(As a corrective to CNN’s new docuseries "The
Bush Years: Family, Duty, Power," a sycophantic whitewashing of the cynicism
and entitlement of a family with a history of greed, corruption, and crimes
against humanity, I am re-posting my feature below, originally published at
kotorimagazine.com on 1/31/09)
"I'm the master of low expectations."
-George W. Bush, aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003
THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE
(2) During the Vietnam War, Bush received academic
deferments to avoid service, then ducked combat by getting into the National
Guard, though there was a nationwide waiting list of 100,000. While
in the Guard he dodged
signed commitments but faced no consequences.
(3) After losing a congressional race and heading a
series of failed business enterprises funded by men with connections to his
father, George W. Bush returned to Texas in 1988 (after Bush Sr.’s successful
presidential campaign) and used his connections to buy the Texas Rangers,
though he put up only 2% of the money. Once the deal went through, the
Rangers owners used
eminent domain and a regressive sales tax increase to get a new stadium
built, mostly on the public dime. [In 1998, Bush received $14.9 million from
the sale of the Rangers after putting in just over $600,000 initially.]
(4) In 1989, GOP movers asked George W. Bush to run for
governor of Texas, but he was more interested in baseball, and as one
strategist told him, “You
haven’t done shit.”
(5) According to Rolling
Stone, “On June 22nd, 1990, when Harken's stock price was unusually strong
[Bush was serving as director of Harken at the time]…Bush sold 212,140 shares
of Harken stock at $4 a share, for $848,560. On August 2nd, Iraq invaded Kuwait
and Harken's stock dropped to $3 a share. On June 30th, Harken had released a
quarterly report disclosing a $23.2 million loss for the second quarter, which
Bush had known about before he sold his stock, since he was on Harken's audit
committee.”
(6) “Bush waited until March 1991--eight months later--to file the required insider-trader forms with the SEC. When he was
subsequently accused of insider trading, Bush justified his lateness by saying
that the proper paperwork had been filed on time but lost by the
SEC.” The head of the S.E.C., George Bush Sr.’s former aide Richard
Breeden, filed no charges.
(7) In 1993, George W. Bush began a campaign to become
the governor of Texas when he wasn’t chosen Commissioner of Major League
Baseball. To keep things simple, Bush strategist Karl Rove "put together a
winning strategy: Bush would campaign on four issues-- reform of the
education, welfare, tort and juvenile-justice systems--and nothing else.”
(9) Bush won the race and quickly established his
hostility to the environment as governor of Texas. According to Bob
Herbert of The New York Times, “In early 1995 Houston and Dallas began
emissions programs to deal with their smog-choked air. Upon coming into
office, Governor
Bush signed legislation killing these programs, and when the lead
contractor (emissions tester) sued Texas, Bush used $130 million of money from
environmental protection funds to pay the lawsuit.”
(10) Bush’s first appointment to the state's
environmental protection agency, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation
Commission, was Ralph Marquez, an executive who had spent 30 years with the
Monsanto Chemical Company.
(12) Texas as a whole had more smog alerts in 1999 than
any other state, and was number one in the discharge of carcinogens into
the air (13), the number of factories violating clean water
standards (14), and the injection of toxic waste into underground
wells (15).
(16) Governor Bush’s right-wing priorities were equally clear in
other policy areas. In 1995, he vetoed
an HMO reform measure. In 1997, the law passed without his signature
[Bush later falsely took credit for the measure when he ran for president.]
(20) Governor Bush signed a death warrant every two
weeks and even lowered the time he spent reviewing death penalty cases
from thirty minutes to fifteen.
(21) In 1995, Governor Bush “signed an
NRA-backed bill to allow private citizens to carry concealed handguns in Texas,
ending a 125-year ban on concealed weapons,” and in 1997 "Bush signed a
bill that allowed Texans to bring their guns
into churches and synagogues (22) unless a sign specifically
barred them from doing so.”
(25) Bush did, however, support a law that gave the
state of Texas permission to “take adopted children away from gay and lesbian
couples and give them to straight couples” (Salon, 10/12/00) and (26) a
gays-only sodomy law that criminalized private consensual sex (New Republic,
10/13/00), and (27) opposed laws protecting gays and lesbians from
employment discrimination.
(28) Governor Bush fought
to limit access to CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) to
children who were up to 150% of the poverty rate, though the federal government
would match funding up to 200%. Bush’s move would have denied health
coverage to 200,000 underprivileged children.
(29) Bush did, however, show compassion for one of his
friends in the embalming business, by sending a letter to
investigators asking them to spike an investigation of shady
dealings.
(31) In a portent of things to come countrywide,
Governor Bush tried to establish his bonafides as a "limited government
conservative" by suggesting a decrease in property taxes, even as he
proposed an increase in the sales tax and introduced a new tax on business.
The Texas legislature passed a tax cut after some modifications, and “…these
tax cuts turned out to be a sham. After they kicked in, school districts across
the state boosted local tax rates to compensate for the loss of revenue. A 1999
analysis in the Dallas Morning News found that 'many [taxpayers] are
still paying as much as they did in 1997, or more.’” Republican Lieutenant
Governor Rick Perry [Bush’s future successor as governor of Texas] called the
cuts "rather
illusory."
(32) Presidential candidate Bush chose as his (Vice)
President Dick Cheney,
a right-wing extremist whose "public service" had included votes against
the creation of the Martin Luther King holiday, sanctions on the
brutal South African regime, and a nonbinding resolution urging the release
of Nelson Mandela from prison. Cheney had also been one of only 13 members of
the House of Representatives to oppose a landmark 1988 bill that initiated
federal funding for AIDS testing and counseling. Colin Powell’s Chief of
Staff Lawrence Wilkerson would later say of
Cheney, "He became vice president well before George Bush picked
him…And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was
going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then
going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."
(35) Though he was running to become the most powerful
person in the world, Governor Bush exhibited a work ethic that would make any
slacker proud. According to Vanity Fair, “Even today, nothing
engages Bush's attention for more than a half-hour, an hour max—more like 10 or 15
minutes. His workday as governor of Texas is ‘two hard half-days,’ as his
chief of staff, Clay Johnson, describes it. He puts in the hours from 8 to
11:30 a.m., breaking it up with a series of 15-minute meetings, sometimes
10-minute meetings, but rarely is there a 30-minute meeting, says Johnson. At
11:30 he's ‘outta here.’ He tries everything possible to have at least two
hours of what he calls private time in the middle of the day to go over to the
University of Texas track or run a hard three to five miles on a concrete path
at a pace of 7.5 minutes a mile, then relax and return to the office at 1:30,
where he'll play some video golf or computer solitaire until about three, and
then it's back to the second ‘hard half-day’ until 5:30.”
W. & JEB RIG THE VOTE IN FLORIDA AND STEAL AN ELECTION
“Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose.
He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play
until he can beat him.”
(39) The State of Florida chose a private company with
Republican ties, Database Technologies (now ChoicePoint Inc.), to create a
database of Florida felons that grew to 174,583 people.
When Database Technologies became concerned that their list was including too
many non-felons (by ensnaring individuals with the same name, or a name similar
to a felon), Emmett Mitchell, the assistant general counsel to the Florida
Division of Elections, told them
“Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let
the [county elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than
exclude certain matches altogether.” [Mitchell was later rewarded for
his voter suppression efforts with a position in the Bush Administration’s Education Department].
(40) The purge lists were very flawed, erroneously
including 8,000 people
who had committed misdemeanors in Texas prior to moving to Florida, people who
had committed felonies in states that restored voting rights (after the
convicted had served their sentence) prior to moving to Florida, and people who
were accused of committing felonies in the future. Yet state Republican
election officials dictated that people on the list were guilty until proven
innocent: local election officials were instructed to not call
those on the list (though this had been an original stipulation of the
"electoral reform" legislation that justified the purge), but to
simply send them a letter. Some voters received letters, some didn’t.
(41) According to The Nation, “The
lists targeted black voters in extremely disproportionate numbers. In
Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, where only 15 percent of voters are
black, 54 percent of the names on the purge list were African-Americans. In
Miami-Dade, where blacks make up 20 percent of the population, a list of 5,762
people contained the names of 3,794 blacks, or 66 percent. In Leon County,
which includes Tallahassee, the state capital, 29 percent of the people are
black, but 55 percent of the purge list names were African-Americans.”
This targeted disenfranchisement was guaranteed to help candidate Bush,
as Al Gore would go on to receive 93% of Florida’s black vote on election
day.
(42) After reviewing a list with 690 names, Ion Sancho,
the Elections Supervisor for Leon County, found so many
errors that he sent just 33 letters. Other county officials were
not so careful.
(43) Even after the flaws became obvious, the State of
Florida asked Database Technologies to loosen standards further, for
example expanding
the list to include voters whose names (the letters in their name)
matched a felon by 80%, down from the original 90% standard.
(44) To have one’s voting rights reinstated, those on
the list had to jump through onerous bureaucratic hoops such as having to
retrieve old court records and appeal to a State Office of Executive Clemency,
with a 6-month wait. The Clemency office was chaired by Jeb
Bush. State literature on the subject included outstanding
child support, traffic tickets, and drug/alcohol dependence as justifications
for denying petition.
(45) While the purge was going on, county supervisors
sent long lists of new voters to the state to be processed, particularly
black voters, but Republican state election officials lagged on processing the
new names and made no preparations for a predictably large turnout. In
fact, Katherine Harris (Florida’s then-Secretary of State and co-chair of
Bush’s presidential campaign in the state) and Clay
Roberts (the Division of Elections chief) later told the Federal Civil Rights
Commission that they never even talked about the contingencies of high voter
turnout. A post-election lawsuit by The NAACP listed voters who couldn’t
vote because of the state’s delays.
(46) “$100,000 requested by county elections supervisors
for voter education--which would have helped voters use the punch-card system
and decipher confusing ballots--was deleted from the
Division of Elections budget.”
(47) Seminole County elections chief Sandra Goard “allowed two
GOP operatives [to come into her office ten days before the election and] add
voter identification to more than 4,000 flawed [Republican] absentee ballot
applications that had been rejected before the election. The workers were
then allowed to resubmit the corrected applications, in violation of a 1998 law
that [said that ] only the voter, an immediate family member or legal guardian
may fill out an application for an absentee ballot.” Technically, these
actions constituted a third-degree felony. No such action was taken on
behalf of disqualified Democratic ballots. A post-election lawsuit to
invalidate these ballots was rejected.
(48) According to the Palm Beach Post article
“Breaking
Florida Law,” Peggy Robbins, a County Elections Supervisor in Martin
County, did the same with 500 Republican applications in her county. “The
result in both counties was a windfall in a ratio of 2-1 for Texas Gov. George
W. Bush in absentee votes. That represents more than 5,000 Bush votes that were
cast illegally.”
(49) On election day 2000, Florida was in chaos.
Among many other problems, numerous polling places with large Latino and
Haitian populations lacked proper bilingual assistance as required by the
Voting Rights Act, disenfranchising thousands
of voters.
(50) Black voters were hit the hardest, making up 54% of
disenfranchised voters according to a post-election analysis by the federal
Civil Rights Commission, and were five times as likely as white
voters to have their votes disqualified, with one in ten votes being tossed
statewide. Many new voters weren’t on voting lists and their polling
sites lacked the computer resources to verify eligibility (comparable
shortcomings did not typically exist in white-majority districts). Black
voters were also far more prone to having their ballots disqualified because
urban areas tended to use outdated punchcard voting machines that lacked a
verification mechanism (updated electronic voting machines in many
majority-white districts allowed voters to check their ballot for errors before
submission).
(51) In Palm Beach, on the infamous butterfly ballot, Al
Gore’s name was listed second, but his punchhole was placed third,
resulting in Gore losing 6,600 votes (more than ten times Bush's official margin
of victory), according to the Palm Beach Post.
After election day, a mandatory recount narrowed Bush’s lead
in Florida to a few hundred votes. According to an exhaustive
post-election New York Times investigation, “How
Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote,” Bush lawyers in
Florida then conducted a ruthless campaign to drive Bush’s lead up to a more
comfortable margin.
From the article:
“By 4 p.m. the day after the election, the Bush campaign had
begun a pre-emptive strike, faxing a letter to each of Florida's election
supervisors. Under Florida law, candidates and parties can obtain the addresses
of overseas voters. But to make it difficult for Mr. Gore's campaign to track
those voters, Bush aides wanted the supervisors to reject any post-election
requests for the identities of voters who had not yet sent in ballots (52).”
“But elsewhere, the Bush team was itself exploring the
legality of late voting--not by Floridians in Israel [mainly Democrats] but
by members of the military, who, according to its internal memorandums, were
‘presumed’ to ‘represent conservative electors.’”
(53) “The Republicans decided they had to make sure as
many military ballots as possible arrived in Florida in time to be counted on
Nov. 17…The Pentagon soon faced pressure from the Bush campaign. Leading
Republicans in Congress wrote letters and made calls.”
“When the ballots arrived, Republican lawyers (54) cajoled
county elections officials in Republican counties to bend state law to accept
illegal overseas absentee ballots even as they pushed elections officials in
Democratic counties to apply exceptionally strict standards, in violation of
the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
According to the Times (55), “The effectiveness of
the Republican effort [was] demonstrated by striking disparities in how
different counties treated ballots with similar defects. For instance, counties
carried by Mr. Gore accepted 2 in 10 ballots that had no evidence they were
mailed on or before Election Day. Counties carried by Mr. Bush accepted 6 in 10
of the same kinds of ballots. Bush counties were four times as likely as Gore
counties to count ballots lacking witness signatures and addresses.” Gary
King, “a Harvard expert on voting patterns and statistical models,” estimated that
Bush picked up 245 votes in the process.
Even after the initial (mis)count of overseas ballots provided
Bush with an additional cushion, “the Bush campaign (56) unleashed a
full-scale legal and public relations offensive with a single aim: persuading
selected Bush counties to reconsider hundreds of overseas military ballots
rejected the night before.”
“As a legal matter…not a single judge agreed with the Bush
campaign's argument that Florida's postmarking requirements were invalid,” yet
“By the end of the week, canvassing boards in about a dozen Republican-leaning
counties had reconvened for a second round of counting. In each place,
longstanding election rules were bent and even ignored (57). Boards
counted ballots postmarked as many as seven days after the election.” 288
ballots that had been rejected just days before were then counted, helping Bush
further pad his narrow lead by 109 votes.
Bush’s Florida campaign co-chair and Florida Secretary of
State Katherine Harris (58) certified the vote totals (and thus, the
election) for Bush, and ignored Palm Beach supervisors’ request for
additional time to conduct a hand recount. When Florida’s Supreme Court
refused to shut down the vote count, Republican operatives (59) staged a riot in Miami-Dade
county that convinced election officials to stop counting votes there (Bush
called the rioters afterward to thank them). In addition, Bush’s recount
spokesman James Baker twice (60) threatened
to do an end run around the vote-counting process and simply have Florida’s
Republican legislature declare Bush the winner, vote tallies be damned.
Ultimately, a Republican-majority federal appeals court in
Atlanta refused to block the recount, but five Republican appointees on the
federal Supreme Court previously steadfast in their ideological aversion to
federal encroachment on state rights overruled (61) the Florida
Supreme Court and shut down the vote count as being a violation of the Equal
Protection clause.
Instead, George W. Bush became president (62) despite
losing the popular count by over half a million votes, a distinction carried by
no other president-elect since 1888.
W. CAMPAIGNS AS A UNITER, GOVERNS AS A DIVIDER
“What we need is to be able to reach across the aisle. Put
together coalitions of Republicans and Democrats and build the kinds of
coalitions that will get something done in Washington. George Bush is a man of
great integrity that will make a first-rate president.”
“America has a long tradition of uniting once elections are
over…Secretary Cheney and I will do everything in our power to unite the
nation, to call upon the best, to bring people together after one of the most
exciting elections in our nation’s history.”
-George W. Bush, after winning the presidency on a party-line 5-4 Supreme
Court decision
Promises to the contrary, George W. Bush governed as a
hyper-partisan Republican from moment one. Immediately upon taking office
Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, put a large assortment of Bill Clinton's
labor, consumer, and environmentally-friendly regulations on ice (63).
Not long after, Bush let his patrons at Enron bleed
California by refusing (64) to re-authorize a cap on energy
prices put in place by Bill Clinton, while falsely claiming in public that the
spike in energy costs was a result of California’s prohibitions on construction
of new power plants.
With rare exceptions, Bush’s appointments were right-wing
Republicans that had no intention of carrying out their department’s historic
missions. Bush made Larry Thompson --a director of Providian, which had
paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars for fraud--a watchdog over
corporate crime (65), Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who had specialized in
ensuring that his corporate clients would not pay the price for their
negligence, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (66), and
John Ashcroft (67), a right-wing extremist that had made his name in
Missouri politics by opposing integrated busing, the nation's top law
enforcement official.
As one example of many of Ashcroft’s theocratic modus
operandi, he appointed two members of the “Independent Women's Forum”--Margot
Hill (68) and Nancy Pfonhauer (69)--to a domestic violence
advisory committee, though they had both opposed the Violence Against Women
Act, a measure Bill Clinton had signed into law in 1994.
Bush appointed Gale Norton (70) head of the
Department of Interior, the agency that oversees federal land use. Norton
was known for suing the state of Colorado for enforcing environmental
regulations. Among her career highlights was a comment that the Southern
states “lost too
much” in the Civil War and her threat to sue the federal government over
ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) requirements that the Colorado statehouse
add a wheelchair ramp that she said was “a really ugly addition to the state
capitol.”
Bush’s pick for the Department of Energy (71) was
Spencer Abraham, who had supported abolishing the Department of Energy just a
few years prior, while in Congress. Abraham was perfectly representative
of Bush’s preference for people who were ill-intentioned, ethically-challenged,
or just plain incompetent, as were David Hager (72), a highly
controversial doctor who had written that women should use prayer to reduce the
symptoms of PMS, to the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Commission,
and Rod Paige (73), a Secretary of Education that called the National
Education Association a “terrorist
organization.”
Among Bush’s judicial choices were:
(74) Jay Bybee (who defended employment discrimination
against gays in the Department of Defense)
(75) Dennis Shedd (a protégé of arch-segregationist Strom
Thurmond)
(76) Peter Keisler (a former clerk for the notorious
Robert Bork, who had been one of the rare Supreme Court appointments so extreme
that he was deep-sixed by the Senate)
(77) Terry Boyle (a former staff member of the virulently racist senator Jesse Helms)
(78) Priscilla Owen (the most extreme member of Texas's
far right Supreme Court)
(79) Jeffrey Sutton (who had earned his Republican street
cred by fighting protections for the disabled)
(80) Brett Kavanaugh (an author of the salacious Starr
Report)
(81) Bill Pryor (an Alabama attorney general who had
filed a brief in defense of an anti-sodomy law which was later overturned by
the Supreme Court)
(82) Charles Pickering (a Mississippi judge who had
tried to convince a jury to be more lenient in its treatment of defendants who had
burned a cross on a black family's lawn)
Moreover, Bush lied repeatedly about his tax plan (85),
saying during the
campaign,"The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go to the bottom
end of the spectrum," and claiming that the estate tax phaseout portion of
his plan would “keep family farms in the family," though The New York
Times couldn’t find a single instance of this being true (86).
“Bush's
tax policies have (87) necessitated hikes in federal fees,
state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families
who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and
college students, and in a wide range of state services.”
At the same time that he lowered the tax burden on the
well-off, Bush reduced IRS enforcement of rich tax cheats (88) and
increased IRS investigations of the working poor (89), enacted steroidal
increases to America’s already-bloated defense budget (90), and
proposed decidedly un-Christian budget cuts to a whole host of important
government services, including but not limited to libraries (91),
advanced pediatric training for doctors (92), worker re-training (93),
public housing (94), the Women and Infants Nutrition program (95),
the Childcare and Development grant (96), money used to investigate cases
of child abuse and neglect (97), Americorps (98), community
policing programs (99), cuts to payments to people suffering from
cancer and other illnesses as a result of cold war atomic weapons
projects (100), the Veteran’s Administration (101), childcare
for needy children (102), Medicaid (103), Headstart (104),
school lunches (105), youth opportunity grants for at-risk children (106),
HUD community development block grants (107), the Low Income Energy
Assistance Program (108), and training schools for teachers at children's
hospitals (109).
As additional aspects of his compassionate conservative
agenda, Bush
(110) convinced Congress to nullify ergonomic rules put
in place by Bill Clinton that would have helped workers with repetitive stress
injuries
(111) proposed a re-working of overtime laws that would
have allowed employers to base overtime on an 80-hour cycle, instead of the
current 40, and allow employers to replace overtime with comp time for any
employees loosely classified as management
(112) repealed a Clinton rule that allowed states to use
unemployment money to help people claim family leave to have babies or adopt
children
(113) sought the
dismissal of a class-action lawsuit filed in the United States against Japan by
Asian women forced to work as sex slaves in World War II
(114) signed a “Bankruptcy Reform” bill (which had been vetoed by
Clinton) that punishes the working poor and anyone else with out-of-control
medical bills
(115) sold and signed a prescription drug plan written by
pharmaceutical lobbyists that prohibited the federal government from
negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for more reasonable prices or
allowing cheaper generic drugs from Canada, leaving enrollees with limited
coverage and the highest prices in the world
(116) vetoed an
expansion of CHIPS (Children’s Health Insurance Program) that extended
insurance to children with no coverage
(117) cut
funding for schools that was necessary to help them meet the tough new
academic standards mandated in his No Child Left Behind Act
Bush did, however, find enough money in the budget to give his
Attorney General John Ashcroft over $8,000 so that a blue robe could be
thrown over the nude statue of
lady justice during Ashcroft's press conferences (118).
W. GUTS EVERY ENVIRONMENTAL LAW IN SIGHT
-George W. Bush, September 29,
2000
Arguably Bush’s biggest stamp in
domestic policy was in the area of environmental policy. While
Bush’s first opponent, Al Gore, has become a Global Citizen and Nobel-winning
environmentalist, President Bush took a distinctly different tack. Not
months after seizing office, President Bush abandoned (119) the
Kyoto Protocol to regulate greenhouse gases, which Gore had
negotiated. (Documents later emerged that indicated “that the
decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, in 2001, was
influenced by the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group with ties to
Exxon.”)
Bush’s environmental appointments
shared consistently destructive impulses. He appointed Gail Norton
(see #70) as Secretary of Interior; Steven
Griles, an oil and coal lobbyist, as Deputy Secretary of the Interior (120); Lynn Scarlett,
a global warming denier and opponent of clean air regulations, as
Undersecretary of the Interior (121); Bennett Raley,
who had supported the repeal of the Endangered Species Act, as Assistant
Secretary of the Interior for Water and Science (122); and Monsanto
executive Linda Fisher as deputy administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency (123).
Among Bush’s achievements in
environmental policy:
(124) The administration
immediately suspended the hallmark of Clinton's environmental legacy, his rule
against development in big portions of publicly-owned forests
(125) The
administration replaced
Clinton's strict New Source Review policy, which forced old coal-fired
plants to upgrade to cleaner burning technologies, with the "Clear
Skies" plan, which relied on the facade of voluntary compliance and
actually increased the net amount of allowable pollutants, and
stonewalled (126) on handing over documents to Senate Environmental
Works head Jim Jeffords about the polluter-friendly rewrite of New Source
review
(127) The administration
lifted a strengthened standard for arsenic in drinking water drawn up in the
Clinton presidency and lied about why they were doing it: they said the
proposal had been rushed, though in fact it had been the result of lengthy scientific deliberations. According to a former Bush speechwriter, the
move was really a ploy to
try to win the swing state of New Mexico, which had high naturally occurring
levels of arsenic in its water
(128) The administration
cut the EPA enforcement budget to weaken the EPA, tried to hand enforcement off
to ill-equipped state regulatory agencies, and supported (129) a
technique used by West Virginia coal companies called mountaintop removal,
whereby mountaintops are sheared open to get to the seams, dumping pollutants
and debris into surrounding forests and streams
(130) Where the Clinton EPA
had continued the traditional practice of defending environmental laws in
court, the Bush EPA preferred to settle out of court, giving polluters a slap
on the wrist
(131) The administration
nullified a Clinton rule protecting wetlands, another rule that regulated run
off from big industrial farms (132), and (133) weakened
energy-saving standards set by Clinton for air conditioners and heat pumps
(134) The administration
declared a moratorium on expansions of the National Park system, pushed (135) proposals
to eliminate environmental impact statements and public participation when
private companies wanted to drill, log, mine or develop publicly-owned lands,
abandoned (136) a plan to change the Missouri River flow to
avoid the extinction of endangered fish and birds, reversed (137) a
Clinton rule banning mining for copper, gold, zinc and lead on public lands,
and issued (138) a legal opinion allowing Glamis Gold Ltd., a Nevada
company, to dig an open-pit gold mine near El Centro, California, a desert considered sacred by the local Quechan Indian tribe (Clinton had opposed the mine)
In addition, the Bush
Administration extended (139) amnesty to livestock producers from the
Clean Water Act, slashed (140) funding for the cleanup of Superfund
sites and shifted (141) the cost of Superfund cleanups from chemical
companies to the taxpayers.
Moving along, the administration:
(142) Allowed snowmobiles
back into the Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks in Wyoming
(143) Gutted a regulation
mandating public notification of sewer spills
(144) Overturned
regulations against personal watercraft in eight national parks
(145) Backed away from a
Clinton plan to create a national seashore just north of Santa Barbara
(146) Lifted wildlife
protections on federal lands
(147) Reversed a Clinton
policy blocking construction of a geothermal plant in the Modoc
National Forest, a sacred Indian ground
(148) Published a rule in
the federal register delaying a measure to force oil and gas industries to
follow water pollution standards at drilling sites
(149) Put off Hudson river
dredging (of PCBs) until 2006
(150) Forced conservation
groups to sue in court to protect Clinton's long-negotiated Northwest Forest
Plan
(151) Ignored Clinton's
plan to restore salmon and steelhead habitat in the Snake River
(152) Gutted Clinton's
Sierra Nevada plan and Clinton's sand dune protections (from dune buggies) in southeastern
California (153)
(154) Ended the
environmental fellowship program for students pursuing environmental sciences
(155) Tried to pry other innumerable publicly-owned natural
treasures to commercial exploitation
(156) Declined to tighten regulations
on annual emissions of soot
(157) Extended tax credits
to SUV buyers
(159) Supported drilling in
the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(160) “White House Minimized
the Risks of Mercury in Proposed Rules, Scientists Say”
(161) “Interior
Dept. Is Denounced”: “A court-appointed investigator has resigned
from his job probing the federal government's management of hundreds of
millions of dollars owed Native Americans, and charged that the Department of the
Interior blocked his work in a bid to conceal its deals to enrich energy
companies and cheat American Indians.”
(163) “Earl
Devaney, currently the [Interior] department’s inspector general, reported
to Congress that on 15 separate occasions the department’s political appointees
had weakened protections for endangered species against the advice of the
agency’s scientists, whose work they either ignored or distorted.”
The Bush Administration’s War on
Science and Empiricism was so extreme that the Union of Concerned Scientists
sent a public letter (signed by sixty top-notch scientists, including twenty
Nobel prize winners) that said of the administration: "When
scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals,
the administration has often manipulated the process through which science
enters into its decisions…”
This onslaught took its toll on
career employees at the EPA, producing a record number of departures, voluntary
and otherwise: Forest Service head Michael Dombeck (166); Eric Schaeffer,
head of EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement (167); EPA ombudsman Robert
Martin (168), along with his partner Hugh Kaufman (169); James
Furnish (170), a self-described evangelical Christian disappointed with
what he termed the Bush administration's "strident pro-development
policy"; Martha Hahn, state director of Bureau of Land Management in
Idaho (171); Sylvia Lowrance, former acting head of the office of
enforcement and compliance (172); and David Mihalic, superintendent of
Yosemite National Park (173).
The Bush Administration’s negligence also crossed into the
area of public safety:
(175) Bush proposed cuts to the National Center for
Disease Control and Prevention in the middle of the SARS epidemic
(176) Despite serious concerns in the air about security
at chemical plants and nuclear facilities, Bush and congressional
Republicans caved
to the chemical lobby and passed over a Democratic plan for strict
safety guidelines in favor of voluntary compliance
(177) On Dick Cheney's suggestion, Bush fought to bring
nuclear energy back from the dead; Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card
shrugged off public concern by explaining that "apart from Chernobyl
and Three Mile Island"
nuclear energy had had a bright track record (178)
(179) The administration also downgraded the safety
standards for radioactive leaks so that they could push for a nuclear waste
repository in the earthquake zone of Yucca Mountain, not far from one of the
fastest-growing parts of the country
(180) Bush's FDA reversed a Clinton requirement
that drugmakers test their products to determine whether they are safe and
effective for children and (181) stacked the Center for Disease
Control's Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning with people
sympathetic to the lead industry, including two people with direct lead
industry ties
(182) To help his good friends at the Pentagon, Bush put
a gag order on a risk health assessment of perchlorate (a rocket fuel component
that has seeped into the groundwater in many states which has been known to
cause neurological damage)
(184) Bush made steep cuts to mining enforcement not long
before 12 miners died in a Sago, West Virginia mineshaft in January 2006. Before that, Bush had
nominated former mining company executive Dan Lauriski as
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health (185), and had
suspended federal rules aimed at making it easier for coal miners with black
lung disease to be properly compensated (186), which was overturned in
court. After the mineshaft tragedy the following headlines appeared: “Bush Ignored Explicit Warnings In 2002 About Mine Safety” and “Mine fines routinely ignored," in
which it came out that Bush's Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health
Administration failed to levy fines for 4,000 violations over a six-year span (187).
Even after the Sago disaster, Bush appointed Richard
Stickler, a former mining industry executive with a spotty record on
mining safety (188) to be his mine safety czar. Stickler’s
appointment was so inappropriate that he couldn’t even pass a vote in a
Republican Senate, so Bush appointed him during a congressional recess (189).
As reported in “Under
Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction,” “…during the Bush administration…political
appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations,
slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response
to industry pressure (190).
“The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several
health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA
officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically
significant by the Office
of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar
period in President Bill
Clinton's tenure, according to White
House lists.” (191)
W. DYNAMITES THE WALL BETWEEN CHURCH & STATE
When it wasn’t rooted in quid-pro-quos with industries that
were major contributors, Bush’s War on Science often stemmed from a desire to
kowtow to his evangelical base. When Bush first ran for office (and many
times thereafter), he said that the
jury was still out on evolution (192), though, as a friend told New
York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “he doesn’t really care about that
kind of thing.”
Bush also supported the
teaching of the pseudo science Intelligent Design in schools (193),
had information about the effectiveness of condoms (194) and a study
showing the lack of a link between abortion and breast cancer (195) removed
from federal agency websites, overruled FDA scientists’ recommendation that
emergency contraception become available over the counter (196), greatly
increased funding for abstinence-only education (197), replaced his first
top adviser on AIDS, Scott Evertz, because
conservatives complained about Evertz's support for condoms in AIDS prevention
workshops (198), appointed Jerry Thacker, who had called AIDS the
"gay plague,” to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and
AIDS (199), and gave the United States the unique
distinction of being one of the only first world countries to oppose
international family planning (200).
Bush’s decision to handcuff stem-cell research (201) could
prove fatal to many people in the future that suffer from diabetes,
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, spinal cord injuries, and heart disease. Not
only did Bush stifle potentially life-saving research, he lied (202) about
the number of existing lines that did exist:
“At the
time of Bush's announcement, most scientists working in the field knew that
although 60 lines might exist in some form somewhere, the number of robust and
usable lines was much lower. Indeed, the NIH had published a report in July
2001 that…estimated the total number of available lines at 30. Because that
initial figure wasn't enough for the administration, according to Time magazine,
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson asked the NIH to see if more
lines ‘might conceivably exist.’ When NIH representatives met with Bush a week
before his speech with an estimate of 60 lines scattered around the world in
unknown condition, the White House thought it had what it wanted. In his
announcement, Bush proclaimed, without qualification, that there were ‘more
than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines.’
“Within days, basic inquiries from reporters revealed that
there were far fewer than 60 viable lines. The National Institutes of Health
(NIH) has so far confirmed only 11 available lines.”
Moreover, Bush stacked (203) his Council on
Bioethics with people opposed to stem cell research, who covered Bush’s tracks
by overemphasizing (204) the “promise
of adult stem cells (cells that can be obtained without the
destruction of embryos)” while downplaying the potential of embryonic stem
cells. Elizabeth Blackburn, one of the rare dissenting voices on Bush’s
Council, was the lone member not to be re-appointed (205).
Bush also blocked (206) forward motion on
therapeutic (as distinct from human) cloning and showed his disregard for
science by (207) taking “seven
months to choose a White House science adviser for the Office of
Science and Technology Policy,” then “[demoting] the rank of the position,
[moving] the office out of the White House, and [cutting] the number of
associate directors from four to two.” Bush took even longer to
name (208) an FDA director --20 months--and a director (209) for
the National Institute of Health, 14 months.
Among many other examples, Bush also catered to the
evangelical minority by stirring up a media circus by trying to intervene (210) in
the case of Terri
Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen
years following cardiac arrest, and trying to overturn (211) the
right of Oregon residents to die with dignity, a right that had twice been
confirmed at the ballot box.
And then there were many examples of good old gay-bashing,
including but not limited to asking applicants
for governmental positions their sexual orientation (212), killing an
annual Pride celebration of gay employees in the Justice Department (213),
proposing that religious groups receive federal housing aid even if they
discriminate against employees on the basis of religion or sexual
orientation (214), and pushing a constitutional amendment to ban gay
marriage (215) in the lead-up to the 2004 election, though, according to
the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives, David Kuo: “After the 2004 election they cut the White House
faith-based staff by 30 percent, 40 percent, because it became clear that it
had served its purpose.”
W. IGNORES MOUNTAINS OF INTELLIGENCE, TAKES A MONTH-LONG VACATION, & ALLOWS THE BIGGEST NATIONAL SECURITY FAILURE IN U.S. HISTORY
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they
would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a
missile."
-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on 5/16/02
"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to
kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to
protect the American people."
-George W. Bush, on 5/17/02
“[Bush] failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from
al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for
taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.”
-Richard Clarke, George W. Bush’s counterterrorism czar on
9/11
According to "Truth and Consequences," a lengthy, fully-sourced report by the Center for American Progress, quoted
hereafter: “The federal government was rapidly increasing its
counter-terrorism efforts at the time President Bush took office. As the New
York Times reported, Attorney General Janet Reno ended her tenure as ‘perhaps
the strongest advocate’ of counterterrorism spending. Similarly, Newsweek and
the Washington
Post reported National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was ‘totally
preoccupied’ with the prospect of a domestic terror attack, telling his
replacement that they [needed] to be ‘spending more time on this issue’ than on
any other.”
-“In January of
2001, the U.S. Government's bipartisan Commission on National Security gave
the White House a report that warned of an attack on the homeland and urged the
new Administration to implement its specific recommendations to prevent acts of
domestic terrorism.” Instead, the Bush administration decided to come up
with their own plan, a task force to be run by Dick Cheney. The task
force wasn’t announced until May 2001 and didn’t meet once before 9/11. (216)
-In early 2001, “The new Bush Treasury Department
disapproved (217) of the Clinton Administration's approach to money
laundering issues, which had been an important part of the drive to cut off the
money flow to bin Laden. Specifically, the Bush Administration opposed
Clinton Administration-backed efforts by the G-7 and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development that targeted countries with ‘loose
banking regulations’ being abused by terrorist financiers.”
-“…in the spring of 2001, the [Bush’s] attorney general [John
Ashcroft] had an extraordinary confrontation with then FBI Director Louis Freeh
at an annual meeting of special agents…Ashcroft laid out his priorities (218) for
Freeh: ‘basically violent crime and drugs,’ recalls one participant. Freeh
replied bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk about
terror and counterterrorism. ‘Ashcroft didn't want to hear about it,’ says a
former senior law-enforcement official."
-On April 23, 2001, “The Bush Administration released the
government's annual report on terrorism, but unlike previous administrations,
it decided to specifically omit (219) an ‘extensive mention of
alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official
told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin
Laden.’”
By the summer of 2001, “A rash of intelligence [was coming
in], including reports entitled ‘Bin Laden planning multiple operations,’ ‘Bin
Laden’s network’s plans advancing,’ and ‘Bin Laden threats are real.’ The
intelligence mentioned potential hijackings and hostage plots, and the CIA
warned that the attacks could occur ‘on a catastrophic level, indicating that
they would cause the world to be in turmoil.’”
During this period, Bush’s main anti-terrorism adviser Richard
Clarke sent
e-mails to Condoleezza Rice with the following titles: “Bin
Laden Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3), “Terrorist Groups Said
Co-operating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23), “Bin Laden’s Networks’ Plans
Advancing” (May 26), “Bin Laden Attacks May Be Imminent” (June 23), “Bin Laden
and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25), “Bin Laden Planning High-Profile
Attacks” (June 30),” and “Planning for Bin Laden Attacks Continues, Despite
Delays” (July 2).
According to
Clarke: “We went into a period in June where the tempo of intelligence
about an impending large-scale attack went up a lot, to the kind of cycle that
we’d only seen once or twice before. And we told Condi that. She didn’t do
anything (220). She said, ‘Well, make sure you’re coordinating with the
agencies,’ which, of course, I was doing. By August, I was saying to Condi and
to the agencies that the intelligence isn’t coming in at such a rapid rate
anymore as it was in the June-July time frame. But that doesn’t mean the attack
isn’t going to happen. It just means that they may be in place.”
-On July 20, 2001, when senators "sent a copy of draft
legislation on counterterrorism and homeland defense to Cheney's office…they
were told by Cheney's top aide ‘that it might be another six months before
he would be able to review the material.’” (221) With all this scary intelligence coming in, what did President
Bush do?
On August 6, 2001, while Bush vacationed in Crawford, Texas,
the CIA sent a briefer out who gave the president an intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden
Determined To Strike in US” that mentioned the possibility of
hijackings. According to "The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron
Suskind, after reading the memo Bush told (225) the briefer “All
right. You’ve covered your ass now.” [The White House would later
stonewall requests for the August 6th document, 226]
Three days later, on August 9, “the
Administration distributed a strategic plan to the Justice Department
highlighting its new goals from a list of Clinton Administration goals. The
item that referred to intelligence and investigation of terrorists was left
un-highlighted (227).” In the time before 9/11, the Justice
Department also “curtailed a highly classified program called 'Catcher's Mitt'
to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States (228)," and
Attorney General John Ashcroft “proposed a $65 million cut for a program that
gives states and localities counterterrorism grants for equipment, including
radios and decontamination suits and training (229)."
“On September 9…Congress proposed a boost
of $600 million for antiterror programs. The money was to come from
[Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld's beloved missile defense program, the
eventual price tag of which was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at
between $158 billion and $238 billion. Congress's proposal to shift $0.6
billion over to counterterror programs incurred Rummy's ire, and he
threatened (232) a presidential veto.”
On September 10, Ashcroft
denied (233) FBI requests for “$58 million for 149 new
counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional
translators” and “sent his Justice Department budget request to Bush. It
included spending increases in sixty-eight different programs…[none of which]
dealt with terrorism (234). Ashcroft passed around a memo listing his
seven top priorities. Again, terrorism didn't make the list (235).”
On September 11, 2001, George W. Bush was
struggling. According to the administration’s own internal polls
(which didn’t
ask “a single question…about foreign policy, terrorism, national
security”), Bush’s approval rating was hovering around 50%, and he was
on the defensive on a host of issues, as he’d lost control of the Senate a few
months earlier when Senator Jim Jeffords had bolted the GOP because of Bush’s
right-wing agenda (and perhaps his Rovian tactics as well, such as punishing Jeffords
for his occasional dissent by not inviting him to a White House ceremony
honoring the Teacher of the Year, from Vermont, Jeffords’ home state).
As Newsweek would later report, the administration had received
"as many as 10 to 12 [terror] warnings" up to this point, more than
two of which “mentioned the possibility of hijackings," yet terrorism was
the topic in only two of the roughly one hundred meetings (236) Bush’s
national security team had had before September 11. On the morning of
September 11, Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was set to give
a big national security speech--on the imminent need for national missile
defense (237).
According to
Richard Clarke, “That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and
the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, ‘You
know, we’ve got to do Iraq,’ and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at
him and Powell looked at him—like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ And
he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan.
We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong
and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks...And I made the
point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had
nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.” (238)
Also in the days after 9/11, the White House made the EPA
issue “false
assurances on [the] air quality” at Ground Zero, which has
resulted in respiratory and other illnesses for thousands of rescue workers and
other citizens in the area. (239)
It soon came out that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from
Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally that Bush had been particularly close to--because of
lucrative financial ties his inner circle had with Saudi Arabian royalty and
businessmen, despite known Saudi connections to al Qaeda. After 9/11,
President Bush repeated the mantra that "if you aid a terrorist, if you
hide terrorists, you're
just as guilty as the terrorists," yet Bush “was going ‘out of his way to compliment
the Saudis.’” (240) The Los Angeles Times would later
report that the "Saudi government not only provided significant money and
aid to the suicide hijackers but also allowed potentially hundreds of millions
of dollars to flow to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups." (241)
Moreover, according to investigative journalist Greg Palast, reporting
for the BBC, “after Bush took office, ‘There was a major policy shift’ at
the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to ‘back off’ from any
inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially if they
touched on Saudi royals and their retainers.” (242)
Similar privileges were extended to
Saudi Arabian kin of Osama bin Laden, who were allowed to fly out of the United
States immediately after 9/11, though air travel was officially in
lockdown (243).
On September 13, 2001, Bush said, “The most important thing is
for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not
rest until we find him," yet when the United States had a chance to
capture bin Laden, Bush botched (244) it
by relying on Afghan militia and Pakistan frontier forces sympathetic to the
Taliban, against the advice of military commanders. Bin Laden escaped. Six months later, on March 13, 2002, Bush said, "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have
no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our
priority." (245)
Rather than harness the unique upsurge of good will after 9/11
to unite the country, as Bush had promised to do during the presidential
campaign, the administration leveraged the fear spawned by 9/11 to seize
executive power and trample civil liberties with the Patriot Act (246),
warrantless wiretaps (247), secret military commissions (248), a
detention center at Guantanamo Bay (249), and the authorization of
torture (250).
In April 2002, amid calls for an independent investigation to
study the biggest national security failure in U.S. history on continental soil, Bush said that the
investigation into 9/11 should be confined to (a Republican-controlled)
Congress (251). Vice President Dick Cheney followed suit in May of
that year in an appearance on Fox (252).
When the administration did give in to an independent
investigation after many months of public pressure, they appointed war
criminal-cum-cover-up artist Henry Kissinger to head up the committee (253).
When Kissinger stepped down for being politically radioactive, Bush chose
Philip Zelikow, a close friend of Condoleezza Rice and the man who had written
their official policy
paper justifying pre-emptive war on Iraq, to be the chairman (254).
In June 2002, after opposing the creation of a Department of
Homeland Security, the Bush Administration reversed itself with a very public
pronouncement on the same day that
FBI employee Coleen Rowley was set to testify about the FBI’s gross
incompetence in the run-up to 9/11 (255). After Bush agreed to
the creation of the Homeland Security department, he fought Democrats over
unionization of department employees, and Bush's Republican Senate candidate of
choice in Georgia, who had avoided service Vietnam with a bad knee, ran a smear ad accusing
Georgia's Democratic senator Max Cleland (who had been wheelchair-bound
since getting a Purple Heart in Vietnam) of being unpatriotic for supporting
unionization (256). Cleland lost his seat.
In 2003, as the congressional investigation of 9/11 was about
to be made public, the Administration classified 27
pages of the report that "examined
interactions between Saudi businessmen and the royal family that may have
intentionally or unwittingly aided al Qaeda or
the suicide hijackers." (257) “The LA Times
reported that ‘the 27 classified pages…depict a Saudi government that
not only provided significant money and aid to the suicide hijackers but also
allowed potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to flow to Al Qaeda and
other terrorist groups through suspect charities and other fronts.’ (258) In
addition, according to Newsweek, “thousands of dollars in charitable gifts
from Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar [an “Executive Policy
Advisor to Bush], "ended up in the hands
of two of the September 11 hijackers," (259) and George Bush
Sr.’s former Secretary of State James Baker's law firm represented the Saudi
Arabian government in a trillion-dollar lawsuit filed against them by families
of 9/11 victims (260).
Despite heated rhetoric about protecting the homeland, Bush
opposed government regulation of chemical plant security (see #176)
and shunted an
IRS plan to increase investigations of terror financing (261) in
March of 2004.
Also in 2004, the Administration opposed requests from the
9/11 independent commission for testimony from Condoleezza Rice (262) until
avoidance became politically untenable. As Colin Powell’s former Chief of
Staff Lawrence Wilkerson put
it recently to Vanity Fair: “John [Bellinger] and I had to
work on the 9/11-commission testimony of Condi. Condi was not gonna do it, not
gonna do it, not gonna do it, and then all of a sudden she realized she better
do it. That was an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it
look like the president had been actually concerned about al-Qaeda…They didn’t
give a shit about al-Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower
taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.” (263)
When the president agreed to speak to the commission, the
administration set out very restrictive conditions:
(267) Neither Bush nor Cheney would have to take an
oath.
(268) The testimony would not be recorded or
transcribed, and notes of the meeting would not be public information. (269)
Meanwhile, according to New York Times reporter
Philip Shenon, Bush’s hand-picked committee chairman Philip Zelikow not only
had four phone conversations with Bush’s strategist Karl Rove during the
election season (270), but ran interference for Condoleezza Rice on the
commission, by “[making] it clear to the team’s investigators that [Richard]
Clarke should not be believed, that
his testimony would be suspect.” (271)
Also from Shenon: “When 9/11 Commission historian Warren
Bass uncovered a smoking gun email from Clarke to Rice written on September 4,
2001, which asked, ‘Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?,’
Zelikow reverted to defending Condi…Months later, Bass threatened to resign
over what Shenon calls Zelikow’s repeated “attempts at interference”…Bass felt
the White House was trying to sabotage his work by its efforts to limit his
ability to see certain documents from the NSC [National Security Council]
files (272) and take useful notes from them…”
Even as the Bush Administration did everything it could to
cover up its failures to protect the country before 9/11, Bush ran for a second
term as the person that could keep America safe (273) and his surrogates,
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, questioned the honor of Bush’s
opponent (274), John Kerry, a decorated war veteran, claiming he had given
“aid and comfort to the enemy” by protesting the Vietnam War after he had served with honor in Vietnam. While Kerry was on the defensive from
these highly deceptive and
brutally effective ads, the GOP held their 2004 convention in New
York City, and even made the convention unusually late, so that it would
coincide with the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (275).
Worse yet, as veteran journalist Jack Newfield pointed out at
the time, “The Bush Administration [had] treated New York City like a
battered wife who [is] displayed for photo-ops and state dinners.” In detail,
Newfield listed the ways in which the Bush Administration had used and abused
New York City:
-In the time between 9/11 and the 2004 election, Bush and a
Republican Congress cut homeland security money for New York City by
two-thirds, doling out big sums of money to red state cities and towns with virtually no risk of being attacked (276). “On a per capita basis, New York State ranks
forty-ninth among the states in antiterrorist funding, far below rural,
sparsely populated Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota.”
-“Or consider the Bush Administration's treatment of first
responders. It has recently eliminated (277) its only program
providing funds for upgrading police and fire department radio communications.
On 9/11 the FDNY's radios did not function. Warnings over police radios to
evacuate the towers immediately were not received by the firefighters trying to
rescue trapped office workers. On that one day, 343 New York City firefighters
died, and about 120 of these deaths have been attributed to the futile radio
transmissions.”
-“[Bush’s] Homeland Security Department has killed (278) a
federal program to integrate police and fire communications systems; New York
will lose $6 million. Bush and [Homeland Security head Tom] Ridge have
announced a $200 million cut in similar programs for next year, and a cut of 33
percent in the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program (279).”
-“The FDNY [New York fire department] has requested $250
million from the Bush Administration for the next three years for antiterrorist
equipment and technology. The NYPD [police department] has requested $261 million. But according to
NYPD testimony last November, the city has received less than $60 million so
far--for all first-responder agencies.” (280)
-“The FDNY has only one dedicated hazardous materials unit for
the entire city of 8 million (281). Meanwhile, the fire department in
Zanesville, Ohio (population 25,600), has federally-funded thermal imaging
technology to find victims in dense smoke and a test kit for lethal nerve
gases. The FDNY is still asking for radios that work in a crisis.”
-[Bush’s prescription drug bill] “is especially damaging to
New York, where poor people depend on teaching hospitals for care. The law's
funding formulas give preferential treatment to rural hospitals and to states
with less dense population patterns (282)…“The bill made a 15 percent cut
in payments to teaching hospitals (283), which are concentrated in New
York City. In practice, this is a 15 percent cut in healthcare services for the
poor and elderly, who depend on Medicare.”
-“New York City is the biggest recipient of Title I funds in the
country--Title I being the largest federal program put under the NCLB [No Child
Left Behind] umbrella--with 900 out of 1,200 schools eligible…A study released
by New York City Representative Anthony Weiner showed that Title I schools in
New York City lost $657 million (284), disabled pupils lost $513
million (285) and teacher-training programs lost $39 million (286).
There was $17.5 million less for computers in poor communities (287), and
$12 million for programs that include school nurses and counselors (288).
-“Bush's proposed budget for 2005 does add (at least on paper)
about $1 billion for the poorest schools. But at the same time, in a bit of
fiscal flim-flam, his budget cuts or eliminates dozens of other education
programs that help all cities. Among the programs being cut are those for drug
treatment, guidance counselors, childcare, dropout prevention, increased
parental involvement in low-income communities and a national writing project (289).”
-“Buried in Bush's $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 is another
battering blow: The budget provides $2 billion less than the Congressional
Budget Office estimates is needed to fund Section 8 housing vouchers for the 2
million impoverished, elderly or disabled people already enrolled in this
rent-subsidy program nationally. With 80,000 New Yorkers now in the Section 8
program, this means up to 10,000 New York families are now in jeopardy of
losing their vouchers and their homes (290).”
W. EXPLOITS FEAR & THE PUBLIC FAITH GIVEN TO HIM AFTER 9/11 TO LIE US INTO A WAR OF CHOICE, WITH CATASTROPHIC RESULTS
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved
into Baghdad? [in the first Gulf War, when Dick Cheney had been Secretary of
Defense]
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all
alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a
U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight
with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam
Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a
very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of
Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it,
the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it--eastern Iraq-- the
Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north
you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in
Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
“If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a
humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And our nation stands alone
right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be
humble, and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.”
“I think they had a plan from day one they wanted to do
something about Iraq. While the World Trade Center was still
smoldering, while they were still digging bodies out, people in the White House
were thinking: ‘Ah! This gives us the opportunity we have been
looking for to go after Iraq.’”
-Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke
Though he had campaigned in 2000 on a “humble” foreign policy,
George W. Bush made it clear early on that under his leadership, the United
States would do whatever it wanted in international affairs. The
administration dropped out of, sabotaged, or forced a heavy hand on a
whole host of international agreements: the 1972 ABM Treaty (291);
the world tobacco treaty (292); the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (293);
the 1972 treaty on germ warfare (294); the Biological
Weapons treaty (295); the UN meeting on racism (296); a treaty
that banned exportation of diamonds mined and sold illegally (297); a UN
vote on an international torture convention (298); the Convention on Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (299); a War Crimes
Court (300); the World Summit on Sustainable Development (301); a
U.N. pact to stem the illegal flow of small arms (302); and the 1993 START
II nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia pushed by Bush’s father (303).
As counterproductive as all of these decisions were, the Bush
Administration’s fixation on an invasion of Iraq was far more irresponsible,
destructive, and damaging to America’s standing abroad. Though the
decision to go to war was publicly presented as something that had to be done
for America’s safety, ample evidence and testimony from administration officials show that Bush had made his
mind up long before the invasion and that the motives for the invasion were oil and geopolitical hegemony.
-In 1999, George W. Bush told interviewer Mickey
Herskowitz, “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he
drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade,
if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it (304).” [Bush also
told Herskowitz, “…that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That was
one of the keys to being a leader."]
-According to Bush’s first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill,
the administration began planning an invasion of Iraq within days of
Bush’s inauguration (305).
-“In
March 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney met with oil company executives in
what has been described as the Cheney Energy Task Force. Cheney has
refused to reveal who attended the Energy Task Force meetings (306) or
who provided energy policy recommendations to the task force...Lawsuits by
Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club were unsuccessful at obtaining the records
related to the task force players…However, Judicial Watch was able to obtain
through the Freedom of Information Act process, maps of Iraqi oil fields as
well as documents that list foreign suitors for Iraqi oilfield contracts, both
of which were elements of the Cheney Energy Task Force meetings (307).”
-According to
Richard Clarke, immediately after 9/11, "The president dragged me into a
room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to
find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire
conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come
back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr. President. We've done
this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind.
There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if
there's a connection'. And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should
come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got
together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent
the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They
all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced
by the National Security Adviser or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back
saying, 'Wrong answer…Do it again (308).’"
-Bob Graham, a retired Democratic senator from Florida
recently told Vanity
Fair, “In February of ‘02, I had a visit at Central Command, in Tampa, and the
purpose was to get a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan. At the
end of the briefing, the commanding officer, Tommy Franks, asked me to go into
his office for a private meeting, and he told me that we were no longer
fighting a war in Afghanistan and, among other things, that some of the key
personnel, particularly some special-operations units and some equipment,
specifically the Predator unmanned drone, were being withdrawn in order to get
ready for a war in Iraq (310).”
- On June 1, 2002, Bush gave a speech to the graduating class
at West Point wherein he said that
the U.S. had the right to respond to threats pre-emptively. “Preparations
for war with Iraq [were] not yet publicly acknowledged, but earlier in the
spring, as Condoleezza Rice [discussed] diplomatic initiatives involving Iraq
with several senators, Bush [poked] his head into the room and [said], “Fuck
Saddam. We’re taking him out (311).”
-“July
23, 2002: Senior British defense, diplomatic, and intelligence
officials meet in London to discuss the American position on war with Iraq. An
account of the meeting, known as the Downing Street Memo, is drawn up by one of
the participants, but remains secret for several years. In the meeting, Sir
Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, gives an assessment of his
recent talks in Washington: ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military
action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy (312).’”
-“In July 2002, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld had a
one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships
with Al Qaeda terrorists: ‘Sure.’ In
fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence
Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director [George] Tenet) found an
absence of ‘compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the
government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.’ What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said
that ‘the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear’, a finding
later echoed by the independent 9/11 commission and the U.S. military (which
the administration successfully
kept off the worldwide web, 313).
Rumsfeld’s disregard for factual reality was shared throughout
the administration. As reported by
journalist Ron Suskind:
“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in
Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications
director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He
expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at
the time I didn't fully comprehend--but which I now believe gets to the very
heart of the Bush presidency.”
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the
reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded
and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me
off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We're
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do.’''
-“On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention
of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: ‘Simply
stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends,
against our allies, and against us.’ In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet
later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments
at the time.” Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told
journalist Ron Suskind, “Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff
from?'" (314) This skepticism was shared by
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British ambassador to the United Nations and
British special representative in Iraq, who told Vanity Fair, “When I arrived
in New York, in July 1998, it was quite clear to me that all the members
of the Security Council, including the United States, knew well that there
was no current work being done on any kind of nuclear-weapons capability
in Iraq."
Cheney’s speech dovetailed with the administration’s strategy to
beat the war drums right before congressional elections in which the
Republicans sought to regain control of the Senate by turning the media focus
to national security issues (315). Asked why they had waited
until September to make their case, White House Chief of Staff told the New
York Times, “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products
in August." The next day, all the media faces of the
Bush Administration began parroting lines about the purported threat
posed by Saddam Hussein.
As another part of the strategy, the administration cajoled
the Democratic leader of the Senate, Tom Daschle, to hold a vote on
the use of force in Iraq--before the mid-term election (316). According to
Daschle, “I asked directly if we could delay this so we
could depoliticize it. I said: ‘Mr. President, I know this is urgent, but
why the rush? Why do we have to do this now?’ He looked at Cheney and
he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said:
‘We just have to do this now.’ ”
Former Florida senator Bob Graham seconded Daschle’s
suspicion of the timing: “Unlike the first George Bush, who had
purposefully put off the vote on the Persian Gulf War until after the
elections of 1990—we voted in January of 1991—here they put the vote in October
of 2002, three weeks before a congressional election. I think there were
people who were up for election who didn’t want, within a few days of meeting
the voters, to be at such stark opposition with the president.”
September
15, 2002: “In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the
assistant to the president for economic policy, Lawrence Lindsey,
estimate[d] the cost of a war with Iraq to be in the neighborhood of $100
billion to $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, the director of the Office of
Management and Budget, quickly revise[d] the figure downward to $50 billion to
$60 billion, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld call[ed] Lindsey’s estimate ‘baloney.’
Lindsey was fired in December…Years later, an analysis by Nobel-laureate economist
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes will estimate the cost
of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion (319) .” An analysis by the news organization Reuters put the cost at $6 trillion.
-“In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional
vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq,
Bush told the
nation in his weekly radio address: ‘The Iraqi regime possesses biological
and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according
to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as
little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a
nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.’ A few
days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--an analysis that
hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it
unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it (320).”
In October of 2002, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans
Blix, went to the White House: “The
most remarkable thing was the talk that we had with the vice president
before we were taken to Mr. Bush…Much of it was a fairly neutral
discussion, but at one point he [Dick Cheney] suddenly said that you must
realize that we will not hesitate to discredit you in favor of disarmament (321).”
The fear-mongering in September and October worked wonders for
the administration. Helped by Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone’s fatal
plane crash, Max Cleland’s defeat in Georgia (see #256), a successful
phone-jamming operation in New Hampshire (see #566), and a one-point win in the
Missouri Senate Race, Bush won back narrow control of the United States Senate
(and was applauded by the media, including Washington Post writer David Von Drehle, for his tactical brilliance.) Not
long after, Dick Cheney proposed another round of tax cuts for the rich (see
#84). When Bush questioned giving the well-off another windfall,
Cheney reportedly said, "We won the midterms. This is our due (322)."
When Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill publicly questioned the second round
of tax cuts, he was forced out. O’Neill would later say that Bush
was “like a blind
man in a room full of deaf people.”
On December 2, 2002, “Donald Rumsfeld sign[ed] off on a memo
from the Defense Department’s legal counsel, Jim Haynes, permitting
the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay, including
stress positions, isolation, and sleep deprivation. Rumsfeld [wrote] on
the memo, ‘I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4
hours?’” (323)
In January 2003, two months before the invasion, “Bush
was startled to
learn…that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
Responding to the three Iraqi exiles whom he had invited as guests to the
Super Bowl, Bush looked at them and said, ‘You mean...they're not, you
know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?’” (324)
In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, Bush
said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” though the CIA
had made it clear that this assertion was dubious. (325) [In
July 2003, Joseph Wilson, who had been sent to investigate, penned a New York Times op-ed in
which he said that the uranium claim was bogus. In retaliation, the
administration outed Wilson’s wife as a CIA agent (326). In the
firestorm that followed, Bush said he would fire anyone
who had leaked the identity of a CIA agent, but after Dick Cheney’s Chief of
Staff Scooter Libby was found to have done just that, and convicted
of lying to a grand jury, Bush commuted Libby’s
sentence (327).]
On
January 31, 2003 Bush met with Tony Blair. “A secret account of the
meeting, written by Sir David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign-policy adviser and
later ambassador to Washington, [became] public three years later. The
administration’s public stance [was] that it hope[d] to avoid war with Iraq. In
the meeting, however, Bush and Blair agree[d] on a start date for the war,
irrespective of the outcome of U.N. inspections: March 10. Bush propose[d] that
a pretext for war might be provided if an aircraft were painted with U.N.
colors and sent in low over Iraq, in the hope that it would draw fire.
According to the memo, Bush also ‘thought it unlikely that there would be
internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups’ in Iraq
once Saddam was removed from power (328).”
Also in late January, Bush told Secretary
of State Colin Powell, "We've really got to make the case" against
Hussein…"and I want you to make it." Only Powell had the “credibility
to do this," Bush said. "Maybe they'll believe you." (329)
On February 5, 2003 Colin Powell appeared before the United
Nations Security Council. “A
nationwide poll released just that morning had found that ‘when it
comes to U.S. policy toward Iraq,’ Americans trusted Powell more than Bush by
63 to 24 percent.” Powell proceeded to make a long list of false
accusations about Saddam Hussein’s WMD ambitions and connections to
al-Qaeda (330). Though much of the intelligence Powell used was based
on questionable sources, sometimes single sources (331) that hadn’t
even been interviewed by U.S. intelligence, Powell told the world, "every
statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not
assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid
intelligence." Powell’s Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who had
been in the middle of writing the speech, later referred to the affair as
"the lowest moment of my life."
“The
next day, opinion polls indicated that national opinion had shifted
literally overnight; most Americans surveyed said they believed an invasion was
justified to protect the nation.”
On February 25, 2003 “General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of
staff, tells a
congressional hearing that ‘something on the order of several hundred thousand
soldiers’ will be required to mount a successful occupation of Iraq. Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly rebukes Shinseki, stating that the
general’s estimate is ‘wildly off the mark.’ Shinseki is forced to retire
early (332).”
Also in February 2003, “the
Army War College prepared a report saying that ‘the possibility of the
United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious
... The United States may find itself in a radically different world over the
next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale
shadow of new problems of America's own making.’” Similar predictions
were made by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and Join Staff, the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the CIA's National
Intelligence Council.
In early March, “an influential adviser to the Pentagon
[neocon Richard Pearle] received a secret message from a Lebanese-American
businessman: Saddam
Hussein wanted to make a deal…Iraqi officials, including the chief of the
Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted
Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction,
and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent
search."
"Iraq submitted a
report to the UN, as required, indicating that it possessed no weapons of
mass destruction. The Bush administration immediately and definitively asserted
that Saddam was lying," but according to
Hans Blix, the inspections were bearing Iraq’s claims out: “What you can
do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different
sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue…If we had been
allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of
the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren’t any weapons of
mass destruction, that’s what we would have reported.”
Around the same time, Dick Cheney appeared on
Meet the Press. When asked by host Tim Russert about the possibility of
an insurgency after the invasion and a drawn out war, Cheney responded “I
don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we
will be greeted as liberators." (333)
Two days before the invasion, Bush gave Saddam Hussein two
days to leave, said "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments
leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of
the most lethal weapons ever devised," and again conveyed the false impression
that he was threatening war as a last resort: "Should Saddam Hussein
choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been
taken to avoid war and every measure will be taken to win it."
Soon after a lightning quick attack and occupation, Iraq’s
National Museum was looted in full sight of the U.S. military, who did nothing
to stop the pillaging (334). When asked about this negligence,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged it off with the words, “Stuff
happens.” The initial looting would be only the first example of a
major assault on
some of the world’s oldest, most precious antiquities and archeological digs
throughout Iraq.
On March 30, Rumsfeld claimed of Iraq’s WMDs: “We know
where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west,
south and north somewhat (334).”
In early April, with its nuclear program still nascent, Iran “offered a
dramatic set of specific policy concessions [to the Bush Administration,
including] an overall bargain on its nuclear program, its policy toward
Israel, and al-Qaeda.” The proposal was ignored by the Bush
Administration (335).
On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush clambered aboard the U.S.S.
Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit, then gave a speech in which he
said that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” while he stood
under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished (336).” In the middle of
that same month Bush’s people in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)
banned members of the Baath Party (Saddam Hussein’s party) that had constituted
the bulk of Iraq’s government bureaucracy from serving in significant positions
in Iraq’s reconstituted government (337) and disbanded the Iraqi army,
which “put 250,000 young Iraqi men out of a job, out on the streets, angry, and
armed—and all but guaranteed the violent chaos to come (338).”
Moreover, “Most of the Americans sent to staff the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) had no technical or
professional training or experience in the work to which they were
assigned. Rather, they were chosen because they were Republican Party
loyalists (339).” And, "in one of his last official acts before leaving
Baghdad, Bremer
issued an order (340)—prepared by the Pentagon, he says—declaring
that all coalition-force members 'shall be immune from any form of arrest or
detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States.'
Contractors also got the same get-out-of-jail-free card. According to Bremer's
order, 'contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to
acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or
any sub-contract thereto.' The Iraqi people, who had had no say over Saddam
Hussein's illegal conduct during his dictatorship, would have no say over
illegal conduct by Americans in their new democracy."
These early decisions were harbingers of the many mistakes
the Bush Administration’s agents in Iraq would make in the nation-building
enterprise Bush had said he didn’t believe in as a candidate. According
to a thorough
recounting of the Iraq reconstruction efforts in the New York
Times:
-“An unpublished
513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq
[written by a Republican lawyer] depicts an effort crippled before the invasion
by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign
country (341).”
-The plan became “a $100 billion failure [beset] by
bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements
of Iraqi society and infrastructure (342).”
-“…when the reconstruction began to lag—particularly in the
critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army—the Pentagon simply put
out inflated measures (343) of progress to cover up the failures.
“In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted
as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department
‘kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces—the number would jump 20,000
a week! We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’”
-“In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a
civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was
at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would
need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s
reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan (344).”
While the Bush administration made a hash of things in Iraq,
they were covering their mistakes up back home, among other examples by banning the
photographing of the coffins of returning soldiers (345).
But Bush still appeared to have no second thoughts about his decision.
Four months after the invasion of Iraq, at an Israeli-Palestinian summit,
according to Nabil Shaath (then a Palestinian foreign minister), Bush said “I
am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight
these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me
'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did (346)." And
according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, “During a
December 2003 interview with Bush, I read to him a quote from his closest ally,
British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of
slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. ‘And don't believe anyone
who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don't suffer any
doubt,’ Blair had said.
‘Yeah,’ Bush replied. ‘I haven't suffered doubt.’
‘Is that right?’ I asked. ‘Not at all?’
‘No,’ he said.” (347)
On
January 23, 2004, “David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, resigns his
position, affirming his belief that no W.M.D. stockpiles will be found in Iraq;
the following week he discusses his conclusions at the White House. Nine months
later his successor, Charles Duelfer, will conclude officially that Iraq not
only did not possess W.M.D. but did not have an active program in place to
develop them.
On
March 25, 2004, at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents
Association gathering, Bush “displayed a series of photos that showed him
searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the
furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: ‘Those weapons of mass
destruction have got to be somewhere (348).”
In December of 2004, by which time it was common knowledge
that the war was not going well and had been sold to the public with false
claims, Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the war’s
architects, George Tenet, L. Paul Bremer, and Gen. Tommy Franks. (349)
The folly of the decision to go to war would become ever more
obvious in 2005 and 2006, with the onset of a civil war unleashed by the
invasion. Even as administration officials and other Republicans branded
their critics as “cut-and-run Defeatacrats” or appeasers that weren’t
“supporting the troops,” it was clear that the invasion was not improving
America’s security. In June 2006, Matthew Yglesias reported in
the American Prospect eleven much more fundamental ways the Bush Administration
could’ve kept the U.S. safe with the money spent on Iraq and on 9/24/06, a
headline read “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.” (350)
Bush’s troop surge, initiated in early 2007, has brought
relative calm to Iraq, but even so, Iraq is a mess. Iraqis struggle with
50% unemployment (351), a lack of access to electricity (352) and
clean water (353), and a breakdown in institutions--including schools--
and basic public services (354), in part due to the brain drain (355) of
middle-class professionals precipitated by the invasion and subsequent civil
war.
Among the many other casualties of the Iraq War have been:
-Anywhere between 100,000 and one million-plus dead Iraqi
civilians and many times that injured (356), and four million
refugees (357)
-Over four thousand dead American troops (358), and
many times that injured, physically and psychologically (359)
-The gratuitous invasion of a muslim country has boosted
terrorist recruitment around the globe, coincided with increased
suicide bombings, and ruined our image abroad (362), though Barack
Obama’s ascension to office is certain to repair this to a degree.
-The opportunity costs of the war are immense. The money
spent on the war has bled
the elemental priorities of a civilized society back home (363),
translating into budget cuts for hospitals,
shuttered libraries, collapsing bridges, closed nursing homes, and education
cuts, including pink slips for teachers. The time and energy sapped by
the Iraq excursion diverted the United States from far more pressing matters in
Afghanistan, where the Taliban are resurgent (364), Iran (365), which
is now as powerful as ever, swimming in oil revenues and moving toward a
nuclear program that could re-calibrate the whole balance of power in the Middle
East, and Pakistan (366), a nuclear-armed country that is teetering on the brink of all-out
civil war that threatens to engulf the whole region.
As Ahmed Rashid put it in his recent book Descent into Chaos,
"the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world
than existed on that momentous day in 2001" and “Rather than diminishing,
the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates has grown, engulfing new regions of
Africa, Asia, and Europe and creating fear among peoples from Australia to
Zanzibar. The US invasions of two Muslim countries...[has] so far failed to
contain either the original organization or the threat that now comes from its
copycats...in British or French cities who have been mobilized through the
Internet.”
Not only has the war been a disaster, but it’s
crystal clear that the American public was lied into it.
Approximately one year ago, the Center for Public Integrity reported on the
“orchestrated campaign” the administration deployed to lead “the nation to war
under decidedly false pretenses.” The Center found that key members of
the administration had made 935 false statements, including 260 from Bush (367),
254 from Colin Powell (368), 109 each from Donald Rumsfeld (369) and
the first White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (370), 86 from Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (371) , 56 from Condoleezza
Rice (372), and 14 from the second White House spokesman Scott
McLellan (373), who later admitted that the administration’s p.r. campaign
in defense of an invasion was “propaganda.” And yet, despite the
overwhelming evidence that the invasion was unnecessary, ill-advised, and
driven from moment one by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld’s ulterior motives, Bush’s
sole regret in one of his exit interviews was that he “Wishes the intelligence
had been correct (374). ”
W. WINS A SECOND TERM BY ATTACKING HIS OPPONENT (A DECORATED VETERAN) AS WEAK ON NATIONAL SECURITY & SYSTEMATICALLY SUPPRESSING THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE IN THE KEY STATE OF OHIO
“Nothing is more central to a functioning democracy than free
and fair elections.”
-George W. Bush, in a statement to
the Iraqi Parliament (9/24/08)
[Republican Congressman] Peter King: “It’s
already over. The election’s over. We won.”
Reporter: “How do you know that?”
King: “It’s all over but the counting, and we’ll take
care of the counting.”
[Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Kenneth]
“…Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that
occurred in Florida in 2000.”
-Federal Judge James Carr, commenting on Blackwell’s decision
to allow poll workers to determine whether or not voters not on the voter rolls
could receive provisional ballots
Ohio was the pivotal
battleground state in the 2004 presidential election. As the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
and absence of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda became public knowledge,
the Bush Administration shifted the rationale of the war to a desire to
democratize the Middle East. At the same time, the Bush Administration
and its surrogates did everything they could to rig the election in Ohio.
Fortunately for George W. Bush, once again he had friends in
the right places: as had been the case in the deciding swing state of Florida in 2000,
Bush’s campaign co-chair in Ohio in 2004 just happened to be the Secretary of
State, the state’s top elections official. Going according to a familiar
script, Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell--whose personal
motto was "A
passion for truth, a quest for excellence”--made one decision after
another to benefit Bush (quoted text below is from “Was
the 2004 Election Stolen?” from Rolling Stone):
-Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell tried to mandate
electronic voting machines with no paper trail statewide, to be purchased from
Diebold, a machine manufacturer whose CEO Wally O'Dell had said in a 2003 Bush
fundraiser invitation that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president next year (375)." [Republicans
backed down from this scheme, but they did succeed at getting Issue 1 (a
divisive constitutional amendment to force cities and universities to end
domestic partner benefits) on the Ohio ballot (376).
-“Against a backdrop of record Democratic voter registrations
drives…Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to
register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September
7th [2004]—less than a month before the filing deadline—that election
officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on
eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard (377)…He
further specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper
stock that miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were
not to be processed; instead, they were to be treated as applications for a
registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new card (378)…Under
the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his order on September
28th—six days before the registration deadline…But by then, the damage was
done. Election boards across the state, already understaffed and backlogged
with registration forms, were unable to process them all in time. According to
a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland
Voter Coalition...a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through
avoidable registration errors (379),” most of them Democrats.
-“To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican
National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of
thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal
mailings known in electioneering jargon as ‘caging (380).’ During the
Eighties…[the GOP] was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to
abstain from caging. But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority
voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000
newly registered voters in sixty-five counties…Notices to challenged voters
were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the
very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty (381).”
“On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both
the ‘constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,’
U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge—but not
before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were
improperly registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored
Dlott's ruling (382), stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls. In
Columbus and elsewhere, challenged registrants were never notified that the
court had cleared them to vote (383).”
-“Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens
who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are
entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former
convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote (384).”
-“[Bush’s state campaign co-chair Kenneth] Blackwell permitted
election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive
purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000
voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national
elections (385). In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly
one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.”
-“Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the
availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to
protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more
opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the
vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot
judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide
provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible (386).”
-Though Blackwell had allowed provisional ballots cast in
the wrong precinct to be counted in the 2004 Ohio primary, in the months just
prior to the 2004 presidential election he ruled that provisional ballots cast
in the wrong precinct would be invalidated (387). This move guaranteed
that Kerry votes (minorities and students in particular) would be disqualified
at a high rate, as city precincts were much more likely to have changed in the
2000 Census redistricting, low-income voters move with far greater frequency
than those further up the economic ladder, and some polling places had multiple
precincts within the same building. “On October 14th, Judge [James] Carr
overruled the order, but Blackwell appealed…[Blackwell] enjoyed the backing of
Attorney General John Ashcroft, who filed an amicus brief in support of
Blackwell's position—marking the first time in American history that the
Justice Department had gone to court to block the right of voters to vote (388).
The Sixth Circuit, stacked with four judges appointed by George W. Bush, sided
with Blackwell.”
-“A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that
denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots
in the mail (389). But that ruling did not come down until after 3 P.M. on
the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level
at all—denying the franchise to even more eligible voters.”
George W. Bush also greatly benefited by the shortage of
voting machines in Democratic precincts, which produced unusually long
lines: “The long lines were not only foreseeable— they were actually
created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new
electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local
election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases,
the new machines never materialized—but that didn't stop officials in twenty
of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from
slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent (390).”
Also, as just one example of many, months before the 2004
election William Anthony (the chair of the Franklin County Board of Elections,
which includes Columbus, Ohio) had publicly requested more voting machines--due to a study showing that Franklin would need 5,000 voting machines (at the
time, Franklin had barely more than half that) to accommodate the county's 25%
increase in voter registration--but was turned down by Matt Damshroder, the
Republican head of the Franklin County Board of Elections (391).
Also, “According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy
percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in
2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines. An
analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with
the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the
seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country (392).”
“According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press,
white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged
waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours
and fifteen minutes.”
This pattern generally held across the state: “Would-be
voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three
hours (393). Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and
Toledo—which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more—often waited up to seven hours . At [liberal] Kenyon College, students were
forced to stand in line for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the
last voters casting their ballots after three in the morning (394)…At
[Kenyon], where students had registered in record numbers, local election
officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of
up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon
Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.”
“A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the
Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of
all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave
without casting a ballot (395). That's more than 174,000 voters. ‘The vast
majority of this lost vote,’ concluded the [the senior Democratic member of the
House Judiciary Committee John] Conyers report, ‘was concentrated
in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.’”
“By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping
out of line rather than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to
distribute paper ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied (396) the
request, saying it was an invitation to fraud…As day stretched into evening,
U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary restraining order
requiring that voters be offered paper ballots. But it was too late: According
to bipartisan estimates published in the Washington Post, as many as
15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone home.”
“The median turnout in Franklin County precincts won by Kerry
was fifty-one percent, compared to sixty-one percent in those won by Bush.
Assuming sixty percent turnout under more equitable conditions, Kerry would
have gained an additional 17,000 votes in the county.”
Electronic voting machines around the state also magically
defaulted to Bush (397): “In heavily Democratic areas around
Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ‘Kerry’ on the touch
screen and watching ‘Bush’ light up, at least twenty machines had to be
recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry
votes to Bush” and “an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the
town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.
In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters.”
In other Bush-friendly oddities, in Coshocton County, write-in
votes for Kerry defaulted to Bush when run through voting machines (398),
in Trumbull County, voters testified that they had received punchcard ballots
with Bush's name already punched in (399), and in Mahoning County, 25-30
electronic voting machines had to be recalibrated following numerous reports of
votes hopping from Kerry to Bush (400).
Moreover, “some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote for
president at all—most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the
tiny fraction of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for
president—generally in the range of half a percent, according to Ohio State
law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji—that would mean that
at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment…Most of the
uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities,” treasure troves of votes for
John Kerry (401).
“On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major
networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 P.M. Kerry, they were informed, had
an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to
Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call…Based on exit polls, CNN had
predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points.
Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent…The
greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in
Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty
percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By
contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the
exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent—a pattern that
suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.”
(402) “…in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered
across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke,
Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren…John Kerry's
numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties—and George
Bush's were unusually high…Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than
[Democratic candidate Ellen] Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by
a margin of thirty-two percent [statewide]. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar
counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in
history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes.”
At the same time, “Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas
Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet
in the twelve questionable [Republican] counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was
fifty percent—a strong indication that the president's certified vote total
was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the
twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean
election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520
votes from Kerry to Bush—more than enough to alter the outcome.”
-“In Clermont County…sworn affidavits by election observers
given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry
were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to
replace them (403).”
-“In Miami County, where [Democratic State Supreme Court
candidate Ellen] Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of
98.55 percent—meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on
Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected
affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote (404).”
“Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the
ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more
popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the
twelve suspect counties—as well as in six other small counties in central
Ohio—Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the
official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural
Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage (405).”
“Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP
officials—citing the FBI—declared that [Warren] county was facing a
terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county
administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to
tabulate the results without any reporters present…In fact, there was no
terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning (406),
and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that
the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for
eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to
the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown (407).”
“A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at
least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were
prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004…In
what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every
four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only
to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to
stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.” (408)
***
Late on election night, Kenneth Blackwell stepped before the
cameras and said "This
has been a good day for Ohio." Not long after the election,
the Green and Libertarian Party presidential candidates filed for a recount in
Ohio. Kenneth Blackwell issued two orders: 1) that ballots had to be locked
up/could not be examined by public interest groups until the recount, which 2)
would not begin until the electoral votes had been certified for Bush (409).
On the same day that electors cast their votes for Bush, a
lawsuit was filed in federal court alleging that Kerry would have won in a
fairly administered, fully-funded election. Richard Hayes Phillips, a PHD in
Geomorphology, filed a suit in which he tabulated projected vote losses for
Kerry in uncounted ballots (16,650), provisional ballots (5,370), Cleveland
(17,500), Columbus (17,000), Toledo (7,000), Butler/Clermont/Warren counties
(27,154), Miami County (6,000), and Mahoning (2,200), among other counties,
totaling 101, 020 votes. An addendum at the bottom of the filing added
possibilities of extra Bush votes in Butler County, to the tune of over 20,000
votes, enough in combination with the other projections to have handed the
presidency to Kerry.
“Under state law, county boards of election were required to
randomly select three percent of their precincts and recount the ballots both
by hand and by machine…But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to
avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in
April [2006], election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly
pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine
count (410)…’If it didn't balance, they excluded those precincts,’ said
the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three
election workers in Cleveland. ‘They screwed with the process and increased the
probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be full, countywide
hand count.’”
“In Hocking County, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton
caught an employee of Triad— which provided the software used to count
punch-card ballots in nearly half of Ohio's counties—making unauthorized
modifications to the tabulating computer before the recount. Eaton told the
[Democrat John] Conyers committee that the same employee also provided county
officials with a ‘cheat sheet’ so that ‘the count would come out perfect and we
wouldn't have to do a full hand-recount of the county (411).’ After
Eaton blew the whistle on the illegal tampering, she was fired (412).”
“The same Triad employee was dispatched to do the same work in
at least five other counties. Company president Tod Rapp—who contributed to
Bush's campaign—has confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator
adjustments to help election officials avoid hand recounts. In the end, every
county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand (413) .”
George W. Bush officially won Ohio by 118,000 votes. In
the time since, the following things have happened:
-“On
Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election
boards ‘to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper
and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time
otherwise instructed by this Court.’”
-In January of 2007, M.R. Kropko reported that
“Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of the 2004
presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio’s most populous
county.” (See #410 above)
-In July of 2007, Steven Rosenfeld of Alternet revealed that
“Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential
ballots and related election records (414), according to letters from
county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner…The
lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be
kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued
last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil
rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in
Columbus…The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the
media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio's 2004 vote count,
because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count
anomalies apparently no longer exists.”
-On December 14, 2007, Greg Gordon of McClatchy reported that,
“The Justice Department's voting rights chief [John Tanner] stepped down Friday
amid allegations that he'd used the position to aid a Republican strategy to
suppress African-American votes (415)…Tanner has been enmeshed for months
in congressional investigations over his stewardship of the unit that was
established to protect minority-voting rights. He drew increased focus this
fall after he told a Latino group: ‘African-Americans don't become elderly the
way white people do. They die (416).’
-Earlier that year, Stephen Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
had reported on
Alternet.com that “There is more than ample documentation to show that on
Election Night 2004, Ohio's ‘official’ Secretary of State website--which gave
the world the presidential election results-- was redirected from
an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of
Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that
have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's
firing of eight federal prosecutors (see # 587)…The software created for the
Ohio secretary of state's Election Night 2004 website was created by GovTech
Solutions, a firm co-founded by longtime GOP computing
guru Mike Connell.”
-Late last year, Connell was in the hot seat over these
machinations, and was about to be grilled by election fraud attorneys if Bush’s
surge in Ohio on election night 2004 (which overperformed exit polls by over
six percentage points) had been tied to GOP control of official vote count
servers, but the answer to this question may never be known, as Connell died
in a plane crash on December 19th, 2008.
W. RUINS FEMA, SLASHES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS FUNDING, IGNORES STORM WARNINGS, & LETS NEW ORLEANS DROWN
-a message from the Heritage Foundation (a right-wing think
tank) to the incoming Bush Administration after the 2000 election
“I think we’ll look back on this period as one of the most
destructive periods in American public life . . . both in terms of policy and
process.”
-Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings
Institution
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] issued
a report in early 2001 that identified the three catastrophes most
likely to hit the United States: a terrorist attack on New York, an earthquake
in San Francisco and a hurricane in New Orleans.”
And yet, despite this warning, “In 2002 the [Army] corps' [of Engineers]
chief resigned,
reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the [Bush]
administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control
spending (417).”
These cuts became even steeper after the Bush Administration invaded Iraq in 2003:
-“The
Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in
Iraq, as well as homeland security--coming at the same time as federal
tax cuts--was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the [New
Orleans] Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost
of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars…In
early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed
spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed (418) for
Lake Pontchartrain [which borders New Orleans], according to a Feb. 16, 2004,
article, in New Orleans City Business.”
-“On
June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the
money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and
the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy
that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make
the case that this is a security issue for us."
-“The effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers
were severe.
As George W. Bush was slashing funds that could’ve helped
protect New Orleans, his appointees were busy ruining the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA had been a well-oiled machine under Bill
Clinton appointee James Lee Witt, who had had disaster experience in
Arkansas, but Bush replaced Witt with Joe Allbaugh (422), who had no
disaster experience–though Allbaugh had served with distinction in his role
as a white collar thug in the successful GOP effort to shut down a vote recount
in Miami-Dade county in the 2000 election battle (see #59).
Allbaugh lowered expectations of
what Bush’s FEMA could do as early as May 2001 when speaking before a Senate
appropriations subcommittee: “Many are concerned that federal disaster
assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a
disincentive to effective state and local risk management…Expectations of when
the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may
have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level (423)."
“At FEMA, Allbaugh launched a
purge, forcing out many of the most experienced officials (424).
Allbaugh…also abandoned a recent agency tradition of hiring experienced
professionals and filled high FEMA positions with political operatives lacking
familiarity with emergency disaster management (425).” In addition, “FEMA
changed the way in which the agency handled contracts, awarding them to
numerous firms with political connections but little in the way of corporate
infrastructure to handle the work. Some of these recipients were merely
Enron-style shell corporations that subcontracted all the work to others,
keeping a sizable share of the profits (426).”
On November 25, 2002, the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) was formed. As part of the organization of DHS, FEMA was downgraded
from the cabinet status it had under Bill Clinton (427) and crowded
under DHS along with 22 other departments (428). Once under the DHS
umbrella, FEMA was underfunded (429) and disaster planning shifted from
natural disasters to terrorist attacks.
On March 1, 2003 Michael Brown was appointed to replace Allbaugh as head of
FEMA. Brown had once been the commissioner of the International
Arabian Horse Association, but like Allbaugh, he had no disaster relief
experience (430). Meanwhile, Allbaugh “immediately
began setting up a network of lobbying interests to benefit from his
connections. His clients quickly won major contracts from several government
agencies, notably the Brown-led FEMA (431).”
-In
2004, “FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a
mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended.
Many of the scenarios [that would happen after Hurricane Katrina], including a
helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a
fictional storm named Pam….[In 2005], the group was to design a plan to fix
such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the
Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens…Funding for that
planning was cut, said [Eric] Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response
director (432).”
-In 2004, “James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his
leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at
a Congressional hearing: ‘I am extremely concerned that the ability of our
nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear
from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly
every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared.’”
-In February 15, 2005, Michael Chertoff became Michael Brown’s
boss when he became the second head of the Department of Homeland
Security. Chertoff had no experience in disaster relief (433).
***
On
Friday, August 26th, 2005, “weather forecasters at CNN predicted
that Katrina was aiming for Mississippi and Louisiana, which CNN posted online,
along with the weather warning that a ‘Deadly hurricane could hit again Monday
as a Category 4.’” That day, “a veteran FEMA employee arrived at the
newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm. Inside, there
was surprisingly little action. ‘It was like nobody's turning the key to
start the engine,’ the official recalled (434).”
FEMA's National Situation Update for
Saturday, August 27, 2005, reported that
Katrina had already become a Category 3 hurricane and that in
"anticipation of a possible landfall, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco declared
States of Emergency Friday.” George W. Bush stayed on vacation in
Crawford, Texas (435).
“At
4:00 PM on Sunday, August 28th, ‘National Hurricane Center Meteorologist
Chris Lauer said Katrina was still on track to hit the New Orleans area as
a devastating Category 5 hurricane as its eye comes ashore’ on Monday morning,”
as reported by Gordon Russell for the [New Orleans] Times-Picayune.
On the night of the 28th disaster officials had a video
conference with President Bush, who was still at his ranch in Crawford. According
to the AP, “In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster
officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before
Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk
in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential
video footage,” yet “Bush's confidence on Aug. 28 starkly contrasts with the
dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local
officials provided during the four days before the storm (436).”
"Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before
Katrina struck on Aug. 29 (437), but he assured soon-to-be-battered state
officials: 'We are fully prepared (438).'" [And stayed on
vacation, 439.]
On Monday August 29th Katrina made landfall and the first
reports of water breaching levees came out. Rather than head to New
Orleans, Bush flew to Arizona to meet John McCain on an airport tarmac to grip
and grin over John McCain’s birthday cake (440), then went to two
different stops to plug his
prescription drug plan (441).
On Tuesday August 30th, “as New Orleans was drowning and DHS
[Department of Homeland Security] officials were still hours away from invoking
the department's highest crisis status for the catastrophe, some department
contractors found
an important e-mail in their inboxes…Attached were two documents…that
spelled out in numbing, acronym-filled detail the planned ‘national
preparedness goal.’ The checklist, called a Universal Task List, appeared to
cover every eventuality in a disaster, from the need to handle evacuations to
speedy urban search and rescue to circulating ‘prompt, accurate and useful’
emergency information…But the documents were not a menu for action in the
devastated Gulf Coast. They were drafts, not slated for approval and release
until October, more than four years after 9/11 (442).”
Meanwhile,
in California, “After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious
boilerplate (‘our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens’), [Bush]
turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W.
Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism
and guilty of a pre-9/11 ‘mind-set of isolation and retreat (443).’"
"Yet even as Mr. Bush promised ‘victory’ (a word used
nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of
his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared
‘Mission Accomplished’ (see #336) in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham
Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, the Washington
Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was
positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay
off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of ‘major combat
operations (444).’”
Later that day, as New Orleans was suffering the worst natural
disaster since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Bush seized
another fanciful
photo op as he strapped a guitar on with country star Mark Wills at
his back (445).
Though the levees had been breached on Monday, Bush’s Homeland
Security Chief Michael Chertoff told the media, “It was on Tuesday that the
levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to
break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was
no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to
start to drain into the city (446).”
On Wednesday, August 31st, “Even military resources in the
right place weren't ordered into action. ‘On Wednesday,’ said an editorial in
The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., ‘reporters listening to horrific stories
of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north
across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing
calisthenics. Playing
basketball and performing calisthenics!’ (447)
That same day, George W. Bush made his first appearance at the
scene of the hurricane, 48 hours after the hurricane had made landfall (448).
Arianna Huffington spoke for
many:
“The president's 35-minute Air Force One flyover of
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was the perfect metaphor for his entire
presidency: detached, disconnected, and disengaged. Preferring to take in
America's suffering--whether caused by the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina--from a distance. In this case, 2,500 feet.”
Also on Wednesday, Karl Rove sent a message to Louisiana
Governor Kathleen Blanco suggesting she declare martial
law (449), Michael Chertoff said "We are extremely pleased with
the response of every element of the federal government (and) all of our
federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy" at a D.C. news
conference (450), and Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice was spotted shopping at Salvatore Ferragama
on Fifth Avenue in New York, and attended
the Broadway comedy Spamalot that evening (451).
On Thursday, September 1st, The Institute for Public Accuracy
put out a news
release that provided another example of how the war of choice on Iraq
was contributing to the disaster in New Orleans. Nancy Lessin of Military
Families Speak Out said, “The numbers we have are that there are 11,000
National Guard personnel from Louisiana, of whom about 3,000 (452) are
in Iraq with most of the heavy equipment. This included generators and
high-water and other vehicles which could assist with the rescue effort (453)."
Lessin then lasered in on the human cost: “My daughter is in New Orleans
in a hotel with no plumbing and no electricity. Meanwhile, the residents of New
Orleans--particularly working and/or poor people--do not appear to be
having the rescue attempts that they desperately need right now."
That same day, in a reprise of his purported astonishment that
anyone could use airplanes as a weapon, George W. Bush told an ABC interviewer
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” though this
possibility had been long known (454). Diane Sawyer later reported
that Bush had assured her after this appearance that despite the decimation of
a major American city, "There won't have to be tax increases (455)."
Also on the 1st, Dick Cheney came back from his
vacation. “[When] asked by reporter Roger Simon "why he did not
return from his vacation earlier than three days after the hurricane hit, the
vice president replied:
'I came back four days early (456).'”
Department of Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff “told
NPR that he had ‘not heard a report of thousands of people in the
convention center who don't have food and water’-- even though every television
viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at
least a day (457) .”
On Friday, September 2nd:
-President Bush’s allies at Fox News reported that
“Evacuees who had taken refuge in the Superdome were waiting hours to get onto
buses that were taking them 350 miles away to the Houston Astrodome, which can
hold 27,000 people. Conditions in the Superdome had become horrendous: There
was no air conditioning, the toilets were backed up, and the stench was so bad
that medical workers wore masks as they walked around (458).
-Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans' emergency operations,
warned that the slow evacuation at the Superdome had become an "incredibly
explosive situation," and he bitterly complained that FEMA was not
offering enough help. "This
is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace," he said.
"FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control (459).
We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the
city of New Orleans."
-Newt Gingrich, former Republican attack dog and Speaker of
the House said of the
federal government’s handling of Katrina, “I think it puts into question all of
the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last
four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we
saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to
respond to a nuclear or biological attack (460)?”
President Bush finally made a visit to the disaster scene in
person four days after landfall (461), but it didn’t go so well. Dan
Froomkin, a blogger for the Washington Post, provided some
details:
“From a statement by
[Louisiana] Sen[ator Mary] Landrieu about Bush's trip to New Orleans on Friday:
‘[P]erhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street
levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I
believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause
of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less
than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily
prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the
desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single,
lonely piece of equipment (462).’”
“And Michelle
Krupa writes in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: ‘Three tons of
food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers
Point sat on
the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic
was halted because of President Bush's visit to New Orleans, officials
said (463).’
Though FEMA Director Michael Brown had clearly made a mess of
the federal government’s hurricane response to much human misery, and while
doing so had even “sent a
series of embarrassing e-mails to colleagues discussing his appearance, the
care of his dog, and, as the storm was making landfall, his desire to
‘quit’ and ‘go home (464),’ Bush told Brown at a public appearance,
“"Brownie, you're
doing a heck of a job (465).”
***
The Monday following, September 5th, Bush “skipped the
hardest-hit coastal areas entirely (466), choosing instead to visit
Baton Rouge, the state capital about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans,
which sustained no damage. He also went to Poplarville, Miss., to walk the
streets of a middle-class neighborhood that seemed to suffer little more than
snapped trees, a couple off-kilter carport roofs and a downed power line or
two,” while his mother, Barbara Bush, said of
the thousands of refugees stranded at the Houston Astrodome, “And so many of
the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them (467)."
Meanwhile, not happy with reality, the administration once
again attempted to contort perception with a full-court public relations blitz
in which they tried to keep the media from photographing the dead (468),
sent administration principals out to disaster-stricken areas after the fact,
and attempted
to shift the blame (469) to state and local officials for the
catastrophe. Michael Brown did his part by resigning as head of
FEMA.
As New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted, Bush
put his political strategist, Karl Rove, who had zero disaster experience,
“officially…in charge of the reconstruction effort (470). The two top
deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a
former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in
P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns (471).”
In addition, Rich pointed out that, “The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a
week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and
elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as
‘community relations officers for FEMA’ rather than used as emergency workers
to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to
Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was ‘to stand beside
President Bush’ as he toured devastated areas (472).”
“On Thursday night [ September 15,2005] , Mr. Bush wanted to
appear casually in charge as he waged his own Battle of New Orleans in Jackson
Square. Instead, he looked as if he'd been dropped off by his folks in front of
an eerie, blue-hued castle at Disney World. (Must be Sleeping Beauty's Castle,
given the somnambulant pace of W.'s response to Katrina.)”
“All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could
not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened
greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House
klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch
president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency
continues to flail.”
“In a ruined city--still largely without power, stinking with
piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in
the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their
lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of
evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either
electricity or rescuers--isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of
energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a
burnished skin tone and a prettified background?” (473)
The catastrophic scale of the Bush Administration’s failure
was so obvious that post-mortems were going to press less than a week after
Katrina made landfall. From “Storm
Exposed Disarray at the Top,” printed in the Washington Post on
Sunday September 4th:
“Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing
for the worst, the federal government was not ready (474) when it
came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen
current and former senior officials and outside experts.”
“…[Department of Homeland Security Head Michael] Chertoff
waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an ‘incident of
national significance,’ the trigger needed for federal action (475).”
“…several current and former senior officials charged that
[concerns about natural disasters] were never accorded top priority--either
by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS…[DHS] emphasized terrorism at
the expense of other threats (476).”
“New leaders such as [Joe] Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's
natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to
the post-9/11 fear of terrorism.”
“’Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' recalled the senior
FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ‘If you brought
up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker (477).’
The result, the official said, was that ‘FEMA was being taxed by the
department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the
mission of the agency.’"
"We are so much less than what we were in 2000,"
added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able
to do then."
“’What we were afraid of, and what is coming to pass, is that
FEMA has basically been destroyed as a coherent, fast-on-its-feet, independent
agency,’ said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.).”
“Other officials said they were warned well before Monday [the
day the levees were breached] about what could happen. For years, said another
senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send
evacuees to the Superdome…But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in
pre-hurricane evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major
hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail (478).”
“Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned
down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had
offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA
but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said (479).”
“Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending
300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former
senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General
Services Administration. ‘GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it,’ Breaux
told CNN. ‘As a result they weren't sent.’” (480)
-“The response to Hurricane Katrina was ‘a national failure’
and ‘an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common
welfare.’”
-“The report, entitled A Failure of Initiative…criticizes the
homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, saying his detachment from events
led him to implement federal emergency response measures ‘late, ineffectively
or not at all.’”
-“It adds that the White House did not ‘substantiate, analyze
and act on the information at its disposal.’ It also questions why the
‘untrained’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) chief, Michael Brown,
was selected to lead the response to the disaster, noting that he and the US
military set up rival chains of command.”
Unfortunately for the United States, George W. Bush’s
calamitous mishandling of Katrina was the administration’s modus operandi.
In September 2007, Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin reported that
Pew Research Center public opinion polls in 2006 and 2007 showed that the
number one word associated with Bush was "incompetent.” (482)
A thorough study (“Broken
Government”) recently released by the non-partisan Center for Public
Integrity bore the public instinct out. In what is certainly an abbreviated
list, the study listed dozens of instances of the Bush Administration’s failure
of governance:
-$212.3 million in overcharges by Halliburton
for Iraq oil reconstruction work (487)
-$9.91 billion allocated for government secrecy in 2007—a
record (488)
-809 government laptops with sensitive
information lost by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (489)
-$300 billion over budget for Department of
Defense weapons acquisitions (491)
-2,145 troops killed and 21,000
injured in Iraq from March 2003 through November 1, 2008, by IEDs
(improvised explosive devices) and other explosives—many while troops awaited body
armor (493)
-$12.5 billion spent on a defective National
Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (498)
-$4 billion spent to upgrade National Security Agency
computers that often crash, have trouble talking to each other, and lose key
intelligence (499)
-60,000 flights made by 46 Southwest Airline
jets in violation of FAA safety directives due to lax FAA enforcement (500)
-60,000 newborns a year at risk for
neurological problems due to mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants (504)
-At least $500 million for FEMA trailers contaminated by
formaldehyde occupied by thousands displaced after Hurricane Katrina (506)
-558 detainees at Guantanamo detention facility
reduced to 255 after court-ordered case reviews (507)
-$9 billion in federal oil and gas royalties
mismanaged by agency linked to drug-and-sex scandal (510)
-$45 trillion in credit-default swaps, without
federal oversight, in 2007 (512)
-2,640 days Osama bin Laden at large since September
11, 2001 (as of December 10, 2008) (515)
As the report said, “Many of the failings are tied to Bush
appointees who appear to have been selected primarily on the basis of ideology
and loyalty, rather than competence. Every administration has its share of
political cronies, of course, but the examples of the past eight years seem
especially stark:
-a National Aeronautics and Space Administration inspector
general who blocked multiple investigations—conservative Republican Senator Charles
Grassley said of his leadership: “I thought he’d be gone by now. . . . You’d
like to have him get the message.” (516)
-a secretary of Housing and Urban Development who openly
encouraged his staff to consider political affiliation when awarding
contracts. (517)
-a team leading the Department of the Interior whose involvement in partisan political activity was so flagrant that the department’s own inspector
general noted that ‘short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of
the Department of the Interior.’ (518)
“The administration has also displayed what’s at best a
lukewarm interest in independent oversight, often siding with business over
consumers and special interests over the public. The results have had dramatic
consequences in a variety of sectors. Among the examples:
-an Environmental Protection Agency that largely ignored and
underutilized its own office and task force on children’s health, leaving the
governmental entity responsible for air quality and other regulations without
any “high-level infrastructure or mandate” to protect children. (519)
-a Food and Drug Administration unable to guarantee food and
drug safety—causing far-right Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas
to repeatedly blast the agency for “stonewalling, slow-rolling, and plain
incompetency.” (520)
-a Federal Labor Relations Board that in the past year has
been without a general counsel and the required quorum necessary to handle
hundreds of complaints regarding unfair labor practices. (521)
-Much of the function of the federal government shifted from
public employees to private contractors, as federal spending on contractors
nearly doubled from FY 2001 to FY 2006, jumping from $234.8 billion to $415
billion. These contracts often lacked competitive bidding processes and
effective oversight and suffered from cost overruns and poor execution. (522)
W. PROMISES TO RESTORE HONOR AND DIGNITY TO THE WHITE HOUSE AND INSTEAD ENGAGES IN BANANA REPUBLIC LEVELS OF CORRUPTION & GOVERNMENT SECRECY
“During the year and a half that I covered George W. Bush's
2000 presidential campaign, I must have heard his stump speech a thousand
times. The lines changed little over the months, and the ending almost never
changed--Bush would raise his hand, as if taking an oath, and promise to
restore honor and dignity to the White House.
He also vowed to restore civility to the poisonous atmosphere
of the nation's capital, declaring at a GOP fundraiser in April 2000 that
"it's time to clean up the toxic environment in Washington, D.C."
A few months later, Bush told voters at a campaign event in
Pittsburgh that his administration would "ask not only what is legal but
what is right, not what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves."
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's
no question about it."
Despite what he promised on the campaign
trail, George W. Bush quickly established his administration’s
penchant for secrecy and being above the law. Early in the administration,
Bush reversed Clinton policy on the Freedom of Information Act to narrow the
circumstances under which documents would be open to the public (539).
In a similar vein, Bush rewrote the Presidential Records Act by executive
fiat:
“President
Bush became intimately familiar with this position [the national
Archivist] when the Archivist sent him a little notice that he was preparing to
release the presidential papers of President Ronald Reagan on January 20, 2001.
This was done under the Presidential Records Act, which mandates the release of
unclassified records at the end of a twelve-year period. Not only do some of
these documents involve President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, but they
also involve over a dozen current high-ranking officials, including
Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Historians are
particularly interested in the material to shed further light on the Iran-Contra
scandal as well as other controversies that led to the conviction of various
Reagan Administration officials…After a series of delays (540)to review
the material, President Bush responded with an executive order that effectively
rewrites the
Presidential Records Act in its inverse image (541), converting
the Act from a measure guaranteeing public access to one that blocks such
access. The order strips the Archivist of authority to give the public access
to these papers and gives a former president the ability to indefinitely delay
their release.” [Bush also requested a Freedom of Information exemption for the
Department of Homeland Security (542)]
Also, “[the Bush] administration has asserted that
the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such
matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress
has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing
constitutionally dubious ‘signing statements,’ which declare, by fiat, how he
will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation
flagrantly violates the will of Congress (543).” ["Minimum number of
laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his
administration from following: 1,069"]
As late as December of 2008, Bush was still at it, trying
to keep records of his administration’s activities from the public (544):
“…the Bush administration may be determined to make one last play for secrecy
by taking its records and storing them in a Dallas warehouse, pending a Bush
library. In these waning weeks, a group of us is locked in legal combat with
Vice President Dick Cheney and his corps of unseen advisers, seeking an
injunction to prevent them from leaving office with their e-mail
records...Cheney and his team are resisting at every turn, following a strategy
of running out the clock and thereby implicitly admitting their intention to
destroy or take their records.”
Not several weeks after the Patriot Act was passed, Bush’s
Attorney General John Ashcroft told the
Senate Judiciary Committee: "To those who scare peace-loving people
with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid
terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.
They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends (546)."
In addition, Bush authorized secret
spying on citizens without court orders (547). Roughly two years later, “On
the night of March 10, 2004, as
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his
deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call…White House Counsel
Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.,
were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's
domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department [over which
Ashcroft had purview] had just determined was illegal (548)."
“In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee
yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced,
sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes
before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and
speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had
never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.”
Later, when the Bush Administration discovered that The New
York Times was going to out their domestic spying, they tried to kill the
story and told the editor of the New York Times “You’ll have blood on
your hands” when it became obvious that freedom of the press would win the
day (549). At the time the story came out, “Bush said in a statement
that only people in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas
would have been targeted for surveillance,” but on Obama’s first day in office
a whistleblower revealed that
“in truth, the spying involved a dragnet of all communications”…‘The National
Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications,’ he said. ‘Faxes,
phone calls and their computer communications…They monitored all
communications.’”
Bush’s people also proposed the The Terrorism Information and
Prevention System (TIPS), a program that, as the normally staid Boston Globe
put it, “is
a scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated. Plans for its pilot
phase, to start in August, have Operation TIPS recruiting a million letter
carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access to
private homes as informants to report to the Justice Department any activities
they think suspicious (550)." To run TIPS, Bush exhumed John
Poindexter, who had been at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal in the
eighties (551). [TIPS was later abandoned when even many Republicans
said it went too far.]
W., SELF-PROCLAIMED CHRISTIAN, PRACTICES TORTURE & LIES ABOUT IT
Though he famously told Katie Couric “We
don’t torture,” among the things George W.
Bush will be best known for is his administration’s plunge into the draconian
policy of torture (552). In June of 2006, in the case of Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush’s policy of indefinite
detention of enemy combatants was unconstitutional.
Eager to reverse this rare limitation on Bush’s expansive executive power and
milk their “toughness on terrorism” theme to the max just before the
upcoming congressional elections, the Republican Congress drew up a bill (The
Military Commissions Act of 2006) which opened the way for the steamrolling of
the Geneva Conventions, the gold standard of international human rights, by
allowing the government to inflict “serious pain”--though they drew
the line at “severe pain.” The bill also gutted Habeas Corpus (553),
the 800 year-old
legal principle that the government must bring charges against someone
under arrest or let them go, denied the right to appeal in the federal courts,
allowed the gathering of evidence without a warrant, and gave retroactive
immunity to members of the CIA who had engaged in torture (during the 200 or
more extraordinary
renditions of prisoners to foreign countries with more lenient laws),
though CIA director Porter Goss had said a
year earlier that the CIA didn’t engage in torture. [In 2008, the
Republican-dominated Supreme Court voided the bill’s provisions on Habeas
Corpus.]
On December 13th, 2008, Scott Horton reported in
Harper’s that the Senate Armed Services Committee had released a report--that
had the unanimous backing of all committee members, Republican and
Democrat--which “concluded that Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials
of the administration consciously adopted a policy for the torture and abuse of
prisoners held in the war on terror” and “enlisted ethics-challenged lawyers to
craft memoranda designed to give torture ‘the appearance of
legality’ (554) as part of a scheme to create the torture program
despite internal opposition.”
Among other findings, the report “[looked] into the use of
psychotropic drugs which were, with Donald Rumsfeld’s approval, routinely
administered to prisoners in order to facilitate their interrogation” and
“torture techniques…[that] were reverse engineered from the SERE program—used
to prepare American pilots to resist interrogation techniques used by the Soviets,
North Koreans, Chinese and North Vietnamese. By ‘reverse engineering,’ we mean
[the United States] was adopting the techniques used by the nation’s Communist
adversaries in prior generations.”
Moreover, “…when photos and other evidence of abuse first
surfaced, the Bush Administration firmly denied any connection between their
policies and the abuse (555), then attempted to scapegoat a group of more
than a dozen young recruits (556).”
While the administration had claimed all along that torture
was necessary to keep us safe, the bipartisan report said that “The
administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies
damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives,
strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority (557).”
THE MOST CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN U.S. HISTORY?
Torture was only one of the most visible malignancies that
grew from the Bush Administration’s cancerous core. As Bush was about to
start a second term, Salon posted a
lengthy scandal sheet from just Bush’s first term which included the
following, as quoted from the original:
-Memogate: The Senate Computer Theft (558)
The scandal: From 2001 to 2003, Republican staffers on the
Senate Judiciary Committee illicitly
accessed nearly 5,000 computer files containing confidential Democratic
strategy memos about President Bush's judicial nominees. The GOP used the memos
to shape their own plans and leaked some to the media.
The problem: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act states it is
illegal to obtain confidential information from a government computer.
-Halliburton's No-Bid Bonanza (559)
The scandal: In February 2003, Halliburton [Vice President
Dick Cheney’s former employer] received a five-year, $7 billion no-bid contract
for services in Iraq.
The problem: The Army Corps of Engineers' top contracting
officer, Bunnatine Greenhouse, objected to the deal, saying the contract should
be the standard one-year length, and that a Halliburton official should not
have been present during the discussions.
The outcome: The FBI is investigating. The
$7 billion contract was halved and Halliburton won one of the parts in a public
bid. For her troubles, Greenhouse has been forced into whistle-blower
protection. [Alan Grayson, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for
whistle-blowers who have worked for American contractors in Iraq, says simply
that during that first year under the Coalition Provisional Authority (see #s
337-340) Iraq was
turned into "a free-fraud zone."]
-Halliburton: Pumping Up Prices (560)
The scandal: In 2003, Halliburton overcharged the army for
fuel in Iraq. Specifically, Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root
hired a Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, to supply fuel at about twice the going
rate, then added a markup, for an overcharge of at least $61 million, according
to a December 2003 Pentagon audit.
The problem: That's not the government's $61 million, it's our
$61 million.
-Halliburton's Vanishing Iraq Money (561)
The scandal: In mid-2004, Pentagon auditors determined that
$1.8 billion of Halliburton's charges to the government, about 40 percent of
the total, had
not been adequately documented.
The problem: That's not the government's $1.8 billion, it's
our $1.8 billion.
-Money Order: Afghanistan's Missing $700 Million Turns Up in
Iraq (562)
The scandal: According to Bob Woodward's “Plan of Attack,” the
Bush administration diverted $700
million in funds from the war in Afghanistan, among other places, to
prepare for the Iraq invasion.
The problem: Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 of the U.S.
Constitution specifically gives Congress the power "to raise and support
armies." And the emergency spending bill passed after Sept. 11, 2001,
requires the administration to notify Congress before changing war spending
plans. That did not happen.
The outcome: [a Republican] Congress declined to investigate.
The administration's main justification for its decision has been to claim the
funds were still used for, one might say, Middle East anti-tyrant-related
program activities.
-Iraq: More Loose Change (563)
The scandal: The inspector general of the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Iraq released a series of reports in
July 2004 finding that a significant portion of CPA [Coalition Provisional
Authority, the governing body the Bush Administration established in Iraq after
the invasion] assets had gone missing -- 34 percent of the materiel controlled
by Kellogg, Brown & Root -- and that the CPA's method of disbursing $600
million in Iraq reconstruction funds "did not establish effective controls
and left accountability open to fraud, waste and abuse."
The problem: As much as $50 million of that money was
disbursed without proper receipts.
-Wiretapping the United Nations (564)
The scandal: Before the United Nations' vote on the Iraq war,
the United States and Great Britain developed an eavesdropping operation
targeting diplomats from several countries.
The problem: U.N. officials say the practice is illegal
and undermines
honest diplomacy, although some observers claim it is business as
usual on East 42nd Street.
-The Medicare Bribe Scandal (565)
The scandal: According to former Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), on
Nov. 21, 2003, with the vote on the administration's Medicare bill hanging in
the balance, someone
offered to contribute $100,000 to his son's forthcoming congressional
campaign, if Smith would support the bill.
The problem: Federal law prohibits the bribery of elected
officials.
-Busy, Busy, Busy in New Hampshire (566)
The scandal: In 2002, with a tight Senate race in New
Hampshire, Republican Party officials paid a Virginia-based firm, GOP
Marketplace, to enact an Election Day scheme meant to depress Democratic
turnout by "jamming" the Democratic Party phone bank with continuous
calls for 90 minutes.
The problem: Federal law prohibits the use of telephones to
"annoy or harass" anyone.
The outcome: Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the
New Hampshire GOP, pleaded guilty in July 2004 to a felony charge, while Allen
Raymond, former head of GOP Marketplace, pleaded guilty to a similar charge in
June. In December, James Tobin, former New England campaign chairman of
Bush-Cheney '04, was
indicted for conspiracy in the case. [AP would later report that “Phone-Jamming
Records Point to White House”]
-The Medicare Money Scandal (567)
The scandal: Thomas Scully, Medicare's former
administrator, supposedly
threatened to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster to prevent
him from disclosing the true cost of the 2003 [Republican prescription drug]
Medicare bill.
The problem: Congress voted on the bill believing it would
cost $400 billion over 10 years.
The program is more likely to cost $550
billion.
-The Bogus Medicare "Video News Release" (568)
The scandal: To promote its Medicare bill, the Bush
administration produced
imitation news-report videos touting the legislation. About 40 television
stations aired the videos. More recently, similar videos promoting the
administration's education policy have come to light.
The problem: The administration broke two laws: One forbidding
the use of federal money for propaganda, and another forbidding the
unauthorized use of federal funds.
The outcome: In May 2004, the GAO concluded the administration
acted illegally, but the agency lacks enforcement power.
-Pundits on the Payroll: The Armstrong Williams Case (569)
The scandal: The Department of Education paid
conservative commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote its
educational law, No Child Left Behind.
The problem: Williams did not disclose that his support was
government funded until the deal was exposed in January 2005.
Bush’s second term provided more of the same:
“A senior White House budget official who resigned abruptly
last week was arrested Monday on charges of lying to investigators (571) and
obstructing a federal inquiry involving Jack Abramoff (572), the
Republican lobbyist who has been under scrutiny by the Justice Department for
more than a year.”
Though the administration had tried to downplay their
closeness to him, Lobbyist Jack Abramoff [who had received 70 months in prison in
March of 2006 for conspiracy, fraud, tax evasion, and bribery] “claimed in
billing records that he and his associates had at least 485 contacts with White
House officials during President George W. Bush's first term (574),
according to a report by a U.S. House panel.” [the White House would later stonewall (575) on
600 pages relating to the administration’s contacts with Abramoff]
“The former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives violated ethics rules by requiring 20 employees to help
his teenage nephew prepare a high school video project, part of a wide-ranging
pattern of questionable expenditures on a new ATF headquarters, personal
security and other items, according to a report issued yesterday (576).
-Number of
times FDA officials met with consumer and patient groups as they revised
drug-review policy in 2006: 5; Number of times they met with [pharmaceutical]
industry representatives: 113 (577)
On November 6, 2006 Salon reprised a
second scandal sheet, just as American voters were about to overwhelmingly
reject the Republican Party at the polls. Among the findings:
-Trumped-up Terror Busts (578)
The scandal: It wasn't just the "Lackawanna
Six" who got the Kafka treatment after 9/11. In February 2006
director of national intelligence John Negroponte warned Congress about "a
network of Islamic extremists" in Lodi, Calif. Two men there were charged--Umer Hayat, an ice cream truck driver, and his son, Hamid--but the cases,
riddled with faulty intelligence and coerced testimony, crumbled in court. FBI
agents had pushed the two men into separate accounts about a training camp in
Pakistan, but the confessions didn't square. "You can hear the agents
literally dictate to [Hayat] what it is that they thought he was involved
in," James
Weddick, a 35-year FBI veteran who reviewed the interrogation tapes,
told "Frontline" this fall. "And then he mimics back to them
what he thinks that they want to hear."
"Then there was the highly publicized bust by the feds in
Miami this summer: A group calling itself the "Seas
of David" stupidly dreamed out loud of blowing up the Sears Tower-- but lacked weapons, means of transportation and the al-Qaida "uniforms"
they hoped to purchase from a terrorist-cum-FBI operative. FBI deputy director
John Pistole admitted the group was "aspirational" rather than
"operational." And then there were the three Arab-Americans locked
up this year for the menacing act of buying a bunch of cheap
cellphones at Wal-Mart."
-Pat Tillman: The Hero Myth, the Ugly Truth (579)
The scandal: Attempting to deceive the American public about
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was nothing new from the P.R. department of
Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon-- think back to the
Jessica Lynch fable (580) or the various Pentagon
efforts to hide U.S. casualties (581)--but the Pat Tillman
affair perhaps stands as the Bush administration's most craven and cynical
attempt to bury a painful truth while maximizing political spin.
When the
former football star and Army Ranger was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, the
Pentagon put out a press release implying that he'd died while courageously
taking "the fight to the enemy forces." It wasn't until long after
Tillman was awarded a Silver Star and his memorial service was televised
nationally that the truth came out: he'd accidentally been killed by his fellow
soldiers. In June 2005, columnist Robert Scheer reported that
files from an internal military investigation given to him by Tillman's mother
made it "unmistakably clear that the true cause of Tillman's death was
known in the field shortly after he was killed and reported as fratricide up
through the military command. Yet those facts were systematically kept from the
family (582)--including Pat's brother and fellow Army Ranger, Kevin
Tillman, who was serving in the same unit in Afghanistan--while a markedly
inaccurate story played itself out in the world's media."
The problem: The campaign of deception went all the way to the
heart of the White House. According to a memo included in the Army's investigation,
in late April 2004--right as the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was sending shock
waves around the world--a White House speechwriter requested information on
Tillman ahead of the president's appearance at the upcoming White House
correspondents dinner. There, Bush declared: "Corporal Tillman asked for
no special attention. He was modest because he knew there were many like him,
making their own sacrifices." By then the White House had already told the
press that Tillman was among those who had "made the ultimate sacrifice in
the war on terror."
-Bush's Unethical Judges
The scandal: With the appointment of Justices John Roberts and
Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court got most of the attention over the last year--but the White House has also worked to stack the nation's appellate courts with
right-wing, corporate-friendly judges, some of them a little too
corporate-friendly. As Salon and the Center for Investigative
Reporting uncovered earlier this year, two Bush nominees to the U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, Judge
James H. Payne and Judge
Terrence W. Boyle, broke federal ethics law by ruling in numerous cases
involving corporations in which they owned stock (583). Meanwhile, a Salon/CIR
exposé published just last week revealed that at least two
dozen federal judges confirmed under Bush made political contributions
to leading Republicans who were influential in their appointments, or to the
president himself, while under consideration for their judgeships (584).
-Hushed Up about Corporate Media
The scandal: In September 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported
that during Michael Powell's tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, two internal draft reports exposing the ill effects of corporate
media consolidation were quashed [because
the Bush administration favored media consolidation, 585]. What the agency
prevented from getting any airtime: A 2004 report that found locally owned TV
stations did a better job covering local news and issues, and a 2003 report
pointing out a decrease in the number of radio station owners.
The problem: Powell and his aides denied knowing about the
studies (586)--but clearly his corporate-friendly agenda would
necessitate flipping the channel on such troublesome findings. Both Powell and
his successor, Kevin J. Martin, supported reduced restrictions on television
station ownership and the lifting of a ban preventing companies from owning a
newspaper and a television or radio station in the same market.
Barely a month later, on December 7, 2006, Bush’s
Justice Department fired “seven United States attorneys without explanation (587).
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales calls the controversy an ‘overblown personnel
matter (588),’ but the legal battle over the firings plays out to this day
as it becomes clear that the attorneys were fired for having insufficient
partisan zeal. Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, and Karl Rove are cited
for contempt of Congress when they refuse a summons by the House Judiciary
Committee to discuss the firings (589).”
When Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was brought
before Congress to explain these transparently partisan maneuvers, he suffered
serial amnesia (590) and later resigned in disgrace, but in a recent
interview he whined that he was “one of the many casualties of the war on
terror (591).”
The scandals continued apace in 2007 and 2008:
“Under criticism that it has been lax in policing the $85
billion student loan industry (593),
the Education Department announced yesterday that the chief official
responsible for overseeing the loan program was stepping down.
The resignation of the official, Theresa S. Shaw, was made
public two days before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is to testify to
a Congressional committee. Ms. Spellings is expected to face tough questions
about the oversight of lenders’ practices and her department’s enforcement of
policies against conflicts of interest. “
World
Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz resigned yesterday, effective June
30, yielding to demands from governments around the world that he leave to
end the ethics controversy (594) that has consumed the institution.
“Former Deputy Interior Secretary James Steven Griles [see
#121]--who pleaded guilty in March to a single felony charge of obstructing
justice by lying to a Senate committee about his relationship with convicted
lobbyist Jack Abramoff (595)--was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District
Court to 10 months in prison and a fine of $30,000.00.”
“At the request of Sara Taylor, the former White House
Director of Political Affairs, John Walters, the nation’s drug czar, and his
deputies traveled to 20 events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress
in the months prior to the 2006 elections. The trips were paid for by federal
taxpayers (596) and several were combined with the announcement of
federal grants or actions that benefited the districts of the Republican
members.”
“Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of
the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the
wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the
bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building,
constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs
of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained
carpets, cheap mattresses… The common perception of Walter Reed [the medical
facility] is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military
medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable
113-acre institution into something else entirely--a holding ground for
physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them--the
majority soldiers, with some Marines--have been released from hospital beds
but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being
discharged or returned to active duty.”
“A senior State Department official in charge of foreign aid
who had used an escort service owned by a woman charged with running a
prostitution operation abruptly resigned on Friday, ABC News reported.”
-“Julie
MacDonald, a former deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and
parks, resigned last year after an earlier report found that she had run
roughshod over agency scientists and violated federal rules by giving internal
documents to industry lobbyists (599).” [Minimum number of Bush
appointees who have regulated industries they used to represent as lobbyists:
98] (600)
“Howard J. Krongard, the State
Department's inspector general, has repeatedly thwarted investigations into
contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan,
including construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad (601), and censored
reports (602) that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush
administration, the chairman of the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform charged yesterday in a
13-page letter.
“The main U.S. disaster-response agency apologized on Friday
for having its employees pose as reporters in a news briefing on California's
wildfires that no journalists attended (603).
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still struggling to restore its image
after the bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, issued the apology
after the Washington Post published details of the Tuesday briefing.”
A top aide to President George W. Bush has resigned over
allegations that he misused US government money (605), the White House
said Friday.
“Robert Coughlin admitted in federal court Tuesday that he
accepted meals, concert tickets and luxury seats at sporting events from a
lobbyist. He pleaded guilty to a single conflict-of-interest charge (606) and
faces up to 10 months in prison under a plea deal with the government.”
“It has been 11 months since investigators found that Lurita
Doan, chief of the General Services Administration, violated the Hatch Act’s
ban on politicking on the job, asking her staff how they could “help our
candidates (607).” This week, the White House finally got around to
ousting Ms. Doan from the government’s principal agency for awarding rich
contracts in goods and services…She denied any violation, but she made her
philosophy of government clear early on in trying to cut the funding of her
agency’s inspector general office. Inspector generals are supposed to track
complaints of waste and fraud. She called them bureaucratic “terrorists (608).”
“In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the
department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen
current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects
about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest
sources of revenue other than taxes.”
According to the report, “officials accepted gifts (610),
steered contracts to favored clients (611) and engaged in drugs and
sex with oil company employees (612).
“Short of a crime,” Mr. Devaney said, “anything goes at the
Department of the Interior.”
-Percentage
change since 2001 in U.S. government spending on paper shredding:
+466 (613)
“In case any Bush administration officials have trouble
summing up the boss' record, the White House is providing a few helpful
suggestions.
A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high-ranking
officials offers a guide for discussing Bush's eight-year tenure during their
public speeches.
Titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record," the
talking points state that Bush "kept the American people safe" after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts,
curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained "the honor and the dignity of his
office."
W. LETS WALL STREET REGULATE ITSELF, IGNORES OVERHEATED HOUSING MARKET, USHERS IN WORST RECESSION IN 80 YEARS
After presiding over the biggest national security failure in
sixty years on 9/11, abandoning Afghanistan, where our foes were, for
Iraq, where they weren’t, and unleashing chaos there, and failing the city of
New Orleans in its moment of need, it would seem that one president couldn’t
possibly birth another grand-scale debacle, but George W. Bush once again
proved to be exceptional. In an epic piece entitled “White
House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire,” New York Times reporters
Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton detailed the Bush
Administration’s contribution to the mortgage crisis that was central to the
worst economic downturn in decades:
-“As early as 2006, top advisers to Mr. Bush dismissed
warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices
were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming (614). And
when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons
and scope of the downturn (615); as recently as February, for example, Mr.
Bush was still calling it a “rough patch.”
As Bush’s Treasury Secretary John W. Snow put it, “The Bush
Administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic
highs…But what we forgot in the process (616) was that it has to be
done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now
realize there was a high cost.”
Along the way “Bush’s second SEC [Securities and Exchange
Commission] chairman was removed after he was found to be too aggressive by
[the mortgage] industry.” (617)
-“When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack
down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort,
asserting that states had no authority over national banks.” (618)
-“…in early 2003, Arnando Falcon Jr, head of the Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight agency overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wrote
a report which ‘outlined a worst-case situation in which Fannie and Freddie
could default on debt, setting off…a financial meltdown…He also raised red
flags about the companies’ soaring use of derivatives, the complex financial
instruments that economic experts now blame for spreading the housing
collapse.’ The White House tried to fire Mr. Falcon on the day he issued
his report (619), at least in part because Franklin Raines, Fannie CEO,
didn’t like the criticism.”
-“The president did push rules aimed at forcing lenders to
more clearly explain loan terms. But the White House shelved them in
2004, after industry-friendly members of Congress threatened to block
confirmation of his new housing secretary.”
-“in March 2008, right before Bear Sterns collapsed, in a
speech at the Economic Club in New York [Bush] cautioned against Washington’s
temptation ‘to say that anything short of a massive government intervention in
the housing market amounts to inaction,’ and added that ‘government action
could make it harder for the markets to recover.’” (620)
-“[Bush Administration Director of the Oversight Board of the
Federal Housing Finance Agency James] Lockhart in July on CNBC said that ‘the
companies [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] were well managed and ‘worsts were not
coming to worst’…not long after the companies’ stocks “lost half their value in
a single day.” (621)
After stubbornly resisting governmental intervention when it
could’ve helped out of a misplaced ideological rigidity, Bush supported a
massive bailout--but only after it became a stone-obvious
necessity (622).
AS THE ECONOMY BLEEDS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS PER MONTH, W. FINISHES HIS PRESIDENCY WITH A FINAL TOXIC BURST OF ASSAULTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PROTECTION, THE POOR, AND WORKERS' RIGHTS
As the economy tanked late in his term, Bush appropriately closed
his presidency with a long list of going away presents--signed off with
little or no public participation or consultation with Congress--for industry
groups that had paid his way:
-In addition, the administration has upped
the number of hours that long-haul truckers can be on the road. The new
rule—nearly identical to one struck down by a federal appeals court last year—allows trucking companies to put their drivers behind the wheel for 11 hours
a day, with only 34 hours of downtime between hauls. The move is virtually
certain to kill more motorists: Large-truck crashes already kill 4,800 drivers
and injure another 76,000 every year. (638)
Moreover, “To
protect the new rules against repeal, the Bush administration began amping
up its last-gasp regulatory process back in May [of 2008]. The goal was to have
all new regulations finalized by November 1st, providing enough time to
accommodate the 60-day cooling-off period required before major rule changes—those that create an economic impact greater than $100 million—can be
implemented.” (642)
“Now, however, the administration has fallen behind schedule—so it's gaming
the system to push through its rules (643). In several cases, the
Office of Management and Budget has fudged the numbers to classify rules that
could have billion-dollar consequences as ‘non-major’—allowing any changes
made through mid-December to take effect in just 30 days, before Obama is
inaugurated. The administration's determination of what constitutes a major
change is not subject to review in court, and the White House knows it:
Spokesman Tony Fratto crowed that the 60-day deadline is ‘irrelevant to our
process.’”
“Once a rule is published in the Federal Register, the Obama
administration will have limited options for expunging it. It can begin the
rule-making process anew, crafting Obama rules to replace the Bush rules, but
that approach could take years, requiring time-consuming hearings, scientific
fact-finding and inevitable legal wrangling. Or, if the new rules contain legal
flaws, a judge might allow the Obama administration to revise them more
quickly. Bush's
push to gut the Endangered Species Act, for example, was done in laughable haste,
with 15 employees given fewer than 36 hours to review and process more than
200,000 public comments.” (644)
W.'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Lest we be too hard on George W. Bush, we must give credit
where credit is due.
On January 8, 2009, Salon posted “W. and the damage
done,” which summarized some of the legacies of the Bush presidency:
-"’An average recession is one in which we lose about 3
percent of GDP. Three percent of GDP is about $500 billion," UCLA economist Lee
Ohanian told Salon. ‘It's not inconceivable that this could be
twice as [bad], which would be close to a trillion.’" (645)
“Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal
growth path in 2009: $900
billion” (646)
“Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78
million” (647)
“Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to
2008: 4 million,
a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate” (648)
“Number of detainees who have died in U.S custody: Human
Rights First claimed that as of February 2006, nearly
100 had died (649), a figure the Pentagon disputes. In addition, Amnesty
International says that more than three dozen individuals believed to have been
in U.S. custody have
essentially disappeared (650).”
Discussing Hurricane Katrina, “W. and the damage done” said
that “Estimates vary greatly, but deaths directly caused by the August 2005
storm are generally believed to be in excess of 1,100, perhaps
about 1,500, with total direct and indirect deaths in excess of
1,800.” (651)
The city's population is still only at
72 percent of its pre-Katrina level of 450,000. (652) Louisiana
and North Dakota are the only two states whose populations declined between
2000 and 2008.
There has also been a financial impact on people who were
spared the wrath of Katrina, who have never heard of a levee and live far from
Louisiana and Mississippi. Home insurance has become more costly and/or more
difficult to procure. After the storm, many national insurers simply stopped
issuing policies for homes that were too close to coastlines.” (653)
In addition, Bush made his mark by:
-pushing tax and budget policies that have led to the most
extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression [Portion of all
U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1
percent of earners: ¾ths (654) ; increase since 2000 in the number of
Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level: 3,500,000 (655)]
-saddling future generations with a total debt (“the total new
debt combined with the total new accured obligations”) of $10.35 trillion, according to Nobel
Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (657)
-presiding over a loss of over 2,300 points in the Dow
Jones, a
record (658), and a wave of foreclosures (659) helped along
by his fixation on lax regulation (see numbers ), a record number of personal
bankruptcies (660), the
worst job losses in over three decades (661)
As a result:
-America’s prestige has plummeted, or, as The Economist (which
endorsed Bush in 2000) recently put
it, Bush has “presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s
reputation since the second world war” (662)
-Bush has the unique distinction of having gone from having
the highest approval ratings in recorded history to among the lowest (663)
The verdict:
A
recent CBS news article quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Joseph Ellis, who said that Bush “might very well be the worst president in
U.S. history.” Ellis also said “He's unusual…Most two-term presidents
have a mixed record. Lyndon Johnson, one of the greatest achievements in the
20th century was civil rights legislation; on the other hand you have the
extraordinary tragedy of Vietnam. Even Richard Nixon opened the door to China
and had foreign policy credentials. Bush has nothing on the positive side,
virtually nothing."
Going on, the same article pointed out that Ellis’s view was common among well-informed
citizenry:
Given a chance to offer an apology, or at least a degree of
remorse, for the wreckage he had wrought in a going-away interview, George W.
Bush told Charles Gibson of ABC: “I don’t spend a lot of time really
worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term
history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.” (666)
Stepping into this accountability vacuum with a column on
January 3rd was former theater critic Frank
Rich. One of the few mainstream journalists that didn’t blink during
the Bush years, Rich pulled back the curtain to reveal the naked truth:
“The last NBC
News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent
of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being
forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you
remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall
Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven
for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur
of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying
to compute it.”
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
