr. Bush had alienated America's allies
by waging war in Iraq — a war against the wrong enemy
at the wrong time, in Mr. Kerry's view.

"I don't fault George Bush for doing too much in the
war on terror, as some do," Mr. Kerry said. "I believe
that he's done too little and done some things that he
didn't have to. When the focus of the war on terror
was appropriately in Afghanistan and on breaking Al
Qaeda, President Bush shifted his focus to Iraq and to
Saddam Hussein.

"He pushed away our allies at a time when we needed
them the most. He hasn't pursued a strategy to win the
hearts and minds of people around the world, and win
the war of ideas against the radical ideology of Osama
bin Laden."