Progressive Ruminations

"10. That actor who played the president was totally unconvincing.

"9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election.

"8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words

"7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported.

"6. Didn't have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger.

"5. Of all Michael Moore's accusations, only 97% are true.

"4. Not sure -- I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe.

"3. Where the hell was Spiderman?

"2. Couldn't hear most of the movie over Cheney's foul mouth.

"1. I thought this was supposed to be about dodgeball!"

"Although the White House repudiated the memo Tuesday as the work of a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office. . . .

"In addition, Timothy E. Flanigan -- then deputy White House counsel -- discussed a draft of the document with lawyers at the [Justice Department's] Office of Legal Counsel before it was finalized, the officials said. David S. Addington, Cheney's counsel, also weighed in with remarks during at least one meeting he held with Justice lawyers involved with writing the opinion. He was particularly concerned, sources said, that the opinion include a clear-cut section on the president's authority.

"That section of the memo has become among the most controversial within the legal community that has analyzed the opinion since it was made public by The Washington Post."

"In repudiating the memo in briefings this week, none of the senior Bush legal advisers whom the White House made available to reporters would discuss who had requested that the memo be prepared, why it had been prepared or how it was applied.

Thin Skinned

But someone in the White House is awfully thin skinned.

As I reported in Friday's column, Bush seemed quite irritated by Irish radio and television correspondent Carole Coleman's tough questions and attempts to move him off his stock answers on Thursday.

Here's Coleman herself describing the interview: "He was tough. He was very tough. And the policy of the White House is that you submit your questions in advance, and so they had my questions for about three days. They knew I was going to ask tough questions and I think he was prepared for that. . . .

"There were a few stages at which I had to move him along for reasons of timing and he's not used to being moved along by the American media. Perhaps they're a bit more deferential."

They had her questions for three days? I'll do some reporting today to figure out why Coleman had to to submit her questions.

And this is what happens when you're not deferential, I guess:

AFP reported on Saturday: "The US administration confirmed it had axed an interview that US First Lady Laura Bush had been due to grant to Irish public television RTE, only two days after the broadcaster's exclusive interview with the US president himself.

"No explanation was given for the schedule change, but journalists traveling with the Bush entourage in Europe noted that the cancellation had come a day after George W. Bush's less-than-sunny showing in his RTE exclusive."

Miriam Lord writes in the Irish Independent: "The White House has lodged a complaint with the Irish Embassy in Washington over RTE journalist Carole Coleman's interview with US President George Bush. . . .

"The Irish Independent learned last night that the White House told Ms Coleman that she interrupted the president unnecessarily and was disrespectful.

"She also received a call from the White House in which she was admonished for her tone.

"And it emerged last night that presidential staff suggested to Ms Coleman as she went into the interview that she ask him a question on the outfit that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit."

Ahern, for those who missed it, wore a pair of canary-yellow trousers at the G8 summit that was so garish that the issue was raised in the Irish parliament.

Here's a transcript of Coleman's interview with Bush. Here's the video.

Angelique Chrisafis writes in the Guardian that "Mr Bush has been choking on . . . the gristle of the Irish media. Expecting nothing more than a gentle probing from a friendly state which America 'helped' to prosper, he gave the first White House interview to an Irish journalist for 20 years. But the state broadcaster RTE subjected him to a grilling which left him fuming and had media commentators and licence-payers debating the Irish style of journalism."

In fact, some bloggers are wondering why the American press corps can't be less deferential.

To be continued.

Hitler Reappears in '04 Campaign, This Time in Bush Ad
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 26, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 25 - Suddenly, Adolf Hitler has become a bit player in the 2004 presidential campaign.

President Bush's campaign Web site is featuring an advertisement casting Senator John Kerry and his allies as a "coalition of the wild-eyed," blending clips of former Vice President Al Gore, former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont and the filmmaker Michael Moore shouting about Mr. Bush. Interspersed twice are images of a shouting Hitler, drawn from a Web spot that MoveOn.org, the Internet advocacy group that runs anti-Bush advertisements, briefly posted months ago in a contest for advertisements about the president.

MoveOn.org quickly removed the advertisement from its site. But it resurfaces in the Bush-Cheney campaign's compendium of clips, and the result appears to liken Mr. Gore's and Mr. Dean's shouting to Hitler's.

"We sold out in Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg," in North Carolina, Mr. Moore said on Sunday. "We sold out in Army-base towns. We set house records in some of these places. We set single-day records in a number of theaters. We got standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C.

"The biggest news to me this morning is this is a red-state movie," he said, referring to the state whose residents voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. "Republican states are embracing the movie, and it's sold out in Republican strongholds all over the country.

Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate, joined Moore on the conference call. "The film played brilliantly this weekend in the 'red states' and the 'blue states,' and the big towns and the small towns," he said. "We played in Peoria. We literally sold out Peoria, Illinois."

Surveys showed the audience was split evenly between male and female, and was predominantly over 25. The biggest demographic consisted of moviegoers aged 25 to 34. In exit polls conducted in about 15 cites, 91 percent of the audience rated the film "excellent," and 93 percent would "definitely recommend" it.

"It's mind-blowing how well this film has been received," said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC, noting that exit polling for "Fahrenheit" was even better than for the 2002 surprise hit "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

But once "F9/11" gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.

Michael Freed said people should see the film, regardless of their political leanings. "You have no right to have an opinion unless you see the movie," said Freed, 51, of Plainview, who caught the movie in Farmingdale yesterday. "It's the same way people want to have an opinion about this country, but they don't vote."

"Q Judge, I wanted to follow on what Suzanne and Ed are asking you. I think people here are looking for more specifics about the President's actual involvement, other than signing his name, to this February document. Can you be more specific about how many meetings did he engage in with you to discuss this? Did you put together a memo yourself, because there isn't one here, that would have preceded his signature on his own? Was there a meeting that involved the Vice President? Can you just give us some more idea, because the President has said we should feel comforted, but I'm not sure there's a lot of specifics here about his interest, his personal interest.

"JUDGE GONZALES: I'm not going to get into a discussion about the internal deliberations of the White House. I can say that during this period of time there was a great deal of debate, over a period of days, maybe a period of a couple weeks, when the presidential determination was made, all the agencies had actually weighed-in very strongly.

"Q With the President, personally?

"JUDGE GONZALES: I believe so. But the equities of all the agencies were presented to the President, and they were before the President as he made his decision.

"Q And who did that, you?

"JUDGE GONZALES: Again, I'm not going to talk about --

"Q Well, wait, I'm not sure I understand, why is that a difficult thing to discuss?

"JUDGE GONZALES: It's not a difficult thing to discuss, it's just one that I don't choose to discuss.

"Q Why?

"JUDGE GONZALES: I just don't.

"Q Why wouldn't that be helpful?

"JUDGE GONZALES: We normally don't talk about the internal deliberations within the White House. I don't think that's appropriate."

 'They said this is America . . . if a soldier orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey'

We know about Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib but until now Bagram and America's secret network of Afghan jails have come under little scrutiny. In a major investigation, Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg discovered a familiar pattern of violent abuse and sexual humiliation

Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential contender, scrapped a speech and a fund-raiser in Albuquerque on Tuesday to fly here from Denver overnight in order to support an amendment to a military spending bill on veterans health care. But procedural delays on the Senate floor, under control of Republicans, kept him from saying "aye" before flying back across the country Tuesday evening to San Francisco, where he plans to speak at a labor union convention on Wednesday.

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 — The United States bowed Wednesday to broad opposition on the Security Council and announced it was dropping its effort to gain immunity for its troops from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," Sen. James Inhofe, May 11th, 2004, Senate Armed Services Hearing. link to story

But today's coverage makes it clear that there are still a host of unresolved issues. Among them:

• Does President Bush still believe, as his 2002 memo said, that he has "the authority under the Constitution" to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to some combatants?

• The memos describe Pentagon prohibitions against torture. But do the distinctions drawn between forceful interrogation tactics and torture meet the common-sense test? And what rules did the White House set for the CIA?

• Did the White House set a tone that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib?

• What was the president's involvement in the deliberations on torture, beyond putting his name at the bottom of that one memo?

• And the debate within the administration, as illustrated most clearly by memos from the Justice Department, continued to rage long after Bush's memo. So how long did the issue of torture remain in play?

There's lots to read about the torture issue below. And keep scrolling to find out about these other White House headlines:

• A Washington Post reporter was questioned yesterday by the special prosecutor investigating the possibly illegal leak of a CIA employee's identity by Bush administration officials.

• The Associated Press yesterday sued for access to Bush's National Guard records.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted June 17, 2004.
Former diplomats and retired military commanders accuse George W. Bush of endangering the nation and call for his defeat in November.

On Wednesday a group of former senior diplomatic officials and retired military commanders -- several of whom are the kind who "have never spoken out before" on such matters -- issued a bracing statement arguing that George W. Bush has damaged the country's national security and calling on Americans to defeat him in November. It's too early to tell if the statement will have an impact on this fall's campaign. But Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, as the group is called, reveals (again) how dangerously isolated the Bush Administration is not just around the world but even from America's own bipartisan foreign policy and military establishments.

This latest missive, as both the LA Times and the Washington Post reported last Sunday, is being sent by Democratic and Republican officials who refuse to stay silent in the face of Bush's extremist and ideological foreign policy which, they say, is squandering America's moral standing. These signatories aren't exactly a Who's Who of the American left.

Jack Matlock, who served as Reagan and Bush 41's ambassador to the Soviet Union, has signed the statement, as has Ret. Adm. William Crowe, who served as Reagan's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Phyllis Oakley, who served as a State Department spokesperson under Reagan, added her name as well. The vast majority of the signatories are, in fact, either conservative Republicans who served under Reagan and Bush 41 or they're bipartisan, consensus-driven ex-diplomats who served their country from Africa to Asia because they believed in America's leadership role around the world.

Now they feel so enraged by Bush's extremist foreign policies that they can no longer stand by as this Administration makes America less secure by upending alliances and alienating much of the world. Against the metastasizing scandal of Abu Ghraib; the botched postwar occupation of Iraq; and the Administration's lies about Iraq's WMDs in the run-up to the war, these old hands are now taking an uncompromising, intelligent stand against what they see as the most arrogant, unilateral and incompetent foreign policy in their adult lifetimes.

Today's signatories join a large and growing chorus of former senior officials who were so enraged by Bush's conduct of the Iraq war that sitting on the sidelines simply wasn't an option for them. John Brady Kiesling, now a retired diplomat, led the charge in February 2003 when he courageously quit his foreign-service job with the American Embassy in Athens, and wrote a stinging rebuke to Bush's headlong rush to wage a war in Iraq. He was followed by another career diplomat Gregory Thielmann who went public, telling Bill Moyers that Iraq didn't pose an "imminent security threat" to America. Thielmann attacked Bush for hyping intelligence reports and for misleading the American people about the need to go to war in the Middle East. The Administration, he said, "has had a faith-based intelligence attitude.We know the answers -- give us the intelligence to support those answers'."

Around the same time, retired military commanders were growing aghast at Bush's utter ineptitude in planning for the occupation of Iraq. That's why, for example, the former Centcom commander Gen. Anthony Zinni ultimately went on 60 Minutes last month and argued that if Bush stayed on the current course in Iraq, America was "headed over Niagara Falls." Retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East under Bush 41, has publicly declared that the United States is "absolutely on the brink of failure" in Iraq.

Meanwhile, other former ambassadors and career foreign-service officers began speaking up, each in their own way and on their own timetables. GOP strategists with ties to the White House were quick and shameless in denigrating those who've spent their life serving the national interest.

Ronald Spiers, the former Ambassador to Turkey and Pakistan and well-versed in the politics of the Middle East, argued that George W. Bush's policies have unraveled our most important alliances around the globe. Spiers faulted the President for causing us to lose "a lot of our international partnerships. We've lost a lot of lives. We've lost a lot of money for something that wasn't justified."

George Harrop, a former ambassador to Kenya and Israel, spoke for many in the diplomatic corps, and I suspect even for some former Bush 41 officials like Brent Scowcroft, when he said: "I really am essentially a Republican. I voted for George Bush's father, and I voted for George Bush. But what we got was not the George Bush we voted for." And former ambassador Joseph Wilson has reminded Americans of just how many lies the Administration was willing to tell in its quest to convince people that Iraq posed a nuclear threat to the United States.

Then, of course, there are the high-level NSC officials who, after getting a ringside seat for Bush's bumbling national security strategies, decided that enough was enough, and that now was the season to speak up and take a stand. Rand Beers left Bush's White House after serving under Reagan and Bush Sr., and he is now running foreign policy operations for John Kerry's presidential campaign. Richard Clarke, is one of the most experienced counterterrorism officials America has produced in the last three decades; he, too, could no longer stand idly by as the Administration ran a fool's errand by starting a war against Iraq.

Just last month a separate group of fifty-three ex-diplomats and other high-level national security officials wrote a letter to Bush in which they excoriated the President for sacrificing America's credibility in the Arab world and squandering America's status as honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

This most recent statement marks the high-water point of dissent among diplomats and military commanders who cannot stomach Bush any longer, but there is still time, and a need, for more high-level officials to come forward and voice their opposition to policies that are undermining our security.

The anger towards Bush and his extremely dangerous policies has now, at long last, reached a critical mass. Wednesday's statement reveals just how extremist in approach and radical in ideology the Administration actually is.


Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor of The Nation.

U.S. Corrects Report to Show Rise in Terrorism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 22, 2004

State Department

United States International Relations

Filed at 12:54 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Correcting an inaccurate report, the State Department announced Tuesday that acts of terror worldwide increased slightly last year and the number of people wounded rose dramatically.

The department also reported a decline in the number of people killed -- to 625 from 725 during 2002. But in April, the department reported 307 people had been killed last year -- a much bigger decline.

Dubious Link Between Atta and Saddam
A document tying the Iraqi leader with the 9/11 terrorist is probably fake. PLUS, how terror financiers manage to stay in business
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Newsweek
Updated: 11:31 a.m. ET Dec.19, 2003

Dec. 17 - A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show  that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in  the summer of  2001 is probably a fabrication that is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip presumably would have taken place, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and FBI documents.

The new document, supposedly written by the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service, was trumpeted by the Sunday Telegraph of London earlier this week in a front-page story that broke hours before the dramatic capture of Saddam Hussein. TERRORIST BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11 STRIKE WAS TRAINED BY SADDAM, ran the headline on the story written by Con Coughlin, a Telegraph correspondent and the author of the book "Saddam: The Secret Life." 

Coughlin's account was picked up by newspapers around the world and was cited the next day by New York Times columnist William Safire. But U.S. officials and a leading Iraqi document expert tell NEWSWEEK that the document is most likely a forgery—part of a thriving new trade in dubious Iraqi documents that has cropped up in the wake of the collapse of Saddam's regime.

 "It's a lucrative business," says Hassan Mneimneh, codirector of an Iraqi exile research group reviewing millions of captured Iraqi government documents. "There's an active document trade taking place … You have fraudulent documents that are being fabricated and sold" for hundreds of dollars a piece.

Bloomberg today bursts Bush's economy balloon a bit, reporting: "A 2.2 percent rise in wages in the 12 months through May has been more than offset by a 3.1 percent gain in consumer prices. . . .

"The disparity between pay and prices may keep President George W. Bush from fully capitalizing on the economy's addition of 1.2 million jobs this year, the best five months of job growth since 2000, as he runs for re-election, said political analysts including Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution in Washington."

Furthermore, Bloomberg writes: "Even with the recent surge in jobs, the economy has had a net loss of 1.5 million jobs during Bush's term, including 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, which typically pay more than the service jobs that account for most of the positions now being added."

"The U.S. labour market -- while finally experiencing increases in job creation -- has also seen a dramatic drop in employment quality, with low-paying jobs elbowing aside higher-paying ones, CIBC World Markets [a major Canadian investment bank] said yesterday."

Borger: "Well, let's go to MohamedAtta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, 'pretty well confirmed.' "

Cheney: "No, I never said that."

Borger: "Okay."

Cheney: "Never said that."

Borger: "I think that is . . . "

Cheney: "Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down."

Cheney: "Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that -- it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue."

'''We believe . . . that there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq,' said Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey. 'Al Qaeda didn't like to get involved with states, unless they were living there. They got involved with Sudan, they got involved . . . where they lived, but otherwise, no,' he told ABC's ''This Week."

Republicans are emphasizing statements from 9/11 commission leaders that the panel's staff report didn't contradict what the White House has said -- there was contact between Iraq and al-Qaida, they say, although the panel has also asked Dick Cheney to hand over his evidence on the matter. The panel's research has led members to conclude thus far that the contact between Iraq and al-Qaida resulted in no collaborative relationship.

What's important to understand here, as this Boston Globe [title link] story shows, is that commission members are saying other countries had much more active, productive contacts with al-Qaida than Iraq -- surely not one of the White House talking points.

The debate grew heated last Monday night when California Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, led the defeat along party lines of a resolution requiring Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to turn over internal reports tied to investigations into Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

"We can't turn away from critical oversight (responsibilities)," said Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat on the committee. "Our duty to taxpayers, our duty to Americans, doesn't end just because we're at war."

"he's [Kerry] now forcing a debate on this fundamental question and I do think it opens him up to the counterattack that if John Kerry had been president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power." - Bill Kristol (transcript)

"Statements by Bush and his top aides and U.S. documents, however, show that the administration systematically sought to justify an invasion of Iraq by connecting Saddam with the perpetrators of the bloodiest terrorist strikes in U.S. history."

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" - President George W. Bush, June 17th, 2004