15 April 2004

If the Bush Was Concerned About Domestic Terror, No One Told the F.B.I.
By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: The F.B.I. came under withering criticism on Tuesday from the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, with its chairman describing new staff reports on the bureau's performance before and after the attacks as an "indictment of the F.B.I." "It failed and it failed and it failed and it failed," the chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said of the bureau at a public hearing of the 10-member panel. "This is an agency that does not work. It makes you angry. And I don't know how to fix it." ...Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Pickard agreed, however, that neither of them had been informed by the White House during the summer of 2001 that President Bush had taken an interest in the question of domestic threats posed by Al Qaeda and had received a special C.I.A. briefing on the issue on Aug. 6, after months of dire intelligence warnings that suggested an imminent, possibly catastrophic attack. They also testified that the White House had not provided them the written intelligence report that accompanied the briefing, even though the so-called Presidential Daily Brief outlined investigations by the F.B.I. that summer into the possibility that Qaeda terrorist cells were present in the United States. Had they known of Mr. Bush's interest, they said, they would have ordered the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to gather up whatever information was available on domestic terrorist threats. "I was not aware that the president of the United States had made a request in that respect," Mr. Ashcroft said. "It would have been my intention to provide the president with a comprehensive report from the F.B.I."
SEE ALSO:
The Price of Incuriosity
New York Times, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: Americans knew George W. Bush was an incurious man when they elected him, but the hearings of the 9/11 investigating commission, which turned yesterday from the F.B.I.'s fecklessness to the C.I.A.'s blurred vision, have brought that fact home in a startling way. The president is trying hard to present himself as a hands-on manager who talked terrorism incessantly with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet. ("I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the time.") But Mr. Tenet had to concede yesterday that he was not in Crawford, Tex., for the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Mr. Tenet told the panel he didn't meet with Bush all that month, but the C.I.A. later said there had been two meetings. No one has been able to say whether Mr. Bush followed up in any way after he asked his intelligence agencies whether there was a domestic threat from Al Qaeda, and got a loud "yes" in response.
SEE ALSO:
The Out-of-Towner
While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen. The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001. Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."

Proof that the tax cuts are working!
Bushes, Cheneys Reaped Tax Benefits
By Jennifer Loven
AP, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney reaped tax benefits last year from the cuts that they pushed through Congress and that Democrats have criticized as a boon to the rich. The government's top two executives, both wealthy men, paid smaller shares of their income in federal taxes in 2003 than in the year before, according to returns released Tuesday by the White House. Bush and his wife, Laura, paid $227,490 in federal income taxes -- or about 28 percent of their $822,126 in adjusted gross income. For 2002, the Bushes paid about 31 percent of their adjusted gross income -- slightly higher at $856,056 ‹ in federal taxes, for a total of $268,719. The difference from one year to the next was even more pronounced for Cheney. He and his wife, Lynne, owed $253,067 in 2003 federal taxes -- about 20 percent of their $1.3 million in adjusted gross income. In 2002, the Cheneys earned less but paid more, owing 29 percent -- or $341,114 ‹ of their $1.2 million in income.
SEE ALSO: Who Pays When Corporations Dodge Taxes? (TP)

Bush's Press Conference Showed Just How Ill-Informed He Is About Iraq
By Sidney Blumenthal
Guardian (UK), 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: Bush's press conference was the culmination of his recent efforts to staunch the political wounds of his bleeding polls since the 9/11 commission began public hearings and violence spiralled in Iraq. Bush had tried to divert blame by declaring that the August 6 memo he was forced to declassify at the commission's insistence contained no "actionable intelligence", even though it specifically mentioned the World Trade Centre and Washington as targets. Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet. President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand. He extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his memoranda from the 9/11 commission. "I know he doesn't read," one former Bush national security council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office.
SEE ALSO:
Talking the Talk: Did Bush Really Say Anything on Tuesday Night?
By Richard Blow
TomPaine.com, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: Bush¹s final sentence last night was this: "The credibility of the United States is incredibly important for keeping world peace and freedom." It was a line straight from the mouth of Robert McNamara--the idea that preventing loss of American "credibility" is reason enough to justify a misbegotten war. It took him a while, but McNamara apologized for his mistakes. Maybe one day, decades from now, George W. Bush will do the same.
SEE ALSO: Press Review of Bush's Press Conference (Guardian)

One Nation, Underperforming
There is so much more we can do environmentally, socially, fiscally. Why aren't we doing it?
By Bill McKibben
TomPaine.com, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: If you spend much time at international conferences, you see that we are no more the center of gravity, the fount of new ideas. Long before President Bush ditched the Kyoto treaty, we were drifting toward the back of the pack. Name the field. Technology? In 1980, the United States was far and away the world's biggest player in the nascent wind market. If you wanted to meet with a windmill guru, you booked a flight to California. Then the Reagan administration gutted subsidies for renewables. While the Danes and the Germans and the Spaniards have advanced the technology, we've only recently begun to revive our interest. If you want to meet a wind guru now, you fly to Copenhagen. What about cars? The Japanese managed to put hybrid engines on the market half a decade before Detroit; now Toyota is licensing the technology to American automakers. The president promises hydrogen cars by 2020‹but the biggest player in the field is Canadian. Or consider design. Green building is still an uphill struggle here--the odd showpiece stuck among sprawling tract mansions. But go to Western Europe and you feel the difference immediately--green architecture embedded in increasingly green cities, where planners have created livable downtowns and built effective mass transit. Our great technological innovations of late, by contrast, seem to be things the rest of the world would happily do without: space-based lasers, Roundup Ready corn. Even our framework of laws--the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, on down the list--now seems threadbare. Carbon dioxide is recognized as a deadly pollutant everywhere else, but it's not regulated in the United States. The Europeans are working out their own market in carbon emissions and can only shake their heads at our laggardly ways. Even the lapdog Blair government in Britain won't back us on this--their environment chief came to Washington earlier this winter and declared that global warming was a bigger peril than terrorism.
SEE ALSO: Environment is this Generation's Failure (Guardian)

14 April 2004

Bush Saw Repeated Warnings
Reports Preceded August 2001 Memo
By Dana Priest
Washington Post, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush Asserts 'We Must Not Waver' on Terror or Iraq
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Tiems, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: The president reaffirmed his plan to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 and said he would add troops if necessary.
• The Press Conference: Text

9/11 Staff Reports Critical of FBI, CIA
Ashcroft also cited in statements issued by commission
AP, 13 April 2004
EXCERPT: A more nimble FBI and CIA working together might have uncovered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist plot, the commission investigating the attacks said Tuesday in two staff reports, laying out an agonizing series of missed opportunities, half measures and bureaucratic inertia.

Ashcroft Gets a Free Pass
Are the commissioners afraid to seem partisan?
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 13 April 2004
EXCERPT: ...not only did the commissioners fail to lay a glove on the guy, they barely took a swing. ...Why? One charitable interpretation might be that the Democratic panelists decided to go easy. To bear down on Bush's most controversial Cabinet officer—the liberals' favorite whipping boy—might make them seem "partisan." They have the goods on Ashcroft and the FBI; it will all come out in their final report. Why, they might have rationalized, polarize the situation by adding their own lashes? If that's what they thought, they might have a point. But then, why hold these hearings? Everything the witnesses say in public, they've already said in closed sessions. The whole point of public hearings is to let us in—not just on the testimony and the findings, but also the judgments of and about our decision-makers. This afternoon, on this point, the commission deeply failed.

F.B.I. Is Assailed for Its Handling of Terror Risks
By PHILIP SHENONand ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times, 13 April 2004
EXCERPT: New reports on the F.B.I.'s performance were released as the Sept. 11 commission conducted sometimes harsh questioning of Attorney General John Ashcroft and others.
• Text: Full Transcript of the Hearing

The Dead Won't Change US Public Opinion
By Linda Colley
Guardian (UK), 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: ...Since the 80s, the US has devoted far less effort than most European governments to eradicating poverty. Incomparably rich, it contains within its boundaries millions of poor people with few prospects or state perks. For these Americans, especially in the agrarian, conservative south, military service is a lifeline, even if it sometimes leads to violent death. The huge US military installations (all called forts) that exist in most states, but that cluster in the south, are well-provided, insulated worlds to themselves. The eight forts in Texas and Georgia, for instance, hold together some 100,000 troops, as well as tens of thousands of civilian aides and family members. Each fort has its own schools, hospitals, dentists, shopping malls, bowling alleys, pools and houses of a style and size most of the men and women within its guarded walls could only dream about outside. Here, the American dream is on offer to a sector of the population that could otherwise never hope to share it. What this means is that the US has engineered for itself in the present what most successful empires in the past have striven to create: a highly professional, self-conscious and privileged military caste that is substantially cut off from the doubts and distractions of civilian society. This is why predictions that the sharp rise in US casualties in recent weeks must of necessity result in large-scale American disillusionment with the war are way off the mark. Naturally, Americans grieve for their warrior dead. But since - in sharp contrast with Vietnam - there has been no draft, the US military is just too cut off from civilian experience, and also too privileged, for these kind of losses by themselves to cause widespread and lasting revulsion at the war. Moreover, I come back to the point that most US soldiers are from the poor. By contrast, most of the decision-makers in Congress and the senate are rich. Few have military histories or relatives in the armed services. It is not individual soldiers dying in Iraq so much as growing doubts about the judgment, effectiveness and truthfulness of President Bush, and about the war's purpose, that are currently leaching support from his administration. [Emphasis by BWUSA]
SEE ALSO:
Dead Soldier's Sisters Excused from Duty in War Zone
Guardian (UK), 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: The two surviving sisters of a soldier killed in Iraq will not be compelled to return to the battlefield, US military officials said yesterday. Michelle Witmer, 20, died last Friday in an ambush of her Humvee, and her father's plea to the Pentagon to spare his two other daughters, who were also serving in Wisconsin national guard units in Iraq, received attention throughout the US.
SEE ALSO: Nader Tells Youths to Brace for Draft (Washington Times)

Flying Blind: Why did the Joint Chiefs reject the idea that planes could be used as missiles?
By The Project on Government Oversight
TomPaine.com
13 April 2004
EXCERPT: According to an e-mail obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), members of the U.S. military responsible for defending America's airspace were in fact concerned that a terrorist group would "hijack a commercial airline [sic] (foreign carrier) and fly it into the Pentagon." Officials at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in April 2001‹five months prior to 9/11‹wanted to develop a response in the event that a terrorist group would use an airliner as a missile to attack the Pentagon, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the scenario as "too unrealistic." NORAD's mission is to "deter, detect, and defend" U.S. and Canadian airspace. National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told the 9/11 Commission in her April 8 testimony that an August 2001 presidential briefing memo that was recently declassified did not contain specific threat information. "And it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles," she testified. However, Rice hedged when asked directly whether she ever saw or heard any memos or discussions from the FBI, CIA or any other intelligence agencies that talked about using planes as bombs. She said she had not, but also added, "I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."

Misreporting 9/11: How the Media Muzzles the Story
By Danny Schechter
Common Dreams, 13 April 2004
EXCERPT: The fact that this PDB, or portions of it, was released at 6 PM on a Saturday night over an Easter Weekend-a time of low news watching-was evidence of an Administration desire to bury it. Administration officials had earlier deliberately leaked portions of it to some media outlets to prepare public opinion, to take the sting off its content while putting some spin on. This advance "media planning" speaks to how manipulative post PR "perception management" has become. Carolyn Kay of Maketthemaccountable.com charges that Bush political svengali Karl Rove stage-managed the forced release: "Why? Because there's damaging information in the August 6 briefing, which Rove will have to release soon, and he's getting out ahead of it. Our wonderful mainstream media have been suckered over and over again by this administration, and there's no reason to think this isn't a sucker play as well. The story line about the memo and what it contains will have already been set in concrete by the time the memo is released."... The details were sketchy. There is no evidence that the President threw the document in the face of his briefers and demanded more detail. As far as we know, he didn't even google for more. This makes a good case for more than incompetence especially when compared to the careful conspiring of the terror groups which apparently spent years planning their attack. The mainstream media has focused on White House rhetoric, not the lack of intelligence in what passes for "intelligence," or the President's delay in acting even when informed of a serious threat. But there is a deeper media clash evident here as well about how to understand the meaning of what we are learning, and which sources to trust. First, there is the role of American mainstream media which for nearly two years, for the most part, resisted the kind of probing that the 9ll Commission is now appearing to do. (It has its harsh critics too who say it whitewashing the issues!) For months on end, many media outlets celebrated the 911victims and "heroes" while giving the White House a pass on what really happened and why. Few critical questions were raised in a climate of self-censorship posing as patriotic correctness. Next, consider other media around the world, Elements of the European media stepped into the breach with more questioning articles and critical columns, Conspiracy theories not even reported in the United States became part of the mainstream discourse in France, England, Germany, South Asia and the Arab world. Unlike in the United States, these allegations were not confined to discussion on the margins.

The Moralist: Peter Singer on Bush's Lack of Integrity
Can we expect politicians to have complete ethical integrity? Yes, says philosopher Peter Singer, whose latest book scrutinises the words and deeds of George Bush - and finds him lacking.
By Gary Younge
Guardian (UK), 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: Given that in previous books he has argued that parents be given the choice to kill their disabled infants if they are suffering "unbelievable pain", Peter Singer's latest work is relatively uncontroversial. The President of Good and Evil: Taking George Bush Seriously, states, simply, that the president of the United States has no reliable moral compass. With the scrutiny of a hawk and the precision of a surgeon, Singer attempts to match the president's own explicitly stated moral standards - on issues including tax cuts, the war on terror, gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia - to his record in office. On almost all counts, he finds Bush wanting. These are claims that would have been relatively difficult to air in the US just a couple years ago, but are now fairly common currency. "When I first thought of writing it I wondered if anyone would publish it," Singer says. "In the period immediately after 9/11 you couldn't say anything critical of the United States. But by the time it came out, the problem was whether it could find room among all of the books criticising Bush."

13 April 2004

"I'd rather be fishing."
Bush to Face Reporters in Prime Time on Tuesday
By Deb Riechmann
AP, 13 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush will work to defuse two issues in his prime-time news conference on Tuesday: rising casualties in Iraq and his response in 2001 to a terrorism warning the White House had in hand before the Sept. 11 attacks. Both issues are critical to Bush's re-election strategy, which is focused on the president's record on national security. Bush plans to open the 8:30 p.m. EDT news conference - the 12th of his presidency, but only his third televised in prime evening viewing hours - with a statement on Iraq, White House communications director Dan Bartlett said Monday. He said the president will be prepared to address questions about a memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," that Bush received on Aug. 6, 2001.
REVISITED: Bush Spends 40% of Time Out of Office (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Bush Administration is Severely Learning Disabled (Charley Reese)
SEE ALSO: Facing Questions, Bush Calls News Conference (LA Times)
SEE ALSO: AUDIO/VIDEO LINK  Veteran White House Correspondent Helen Thomas On Bush and the State of the Media

Bereaved Father Begs Bush to Bring Home Remaining Daughters
America's grief laid bare as family who lost daughter in Baghdad ambush begs US army to send her two sisters home from war zone
By Suzanne Goldenberg
Guardian (UK), 13 April 2004
EXCERPT: A grieving father, mourning the death in Baghdad of his soldier daughter, yesterday begged the Pentagon to send her two sisters home from the war, saying the family could not bear another loss. Few American families with US military personnel serving in Iraq had as much to lose as the Witmers, from New Berlin, Wisconsin. Until Michelle was killed in an ambush on April 9, they had three daughters in Iraq: Rachel, 24, and twins Michelle and Charity, 20.

Decoding the PDB: Were Condi and Bush Asleep at the Switch?
By Larry C. Johnson (former CIA analyst)
TomPaine.com, 12 April 2004
EXCERPT: Are George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice really as clueless as they are claiming to be? Bush and Rice are both on the record misstating what was in the 6 August 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing). They both insist the information was only "historical" and "not actionable."...Absolute nonsense! I wrote about 40 PDB¹s during my four-year tenure at the CIA. This particular PDB article was written in response to a presidential request. I am told that Bush's request was a reaction to the intelligence warnings he was hearing during the daily CIA morning briefings. Something caught his attention and awakened his curiosity. He reportedly asked the CIA to come back with its assessment of Bin Laden¹s intentions. The CIA answered the question--Bin Laden was targeting the United States.... It lays out the historical and evidentiary antecedents that undergird the analyst¹s belief about the nature of the threat and provides current intelligence indicators that reinforce the basic conclusion of the piece--i.e., Bin Laden was determined to attack the United States. It is true that the piece did not contain specific details about the plot that was launched subsequently on 9/11. However, the details that are included in the piece are so alarming that anyone familiar with the nature of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda should have asked, "What are they planning and what can we do to stop it?" Remember the furious attacks against Richard Clarke during the past month? Now that we have seen the content of the PDB we know he was telling the truth when he said that President Bush and Condoleezza Rice did not make fighting Al Qaeda a priority prior to 9/11. At a minimum, the details in the 6 August PDB should have motivated Rice to convene a principals' meeting. Such a meeting would have ensured that all members of the president¹s national security team were aware of the information that had been shared with the president.
SEE ALSO: Unasked Questions the 9/11 Should Pursue (TP)
SEE ALSO:
Condi's Cover-Up Caves In
For years, Bush and his gang tried so hard to keep the Aug. 6 PDB secret. Here's why.
By David Corn
The Nation, 12 April 2004
EXCERPT: The PDB controversy is not about whether Bush received a specific warning a month before 9/11. It concerns his administration's attitude toward al Qaeda and the possibility of domestic attacks prior to September 11 and whether the White House has truly been willing to see the full 9/11 tale uncovered and told. The evidence is mounting that al Qaeda was not the priority it should have been in the first seven months of Bush's presidency. Yet the White House is unable to acknowledge that it made a misjudgment. Much of the public might even believe that it was a natural mistake for a new administration to underestimate the abilities and reach of a madman hunkered down in faraway Afghanistan. In a way, such a screw-up may be more forgivable than Bush and his lieutenants' efforts to cover up information and prevent the 9/11 commission from completing a thorough examination.

12 April 2004

Strange, he didn't have any for invading Iraq either...
Bush: Memo Had No 'Actionable Intelligence'
Ben-Veniste: Briefing wasn't specific, but was a warning
CNN.com, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush said Sunday that an intelligence memo he read shortly before September 11, 2001, contained no "actionable intelligence" that would have helped him to try to prevent the 9/11 attacks. "The [August 6, 2001, memo] was no indication of a terrorist threat," Bush said during an Easter Sunday visit to Fort Hood to decorate wounded soldiers. "There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to."
SEE ALSO: Bush Says Brief on Al Qaeda Threat Was Not Specific (NYT)
SEE ALSO:
Pre-9/11 Doings Are Coming to Light
James P. Pinkerton
Newsday.com, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: If you knew that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had received a memo a month before Pearl Harbor entitled, "Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific," and that he had done nothing about that information, would that knowledge change your perception of FDR as a wise war leader? Roosevelt received no such memo, of course, but President George W. Bush got a blunt warning five weeks before 9/11 and he did little or nothing. He even presided over a stand- down in preparations, concentrating on other concerns. [bwusa emphasis]

Gary Hart, Rice Talked Security Before Attacks
CNN.com,11 April 2004
EXCERPT: Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, who was co-chairman of an earlier bipartisan commission that studied national security, said Sunday that he met with Rice five days before the September 11 attacks because he was concerned that the Bush administration was not moving on his panel's call for action against al Qaeda. The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, created by Clinton in 1998 with congressional approval, released its final report in January 2001 and predicted "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." "What this administration has done ... is to say that until someone tells us that 19 men are going to hijack four airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon at 9 a.m. on September 11, we are not accountable," Hart said on CNN's "In the Money." Hart was co-chairman of the commission with former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire.Among the Hart-Rudman commission's proposals was one "for a new Cabinet-level National Homeland Security Agency that would combine the Federal Emergency Management Agency with several other agencies," Hart said. The commission also called for an overhaul of the State and Defense Departments to reflect the changing security environment. Hart said he asked for and got a meeting with Rice on September 6, 2001. "She was a supporter of mine when I was a presidential candidate in '84 ... and has been a friend over the years," he said. "I asked to see her in September because I didn't see any movement from the administration on our suggestions. "She simply said, 'I'll talk to the vice president about it.' " [bwusa empahasis]

Bush Gave No Sign of Worry In August 2001
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush was in an expansive mood on Aug. 7, 2001, when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Tex. The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing -- the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night -- warning "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday. ...National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony Thursday to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spoke of a government on high alert for terrorism in the summer of 2001. "The president of the United States had us at battle stations during this period of time," she testified. ...But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox." ...The most extended treatment of security issues in the month of August 2001 came on the 24th, when Bush announced Myers's appointment as Joint Chiefs chairman. Again, Bush placed emphasis on missile defense. "One of the things you will hear us talk about is the need to develop an effective missile defense system, and we do have money in the budget for that," he said. ...In the White House Rose Garden on Aug. 3, before leaving for the ranch, Bush summarized the achievements of his first months in office and set a three-part agenda for September. His first goal was completing work on legislation dealing with "education and the disadvantaged." His second priority was the federal budget. And third, he said, "beginning in September, I'll be proposing creative ways to tackle some of the toughest problems in our society." There was no mention of terrorism or even foreign affairs as a priority.

New Details Put F.B.I.'s Actions Under Scrutiny
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: New disclosures about the warnings President Bush received before Sept. 11, 2001, are fueling a central question for the commission investigating the attacks on that date: What exactly was the F.B.I. doing that summer to deter an attack by Al Qaeda on American soil? The answer, Mr. Bush said on Sunday, was that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating known links to Osama bin Laden in the United States, with 70 active cases reported that summer. "That's great, that's what we expect the F.B.I. to do," he told reporters. Critics, however, say the bureau missed numerous opportunities to head off the attacks. Agents that summer were tracking tantalizing leads that included a suspicious flight student in Minneapolis, an ominous warning in Phoenix and a phone call to a United States embassy in the Middle East. But investigations were stymied by miscommunication, dead ends, bureaucratic and legal obstacles and unclear priorities, officials say. And it is still unclear what the bureau's response was to a classified White House memo in July 2001, which officials said directed all 56 field offices to increase surveillance of suspected terrorists and contacts with informants.

Bush Spends 40% of Time Out of the Office
By Gary Younge
Guardian (UK), 12 April 2004
EXCERPT: President George Bush has spent more than 40% of his presidency at one of his three retreats, sparking criticism from Democrats that he is not taking his job seriously at a crucial time in US history. Mr Bush was on his 33rd visit to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, at the Easter weekend, where he has spent 233 days or almost eight months since his inauguration, according to a tally by CBS news. Add his 78 visits to Camp David and five to Kennebunkport, Maine, and he has spent all or part of 500 days out of the office while in office. Mr Bush was at his ranch on August 6 2001 as part of a month-long holiday when he received the briefing warning of Osama bin Laden's determination to attack the US, which has become a focal point of the 9/11 commission of inquiry. On Thursday the president watched his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, give her testimony on television, then toured his ranch with the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, before giving an interview to Ladies Home Journal. Regardless of what is going on in the world Mr Bush is usually in bed by 10pm and wakes at 6am. As governor of Texas he would be in work by 8.30am and out by 5.30pm. In between was a 90-minute to two-hour break for exercise or a nap.
SEE ALSO: Warned of Hijack Threat Before 9/11, Bush Played Golf (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Bush was 'Satisfied' on Pre-9/11 Probes (AP)
SEE ALSO:
Key Bush Administration Mistakes after 9/11
By Robert Jensen
Philadelphia Inquirer via ZNet, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission didn't resolve questions about what the Bush administration could, or should, have done to prevent the attack, but her comments made it clear how Bush policies since 9/11 have made Americans radically less safe. While Republicans and mainstream Democrats argue over what Bush and Clinton officials did or didn't do, the conventional wisdom - that Bush officials may have dragged their feet before 9/11 but have since acted decisively to protect Americans - goes unchallenged. But the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has done virtually nothing to prevent future terrorist attacks, and the Iraq war has boosted recruitment efforts of groups such as al-Qaeda.The Afghanistan war typically is treated as a victory, though it's not clear why. By June 2002, classified FBI and CIA investigations concluded that the war failed to diminish the al-Qaeda threat and may have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers. Indeed, after the war a variety of radical Islamic groups around the world came together, aided in part by al-Qaeda members who had fled Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq, which never had anything to do with fighting terrorism, has provided fresh examples of U.S. brutality for al-Qaeda recruiters. As Rice was testifying on Thursday, the death toll from the U.S. attack on Fallujah rose to 300, doctors begged the United States to lift the siege, and news that the U.S. military bombed a mosque circulated around the Arab and Muslim world. Virtually everywhere outside the United States, people understand the Iraq war was not about liberation of the Iraqi people (claims about weapons of mass destruction, if they ever were taken seriously elsewhere, evaporated long ago) but about extending and deepening U.S. dominance in the Middle East. While the majority in the Muslim world do not support terrorism (by groups or nations), U.S. policy - and the ugly way it is carried out - creates conditions for support or toleration of groups such as al-Qaeda.
SEE ALSO: America's Golfer-in-Chief (BushWhackedUSA)

Kerry Widens Criticism of Bush Economy
By Mike Glover
AP, 12 April 2004
EXCERPT: John Kerry is broadening his economic assault on President Bush with a "misery index" that suggests a combination of soaring college and health care costs and stagnant incomes have battered working families during Bush's term, campaign documents obtained Sunday showed. Much of the Democrats' criticism of Bush is focused on job losses during his tenure, but Kerry's study argues that far broader and more ominous economic trends are at work. "Less noted, but perhaps even more important, is the fact that middle-class families are increasingly being squeezed by the rising cost of health care, college tuition and gasoline at the same time that wages and incomes are stagnating and personal bankruptcies are at record levels," the campaign report said.

The revolution will not be televised...
IRS has Become a Subsidy System for Wealthy Americans
IRS winks at rich deadbeats
By David Cay Johnston
San Francisco Chronicle via Common Dreams, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: The federal tax system that millions of Americans are forced to deal with before April 15 is not at all what you think it is. Congress has changed it in recent decades from a progressive system in which the more one earns the more one pays in income taxes. It has become a subsidy system for the super rich. Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich -- the top 1/100th of 1 percent of Americans. People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more.

GIs: Depleted Uranium Dust Made Us Ill
By Will Cruz
Newsday, 10 April 2004
EXCERPT: David Rodriguez's symptoms started with muscular back pain last summer. By the end of his seven-month stint in Iraq in August, the Army specialist had dizziness, diarrhea and blurred vision. On Friday, Rodriguez, one of nine soldiers to become sick from the National Guard's 442nd Military Police Company based in Rockland County, said the symptoms persist. "Right now," said Rodriguez, 31, a firefighter at Engine Co. 6 in Manhattan, "I have a headache, chest pains. I've had them for about three months straight." Rodriguez joined five soldiers from his unit and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to draw attention to medical problems experienced by those who may have been exposed to depleted uranium in Iraq and to ask the Army to improve its testing and treatment policies. The United States uses depleted uranium in weapons and tank armor. It is dense, and when shells containing it strike a target, radioactive dust is formed. "According to the doctor, we inhaled it," Sgt. Agustin Matos said. "It was in the air."
SEE ALSO: Among Military Families, Growing Questions about Bush (NYT)

Gas Prices Climb to New Record High
Lundberg: Drivers paying 31.5 cents more than in December
CNN.com, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: Gas prices rose on average 2.5 cents a gallon in the past two weeks, with no near-term sign of relief, the publisher of a national survey on gas prices said Sunday. The national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline sold at self-service pumps was $1.79, according to the Lundberg Survey of more than 7,000 U.S. filling stations taken on April 9. Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey, said the new record high comes from an upward trend fueled by higher crude oil prices globally, increased demand for gas caused by economic growth in the United States and increased refinery costs resulting from seasonal changes in refinery processes mandated by environmental rules.

10-11 April 2004

Brief Raises Credibility Questions
Rice may be challenged on her characterization of the classified memo as 'historical' rather than a warning of terrorists plotting against the U.S.
By Ronald Brownstein
LA Times, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: Questions about the Bush administration's vigilance dominated Condoleezza Rice's appearance last week before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But with the release Saturday night of a classified warning delivered to President Bush at his Texas ranch one month before the attacks, questions of credibility may become a growing challenge for Rice — and the president she serves. ...Among the key observations in the report:
•  "After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington."
•  "A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks."
•  Al Qaeda had members inside the United States "and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."
•  The FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers" related to Bin Laden.
•  The FBI and CIA were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
Most dramatic was the sentence saying the FBI saw "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." Briefing reporters Saturday evening, a senior White House official said that language did not refer to specific "FBI investigative observations."
...She is already engaged in a semantic tangle with critics of her repeated claim that Clarke never presented her with a plan for combating Al Qaeda. In her testimony last week, Rice acknowledged receiving a memo from him soon after taking office, but characterized it not as a plan but rather a "set of ideas."

Text of the President's Daily Brief for Aug. 6, 2001
New York Times, 10 April 2004
EXCERPT: Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America." After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a . . . service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (E.I.J.) operative told an . . . service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike. ...Al Qaeda members — including some who are U.S. citizens — have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two Al Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior E.I.J. member lived in California in the mid-1990's. A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks. We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a . . . service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists. Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The F.B.I. is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are investigating a call to our embassy in the U.A.E. in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.
SEE ALSO: CNN pdf file

Bush May Find He's Running Against Sweep of History
In 1920, 1952 and 1968, voters became disillusioned by war-related events.
Kevin Phillips
LA Times, 11 April 2004
EXCERPT: Early April's good news for the Bush White House is principally economic — job data suggesting that the November presidential election shouldn't be driven by high unemployment rates and associated resentments. The bad news, though, is the rising chance that the campaign will echo 20th century contests that were enlivened by voter bitterness over wartime mismanagement or postwar failures. A year ago, foreign affairs — the combination of his response to Sept. 11, firmness against terrorism and apparent military success in Iraq — was the source of President Bush's highest approval ratings in national polls. His national security credentials looked to be a strong Republican trump for November. Not any more. An emerging web of interrelated vulnerabilities — the developing sense that the pre-9/11 White House was inattentive, or worse, to the terrorist threat and Al Qaeda; the Bush family's business and financial ties to the Saudis and Osama bin Laden clan; the clamor over not finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; and administration attempts to blame Saddam Hussein for 9/11 — threatens to weaken the president's foreign policy bona fides. Now come the rising chaos in U.S.-occupied Iraq and the lack of a plan to deal with it. All this is beginning to undercut the president's approval ratings. One recent poll showed public support for Bush's handling of Iraq plummeting from 59% in mid-January to just 40% in early April. Historically, such voter disillusionment has fed incendiary politics. More than virtually any other people, Americans have refought major wars and their unfortunate consequences in postwar election debates. Today's Iraq-Saudi-9/11 issue appears to be signaling a similar political slugfest.

Maybe he just forgot about it...
Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says
White House begins to distance itself from the FBI
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 10 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday. The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford. The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders. ...Also on Friday, the White House offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received instructions more than two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States. But it is unclear what action, if any, the bureau took in response. The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the F.B.I. in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings. ...law enforcement officials said Friday that they believed that Ms. Rice's testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks — including her account of scores of F.B.I. investigations under way that summer into suspected Qaeda cells operating in the United States — overstated the scope, thrust and intensity of activities by the F.B.I. within American borders.
SEE ALSO: Bush: "I mean, make no mistake about it; if we'd had known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we'd have done everything in our power to stop it."
SEE ALSO:
al - Qaida Threat Included in Bush Memo
AP in NYT, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo. The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 -- a month before the Sept. 11 attacks -- said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press. The same month as that briefing of Bush, U.S. intelligence officials received two uncorroborated reports suggesting terrorists might use airplanes, including one that suggested al-Qaida operatives were considering flying a plane into a U.S. embassy, current and former government officials said. Those August 2001 reports -- among thousands of varied and uncorroborated threats received by the government each month -- weren't deemed credible enough to tell the president or his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the officials said. Neither involved the eventual Sept. 11 plot. The sources who read the presidential memo would only speak on condition of anonymity because the White House has not yet declassified the highly sensitive document, entitled ``Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States.''
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
Was that 'historical' or 'hysterical'?
Rice Says PDB "...Did Not Warn of Attacks Inside the United States."
Listen to Rice Now
NPR's Day to Day, 9 April 2004
Ben-Veniste on Rice's Sept. 11 Testimony from Day to Day, Friday , April 09, 2004
NPR's Madeleine Brand talks with Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the 10-person panel investigating the government's response to terrorism before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and former Watergate prosecutor, about National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's testimony on Thursday.
SEE ALSO:
The Rice Version
New York Times, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: In her long-awaited public testimony yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, the most diligent of public servants, made it clear that under her direction the Bush administration touched all the proper bases in planning an antiterror program. The State Department was told to "work with" other countries. F.B.I. field offices were "tasked" to increase surveillance on known terrorists. Warnings were issued, meetings were held. But Ms. Rice was utterly unconvincing when she tried to portray Al Qaeda as anything approaching a top concern for the White House. If President Bush were not making 9/11 the center of his re-election campaign, it might be possible for the country to settle on a realistic vision of how the White House handled the threat posed by Al Qaeda before the terrible attacks on New York and Washington occurred. The administration tried to behave responsibly, but it missed the boat. Ms. Rice was at her weakest in her testimony before the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks when she attempted to portray Mr. Bush himself as a hands-on administrator with a particular concern about terror threats. Her description of the president as tired of "swatting flies" and spoiling for a real fight with Osama bin Laden was especially poorly chosen. "Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11?" asked former Senator Bob Kerrey.
SEE ALSO:
In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: When Condoleezza Rice took the national stage on Thursday morning, her task was to defend President Bush against the accusation that he was inattentive to terrorism before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and to defuse a debate that threatens his re-election campaign. She mounted the defense vigorously, but in the hours after she returned to the White House, it was evident that she had not defused the arguments. At every turn in her three hours of often-contentious testimony, she stuck to the White House script: Everything that could have been done to prevent the attacks had been done. She did not acknowledge failings, apart from the institutional tensions that have long plagued the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a culture that made it impossible for a succession of administrations to see the threat unfolding in front of them. She also did not concede that the newly arrived Bush administration was part of that problem, or that it, too, underestimated what it confronted or was distracted by other issues like tax cuts, China and missile defense. Moreover, her tone — as controlled as her delivery at one of her Stanford seminars — left many panel members wondering if she was defending a position that several of them have publicly said is indefensible. For viewers who have not been following the details of the argument, there was the lingering question of whether anyone in the Bush White House is capable of admitting error — a step many of Ms. Rice's current and former colleagues said would help calm the political waters. "If Dr. Rice wanted to change some minds, she needed to come out and admit that the administration — like so many of its predecessors — had made mistakes in addressing international terrorism," said Ken Pollack, a former analyst at the national security council and C.I.A. and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. "Simply denying that this administration has underestimated the threat is unlikely to convince Americans who see the manifest failures of the United States government to address a systemic problem."
SEE ALSO: Rice on the Stand by David Corn (The Nation)

The Issue Is Iraq
Finding out what happened on 9/11 is vital. But the real question is whether Bush has botched the war on terror
Michael Hirsh
Newsweek, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT Referring to the dramatic turn of events this week in Iraq, when the once-quiet majority Shias joined the insurgency and dozens of U.S. soldiers were killed, Kerrey noted that he was “not going to get the national-security adviser 30 feet away from me very often.” So he offered Rice some grim advice. “I think we’re going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military-operation strategy that we have in place,” Kerrey, now a 9/11 commissioner, said in the hushed hearing room on Capitol Hill. The United States, he suggested, was continuing to misread the Muslim mind. Kerrey worried that because of the worsening quagmire of Iraq—yes, we can call it that now—U.S. policy there could “provide an opportunity for Al Qaeda to have increasing success at recruiting people to attack the United States.” A new 9/11 could be gestating, in other words, even as we perform an autopsy on the last one.

Our War President in Crisis--Duck!
By Tom Engelhart
TomDispatch, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: While the situation in Iraq was devolving and his national security advisor was preparing to testify under oath -- or do I mean to stonewall, firewall, split hairs, filibuster? -- before the 9/11 Commission, our War President, according to Scott Lindlaw of the Associated Press, was planning to spend his April 8th "leading a tour of his ranch for hunting, fishing and land-conservation advocates Thursday, after national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony to the Sept. 11 commission. Aides said Bush had given no indication of planning to watch the testimony Thursday live on television. Rather, Bush intended to receive updates from his top advisers, a senior administration official said. Bush was attending his usual national-security meetings in the morning. A partial list showed groups dedicated to protecting hunting and fishing rights and the habitat of fish and game, including Ducks Unlimited, Quail Unlimited, the Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association." Lindlaw left out one key organization on the tour, however, Pheasants Forever. In the great tradition of our vice president and Supreme Court Justice Scalia, our War President is, at this moment of crisis, leading the war on birds. (And his aides now swear he watched every word Rice spoke today.) Dana Balz and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post report that this week the President "stayed out of sight at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., but events have played havoc with his schedule. Originally, Bush planned to remain out of view until he attends Easter services on Sunday, but aides acknowledged that was untenable at such a momentous time. Now they are planning an Easter Sunday speech at nearby Fort Hood, according to aides, and a possible appearance Friday." If you want to send a War President out in public, I always say, send him to a military base. It's a good way to control the crowd reaction, and a Vietnam-era presidential tic at a moment when this administration is intent on reassuring us that there's honestly, truly, nothing -- they swear -- Vietnam-ish about this moment.
SEE ALSO: Support Eroding for Bush on Iraq (Christian Science Monitor)

Blasting Bush: Two Ex-CIA Analysts Fault Administration on 9/11
Democracy Now!, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA who was one of Vice President George Bush daily briefer says Rice's testimony and the events surrounding it have "the very strong odor of the most accomplished PR machine in White House history." Former CIA and State Department analyst Mel Goodman says the staff studies of the commission, which were released the same day as Richard Clarke's testimony and were largely ignored, "make it clear that there was reduced urgency within the Bush administration" on 9/11.
SEE ALSO:
Two FBI Whistleblowers Accuse Bureau of Ignoring Warnings Before 9/11
Democracy Now!, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: We speak with FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who accused FBI headquarters in 2002 of hampering the investigation into alleged 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds who was hired shortly after 9/11 to translate intelligence related to the attacks and says the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11, 2001. Rowley reveals one of her fellow FBI agents contacted FBI HQ before Sept. 11 and said Moussaoui was the type that might try to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. [includes rush transcript]
SEE ALSO: 9/11 Widow Blames White House for Mishanding and Hampering Investigation
Democracy Now!, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband Richard in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, criticizes the Bush administration for mishandling intelligence prior to 9/11 and hampering the 9/11 investigation. [includes rush transcript]

Bush Administration Loses Touch with Reality
Editorial
Guardian (UK) via Common Dreams, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: Shortly before being elected US president, George Bush wasn't able to name the president of Pakistan when asked in a televised interview. Yet, according to his national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, in the months leading up to September 11, President Bush was fully briefed and supported a detailed plan to help General Musharraf cut off support to al-Qaida in Afghanistan. As Groucho Marx once asked: "Who do you believe--me, or the evidence of your own eyes?"

One Good Month
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT: At last, a favorable surprise on jobs: estimated payroll employment rose 308,000 in March, above almost everyone's expectations. You can't blame the administration for trying to play up the good news, and for being dismayed when the sound of popping Champagne corks was drowned out by the crackle of gunfire. But has the economy, after so many false starts, finally started to deliver? For perspective, it helps to remember what solid job growth looks like. During Bill Clinton's eight years in office, the economy added 236,000 jobs per month. But that's just an average: a graph of monthly changes looks like an electrocardiogram. There were 23 months with 300,000 or more new jobs; in March 2000, the economy added 493,000 jobs. This tells us not to make too much of one month's data; payroll numbers are, as economists say, noisy. It also tells us that by past standards, March 2004 was nothing special.
...In short, this year's election will be a contest between a candidate who advocates a return to economic policies that were associated with eight years of very solid job growth, and one who advocates continuation of policies that have, after three years, yielded exactly one good monthly jobs report. I know: Mr. Clinton doesn't deserve all or even most of the credit for the good times on his watch, and Mr. Bush doesn't deserve all the blame for the bad times on his. Still, on the face of it there's nothing to recommend Mr. Bush's approach. But will voters see it differently? My guess is no. If the election is driven by economics at all — which seems doubtful right now, with the debacle in Iraq accelerating — it will reflect the job situation on the ground, which remains grim.

Bush's Low Profile Questioned as Violence Flares in Iraq
By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, 10 April 2004
EXCERPT: Explosive violence in Iraq and persistent questions about the administration's handling of terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001, have plunged President Bush into one of the most difficult moments of his presidency, as he seeks to maintain public confidence in his leadership while facing what experts say are mostly unattractive options to put U.S. policy on track. In the face of these challenges, Bush has yielded the stage, remaining largely out of sight at his Texas ranch as others in his administration explain his policies. Bush's silence in the face of mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq and concerns about the administration's timetable for transferring power to the Iraqis has brought criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
SEE ALSO: Spring Break for Bush (below)

Gives new meaning to the term 'upholding the Constitution'
US Marshal Defends Forcible Erasure of Reporter's Recording of Scalia Speech
AP, 10 April 2004
EXCERPT: A U.S. marshal said a deputy's erasure of two journalists' recordings of a speech by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was appropriate, given that one of the service's responsibilities is to provide a traveling Supreme Court justice with security. However, Nehemiah Flowers, the U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Mississippi, conceded Friday that Scalia's request that his remarks not be recorded should have been publicly announced before the speech. Flowers said the fact no announcement was made regarding Scalia's wishes, "could have possibly been a faux pas on our behalf.'' He added that "It would have been handled, on hindsight, a little bit different.'' During Scalia's speech Wednesday in Hattiesburg about the Constitution, a woman who identified herself as Deputy Marshal Melanie Rube demanded that a reporter for The Associated Press erase a digital recording of the justice's comments.

Poison and Profits
First California semiconductor firm AXT, Inc. exposed its workers to arsenic. Then it fired them and sent their jobs to China.
By Chris Thompson
East Bay Express via Corpwatch, 7 April 2004
EXCERPT: According to government records, internal company documents, and former employees, AXT has knowingly poisoned perhaps hundreds of its own employees with arsenic over a period of at least five years. When government officials investigated the company in 2000, they found evidence that AXT's managers knew that its employees were being exposed to arsenic levels four times the legal limit -- yet had done almost nothing about it. At one point during the investigation, AXT internal monitoring indicated that one employee was exposed to 31 times the maximum permissible concentration of arsenic dust. Another employee says AXT managers refused to repair broken ventilation systems, and government regulators claimed in writing that the company failed to offer its workers respirators and shower facilities with which to decontaminate themselves. Not only were workers breathing arsenic dust, they were possibly bringing it home on their clothes and exposing their children to it. Investigators from the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health were so horrified with these conditions that in the spring of 2000 they shut down the company's factory for four days and slapped AXT with a $313,655 fine. By the agency's standards, such a fine is nuclear in scale. It says a lot about what AXT had done to its workers, but it also says a lot about how toothless the state legislature has rendered its watchdogs of occupational toxins. Only the 1998 explosion at the Tosco oil refinery generated a substantially larger fine -- $410,000 -- and refinery managers had to kill four people to incur it. The sad fact is that no regulatory body has the power to rein in such businesses. Companies such as AXT can poison, maim, or cripple their workers with near impunity.

No need to look further than Karen Hughes for the Architect of Bush's Unapologetic, Admit No Error Posture
Deep in the Heart Of Washington
Karen Hughes Returned To Texas but She Kept Her Foot in Right Here
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post, 10 April 2004
EXCERPT: Among the White House press corps Hughes was known as Nurse Ratched -- a nickname Newsweek's Howard Fineman pinned on her -- for never straying off-message and keeping the media always at arm's length.

9 April 2004

Complete Coverage of the Rice Testimony By The Center for American Progress
Center for American Progress, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT:
Statement On Rice Testimony, by John Podesta
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission today established new and important facts.
Bush Administration Warned 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' April 8, 2004
Two and a half years after 9/11, the American public learned today that President Bush received explicit warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States – including activities "consistent with preparations for hijacking."
Claim vs. Fact: Rice's Q&A Testimony Before the 9/11 Commission, April 8, 2004
CLAIM: "I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons." FACT: Condoleezza Rice was the top National Security official with President Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. There, "U.S. officials were warned that Islamic terrorists might attempt to crash an airliner" into the summit, prompting officials to "close the airspace over Genoa and station antiaircraft guns at the city's airport."
Claim vs. Fact: Condoleezza Rice's Opening Statement, April 8, 2004
CLAIM: "We decided immediately to continue pursuing the Clinton Administration's covert action authorities and other efforts to fight the network." FACT: Newsweek reported that "In the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called 'Catcher's Mitt' to monitor al-Qaida suspects in the United States."
Responses of Condoleezza Rice in the Weeks Before Her Testimony, April 8, 2004
The president asked if Iraq was complicit. Anybody should have asked whether Iraq was complicit given our history with Iraq.
SEE ALSO:
Rice on the Stand
David Corn
The Nation, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: Condoleezza Rice is fortunate that she only has to speak under oath when she appears before the 9/11 commission. Her much-anticipated testimony to the panel investigating the 9/11 attacks overall was predictable. She vigorously defended herself, her administration and her boss from the charge that they had not assigned the al Qaeda threat sufficient importance prior to September 11. She could not bring herself to utter what Commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator, called "the m-word"--that is, "mistake." Instead, she only would note that "America's response [to the growing al Qaeda threat] across several administrations of both parties was insufficient," and she blamed that on the general tendency of democratic societies to be slow in reacting to "gathering threats." (To prove her point, she cited the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania.) She repeatedly referred to "structural problems" that had long existed in the national security community as the primary reason for the failures--another word she did not mention once in her opening statement--that occurred on and before 9/11. As could be expected, the Republican-appointed commissioners tossed her easy questions, and the Democrats tried to zing her but were hampered by tight time restrictions. Still, the hearing produced information indicating that she and the Bush administration have not been straight with the public as they have attempted to convince America they were fully vigilant in the fight against al Qaeda prior to September 11.
SEE ALSO: Bush Told of Hijack Warning Weeks Before 9/11 (The Guardian)
SEE ALSO:
A Little Light Is Shed on Intelligence Digests
By DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Times, 9 April 2004
EXCERPT:  In Washington-speak, it is the P.D.B. — or President's Daily Brief. An intelligence digest prepared six mornings a week, by the Central Intelligence Agency, it is one of the most highly classified documents prepared by the government, its distribution limited under President Bush to fewer than a dozen senior administration officials. Compiled in a loose-leaf notebook, and consisting of about a dozen items a day, the P.D.B. in some ways serves as a kind of newspaper, with reports on current developments around the world and on broader trends. On Aug. 6, 2001, the digest presented to Mr. Bush in Crawford, Tex., included a memorandum titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S." Until Thursday, when it was publicly disclosed by Condoleezza Rice in her testimony before the special commission looking in the Sept. 11 attacks, even that title was classified.
And, in case you missed it...
SEE ALSO:
"We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001"
A former FBI translator told the 9/11 commission that the bureau had detailed information well before Sept. 11, 2001, that terrorists were likely to attack the U.S. with airplanes.
By Eric Boehlert
Salon, March 26, 2004
EXCERPT: A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.

Condi Lousy
Why Rice is a bad national security adviser.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser—passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.
SEE ALSO: AUDIO LINK  Rice Testifies Before Sept. 11 Panel from Day to Day, Thursday , 8 April 2004
NPR's Alex Chadwick speaks with Slate military affairs writer Fred Kaplan for analysis of the testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice before the Sept. 11 Commission.

LexiCondi: Decoding Rice's Self-Serving Testimony
By William Saletan
Slate, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: Four years ago, when the Justice Department deposed Al Gore in the Clinton fund-raising scandal, I poked fun at Gore's self-serving, hypocritical redefinitions of everyday words. Today, National Security Adviser Condi Rice resorted to similar tactics in her testimony before the 9/11 commission. Here's a glossary of her terms.

Thanks, Mr. President
If John Kerry wins, he'll have to clean up a huge mess.
By Robert Kuttner
The American Prospect, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: Suppose John Kerry actually gets elected president. Here's what he has to look forward to.
On the economic front, most observers expect higher interest rates in late 2004. Kerry will face a sluggish economy, and perhaps a double-dip recession.
The reason for the higher interest rates is the Bush deficits. At some point soon, money markets will start demanding a better return if they are to keep buying government bonds.
To undo the fiscal mess, Kerry would be torn between reassuring Wall Street with a lot of deficit cutting, and trying to find some funds to restore domestic social investment. Foreign policy and domestic security will not be pretty, either. As the focus shifts from imagined threats (Saddam Hussein) to real ones (the scandalously weak state of domestic preparedness against terrorist attack), a Kerry administration would need to spend more on everything from port security to Public Health Service monitoring of a possible biological or radiological attack.
On the foreign front, a Kerry administration would also need to spend more money, at least in the short run, to stabilize and honorably extricate the US from Iraq. Even a multilateral occupation force would demand a lot of American financial help. If Democrats should feel depressed by the morning-after policy challenges a Kerry Administration would face, the politics would be even more daunting.

We're Number Three!
Along with China, Iran and Viet Nam, US Leads World in Executions
Amnesty International, 6 April 2004
EXCERPT: By the end of 2003, 77 countries had abolished the death penalty for all crimes. A further 15 countries had abolished it for all but exceptional crimes, such as wartime crimes. At least 25 countries were abolitionist in practice: they had not carried out any executions for the previous 10 years or more and were either believed to have an established practice of not carrying out executions or had made an international commitment not to do so. Seventy-eight other countries and territories retained the death penalty, although not all of them passed death sentences or carried out executions during 2003... During 2003, at least 1,146 people were executed in 28 countries. At least 2,756 people were sentenced to death in 63 countries. These figures include only cases known to Amnesty International; the true figures were certainly higher. As in previous years, the vast majority of executions worldwide were carried out in a tiny handful of countries. In 2003, 84 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, the USA and Viet Nam.

So much for the freedom of the press...
In Mississippi, Two Reporters Told to Erase Tapes of Scalia Speech
By Denise Grones
AP, 7 April 2004
EXCERPT: Two reporters were ordered Wednesday to erase their tape recordings of a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a Mississippi high school. Scalia has long barred television cameras from his speeches, but does not always forbid newspaper photographers and tape recorders. On Wednesday, he did not warn the audience at the high school that recording devices would be forbidden. During the speech, a woman identifying herself as a deputy federal marshal demanded that a reporter for The Associated Press erase a tape recording of the justice's comments. She said the justice had asked that his appearance not be recorded. The reporter initially resisted, but later showed the deputy how to erase the digital recording after the officer took the device from her hands. The exchange occurred in the front row of the auditorium while Scalia delivered his speech about the Constitution. The deputy, who identified herself as Melanie Rube, also made a reporter for The Hattiesburg American erase her tape. Scalia gave two speeches Wednesday in Hattiesburg, one at Presbyterian Christian High School and the other at William Carey College. The recording-device warning was made before the college speech. At a reception following Scalia's speech at William Carey, the justice told television reporters from Hattiesburg station WDAM-TV to leave. A member of his entourage also told newspaper photographers they could not take pictures, but a college official reversed the order after non-media guests started snapping photos. William Carey spokeswoman Jeanna Graves later sent an apology to the media. "I specifically asked for protocol and was told that the media would have access to Justice Scalia during the reception," Graves wrote in an e-mail. She said she was "embarrassed and angry" over the incident.

White House Downplayed the Risks of Mercury in Proposed Rules, Scientists Say
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
New York Times, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: While working with Environmental Protection Agency officials to write regulations for coal-fired power plants over several recent months, White House staff members played down the toxic effects of mercury, hundreds of pages of documents and e-mail messages show. The staff members deleted or modified information on mercury that employees of the environmental agency say was drawn largely from a 2000 report by the National Academy of Sciences that Congress had commissioned to settle the scientific debate about the risks of mercury. ...scientists on the academy panel and others outside it as well as environmentalists and politicians expressed concern in recent interviews that a host of subtle changes by White House staff members resulted in proposed rules that played down the health risks associated with mercury from coal-fired power plants. The proposal largely tracks suggestions from the energy industry. While the panel members said the changes did not introduce outright errors, they said they were concerned because the White House almost uniformly minimized the health risks in instances where there could be disagreement. "What they are saying is not scientifically invalid on its face," said Alan Stern, a New Jersey toxicologist who served on the panel.

Carter's Crusade
Jimmy Carter explains how the Christian right isn't Christian at all.
By Ayelish McGarvey
The American Prospect, 6 April 2004
EXCERPT: Former President Jimmy Carter, America's first evangelical Christian president, still teaches Sunday school at his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia, and he and his wife, Rosalynn, continue their human-rights work in developing nations through the Carter Center at Emory University. In recent months, the Carters toured Togo, Ghana, and Mali to raise awareness of the public-health needs of those nations. In February, Carter spoke about the role of evangelical Christianity in democratic politics with Prospect writing fellow Ayelish McGarvey.
Q-Republicans have been extremely successful at connecting religion and values to issues like the fight against terrorism, abortion, and gay rights. Democrats have been far less adept at infusing our issues -- compassion, help for the poor, social justice -- with any sense of religious commitment or moral imperative. Why do you think that is?
A-When I was younger, almost all Baptists were strongly committed on a theological basis to the separation of church and state. It was only 25 years ago when there began to be a melding of the Republican Party with fundamentalist Christianity, particularly with the Southern Baptist Convention. This is a fairly new development, and I think it was brought about by the abandonment of some of the basic principles of Christianity.

Bush, AIDS, Big Pharma
The Nation, 26 April 2004 issue
EXCERPT: When George W. Bush announced a $15 billion Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in his 2003 State of the Union address, he compared the fight against AIDS to the war on terrorism. Unfortunately, the analogy has proved apt. More than fourteen months and 3 million AIDS deaths later, the Administration's "war on AIDS" has been characterized by unilateralism, disregard for international consensus and corporate cronyism.

AUDIO/VIDEO LINK
Veteran White House Correspondent Helen Thomas On Bush and the State of the Media
DemocracyNow!, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: Democracy Now! interviews veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas who says, "If we don't have the courage to stand up and ask a question when we are so privileged, we have defaulted on our profession." Thomas has served as White House correspondent for some 57 years and has covered every President since Kennedy. [includes rush transcript]

Voters in Los Angeles Suburb Say No to a Big Wal-Mart
By JOHN M. BRODER
New York Times, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: Voters in Inglewood, a racially diverse working-class suburb of Los Angeles, have soundly rejected a ballot initiative to permit the building of a 60-acre Wal-Mart shopping complex exempt from virtually all state and local regulation. Its defeat at the polls on Tuesday may portend difficult battles ahead for Wal-Mart as it moves forward with plans to build 40 so-called supercenters in California, combining Wal-Mart's usual assortment of goods with large grocery departments on as much as 200,000 square feet of floor space. The Los Angeles City Council is preparing an ordinance that would in essence outlaw the building of such retail behemoths within the city limits, and several other California cities, including San Diego, are considering measures. The Inglewood vote against Wal-Mart, 60 percent to 40 percent, was a victory for a coalition of unions, churches and community groups who said the development would have driven local retailers out of business and gutted the city's legal, environmental and planning powers.

8 April 2004

Claim vs. Fact: Condoleezza Rice's Opening Statement
Dr. Rice makes claims that are rebutted by the facts.
Center for American Progress, 8 April 2004
EXCERPT:
CLAIM: "We decided immediately to continue pursuing the Clinton Administration's covert action authorities and other efforts to fight the network."
FACT: Newsweek reported that "In the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called 'Catcher's Mitt' to monitor al-Qaida suspects in the United States." Additionally, AP reported "though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months," thus terminating the reconnaissance missions started during the Clinton Administration. [Sources: Newsweek, 3/21/04; AP, 6/25/03]
CLAIM: "The strategy set as its goal the elimination of the al-Qaida network. It ordered the leadership of relevant U.S. departments and agencies to make the elimination of al-Qaida a high priority and to use all aspects of our national power -- intelligence, financial, diplomatic, and military -- to meet this goal."
FACT: 9/11 Comissioner Jamie Gorelick: "Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, 'Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership'?" Armitage: "No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11." [Source: 9/11 Commission testimony, 3/24/04]
Etcetera, etcetera...
SEE ALSO: Full Text: Rice's Testimony (NYT)

Rice Faces Accusation on Eve of Testimony
By Julian Borger
Guardian (UK), 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: A senior terrorism expert said yesterday that he had delivered a final desperate warning of an inevitable terrorist attack to Condoleezza Rice five days before al-Qaida struck New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington. On the eve of the national security adviser's public appearance today to defend the Bush administration's record before the commission studying the September 11 attacks, Gary Hart, a former Democratic presidential candidate who co-chaired an earlier three-year public study of the threats to US security in the 21st century, told the Guardian his warning had been ignored. "She [Rice] said: 'I'll discuss it with the vice-president'," Mr Hart said; but he felt the response was a brush-off. "All I can say is she didn't feel the degree of urgency I thought was necessary," he said. He said he has known Ms Rice for 20 years, since she had volunteered to work on his Colorado Senate campaign.

Questions for Dr. Rice
By PETER BERGEN
New York Times, 4 April 2004
Reprinted here in full:
1. A search of all your public statements and writings reveals that you apparently mentioned Osama bin Laden only once and never mentioned Al Qaeda at all as a threat to the United States before 9/11. Why?
2. Both Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" and Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" show that shortly after 9/11 there was considerable focus by the Bush cabinet on Iraq's possibly being the perpetrator of the attacks. Why was Iraq considered a suspect when there was no evidence that it was involved in any act of anti-American terrorism for a decade — other than a failed attempt to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush in 1993 — while there was overwhelming evidence that it was the Al Qaeda network that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, tried to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, blew up American embassies in Africa in 1998 and attacked the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000? After all, the cabinet did not discuss the possibility that the attacks were the work of Iran, Libya or Syria, all countries that have a history of terrorism directed at Americans.
3. Mr. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, has said that of the 100 or so meetings held by cabinet-level officials before 9/11 only one was about terrorism. Is this true? If so, was this emblematic of the Bush administration's posture on terrorism?
4. The Bush administration's position, and your own, has been that it would not have been possible to conceive that planes might be used as missiles against the United States. Yet during the 1996 Olympics countermeasures were taken for just that eventuality. How do you reconcile this discrepancy?
5. According to the interrogations of detainees held as suspected Al Qaeda operatives, the lack of response to the attack on the destroyer Cole made the group feel that it could act with impunity. Early in your administration Al Qaeda was identified as the principal suspect in that attack. In addition, Osama bin Laden released videotapes in January and June of 2001 more or less taking credit for his role in it. Why was there no response of any kind from your administration to the Cole attack, an act of war against the United States that killed 17 sailors and nearly sank one of the most advanced destroyers in the American fleet?
6. On Aug. 6, 2001, President Bush was briefed that members of Al Qaeda might plan to hijack a plane in order to secure the release of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a spiritual leader of Al Qaeda jailed in the United States. Given what you now know of the importance of Sheik Rahman to Al Qaeda — as well as the fact that two of his sons played key roles in the group — how would you now characterize this piece of intelligence?
7. Why did you have no plan in place on 9/11 to immediately attack Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies? The United States government had repeatedly put the Taliban on notice that they would be held responsible for any attacks by Al Qaeda. By delaying the military response for a month, the Taliban and Al Qaeda had time to disperse, regroup and fight another day.
8. When you came into office some two dozen members of Al Qaeda, including several senior commanders of the group, had already been indicted. What plans did you have to bring these men to justice?
9. Why has there been no public apology or resignation by any Bush administration official over the most catastrophic intelligence and national security failure of the past five decades?

US Neo-Cons: From Nation-Building to Religion-Building
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service, 7 April 2004
EXCERPT: One thing that can be said about U.S. neo-conservatives is they do not lack for ambition. ''We need an Islamic reformation'', Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz confided on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year, ''and I think there is real hope for one''. Echoing those views one year later, another prominent neo-conservative, Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), recently declared that the ''ultimate goal'' of the war on terrorism had to be Islam's modernization, or, as he put it, ''religion-building''. Such an effort needs to be waged not only in the Islamic world, geographically speaking, added Pipes, who last year was appointed by President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), but also among Muslims in the West, where, in his view, they are too often represented by ''Islamist (or militant Islamic)'' organizations. Pipes is currently seeking funding for a new organization, tentatively named the ''Islamic Progress Institute'' (IPI), which ''can articulate a moderate, modern and pro-American viewpoint'' on behalf of U.S. Muslims and that, according to a grant proposal by Pipes and two New York-based foundations obtained by IPS, can ''go head-to-head with the established Islamist institutions''.

Owner of Fox News, Murdoch, Cheers on Bush's Re-Election Bid
By Suzanne Goldenberg
Guardian (UK), 8 April 2004
EXCERPT: A day after moving his News Corporation to the US, Rupert Murdoch got to work ingratiating himself with the locals yesterday, telling George Bush he was on his way to an easy victory in this year's presidential election. Unperturbed by images of a mass insurrection in Iraq, or opinion polls that show a slow erosion of support for the president in what promises to be an exceedingly close vote, the media magnate predicted that Mr Bush would coast to a second term in November. "He's going to walk it," Mr Murdoch told Sydney radio station 2GB. "The economy's doing extremely well and there is an international crisis. You've got to understand, America was attacked: 9/11 changed America." His confidence in Mr Bush's prospects has resonance in America, where his media empire, led by the Fox television network, has presided over a collective rightward shift of the political centre.

9/11 Blunders Left Workers, Residents in the Dust
By Katherine Stapp
Inter Press Service, 7 April 2004
EXCERPT: Even as the White House scrambles to defend its handling of the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, the poisonous gas and dust unleashed by the disaster continue to settle in the lungs of thousands of recovery workers and New York City residents. They are particularly exasperated with the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), because it quickly reassured people that the air around the World Trade Center site in New York's Manhattan was safe to breathe, when in fact EPA scientists lacked sufficient data to draw this conclusion. An internal investigation later found that the White House Council on Environmental Quality ²convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones² in its press releases.

Bush and Lay: Time to Revive the Enron Story
By Steve Cobble
TomPaine.com, 7 April 2004
EXCERPT: Four years ago this Wednesday, George W. Bush was taking time out from the campaign trail against Al Gore to travel to Houston to take in a game. Where was he? Enron Field. His host was Ken Lay. This was a big day for "Kenny Boy," as George W. once affectionately tagged him. One year earlier, Lay's Enron Corporation, one of the seemingly great economic stories of the 1990s, had agreed to pay more than $100 million over 30 years (!) for the naming rights to the new Houston baseball stadium. On one level, Enron Field was a strange place for George W. Bush to be in April of 2000. Having already vanquished his main GOP primary rival, John McCain, an observer schooled in politics might have expected that Bush would be directly engaging Vice-President Gore in hand-to-hand political combat in a swing state. After all, both Florida and Ohio have baseball teams. But Texas was never a battleground state, and Houston was never a place where W's presence was required for political reasons. So if George W. just wanted to take in a ballgame to relax, why not a visit to his old team, the Texas Rangers, the Sammy Sosa-trading/eminent domain-wielding/sales tax-increasing corporate juggernaut that allowed him to turn a mere $600,000 (mostly in loans) into $14 million faster than you can say "Hillary Clinton cattle futures". Ah, but there is a reason. You see, according to Opensecrets.org, Enron bossman Ken Lay was well on his way to building the Enron family into the soon-to-be-President-Select's number one lifetime donor‹and for a mere $736,800, a pittance compared to that $100M for the naming rights to Enron Field.

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