US Propaganda Aimed at Foreigners Reaches US Public

Published on Friday, January 27, 2006   by Agence France Presse

The Pentagon acknowledged in a newly declassified document that the US public is increasingly exposed to propaganda disseminated overseas in psychological operations. But the document suggests that the Pentagon believes that US law that prohibits exposing the US public to propaganda does not apply to the unintended blowback from such operations. "The increasing ability of people in most parts of the globe to access international information sources makes targeting particular audiences more difficult," said the document. "Today the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences become more a question of USG (US government) intent rather than information dissemination practices," it said. Called the "Information Operations Roadmap," the document was approved by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003. It was made public by the National Security Archives, a private non-profit research group which obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. The document said that psychological operations, or "psyops," are restricted by Pentagon policy and executive order from targeting US audiences, US military personnel and news agencies and outlets. "However, information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa." In a press release, the National Security Archives said the document "calls for 'boundaries' between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not 'targeted,' any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter." Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita vehemently denied that the Pentagon was unconcerned about possible blowback. "I reject the premise of this release which is, 'Hey if it bleeds back we're okay with it.' We're not okay with it," he said. DiRita said that, with the exception of "battlefield deception," psychological operations used to influence foreign publics were based on factual, accurate information. He said that the Pentagon has sought to erect "firewalls" between psychological operations that aim to "influence" foreign publics and public affairs, which "inform" the press and the US public. But he acknowledged that the distinction between the two has become blurred. "It's an important distinction to understand, but increasingly in the world we're in it's a distinction that deserves scrutiny," he said. Disclosures last month that US military psychological operations units were secretly planting paid-for stories with the Iraqi press through a contractor brought some of those issues to the surface. General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is reviewing the results of an investigation into the case, but officials have said that the disclosures have so far prompted no changes. Copyright © 2006 AFP

Impeach or Indict Bush and Cheney

Published on Friday, January 27, 2006 by the Texas Observer

by Ronnie Dugger

The year 2006 will be historic for the nation, and probably for humanity. Texans Bush and Rove and their conspirators in the second Bush presidency have disgraced American democracy at home and in the world with debasements of our nation and our values that have now entered their climactic phase. What part will the rest of us Texans play in this decisive year? Hate to be picky, but the disgrace began in the first term. The chickens are just now coming home to roost, so to speak. As I have written in a review-essay that appears in the tenth-anniversary spring issue of Yes!, the quarterly of new solutions published in Washington state by David and Frances Korten (YesMagazine.org), we are living and working in the very days and nights of the American Emergency, the climactic American Crisis. Our elections are bought, and our government is run by and for the major transnational corporations. Bush announced in 2002 his illegal presidential policy that the United States can and will attack other nations first, waging war on them, when he so decides. He is now waging, as if he were doing it in our names, a bloody war of aggression against Iraq, which on the face of it is a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg principles that we and our allies established and enforced with hangings after World War II. The President, the Vice-President, and their factors sold this war to Congress with twistings and lies that were crafted to infuriate and terrorize us about Iraq’s alleged connections to Al Qaeda and mass-murder endangerments to us from Iraq itself, all of which literally did not exist. In polls now six of 10 Americans do not believe the president is honest. Yet he has three more years of dictatorial control over our nuclear and other arms and our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and seems now to be maneuvering to use that control to wage another aggressive war on Iran, with literally incalculable consequences. We Texans are a major source of this deterioration into crisis. The leading Democrats of the state so dishonored the liberal traditions of their party that in the resulting political vacuum, Bush was elected Governor here, and from Austin he mounted the campaign that a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court illegally decreed made him President. After that, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from Sugar Land, crafted his scheme to use corporate money to widen the Republicans’ majority in the Texas delegation to Washington, D.C., battening down right-wing GOP control of the House and the Congress. The third President from Texas and his Republican Congress then waged aggressive war on Iraq, drove the nation into insolvency to further enrich the already rich, and just for good measure tore up the Constitution. As we in Texas bear guilt for this we have also begun to join the resistance and revolt against it, starting with Cindy Sheehan’s brigades in Crawford. By happy accident the Texas trip-root that now threatens to help bring the Bush presidency crashing down, crushing itself under its own arrogance, hubris, and criminality, is a law against corporate money in Texas elections that was passed a century ago in the state’s populist afterglow. To uphold that law, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has braved ruthless contumely, as he had done often before in order to prosecute public officials he believed had violated the laws. While it is merely seemly to await the outcome of the trial of DeLay and his co-defendants on the charges that they laundered corporate money through Washington to elect Republicans to the House from Texas, in a speech in September Earle declared what he believes his prosecution is all about. “Corporate money in politics” has become “the fight of our generation of Americans....It is our job—our fight—to rescue democracy from the money that has captured it,” he said. “The issue that we’re faced with is the role of large concentrations of money in democracy, whether it’s individuals or corporations, the issue is the same.” Since 1994, although the polls show a majority of Texan citizens support progressive reforms such as adequate taxation for equal education for Texas schoolchildren, the leaders of the disappearing Texas Democratic Party and their statewide candidates, finking out on every ethically important political issue, have proved again and again that nothing fails like failure. Rot-gut Republicans have swept every statewide office and achieved mercenary domination of the Texas courts, too. In my opinion, Texas Democrats ought to have concluded by 2002 at the latest that they should be choosing, from among the waves of the on-comers, entirely new sets of state and local party leaders and candidates. For example, rather than be taken in, even a jot, by the torrent of contemptuous abuse directed at Ronnie Earle by Tom DeLay, his lawyers, and that ilk, Texans should be realizing that—just as the dramatic prosecutions of Thomas E. Dewey in New York made him a Republican presidential candidate and now the populist prosecutions of Eliot Spitzer in New York State are making him a national figure—Ronnie Earle has fully qualified himself as a front-rank leader in Texas politics. For another example, this year, in my opinion—shared, by the way, by Jim Hightower—Texans are very fortunate to have running for Attorney General the lifelong labor lawyer and Democratic firebrand David Van Os of San Antonio. The Observer does not make political endorsements, but I may say here for myself alone that David, in my carefully considered personal judgment, is the Ralph Yarborough of his generation. The national resistance to Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al., is coming into focus, too. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which is the logical source for impeachment initiatives, has taken the significant step of calling for an investigation of Bush and Cheney with a view to censure, which obviously could metamorphose into impeachment. Tom Daschle, until recently the Minority Leader in the Senate, Sen. Edward Kennedy, and Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, are all calling for investigations of Bush and Cheney. Elizabeth Holtzman writes for impeachment in the current Nation, and the Internet is on fire with initiatives to impeach Bush and Cheney for crimes committed in office, foremost among them lying our nation into a war of aggression. Impeachment is unlikely as long as the House remains firmly in GOP control, but this year it would be gratifying to see citizens seeking the election of House candidates—whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents—who promise explicitly to vote, if elected, to impeach Bush and Cheney. If impeachment does not become possible, let me broach with you the idea that a grand jury, federal or state, should indict Bush and Cheney for their manifold official crimes. Are we, as we are so often piously assured, “a nation of laws and not of men,” or is the President above the law if his party controls the House and can block impeaching him? Can a sitting president be indicted? That, in itself, could be a dangerous precedent to set. We could then have government by prosecutor, as we almost did under Clinton. The Constitution is silent on whether a seated President and Vice President can be indicted, while in office, for crimes committed while they have held those offices. Constitutional lawyers are congenitally prone to announcing that this cannot be done because it would disrupt the ongoing business of the government. But it is time to do it, if necessary absent impeachment, for exactly that reason—to disrupt the continuation of THIS government. I have not yet found one constitutional lawyer who can cite a Supreme Court case or any other judicial precedent prohibiting their indictment—if you know of one please let me hear from you. In 1973 Nixon’s attorney general said the President can’t be indicted, but why should Nixon’s attorney general bind us? Committed to nonviolence, determined, in this post-Gandhi era, against violence, nevertheless we are once again in the position of the Framers of the Constitution. In the post-revolutionary emergency, the Founding Fathers took things in their own hands, violating their clear instructions from the states by proposing to create the United States, which the states then created. In the crisis we are in now we must not be misled by expostulating lawyers or posturing politicians. We the citizens can make up our own minds whether we can indict Bush and Cheney and, if they are convicted, throw them out. May we close here, then, as we began two centuries and more ago, with the words of Tom Paine. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he said. “The birth day of a new world is at hand… We are a people upon experiments. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.” Ronnie Dugger is the founding editor and former publisher of The Texas Observer. Author of presidential biographies and other books and articles, he writes now from his office in Cambridge, Mass. © 2006 Texas Observer

Virginia Lawmaker fires gun in the Capital

We’ve gotten this story from tons of readers today, which is awesome, because we think it’s hilarious and scary at the same time. In Virginia, a state delegate was unloading his gun in his office in the General Assembly building, and accidentally fired it.

Read On

Iraq war leaves mental scars for civilians, US troops alike

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Iraq war is reaping a fierce psychological toll, exposing a mental health crisis inside Iraq, and searing hundreds of thousands of US troops with combat trauma, experts warned.

Iraq's doctors and specialists, subjected to persecution under Saddam Hussein, now the target of insurgent bullets and bombs, are struggling to assess the scale of the problem, they said.

Dr Sabah Sadik, a Britain-based doctor who advises Iraq's Health Ministry, said he was shocked at the dilapidation of the hospital system when he returned after the ouster of Saddam for the first time since the 1970s.

Scores of doctors fled the country under Saddam, and now more are leaving despite recruitment efforts, he said.

"It is very difficult when doctors and intellectuals have been targeted by the terrorists," Sadik said at a news conference in Washington.

"It is a big dilemma because a lot of colleagues would like to leave the country."

As the Saddam Hussein government deliberately neglected to keep statistics, health experts in Iraq are still trying to get to form an accurate picture of the country's mental health, Sadik said.

But a wide variety of ailments can be expected in a nation stifled by decades of tyranny, foreign occupation and three years of post-Saddam violence.

"It is a very easy for a lot of people to lose hope with ongoing violence and ongoing intimidation. Iraqi citizens were also devalued and targeted by the Iraqi regime," said Dr Husam Alathari, medical director of the INOVA Center for Addiction Treatment Services and a consultant to the Iraqi Ministry of Health.

US soldiers returning home from tours in Iraq, meanwhile are initially showing a higher incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than in other American conflicts.

Around 317,000 veterans who received a primary or secondary diagnosis of PTSD were treated at medical centers run by the US Department of Veterans Affairs in 2005.

Around a third have had a subsequent diagnosis of a mental health disorder, said Dr Antonette Zeiss, the department's Deputy Chief Consultant for Mental Health.

"It is higher than initial rates in previous wars," said Zeiss, adding that part of the rise may be due to a vigorous effort by the department to find out what help veterans' need.

There are more women veterans from the Iraq war -- around 13 percent -- than in other conflicts, reflecting the need for more research into PTSD.

Veterans are also typically older, with many from reserve and National Guard units, rather than the young, conscript soldiers in their teens and early 20s who fought the Vietnam War.

Many veterans, who would have died from their wounds in earlier conflicts, survived through speedy access to medical treatment -- but are coming home maimed in body and mind, prompting new mental disorders, Zeiss said.

"They have amputations, significant brain injury, they have lived through something profound," she said.

"We have a lot to learn about how rehab will be possible ... can we get these people back into the community, into relationships?"

LINK

A Call to the Faithful

Published on Thursday, January 26, 2006 by the Guardian / UK

A Call to the Faithful Karl Rove has once again proved his ability to obliterate history in the cause of his president

by Sidney Blumenthal

In a curious juxtaposition, some leading figures from the Bush administration have recently argued that the president is blind, while others, such as Karl Rove, maintain he is omniscient. Rove, Bush's political "architect" and deputy chief of staff, is an expert at arranging the smearing of the motives and patriotism of the president's critics. He remains under investigation for his role in the disclosure of the identity of a CIA operative in order to tarnish the reputation of her husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson - who had revealed that the rationale for the Iraq war was based on false evidence. Every day for the past two weeks, the White House press secretary Scott McClellan has stonewalled questions about Rove's and George Bush's connections to super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty to fraud and bribery and is cooperating with prosecutors. McClellan refuses to name officials who attended "staff-level meetings" with Abramoff. Under these clouds, Rove stepped up to the lectern at the gathering of the Republican national committee in Washington last Friday to invoke the spectre of 9/11. Little else matters but that Bush grasps that it changed everything and that Democrats, of course, do not. "We need," Rove said, "a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in." As Rove spoke, Lewis Paul Bremer III, the former presidential proconsul in Iraq and head of the coalition provisional authority (CPA), was promoting his memoir, My Year in Iraq. "We really did not see the insurgency coming," Bremer told NBC. His arguments for more troops had been rebuffed by Donald Rumsfeld. Rove's call to the faithful lacks Bremer's specificity. For the political theme to remain vital, recent history must be obliterated. For the moment, Rove appears not as a citizen under suspicion, but the cardinal of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. But Bremer's apologia is also challenged by facts. In January 2003, Larry Johnson, a CIA operative who served with Bremer in the state department's office of counterterrorism, sent him a memo that accurately predicted an Iraqi uprising - "no matter how benign or charitable" - and the influence of a "belligerent Iran". "Bremer's reaction," Johnson told me, "was that this was off base, doesn't matter, we're going to war, don't undermine the effort. His mind was made up. There was no brooking any alternative analysis. This is the doctrine, the truth, either you admit to it or you're a heretic." When Bremer became head of the CPA, Johnson tried to brief him with information that the Bush administration had not considered, but Bremer did not "want to listen". Bremer was modelling himself on his commander in chief. In fact, elder statesmen of the foreign policy establishment and the Republican party repeatedly warned Bush to his face what the consequences of the war would be - including the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretaries of state James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. It was "never thought the war would come off right", one of those who spoke to Bush told me. "It was going to end with an Islamic republic dominated by Shias and influenced by Iran ... If you know history, you don't have to be a genius." But Bush would not listen. "It's a sad story." Rove is again playing the patriot game to salvage Bush's political position. This time he is attempting to turn Bush's domestic spying into a false issue of whether Democrats support gathering intelligence on terrorists. The history of the Bush presidency underlines Rove's premise, but not as he wishes: we do need a commander in chief who understands the gravity of the moment. Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of "The Clinton Wars." Email to: sidney_blumenthal @yahoo.com © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

The Truth About the State of our Union

Published on Friday, January 27, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

by Dennis J. Kucinich

On Tuesday night President Bush will stand before the Congress and the nation, to deliver his annual State of the Union address. We are sure to hear a rosy tale of an economy on the rebound, a blossoming democracy in Iraq, a terror network on the run, and a Gulf Coast region rebuilding better and stronger than ever before. As is most often the case with this Administration, the rhetoric does not match reality. The facts are clear. Our economy is struggling and leaving tens of millions of Americans behind. According to the non-partisan National Journal, since President Bush first stood before Congress and the nation in 2001, the median income in this country has decreased, the jobless rate has jumped from 3.9% to 4.9% and the number of families living in poverty has increased from 8.7% to 10.2%. Our trade deficit has doubled. Inflation has gone up. Personal bankruptcies have gone up. Consumer debt has gone up. College tuition has gone up. And, the price of gas has gone up. All the while, this Administration has turned a $128 billion federal budget surplus into a $319 billion deficit. Today, almost 6 million more Americans do not have any health insurance than when President Bush took office. In total, over 45.5 million Americans, or over 15% of our total population, have no health care coverage at all. During his 2003 address, President Bush told the nation that Saddam Hussein "had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax", "materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin", "as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent" and "upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents". Today, almost three years after the start of the President's war of choice, we know Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, had no connection to al-Qaeda and posed no threat to our nation. Yet, our armed forces are bogged down in the middle of civil war that our own generals say cannot be won by military force. Our presence in Iraq is counterproductive and has cost the lives of over 2,200 US troops and $250 billion. President Bush has delivered four State of the Union addresses since the attacks on our nation on 9/11. In four speeches, the President has never once mentioned Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terror attacks on this nation. The status of the FBI's most wanted man apparently is not important to the state of our union. Yet, in the same four speeches, President Bush has mentioned Saddam Hussein 24 times, and Iraq 78 times. President Bush used the opening of his 2003 State of the Union to praise the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. This year our nation, and the world, saw the result of the failure of this massive reorganization of our government. As Katrina rolled ashore, destroying large cities and small towns in four states, it was FEMA, once an independent cabinet level agency--but now rolled into Department of Homeland Security--that failed to react. The searing image of thousands of Americans stranded without food and water dying on American streets will be the lasting legacy of the Department of Homeland Security, not a reorganized government "mobilizing against the threats of a new era" as the President described in his speech. In his 2004 and 2005 addresses, the President spent a considerable amount of time advocating policies that would roll back much of the social progress made since the New Deal. In 2004, the President touted a Medicare prescription drug bill that will fatten the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, endangering the future finances of the entire Medicare program, while leaving seniors confused and empty handed as they try to fill their prescriptions under the new plan. In 2005, the President used his address to promote his plan strip seniors of the guaranteed promise of Social Security, and replace it with a risky scheme to gamble their future in the stock market. What the President has in store for his message this year is not known yet. But, we do know the President Bush will speak in glowing terms about the state of our union. The truth is the state of our union is in great peril. This Administration is conducting a war with no end in Iraq, illegally spying on Americans at home, overseeing an economy that is increasingly leaving more and more Americans behind and abandoning Gulf in their hour of great need. If recent history is any precedent, then next week we should see more of the same old dance around reality that has been the hallmark of President Bush's annual address. Since being elected to Congress in 1996, Kucinich has been a tireless advocate for worker rights, civil rights and human rights. He represents Ohio's 10th District.

Trying to Maintain Control of the State, in a State of Confusion

By Dana Milbank
Friday, January 27, 2006; A07

The best-laid plans for President Bush's news conference went awry just 30 seconds into the event. An Associated Press camera and tripod broke free from their bracket on the ceiling and, in view of the TV cameras, dangled menacingly over reporters from Bloomberg News and the New York Daily News.

"First, I recognize . . ." Bush said, looking up and noticing the twirling piece of metal. "We live in a momentous time . . ." he tried again, then looked back at the unmoored object, which was blocking the MSNBC camera's shot of him. "For those of you watching, we seem to have a mechanical flaw," he felt obliged to explain.

The most powerful man in the world spent the next couple of minutes laboring through his opening statement yesterday in the White House briefing room while a large, bald technician walked into the picture and attempted, in a series of acrobatic gestures, to unscrew the tripod.

For the president, it was a timely reminder that events are not always within his control -- as if he needed another reminder. Earlier in the morning, the world learned that Palestinian voters had just handed their government to the terrorist group Hamas. Bush, trying to explain this reversal, suggested the defeated (U.S.-backed) leadership was crooked.

"If there is corruption, I'm not surprised that people say, 'Let's get rid of corruption,' " he reasoned -- inviting an unwelcome comparison to Jack Abramoff and the 2006 elections.

In all, Bush uttered nearly 7,000 words in his 45-minute Q&A. But his message could be summed up with a brief phrase in his least-favorite language: L'Etat c'est moi (I am the state).

His approval of a program to eavesdrop without warrants: "As I stand here right now, I can tell the American people the program is legal," he certified.

His refusal to release photos of him with Abramoff: "They're not relevant to the investigation."

His view on congressional anti-torture legislation: "Conducting war is a responsibility in the executive branch, not the legislative branch."

His refusal to provide Congress with testimony about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina: "That's just the way it works."

Midway through this Bourbonic performance, the Los Angeles Times's James Gerstenzang offered an observation on Bush's surveillance policy: "This seems to sound like something President Nixon once said, which was: 'When the president does it, then that means that it's not illegal.' " Whispered "oohs" could be heard in the room. Bush gave a look indicating he wished the dangling camera had fallen on Gerstenzang.

"Most presidents believe that during a time of war that we can use our authorities under the Constitution to make decisions necessary to protect us," he answered, then offered his reading of legislation passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks: "Go ahead and conduct the war. We're not going to tell you how to do it."

Bush seemed distracted even before the camera dislodged. "I do want to give you some thoughts about what I'm thinking about," he began.

The Hamas news may have been weighing on his mind. But he spoke as though the terrorist group's landslide had been a balloting triumph. "So the Palestinians had an election yesterday, the results of which remind me about the power of democracy," he said, later adding: "I like the competition of ideas."

When CBS's John Roberts steered questioning toward the National Security Agency's surveillance, Bush dismissed the notion of a law that legitimized it. "My concern has always been that, in an attempt to try to pass a law on something that's already legal, we'll show the enemy what we're doing," he said. "If the attempt to write a law is likely to expose the nature of the program, I'll resist it."

Even the Washington Times pressed Bush to answer charges that he has abused his power. But the president declined to be drawn into constitutional nuance. "I'm going to leave that to the lawyers," he said. "I believe I've been hired by the people to do my job, and that's to protect the people."

Another questioner wondered what it was about the 1978 law governing domestic wiretapping "that you feel you have to circumvent it."

The president's lip curled upward. He held up his hand, then leaned on the lectern and pointed his finger. "It's like saying, 'You know, you're breaking the law.' I'm not," he protested. Still, Bush explained why he disregarded the 1978 law. "I said, 'Look, is it possible to conduct this program under the old law?' And people said, 'It doesn't work.' "

The questions about the Abramoff photos heightened Bush's irritation. "Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that I'm a friend with him or know him very well," he replied to one questioner. "I've had my picture taken with you."

A few questions later, Bush made the distance between Abramoff and himself even longer. "I, frankly, don't even remember having my picture taken with the guy," he declared. "I don't know him."

Still, the president seemed to realize the questions about the photos were not going away. CBS Radio's Mark Knoller tried another approach. "Never mind about the photographs, but can you say whether . . . "

Bush cut him off. "Easy," he noted, "for a radio guy to say."

LINK

And The Revolution Grows Nearer..

...not the one we wanted.... more like the bloody one we didn't want.

 

Study Finds Rich-Poor Income Gap Growing

By MARK JOHNSON, Associated Press WriterFri Jan 27, 2:29 AM ET

The disparity between rich and poor is growing in America as the federal minimum wage has remained flat for years, union membership has declined and industries have faced global competition, according to a study released Thursday.

The report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, both liberal-leaning think tanks, found the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of families nationally grew by an average of $2,660, or 19 percent, over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by $45,100, or nearly 59 percent, the study by the Washington-based groups said.

Families in the middle fifth saw their incomes rise 28 percent, or $10,218.

The figures, based on U.S. Census data, compare the average growth from 1980-82 to 2001-03, after adjusting for inflation.

The poorest one-fifth of families, the report said, had an average income of $16,780 from 2000-03, while the top fifth of families had an average income of $122,150 — more than seven times as much. Middle-income families' average income was $46,875.

Trudi Renwick, an economist with the union-backed Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, said globalization, the decline of manufacturing jobs, the expansion of low-wage service jobs, immigration and the weakening of unions have hurt those on the lower end of the economic scale.

In 38 states, the incomes of high-income families grew by a higher percentage than those of the lowest-income families; Alaska was the only state in which the reverse was true. The 11 states where the high and low incomes increased at about the same rate were mostly in the West and Midwest.

The greatest disparity between rich and poor was in New York, where the top 20 percent of wage earners had average incomes 8.1 times larger than the poorest 20 percent in the early 2000s. Texas had only a slightly smaller gap; Wyoming had the smallest disparity at a 5.2 to 1 ratio.

Matthew Maguire, a spokesman for the Business Council of New York state, said the money earned by the state's wealthiest residents is "something that everybody who cares about New York should be pleased about."

"New York's wealthy pay huge sums in taxes and those wealthy people and their taxes make it possible for New York to provide the nation's most generous social service programs to less fortunate New Yorkers," he said. "It also reflects the fact the state is a magnet for immigrants who come from the four corners of the globe to a state they see as symbol of economic activity."

Renwick said the government "needs to continue its commitment to correcting the natural outcomes of the marketplace" by raising the minimum wage with inflation and by tax policies like the earned income tax credit.

Renwick also suggested that governments, when giving tax breaks to companies, insist those companies provide jobs that pay higher wages.

___

On the Net:   

Economic Policy Institute: http://www.epi.org

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: http://www.cbpp.org/

 

"Polling Analysis: For Bush, bad news comes in fives....

 ......it can't get much worse, or can it?
 

  by August Keso, January 27th, 2006

Hey, it could be worse - right? Well, as it concerns President Bush's standing with the people, it can't get much worse. At least not without him either being impeached, or plunked before a war crimes tribunal. A recent poll conducted by American Research Group, showed the President's approval at 36 percent. Since that poll was released, the news hasn't gotten any better for the President.

A more recent Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg Poll has found just 43 percent approving of Bush's performance. That is his worst showing ever in that particular poll.

"He received even lower marks for his handling of the economy, health care and Iraq -- especially from women, whom the poll found have turned against him on several fronts.

"By a 2 to 1 margin, those surveyed said the nation needs to change direction from the overall course Bush has set."

They say bad news comes in threes, which, for the President, would be a welcome reality. A new Harris Poll finds that, "As President Bush prepares to address the country with the State of the Union, only one-third -- 32 percent -- of U.S. adults believe the current state of the country is good, while 68 percent believe it is poor."

As if the above information wasn't bad enough, another poll, the CBS-New York Times Poll found, "President Bush's approval rating is stuck at a dismal 42 percent as he heads into next week's State of the Union address."

The Poll also revealed, "At the same time, a clear majority, 64 percent, is concerned that the Bush administration's anti-terrorism measures could threaten their civil liberties. A third are 'very concerned.'"

CBS' polling uncovered still more bad news for President Bush, "Fifty-four percent of Americans say the war in Iraq is going badly, versus 45 percent who say it's going well.

"Many Americans are not convinced the president is painting an accurate picture of the situation in Iraq. Fifty-eight percent say he describes things as better than they are, while 31 percent say his descriptions are accurate."

Finally, did someone mention impeachment? A Zogby Poll posted on January 16, 2006, revealed 53 percent, including 29 percent of Republicans, believe Bush, if he spied on citizens without obtaining warrants, should be impeached. That marks the beginning of bad news coming in fives, which, in-and-of-itself, is another ominous sign for the President.

Nobody gets bad news in fives! It's always threes -- has always been threes. Who gets bad news in fives? George W. Bush, that's who gets bad news in fives.

Still, according to the previously cited LA Times-Bloomberg Poll, only 36 percent approve of Congressional Democrats. Perhaps, a youthful 20-year-old Dez Jackson summed it up best, "I was watching the news and I heard nothing from the Democrats," Jackson, who was sharply critical of the president in the survey, said. "What are they, afraid to speak up?"

As the polls show, not only is the country fed up with President Bush and his policies, and willing, if necessary, to have him impeached, but the people seem to be crying out for leadership - real leadership. They are looking for Democrats to step-up and do something - anything, but the people don't see them as delivering.

Yet, for President Bush, impeachment and war crimes tribunal aside, it can't get much worse - or can it?

Copyright © 2005 Progressive Daily Beacon
Please contact editor@progressivedailybeacon.com with any questions or comments

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Bush administration no longer a credible source

Reality-based journalists must stop parroting White House propaganda

AUSTIN, Texas -- We live in interesting times, we do, we do. We can read in our daily newspapers that our government is about to launch a three-day propaganda blitz to convince us all that its secret program to spy on us is something we really want and need. "A campaign of high-profile national security events," reports The New York Times, follows "Karl Rove's blistering speech to national Republicans" about what a swell political issue this is for their party. The question for journalists is how to report this. President Bush says it's a great idea and he's proud of the secret spy program? Attorney General Gonzales explains breaking the law is no problem? Dick Cheney says accept spying, or Osama bin Laden will get you? Or might we actually have gotten far enough to point out that the series of high-profile security events is in fact part of a propaganda campaign by our own government? Should we report it as though it were in fact a campaign tactic, a straight political ploy: The Republicans say spying is good for you, but the Democrats say it is not -- equal time to both sides? Perhaps we have some obligation to try to sift through what it means that our government is spying on us in violation of the law and the Constitution. Then there's the problem of reporting within the context of this administration's other propaganda efforts. "We do not torture," and, "We are not running a gulag of secret detention centers," are two of the more recent examples, superseding the golden oldies -- like the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud. Furthermore, the Rove offensive is not to admit that we are indeed running a gulag of secret detention camps, but to attack those who point it out and put them under investigation for revealing government secrets and helping the enemy. Even without the intimidation, how do you report something claimed by George W. Bush as though you hadn't recently heard him say he would support John McCain's amendment barring torture -- and then turn around and claim that he has the right to violate that law? I genuinely appreciate the response by real conservatives on this issue -- the libertarians, the true heirs of Barry Goldwater, the all-government-is-bad grumps. It's called principle. But I am confounded by the authoritarian streak in the Republican Party backing Bush on this. To me it seems so simple: Would you think this was a good idea if Hillary Clinton were president? Would you be defending the clear and unnecessary violation of the law? Do you have complete confidence that she would never misuse this "inherent power" for any partisan reason? The warrantless wiretaps reportedly covered thousands of calls, and the information obtained was widely circulated among federal agencies. I know one guy who is now on the federal no-fly list. His sin? Co-authoring an unflattering book about Karl Rove. What a menace to national security he is. One of the odder features of our time is that much of our political debate is cast in "moral" terms, with such helpful authorities as Pat Robertson holding forth on whom we should assassinate next. A more useful contribution from this direction comes from Jimmy Carter in his new book, "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis." I am a great admirer of Carter's and glad to hear his soft Southern Christian voice once more. But it occurs to me that in his quiet way, many of his arguments are as pragmatic as they are moral. As one with considerable faith in the common sense of Americans, it occurs to me we may yet rescue ourselves from this bootless skunk match over morality by using plain sense, instead. Many of Carter's points center on the fact that our war on terrorism is not working. Iraq is not working (hard to even count the ways). Major terrorist attacks themselves more than tripled from 2003, to 655 attacks in 2004. Our support in the Middle East sinks lower and lower. The region is not becoming more democratic. What would happen if we had not a political, but a pragmatic debate about all of this: We have made a horrible mess of this entire war on terrorism, now how do we fix it? What do we do? I realize it's a bit simplistic of me after all this time, but I really think one of the best things we could do for ourselves is deal honestly with the facts. Because we have made a mess of this does not mean we are a pitiful, helpless giant -- the United States still has more sheer military power than anyone else on earth. But using it is not necessarily the best way to get the results we want. Because we are stuck with this administration for another three years, I think it important to begin to get past the defensiveness and drawing attention away and blame games that big messes provoke. And part of that calls on American journalism to get over reporting the Bush administration as though it were a credible source. We need to face facts. Read more in the Molly Ivins archive . Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In?

(c) 2006 Creators Syndicate

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20266

KBR gets contract for Detention Centers in U.S.

By John Newby
January 22, 2006

I've heard and seen many reports concerning detention camps that have been built throughout the country. Quite frankly, I viewed them with a bit of skepticism, not that I didn't trust the source or the information, I didn't trust the conclusions. The claims have been many and include information (including pictures) indicating some of these camps are built to hold as many as a million people if need be. While these types of stories are easy to fabricate and can provide plenty of speculation fodder to spread; the following news release should give cause for concern to even the most conspiracy challenged Americans.

Here is the word for word news release:

KBR Awarded Homeland Security contract worth up to $385M. (HAL) (By
Katherine Hunt)

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton Co, (HAL), said Tuesday it has been awarded a contingency contract from the Department of Homeland Security to supports its Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the event of an emergency. The maximum total value of the contract is $385 million and consists of a 1-year base period with four 1-year options. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005. The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and
processing capabilities to expand existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs, KBR said. The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other government organizations in the event of an immigration
emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster, the company said.

If no one has ever heard anything about detention or concentration camps within the United States, the above press release would appear relatively harmless. However, if anyone is waiting for the government and KBR to come out and say "Hey, we're building concentration camps for all you minions," before they will take note, you'll be in those camps 'before' you figure it out.

Several items about this concern me greatly.

 

First, instead of paying $385+ million for the next five years to build detention centers or so they say; why not stop the flow at the borders which would be much cheaper? On the other hand, if the illegals are the real problem and reason for building detention centers; why not cancel all jobs for illegals, stop all government payments to illegals and their off-spring
and watch the illegal problem dry up like a drought stricken river. You won't have to send them back, they will leave. But that would mean that the illegals are the real problem being addressed, could there are other reasons for these little mini Gitmo's?

Secondly, what are these other detention center type projects? Maybe they learned something in New Orleans, maybe they learned that they needed detention camps in which to send people that lost their homes during this natural disaster. By having Haliburton (Man, why does Hallibuton get all the plush assignments) build local camps, we can herd the mindless little masses into them whenever a natural disaster or even
potential disaster occurs. Not to mention NWO orchestrated disasters.

Now I'm sure that many will say, not to worry, no big deal or your just making a mountain out of molehill. Maybe I am, however I believe our country has survived quite well without detention or concentration camps for the past 200 years. Just not sure why King George feels we need them now? Wasn't there another country that built and operated a few concentration camps about 60 years ago?

 

I wonder what little piece of propaganda Hitler used to convince the little minions to look the other way?

Color me naive, but when I hear talk of cages, detention and/or concentration camps, my mind usually wonders in devious directions. I haven't seen anywhere in history where detention centers and so forth were used as freedom enhancing tools.

 

View this anyway you wish, but do so at your own peril.

 

Consider yourself warned, what you choose to do with this information is only up to you.

 

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Using Our Fear

By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post

Once upon a time we had a great wartime president who told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Now we have George W. Bush, who uses fear as a tool of executive power and as a political weapon against his opponents.

Franklin D. Roosevelt tried his best to allay his nation's fears in the midst of an epic struggle against fascism. Bush, as he leads the country in a war whose nature he is constantly redefining, keeps fear alive because it has been so useful. His political grand vizier, Karl Rove, was perfectly transparent the other day when he emerged from wherever he's been hiding the past few months -- consulting omens, reading entrails -- and gave the Republican National Committee its positioning statement for the fall elections: Vote for us or die.

Democrats "have a pre-9/11 worldview" of national security that is "deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong," Rove said. The clear subtext was that Americans would court mortal danger by electing Democrats. Go forth and scare the bejesus out of them, Rove was telling his party, because the more frightened they are, the better our chances.

To cultivate fear for partisan gain is never a political tactic to be proud of, but Rove's prescription of naked fear-mongering is just plain reprehensible when the nation faces a shifting array of genuine, serious threats. This is a moment for ethical politicians -- and, yes, these days that seems like an oxymoron -- to speak honestly about what dangers have receded, what new dangers have emerged, and how the imperatives of liberty and security can be balanced.

From the likes of Rove, I guess, we shouldn't expect anything more noble than win-at-all-costs. But we do have the right to expect more from the president of the United States, and while Bush gives off none of Rove's Sith-lord menace, he has made the cultivation of fear a hallmark of his governance.

At his news conference yesterday, Bush was asked again about the domestic surveillance he has ordered the National Security Agency to conduct without seeking warrants -- a program that seems to violate the law. In his meandering answer, the president kept throwing in the phrase "to protect the American people." I suspect that's a line that tests well in focus groups, but it doesn't really say anything. The fact that we expect any president to protect us does not obviate the fact that we expect any president to obey the law.

Bush mentioned the new tape from Osama bin Laden that surfaced the other day, calling it a reminder that we face "an enemy that wants to hit us again." That's certainly true, but the warning would carry more gravitas if Bush and his administration didn't brag so much about how thoroughly al Qaeda has been routed and decimated. Is anybody keeping track of how many "No. 3" or "No. 4" al Qaeda lieutenants U.S. forces claim to have eliminated?

And Americans would be better able to measure the threat from bin Laden if Bush and the rest of his administration didn't argue -- when it gives them an edge -- that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terrorism." If Iraq is the main event, then bin Laden, huddled in some cave in northern Pakistan, must be just a sideshow, right? But of course he's not a sideshow, he's the author of the Sept. 11 attacks, so what does that make Iraq? The answer seems to depend on whether, at any given time, Bush believes that cultivating fear of bin Laden or stoking fear of a terrorist spawning ground in Iraq would better help his administration achieve its ends.

The thing is, fear works. The administration successfully invoked the fear of "mushroom clouds" to win support, or at least acquiescence, for the invasion of Iraq. By the time it was clear there were no weapons of mass destruction, the fear of losing to terrorists on the "central front" had been given primacy. We stopped hearing the name bin Laden so often -- no need to bring attention to the fact that he remained at large -- until reports emerged of secret CIA prisons, torture and domestic spying.

Bin Laden does remain a threat. He would hit the United States again if he could. We do expect the president to protect us. But a great wartime leader rallies his citizens by informing them and inspiring them. He certainly doesn't use threats to our national security for political gain. He doesn't just point at a map and say "Boo."

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

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When Republicans Loved The F-buster

Supporters of George W. Bush are lambasting Sen. John Kerry for a threatened filibuster against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. But 15 years ago, their attitude was different as backers of George H.W. Bush wielded the filibuster to block a probe into Republican secret dealings with Iran that could have doomed the Bush Dynasty.

In 1991, the Democratic-controlled Senate was planning an investigation into whether Republicans had conducted secret negotiations with Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime during the 1980 campaign, when Jimmy Carter was still President and Iran was holding 52 Americans hostage.

The unresolved hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and gave an important boost to Ronald Reagan when the hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, immediately after he was sworn in as President and George H.W. Bush became Vice President.

A decade after those events, some Democrats wanted to get to the bottom of recurring allegations that George Bush Sr., a former CIA director, had joined clandestine negotiations with Iran in fall 1980 that may have delayed release of the hostages for political gain, what was called the “October Surprise” mystery.

Meanwhile, Republicans were worried that a full-scale October Surprise investigation might implicate Bush in near-treasonous talks with an enemy state and devastate his 1992 reelection campaign. Confirmation of the allegations also would have eviscerated the legitimacy of the Reagan-Bush era.

So, in November 1991, Republican leaders used the filibuster to block funding for the investigation. The Democrats mustered 51 votes – a majority – but fell short of the 60 votes needed for cloture. A fully funded investigation was prevented.

Historical Marker

The Republican success in blocking a full Senate probe received little attention at the time, but represented an important historical marker. It was an early indication of how neoconservative journalists, then rising inside the national news media, could collaborate with Republicans to shape the information reaching the American people.

The preponderance of evidence now suggests that in 1980, Republicans – most likely including Ronald Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey and then-vice presidential nominee George H.W. Bush – did negotiate with representatives of Iran’s Islamic government behind Carter’s back. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Imperium’s Quarter Century” or Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

But exposure of those secret dealings, a prequel to the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage schemes of 1985-86, would not only have sunk George H.W. Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992. The revelations would have exposed collaboration by Israel’s right-wing Likud government in the October Surprise scheme. Likud wanted Carter ousted in 1980 because he had pressured Israel to make major concessions to the Palestinians. [See David Kimche's The Last Option.]

If revealed, the truth had the potential to hurt some very powerful people – and to change the direction of American history.

So, as the October Surprise secrets began to spill out in 1991, the increasingly neoconservative New Republic, which had strong ties to the Likud bloc in Israel, swung into action, publishing a cover story in fall 1991 that purported to debunk the October Surprise allegations.

At the center of the New Republic article – and a similar one published by Newsweek – was a complex alibi for the whereabouts of Casey on a key weekend in July 1980 when one witness, Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi, alleged that Casey met with Iranian emissaries in Madrid.

ABC’s “Nightline” had discovered that Casey had taken an unannounced trip to London on that July 1980 weekend for a World War II historical conference – and there appeared to be enough time in Casey’s schedule for a side trip to Madrid.

However, in their debunking articles, the New Republic and Newsweek cited attendance records for the World War II conference, supposedly accounting for enough of Casey’s time to exclude the two-day meeting in Madrid that Hashemi had described.

The two magazine articles had enormous effect on Washington’s conventional wisdom, which had been caught off-guard five years earlier by the Iran-Contra disclosures and would have looked even sillier if the history of the 1980 election also needed to be rewritten – with Reagan and George Bush Sr. as the villains. So the debunking articles were warmly received by influential Washingtonians.

Eventually, however, the New Republic and Newsweek debunking stories would be shown to be false. The magazines had misinterpreted the London conference attendance records and had put Casey at a crucial conference session, which he had actually skipped.

Inside Newsweek, investigative reporter Craig Unger later told me that he had been shocked by the magazine’s disingenuous work on the “window” of Casey’s known whereabouts. “They knew the window was not real,” Unger said of his Newsweek editors. “It was the most dishonest thing that I’ve been through in my life in journalism.”

But the falsity of the New Republic and Newsweek articles was not known in November 1991 when the Senate considered funding a thorough investigation of the October Surprise charges. Indeed, the two bogus stories represented the centerpiece of the Republican argument against proceeding with the investigation.

Dole’s Filibuster

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole led the fight against the October Surprise investigation, much as he had spearheaded attempts to discredit the work of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who was slowly deconstructing the Republican cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal.

On Nov. 22, 1991, Dole mounted a filibuster against any independent Senate inquiry of the allegations that the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage deals had been, in effect, the second act of secret Republican negotiations with Iran’s radical mullahs. Dole invoked party discipline to defeat a cloture vote on funding for the probe.

Though denied the money, a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee still sponsored a small-scale investigation, with attorney Reid Weingarten hired as the lead investigator. But Weingarten found the lack of money only one of the limitations on his investigative efforts, he later told me.

As the probe proceeded, Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Jesse Helms summoned Weingarten into a closed-door meeting in which McConnell brow-beat Weingarten with personal insults. For his part, Helms barred Weingarten’s investigators from interviewing witnesses outside Washington.

Though hamstrung by lack of funds and Republican obstructions, Weingarten did make some significant discoveries.

Weingarten obtained testimony corroborating claims that Casey had known Cyrus Hashemi, Jamshid Hashemi’s brother who allegedly also took part in the Madrid meetings. Plus, the Senate investigators found that some FBI wiretaps of Cyrus Hashemi in 1980 might have been intentionally erased.

Weingarten found, too, that key Casey records – his 1980 passport and several pages from his personal calendar – were missing and that the Casey family was withholding documents. (Casey, who was Reagan’s first CIA director, had died in 1987.)

But, running out of money, the best Weingarten could do was conclude that Casey had been “fishing in troubled waters” on the hostage issue and was engaged in “informal, clandestine, and potentially dangerous efforts on behalf of the Reagan campaign to gather intelligence on the volatile and unpredictable course of the hostage negotiations.”

The House Probe

Thanks to the Dole filibuster, most of the October Surprise investigation was delivered into the friendlier hands of a House task force, where Republican Rep. Henry Hyde battled the probe from the inside while Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton tried to be as accommodating to George H.W. Bush as possible.

Hamilton even agreed to blackball one Democratic staff investigator because the Republicans didn’t want him involved and because the staffer thought the October Surprise allegations might just be true. The investigator, House Foreign Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver, had written a memo questioning another dubious alibi that had been used to “clear” George H.W. Bush of suspicion.

Though the Senate filibuster succeeded in limiting the investigation of how the Reagan-Bush era began, it did not spare George Bush Sr. from defeat in 1992. Amid growing public suspicion that Bush had lied about his claim to be “out of the loop” on the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush lost to Democrat Bill Clinton.

In the weeks after Clinton’s victory, the House October Surprise task force tidied up the history of 1980 by sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug.

In December 1992 and January 1993, new evidence poured into the task force corroborating allegations of Republican complicity in secret contacts with Iran in 1980. But the information was mostly kept from the American people.

There was little incentive for either side to fight for the truth. The Republicans on the House task force wanted to protect the Reagan-Bush legacy and the Democrats no longer saw any political imperative in exposing wrongdoing by George H.W. Bush.

Though the Democrats didn’t understand the significance at the time, their collaboration in the October Surprise cover-up opened the door for a Bush Restoration eight years later. One of George W. Bush’s few credentials for being President was his father’s reputation as an honorable politician.

So the Republican filibuster in 1991 served a crucial political function by undermining an investigation that might have eliminated the electoral viability of the Bush Family.

The Alito Nomination

Now, 15 years later, a back story of George W. Bush’s nomination of right-wing jurist Samuel Alito is that the U.S. Supreme Court could end up being the final arbiter of attempts to investigate wrongdoing by the current President Bush.

With Alito joining reliable pro-Republican votes – Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy – Bush will have an important card up his sleeve should a legal question about the President’s right to keep secrets from Congress or a prosecutor ever wind its way to the high court.

This time, ironically, a Democratic filibuster might be the only way to prevent the Bush family from concealing more chapters of America’s history.

[For more on the October Surprise mystery, peruse Consortiumnews.com’s archives or see Parry’s narrative of the 1991-92 investigation, Trick or Treason., or his account of the latest evidence in Secrecy & Privilege.]

---

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

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Depleted Uranium; A Pending Global Disaster

By Stephen Lendman

Forget about Avian bird flu. The threat of it becoming a pandemic is more a political scare tactic and potential bonanza for drug company profits and its major shareholders' net worth (including Gilead Sciences, the developer of the Tamiflu drug and its former Chairman and major shareholder Donald Rumsfeld) than a likely public health crisis - unless you live around infected chickens or take an unproven safe immunization shot. There are much more other likely killer bacterial and viral threats than Avian that get little attention. Don't worry about possible or unlikely threats. Worry about real ones. Bacteria and viruses untreatable by anti-biotics are good examples. So are global warming and many others. But, there's possibly one threat that tops all others both in gravity and because it's been deliberately concealed from the public - never discussed, explained or had any action taken to remediate it. It's the global threat from the toxic effects of depleted uranium (DU), and like global warming; DU has the potential to destroy all planetary life. How can something so potentially destructive be hidden and ignored and why?

 | read more

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q

Fitzgerald Eyes Plame-Niger Conspiracy

Prosecutor Probing Niger Forgeries, Possible Conspiracy in CIA Leak

By Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | www.truthout.org

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press - I think a few journalists - about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him."

Over the past few months, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been questioning witnesses in the CIA leak case about the origins of the disputed Niger documents referenced in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, according to several current and former State Department officials who have testified in the case.

The State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because some of the information they discussed is still classified, indicated that the White House had substantial motive for revealing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

They said the questions Fitzgerald asked them about the Niger documents suggested to them that the special prosecutor was putting together a timeline. They said they believe Fitzgerald wants to show the grand jury how some people in the Bush administration may have conspired to retaliate against former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

The officials said Fitzgerald's interest is not in the war's validity. Instead, Fitzgerald is trying to find out if Wilson's public questions about the administration's intelligence and its use of the Niger documents led members of a little known committee called the White House Iraq Group to leak Plame's name and CIA status to reporters.

The officials have provided the first in-depth look at how the administration came to rely upon the Niger documents in the fall of 2002, and how it played a direct role in the Plame leak, which ultimately forced the White House to acknowledge that it shouldn't have allowed President Bush to cite the uranium claims in his State of the Union address - a move the White House had hoped it could avoid.

Wilson was chosen by the CIA in February 2002 to travel to Niger to check on questions Vice President Dick Cheney had about Iraq's interest in buying yellowcake uranium from the African country. Uranium is the key component used to build an atomic bomb. The State Department had first expressed doubts about the vice president's inquiries. Officials at the State Department, including Colin Powell, according to sources, told Cheney the intelligence was suspect.

"We already expressed our opinion about the intelligence the vice president was asking about. We thought it had no merit," one former senior State Department official said. "We resented that they didn't trust what we said."

Indeed, earlier that month, Carlton Fulford Jr., a four-star Marine general, was sent to Niger to check on the security of Niger's uranium. He returned to the United States convinced that the supply was secure. Fulford informed Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about his findings. It's unclear whether Myers ever shared the information with White House officials. A spokesperson for Myers said the general would not respond to questions for this story.

Later that same month, the State Department official said, Wilson traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA. That's the trip the State Department had initially protested because Fulford had already looked into it. But Wilson confirmed that there was no truth to the allegations.

"We felt vindicated," the State Department official said because there had long been animosity between the White House and State over disagreements concerning intelligence on the Iraqi threat.

However, seven months later, the British government prepared a "white paper" giving validity to the claims that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger which the State Department and Wilson had already proved false.

"Some very senior people in the vice president's office saw that as an opportunity," an official who currently works at the State Department in a senior capacity said. "They took it and ran with it, and it was wrong."

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - Cheney's former chief of staff, who was indicted on five-counts of lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame leak - National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and Cheney had embraced the uranium claims cited in the "white paper," according to the State Department sources, and they had all pushed for its inclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.

"I have no idea how or why [the Niger uranium claim] got in there," one of the current State Department sources said. "To this day I don't know. Secretary Powell knew that we disagreed with the intelligence. It wasn't that we disagreed with the White House per se. It's that we disagreed with the intelligence regarding Niger. We were the only people in the intelligence community who thought the documents were bogus."

Numerous messages were left at the offices of Hadley, Cheney and Powell, and there was no response.

Iraq's interest in the yellowcake caught the attention of Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Association. ElBaradei had read a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate and had personally contacted the State Department and the National Security Council, where Hadley was then deputy advisor, to obtain the evidence so his agency could look into it.

ElBaradei sent a letter to the White House and the National Security Council in December 2002, warning senior officials he thought the documents were forgeries and should not be cited by the administration as evidence that Iraq was actively trying to obtain WMDs. ElBaradei said he never received a written response to his letter, despite repeated follow-up calls he made to the White House, the NSC and the State Department.

The State Department officials said they did not know whether Powell ever saw ElBaradei's letter, but they were unaware that ElBaradei had inquired about the allegations made in the Niger documents.

In a second letter sent to Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, in March 2003, after the Iraq had war started, ElBaradei laid out the details of his attempts to get to the bottom of the Niger uranium story.

ElBaradei said that when the Niger claims were included in the State Department fact sheet on the Iraqi threat in December 2002, "the IAEA asked the U.S. Government, through its Mission in Vienna, to provide any actionable information that would allow it to follow up with the countries involved, viz Niger and Iraq."

ElBaradei said he was assured that his letter was forwarded to the White House and to the National Security Council. He added that he and his staff were suspicious about the Niger documents because it had long been rumored that documents pertaining to Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger had been doctored.

In conversations and correspondence with Waxman in March 2003, ElBaradei said White House officials pledged to cooperate with United Nations inspectors but repeatedly withheld evidence from them.

Cheney, who made the rounds on the cable news shows that month, tried to discredit ElBaradei's conclusion that the documents were forged.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

Two months earlier, Wilson re-emerged. It was one day after President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, in which the president said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Wilson said he met with a friend who worked at the State Department and asked why the president cited the British intelligence report about Iraq's attempt to buy uranium, when he had debunked the allegation a year earlier.

"I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case," Wilson wrote in his infamous July 6, 2003, op-ed in the New York Times, which preceded his wife's identity being leaked to reporters by about a week.

Many career State Department officials were also livid that the so-called "16 words" made its way into the State of the Union address, the current and former department officials who commented for this story said.

"To me it showed a total disregard for the truth, plain and simple," said one former State Department official who had worked closely with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, referring to the administration's use of the flawed intelligence.

"I refuse to believe that the findings of a four-star general and an envoy the CIA sent to Niger to personally investigate the accuracy of the intelligence, as well as our own research at the State Department, never got into the hands of President Bush or Vice President Cheney. I don't buy it. Saying that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was all it took, as far as I'm concerned, to convince the House to support the war. The American people too. I believe removing Saddam Hussein was right and just. But the intelligence that was used to state the case wasn't."

The officials said Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley had pressured Powell to reference the Niger documents in his presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, but Powell did not believe the intelligence was solid and refused. The officials said there was a verbal confrontation between the men over the issue. Other sources close to Powell confirmed this as well.

Although there were suspicions that the Niger documents were forgeries, the White House went to great lengths to defend its use of the report in Bush's State of the Union address, saying the CIA signed off on it.

At this time, Wilson was also unconvinced that the White House did not see his report. In private conversations with a State Department official and a few reporters, he accused the White House of twisting the intelligence to fuel the administration's war machine. He let it be known that he had personally investigated the allegations on behalf of the CIA.

By May 2003, Wilson had made enough noise in Washington, DC, political circles about the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence to attract the attention of Libby and Hadley. Wilson had been a source for Nicholas Kristoff's New York Times column that suggested the administration knowingly used the phony Niger documents to win support for the war.

"You have to understand," the former State Department official said, "this was two months after the invasion, and here was a person contradicting what the administration felt strongly about. The administration put so much stock into the fact that WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) were there. But it was clear that in May 2003 there was no evidence of WMDs. Anyone bringing it up, calling the administration out, so to speak, became a target."

All of the officials said that after Kristoff's column was published, they received phone calls from from Libby and Hadley inquiring about the unnamed official in Kristoff's column, who turned out to be Wilson. For the first time, the public learned that the US had sent an American envoy to personally check on the accuracy of the Niger claims.

This was in stark contrast to what the administration had been saying publicly up until this point: that they only cited the Niger documents because they had been confirmed by British intelligence. But the column raised new questions about what the administration knew and when they knew it. The revelation in Kristoff's report threatened to expose how senior White House officials ignored Wilson and all the other warnings they had received about the veracity of the documents.

Cheney found out who Wilson was in May 2003, according to the indictment handed up against Libby in late October. Cheney found out that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. He shared the information with Libby, although Libby had been snooping around on his own and found out the same information, too.

In fact, according to sources knowledgeable about the discussions that took place during this time, only a handful of Cheney's very close aides knew the identity of the person trashing the administration's pre-war intelligence. Karl Rove wasn't even in the know yet, the sources said.

White House officials' decision to retaliate against Wilson by blowing his CIA wife's cover to reporters would come less than a month later - in early June 2003.

The Wilson story had legs. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post started poking around. He called the CIA to check on Wilson's story. He called other people at the White House, too. Reporters were becoming very interested in the fact that the Bush administration failed to inform Congress or the public that Cheney asked the CIA to look into the Niger uranium allegations a year before, and that Wilson was chosen for the mission. It started to appear as if the administration had manipulated the intelligence and duped Congress into backing the war.

Marc Grossman, then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, read about the Niger story, and the unnamed special envoy that was sent to check out the bogus claims, in Kristoff's column.

"He got a request from someone at the White House to look into it, the Niger issues that is, and he asked INR about it," the current State Department official said.

Grossman was scheduled to meet with Cheney and Libby and other senior officials who were members of the White House Iraq Group to discuss the war and the negative stories that were flooding the media about the absence of WMDs in Iraq.

There is no indication that Fitzgerald is investigating Cheney.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed in August 2002 by Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff, to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. WHIG operated out of the Vice President's office.

The group's members included Rove, Bush advisor Karen Hughes, Senior Advisor to the Vice President Mary Matalin, Deputy Director of Communications James Wilkinson, Assistant to the President and Legislative Liaison Nicholas Calio, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Last week, this State Department official said that a meeting took place in the office of the Vice President after Libby read the memo, to decide how they would respond to Wilson's increasing public criticism about the administration.

"There was a major, major concern about the polls, the public response, that Mr. Wilson could cause enormous damage," the retired senior State Department official said.

Grossman asked Carl Ford, then the head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to prepare what is known as an INR report about the Niger claims to shed additional light on what Wilson had been referring to in news reports.

The four-page memo indicated that the State Department long had doubts about the veracity of the administration's claims about Iraq's attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. The memo made scant reference to Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame.

"We had real qualms that the intel was not true. When the report was prepared, we were actually happy, because it was an opportunity to talk about Niger again and why we thought there was absolutely no truth to the intelligence," one senior State Department official who saw the report said. "It was not intended to be a report about Mr. Wilson or Ms. Plame."

A retired State Department official who was a source for a July 20, 2005, Associated Press story told the AP that the memo was drafted to respond to specific questions about Wilson's debunking of the Niger uranium claims.

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," the State Department official told the AP. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement with the White House."

The retired official was tracked down and interviewed by this reporter. This person said some senior members of Cheney's staff wanted the memo "toned down" after they read it.

"Try to understand their concern," the retired State Department official said. "This was the very first time there was written evidence - not notes, but a request for a report - from the State Department that documented why the Niger intel was bullshit. It was the only thing in writing, and it had a certain value because it didn't come from the IAEA. It came from State. It scared the heck out of a lot of people because it proved that this guy Wilson's story was credible. I don't think anybody wanted the media to know that the State Department disagreed with the intelligence used by the White House. That's why Wilson had to be shut down."

The current State Department official said the INR memo was discussed at length during the meeting Grossman attended at the White House. That meeting may have been the first time other White House officials, including Karl Rove, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and other unknown administration officials learned that Valerie Plame was Wilson's wife and that she worked at the CIA in a covert capacity.

All of the sources interviewed separately for this story said they were told that Karl Rove was the person who first suggested using the media to "turn the tables on Wilson." The officials wouldn't identify the person who told them this. The decision, however, was made during a meeting that took place between the White House Iraq Group.

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press - I think a few journalists - about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him. They were going to show that Wilson and his wife were Democrats. Can you imagine? They were going to say 'don't listen to them, they're partisan.' It was a coordinated effort to turn him into the story. Much to my surprise, it worked."

One of the officials interviewed for this story was also cited in a September 28, 2003, Washington Post story about the motivation to leak Wilson's wife's identity to the media. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the State Department official told the Post. The Post did not name the official.

Lawyers close to the leak case said Fitzgerald seems to be pursuing conspiracy charges against some of the higher-profile suspects in the leak, such as Rove.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return numerous messages left at Patton Boggs, the law offices where he works in Washington, DC.

The State Department officials said they were asked by Fitzgerald how important they thought the Niger uranium claims were in making a case for war. He also asked them why they doubted the authenticity of the Niger documents, why the reports appeared to be dubious, if they knew how Wilson was picked to investigate it, whether they heard about his verbal report upon his return, how and why the INR memo was prepared, and whether it was done in response to Wilson's claims about the Niger intelligence or so officials could find out how Wilson was chosen for the trip, and why any reference to his wife was made in the memo.

Ironically, a day after Wilson's July 6, 2003, op-ed titled "What I didn't Find in Niger" was published in the New York Times, Hadley accepted responsibility for allowing the infamous "16 words" to be included in Bush's State of the Union address. Hadley was sent two separate letters from the CIA, warning him not to allow Bush to cite the Niger uranium claim in his State of the Union address. Hadley said he forgot about the letters.

Exactly one week later, Valerie Plame Wilson's cover was blown in a column written by conservative journalist Robert Novak.

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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.