by Molly Ivins
The incompetence of the INS was underlined when it issued a visa to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, six months after 9/11. In the wake of the attacks, the Bush administration promised to increase funding for the INS, to get the agency fully computerized with modern computers and generally up to speed. All that has happened since is that INS funding has been cut.
Much attention is being paid to the selective editing of the report, apparently to protect the Saudis. I think an equally important piece of the report is on the bureaucratic tangle that prevents anyone from being accountable for much of anything.
The CIA controls only 15 percent to 20 percent of the annual intelligence budget. The rest is handled by the Pentagon, despite widespread agreement that it needs to be centralized. The Bush administration has ignored these calls, mostly because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t want to give up any power.
Time magazine reports, “It was striking that the Pentagon came under such heavy fire in last week’s bipartisan report for resisting requests made by CIA director Tenet before 9/11, when the agency wanted to use satellites and other military hardware to spot and target terrorists in Afghanistan.”
But the most striking thing about this report is that none of its conclusions and none of its recommendations have anything to do with the contents of the PATRIOT Act, which was supposedly our government’s response to 9/11. All the could-haves, would-haves, and should-haves in the report are so far afield from the PATRIOT Act it might as well be on another subject entirely.
Once again, as has often happened in our history, under the pressure of threat and fear, we have harmed our own liberties without any benefit for our safety. Insufficient powers of law enforcement or surveillance are nowhere mentioned in the joint inquiry report as a problem before 9/11. Yet Attorney General John Ashcroft now proposes to expand surveillance powers even further with the PATRIOT II Act. All over the country, local governments have passed resolutions opposing the PATRIOT Act and three states have done so, including the very Republican Alaska.
The House of Representatives last week voted to prohibit the use of “sneak and peek” warrants authorized by the PATRIOT Act. The conservative House also voted against a measure to withhold federal funds from state and local law-enforcement agencies that refuse to comply with federal inquirers on citizenship or immigration status. All kinds of Americans are now waking up to the fact that the PATRIOT Act gives the government the right to put American citizens in prison indefinitely, without knowing the charges against them, without access to an attorney, without the right to confront their accusers, without trial. Indefinitely.
The report was completed late last year, but its publication was delayed by endless wrangles with the administration over what could be declassified. Former Georgia senator Max Cleland, who served on the committee, said the report’s release was deliberately delayed by the White House until after the war in Iraq was over because it undercuts the rationale for the war. The report confirms there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
“The administration sold the connection to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war,” Cleland said. “What you’ve seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends.”
July 2003
The Wrong Way
THERE ARE MESSY-DESK people and there are clean-desk people. I’m a major messy. About every six months, I am seized by a desire to Get Organized, so I start doing archaeological excavations into the midden heap on my desk. The result this time was a sort of time-lapse photography of where the country is headed.
Going through stacks of old newspaper articles, speeches, reports, studies, and press releases at a high rate of speed left one overwhelming impression: deception . . . government by deception. I’d like pass along some of what I found without the usual journalistic standards of sourcing because I want to re-create the impression it all left—rather like leafing through a book rapidly, catching a sentence here and there. Leaving aside the missing weapons of mass destruction (hey, we found the oil), I found so many little things that fit the same pattern.
• Administration announces with great fanfare new regs to control listeria, a deadly bacteria that can contaminate certain foods. Great, they put in new regs, but first they eviscerated them so they have no real impact.
• U.S. Agency for International Development chief Andrew Natsios blasts NGOs (that’s the jargon for nongovernmental organizations—private groups engaged in humanitarian assistance) for not doing enough PR for the United States. They’re supposed to be helping starving and sick people, not flacking for America. Either talk up the United States, Natsios threatened, or he would personally tear up their contracts. (Great, some little Ethiopian kid on the edge of starvation, eyes dull, belly swollen, has to listen to a lecture on U.S. beneficence before he gets some oatmeal.)
• New study shows eight million mostly low-income taxpayers will get no benefit from the latest round of tax cuts, despite repeated assurances that it would help everybody who pays income taxes.
• Cost of photo-op with the president at a June fund-raiser: $20,000. Cost of a “leadership luncheon” with Karl Rove: must raise $50,000 for reelection.
• “American officials are considering a plan to use Iraq’s future oil and gas revenues as collateral to raise cash to rebuild the country. Several U.S. companies, including Halliburton and Bechtel, which are jostling for the lucrative reconstruction contracts, are reportedly pushing the scheme to expedite the commissioning process.” That means there’s no Marshall Plan, we’re not going to rebuild Iraq, we’re going to take their oil to pay our corporations to fix what we messed up.
• President nominates Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace. This is one of a series of cruel-joke appointments: Pipes is a Middle East expert whose vision of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no negotiation, no hope for compromise, and no use for diplomacy. He wants the Palestinians defeated, period. Just the man for the Institute of Peace.
• On Friday, April 11, three days after “coalition” forces entered Baghdad, the Interior Department announced a settlement with the state of Utah that effectively destroys the executive branch’s key powers to protect the wilderness, reversing three decades of environmental policy. Starting immediately, oil, gas, and mineral companies are granted access to more than two hundred million acres of public lands. Bet you saw a lot of headlines about that one.
• Innumerable articles documenting the collapse of our dysfunctional health-care “system.”
• “And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.”—Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly on Good Morning America, March 18.
• “The White House today defended the decision of congressional negotiators to deny millions of minimum-wage families the increased child tax credit, saying the new tax law was intended to help people who pay taxes, not those who are too poor to pay.” The poorest people in this country pay exactly the same percentage of their income in payroll taxes as wealthy people do in total taxes.
“Ain’t gonna happen,” said House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The only way DeLay would support tax cuts for the working poor would be if for every $1 in tax cuts to the working poor, rich people got another $22 in tax cuts. Lends new meaning to phrase “without DeLay.”
• Two and half million jobs have disappeared since Bush took office. Real wages have stagnated or declined. Retirement savings have shrunk. People are losing health insurance, retirement benefits, and overtime.
• The “death tax,” as the Republicans so cleverly misnamed the estate tax, which affects 2 percent of all Americans, has now been replaced by the Bush birth tax—if you’re born in this country, you’re in debt—you have to help pay back the money the Bushies took out of Social Security, plus the interest on the debts they’re
running up.
My thanks to all the people and publications whose research I have used without credit today. You have all contributed to this brief portrait of a country headed in the wrong direction.
August 2003
Where’s the Accountability?
AT THE BEGINNING of the summer, several of us who are not exactly upbeat about our prospects in Iraq urged the administration to Do Something before it was too late—like, by the end of the summer.
Now what? Our people are over there like staked goats in the desert, the administration won’t ask other countries or the United Nations for help, they won’t send more troops, and the NGOs are pulling out. There was no apparent connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda before this war, but there sure as hell is now. We have already lost more soldiers in the “peace” than we did during the war.
And still no weapons of mass destruction. I realize all the good little boys and girls are supposed to “get over” the missing weapons of mass destruction, but I cannot brush this aside with the careless élan of the neo-con hawks (“doesn’t matter,” “makes no difference,” “who cares?”). Public officials need to be held to some standard of accountability for what they say.
In a separate column, I will try to Be Constructive about our current plight, but I think it is important to remember how we got here. May I remind you of what we were repeatedly told?
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”—Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002
“Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.”—George W. Bush, September 12, 2002
“The Iraqi regime possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.”—Bush, October 7, 2002
“We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that would be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using the UAVs for missions targeting the United States.”—Bush, October 7, 2002
“The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahideen’—his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past.”—Bush, October 7, 2002
“We know for a fact there are weapons there.”—Ari Fleischer, January 9, 2003
“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as five hundred tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent.”—Bush, January 28, 2003
“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.”—Colin Powell, February 5, 2003
“We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons—the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”—Bush, February 8, 2003
“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.”—Bush, March 17, 2003
“Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical, particularly.”—Fleischer, March 21, 2003
“There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.”—General Tommy Franks, March 22, 2003
“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.”—Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board, March 23, 2003
“We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.”—Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003
“We’ll find them. It’ll be a matter of time to do so.”—Bush, May 3, 2003
“I never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.”—Rumsfeld, May 4, 2003
“U.S. officials never expected that we were going to open garages and find weapons of mass destruction.”—Condoleezza Rice, May 12, 2003
“They may have had time to destroy them, and I don’t know the answer.”—Rumsfeld, May 27, 2003
“We based our decisions on good, sound intelligence, and the—our people are going to find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence. There’s no doubt in my mind.”—Bush, July 17, 2003
To quote Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, “And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he had nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.”—March 18, 2003
September 2003
Call Me a Bush-Hater
AMONG THE MORE amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible president.
Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his forty-four years of covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of “Bush-haters” in Time magazine as though he had never before come across a similiar phenomenon.
Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to—our last president. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven’t let up yet. Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug-running, sexual harassment, financial chicanery, and official misconduct. And they accuse his wife of even worse. For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters. Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing on radio talk shows and “Christian” broadcasts and nutty Internet sites. People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines, people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with notoriously racist pasts—all were given hearings, credence, and air time. Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and many an ambitious young right-wing hit man like David Brock, who has since made full confession, took that golden opportunity.
And these folks didn’t stop with verbal and printed attacks. From the day Clinton was elected to office, he was the subject of the politics of personal destruction. They went after him with a multimillion-dollar smear campaign funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing billionaire. They went after him with lawsuits funded by right-wing legal foundations (Paula Jones), they got special counsels appointed to investigate every nitpicking nothing that ever happened (Filegate, Travelgate), and they never let go of that hardy perennial Whitewater. After all this time and all those millions of dollars wasted, no one has ever proved that the Clintons did a single thing wrong. Bill Clinton lied about a pathetic, squalid affair that was none of anyone else’s business anyway, and for that they impeached the man and dragged this country through more than a year of the most tawdry, ridiculous, unnecessary pain. The day President Clinton tried to take out Osama bin Laden with a missile strike, every right-winger in America said it was a case of “wag the dog.” He was supposedly trying to divert our attention from the much more breathtakingly important and serious matter of Monica Lewinsky, and who did he think he was to make us focus on some piffle like bin Laden?
“The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from,” mused the ineffable Mr. Krauthammer. Gosh, what a puzzle that is. How could anyone not be just crazy about George W. Bush? “Whence the anger?” asks Krauthammer. “It begins of course with the ‘stolen’ election of 2000 and the perception of Bush’s illegitimacy.” I’d say so myself, yes, I would. I was in Florida during that chilling postelection fight, and am fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore actually won Florida, not to m
ention getting 550,000 more votes than Bush overall. But I also remember thinking, as the scene became eerier and eerier, “Jeez, maybe we should just let them have this one, because Republican wingnuts are so crazy, their bitterness would poison Gore’s whole Presidency.” The night Gore conceded the race in one of the most graceful and honorable speeches I have ever heard, I was in a ballroom full of Republican Party flacks who booed and jeered through every word of it.