The Lies of George Bush
by Jeremy Warren
BuzzFlash - Guest Commentary

February 23, 2004

When Democrats accuse George W. Bush of being a liar, Republicans — and until recently, the media — have responded that Bush is a man of integrity whom you can trust at his word. It was the evil Bill Clinton who lied. Remember him wagging his finger at us? That bastard!
Well, yes, Bill Clinton did indeed lie to us. He lied to us about a blow-job. It sure is good that we spent nearly $100 million to find out how semen reacts on a cotton blue dress from the Gap. Of course, it turned out that he was telling the truth to us about Whitewater and filegate and travelgate and campaign finance-gate and gate-gate and more. I’m sure we could find better uses for that money today. But, Clinton certainly did lie about that hummer. Imagine that, a man lying about sex. In America no less.

Of course, unlike another president, Clinton’s lies didn’t kill anyone.

Anyway, I decided to put just a short list together of lies by George W. Bush. These are not banal lies about one’s sex life, these are big lies, whoppers and tall tales about his own record, who he is, what he’s done and what he stands for.

1. The Iraq War.

We could really start and end with this one, since this lie has killed and wounded thousands of American soldiers and countless Iraqi men women and children. But this one certainly does not stand alone.

Let’s break this out into subcategories as well, such as:

a) “The smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud.” Iraq didn’t even have shitake mushrooms.

b) “Saddam would not let the inspectors in.” Bush has now made this claim twice. It came as quite a surprise to the hundreds of U.N. inspectors that were in Iraq in 2003 and were told by the U.S. to get out or get bombed.

c) Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. All right, I cut them some slack on this one as EVERYONE thought that he still possessed some WMD capability. The difference is that no one else felt that Hussein was any sort of credible military threat to the rest of the region, much less the United States. And, by “no one” else, I mean C.I.A., the U.N. and anyone else not named Wolfowitz, Rice, Libby, Rumsfeld, Cheney or Pearle.

d) “We know exactly where they are.” So said Rumsfeld shortly after the war ended. I wonder if he’s shared that bit of information with his boss yet?

e) The laundry list. Both Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech and Colin Powell at the United Nations read through a laundry list of horrors that was quantified down to the milliliter. Powell called these charges “facts” that were unassailable. Yet we have still not found a drop.

f) “We believe that, in fact, Saddam Hussein has reconstituted nuclear weapons.” Dick Cheney said this on Meet the Press in 2003. Even as Bush and others were careful of going overboard, Dick “Goebbels” Cheney kept going for not just the Big Lie, but the Grandaddy of them all.

g) Drones that could attack the United States. True, if they were launched from Padre Island. The truth is that little Timmy down the block has a more sophisticated remote control airplane than Saddam did.

h) Yellow cake uranium. The Italian press thought those documents were fake. Let me repeat that: the ITALIAN PRESS thought they were forgeries!

i) We will be welcomed as liberators. Those are bullets, roadside bombs and RPGs, not roses fellas.

j) Imminent? Who said imminent? Well, Ari Fleischer, Donald Rumsfeld and others. But, apparently Bush never said the words himself. He just used every other phrase he could think of to scare the crap out of us. And, as a point of order, isn’t it the Bush Administration? When someone is speaking for the administration, don’t they speak for Bush?

k) Al Qaeda and Saddam had close ties. Well, both he and bin Laden are Sunni Muslims, they both have moustaches and, to quote Cliff Clavin, neither of them have ever been in my kitchen. They must be like brothers.

l) “We have found WMDs in Iraq.” Bush and others have made this claim regarding an ever so dangerous weather tracking truck.

m) “They could have been destroyed by Saddam. Or moved out of the country.” I know Bush doesn’t read the papers or watch the news, but does he even listen to his own staff? David Kay, his hand-picked inspector, said there obviously weren’t any weapons in the first place. But, what if Bush is right and they were moved, shipped out of the country? Well, then the whole purpose of the war — to keep Hussein from giving his WMDs to terrorists — was a failure. Well, George, which one is it?

I could go on and on, but we’ve got even more real hardcore, honest to goodness, Grade A lies to address.

2. Taxes (part 1)

Bush has consistently claimed that he is against tax increases. Yet, as Governor, his 1997 tax plan would have forced tens of thousands of business to pay franchise taxes that previously did not have to pay. According to the GOP School of Taxes playbook, that’s a tax increase, no if ands or buts about it.

3. Taxes (part 2)

Throughout the 2000 campaign and through 2001, Bush claimed that his mega tax cut for the mega rich was actually a tax cut for the working folks. In fact, he said “the vast majority” would go to “the bottom.” As Al Franken has so ably pointed out, “by far the vast majority” usually means more than 14.7 percent that the bottom 60 percent received. Consider that “fuzzy math.”

4. Taxes (part 3)

In 2003, Bush claimed his latest sop to the uber-wealthy would create jobs. In fact, the special interest, Rockefeller tax cut was — in true Orwellian fashion — named the Jobs and Growth Act of 2003. Someone wake me when those 2.6 million jobs Bush promised in 2004 start being created. He needs to create around 300,000 jobs a month through Election Day to reach his pledge.

5. Taxes (part 4)

Bush, who tried to extend taxes to thousands of businesses and not call it a tax increase, now claims that if his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are not made permanent, that is a tax increase. Now, remember, the law as written says those taxes automatically phase out if nothing is changed. Bush now says if the law as written — the law he signed — is not changed, that is a tax increase.

6. “I fulfilled my duty.”

“He didn’t take his flight physical because his doctor was in Houston.” The entire National Guard spin is falling apart before our eyes. The facts of the issue have remained the same, but the Bush Team’s laughable responses become “inoperable” by the day. Despite their ever-angrier denials, the issue won’t go away. Last Friday night’s document dump and run still hasn’t answered the key question: where were you during the war, George? At least 1972. You can say it’s “trolling for trash” all you want, but you can’t make the issue go away without some proof.

7. “I’m a uniter not a divider”

Bush’s 2000 mantra — bought hook, line and sinker by much of the media — was that only he could come to Washington and end the partisan bickering. Within weeks, this proved to be completely untrue. His heavy-handed partisanship even cost him control of the U.S. Senate for a time, as Republican Jim Jeffords bolted the party.

In 2002, Bush showed his unifying skills by saying that Democrats who disagreed with his behemoth vision for the Department of Homeland Security — a plan he had opposed for nearly a year — “didn’t care about the security of the country.” You know, guys like Senator Tom Daschle, who was actually a terrorist target. He then thanked Max Cleland and Mary Landrieu for their steadfast support by targeting them and backing opponents who questioned their patriotism and, in Louisiana, sent out mailers to black neighborhoods with the wrong election date.

Well, Bush is a uniter in one way: He has united the Democratic Party like never before, and is driving independents back to the Democratic Party in droves. Please, keep uniting us.

8. The 2004 budget.

From front to back, the latest Bush budget is one of the most fraudulent documents ever created by the U.S. government. Well, at least since the last budget. Like 2003, Bush doesn’t count the cost of Iraq or Afghanistan into his fantasy land accounting. He also counts in billions of spending cuts that are flat out pipe dreams that even the GOP won’t support. According to the White House, the deficit — which has gone from hundreds of billions in the black to $518 billon in the red in just three short years — will be cut in half. This from an administration that has overestimated growth and underestimated projected deficits each year. But, according to George, prosperity truly is just around the corner.

9. “I won’t run a deficit.”

During the 2000 campaign, Bush responded to those who — quite correctly — said his voodoo economic plan would drive us right back into the gutter that he would not operate a deficit. He said that he was “a governor. I believe in balanced budgets.” Yes, the same way kids believe in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny.

10. “I hit the trifecta.”

Following our steady plummet back into deficit land, Bush used the handy excuse of “the trifecta”: war, national emergency and recession. He explained away his past statements that he wouldn’t run a deficit by claiming he had made an exception for those three things. Of course, he never actually said that. Paul Begala, Al Franken, Paul Krugman, Joe Conason and others have all reviewed every statement printed during the 2000 campaign and Bush never made any such qualification. Of course, why should we hold them to what he actually said? As Larry Speakes, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary once said, “No it wasn’t true, but it sure sounded good.”

11. “I released all my National Guard records in 2000.”

On Meet the Press, Bush once again fell back to his standard behavior when confronted with an uncomfortable subject: he lied his ass off. Four years after reporters first asked him to release his records — and a nearly a week after he promised to — Bush finally followed in the footsteps of John F. Kennedy, John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Kerrey and Wes Clark and released his full military record.

12. “I’m spending less than Bill Clinton.”

On Meet the Press, an interview that will go down in history as one of the stupidest decisions Karl Rove has ever made, Bush claimed that government spending has actually dropped under his tenure. Even GOP stalwarts ran away from this one faster than Rush Limbaugh runs to a bowlful of Oxycontins. The truth of the matter is that federal spending has exploded under George W., just as spending exploded in Texas while he was governor. This fella just ain’t your daddy’s fiscal conservative.

Here is a great quote on Bush’s spending:

“His dramatic increase in the size and spending of the federal government with a record deficit. With his $2.23 trillion budget, his administration will complete the biggest increase in government spending since Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” The budget deficit predicted by the House Budget Office will hit a record $306 billion. Spending on government programs increased 22% from 1999 to 2003. A Washington Post report said, “The era of big government, if it ever went away, has returned full-throttle under President Bush.” Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey commented that under President Bush, the federal government is “out of control.”" The source? Liberal media publication Intellectual Conservative in an article entitled “Why Christians Should Not Vote for George W. Bush”, February 15, 2004.

13. Free Trade.

George W. Bush supports free trade. That’s why he slapped tariffs on imported steel. Of course, had the potentially affected steel mills been located in New York instead of Pennsylvania — a state he hopes to win in 2004 — Bush would still be a pure free trader.

14. Outsourcing.

Last week, the Bush Administration claimed that the outsourcing of high-paying U.S. jobs to other countries “is a good thing.” N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote a report saying exactly that. He then reiterated his belief in the wonderful attributes of Americans losing their jobs at a press briefing on the report. Once again, Republicans are fleeing from this statement as fast as they can. So is George Bush, who immediately ran to Pennsylvania to promise 2.6 million jobs by the end of the year. Unfortunately, Mankiw is Bush’s hand-picked employee — and the president has already signed the report.

As Senator Tom Harkin said: “Under George Bush, America has a new #1 export: jobs.”

15. “No one could have imagined them hijacking airplanes.”

Of all the lies, this one might be the most annoying. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice made this claim repeatedly during the summer of 2002. Nevermind that Ramsey Yousef, one of the masterminds of the original attack on the World Trade Center, had his plot to hijack and crash 12 airplanes foiled by U.S. and foreign intelligence agents…in 1995. It was big news then, but apparently didn’t make it all the way out to Stanford University. Rice’s deceit was completely exposed in 2002 when details of the President’s Daily Intelligence Briefing in August 2001 revealed that CIA and other sources warned the administration of just such hijackings. But she is never called on this or other lies when she makes her media rounds.

16. Air Force One was a target.

While everyone remembers and praises Bush’s appearance with firefighters in New York City, the White House — and the press — conveniently ignore the actual timeline of events. That meeting took place on September 14, 2001. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, the entire New York congressional delegation and, of course, Rudy Gulliani, had been on the scene for days, Rudy and Bill since almost minute one. On September 11, 2001, after he was notified of both the first and second plane crashes, it took nearly an hour for Bush to depart Florida. But, he did not go to Washington, or even make a statement in Florida. No, first he flew to an Air Force Base in Louisiana; then, to the safety of a bunker in Nebraska. He told Americans it was safe, while he was entombed.

Many criticized his absence, most notably Peter Jennings who asked “Where is the President.” To combat such criticism, the Bush White House claimed that they zig-zagged across the country because of a “credible threat” against Air Force One. Nearly a year later, they were forced to admit that they had, in fact, received no such threat.

Now, I am not necessarily criticizing Bush’s flight itinerary on 9/11/01. Keeping the President safe was the top priority and they rightly took steps to ensure his safety. So why not just say that and be done with it? Why did the White House have to put out another lie to try to make themselves look heroic? Because that’s what they do.

17. Bill Clinton pillaged the White House as he walked out the door.

Well, according to the General Accounting Office in yet another investigation that spent our tax dollars, the allegations of looting just weren’t true. Was there some damage and pranks? Of course, just as there are in every transition. But widespread damage? No, it wasn’t true, but it sure sounded good.

18. Leave No Child Behind.

The president’s key education initiative is a well-intentioned attempt to change education in the United States. It could lead to real changes, if Bush had actually funded the plan rather than treat it as a nice photo op to show he really cared.

According to Senator Edward Kennedy, the author of the legislation and Bush’s main prop in 2001, “in the two years since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, the Bush Administration has cut its funding, reneged on promised resources for better teachers and smaller classes, and worked to divert millions of dollars to private school vouchers… President Bush’s new budget for 2005 will leave over 4.6 million children behind. Still pending before Congress is President Bush’s 2004 budget which provides schools with over $7.5 billion less than promised in the No Child Left Behind Act. And there is every expectation that the President will propose again not only to cut resources for public school reform, but to divert scarce public education dollars to private schools.”

Enough said.

19. Cost of the Medicare Bill.

Oops! They must have forgot to carry the one…or they are just liars. In fall 2003, Bush sold his Medicare budget with some interesting numbers: it would only cost $400 billion over 10 years. Now keep in mind that passage of this plan was in extreme doubt, as Democrats opposed the plan as a joke that would cost too much and do too little, while Republicans complained that, well, it cost way too much. The Bush Team assured everyone that it would cost no more than $400 million and the plan passed the House by a razor thin margin.

Lo and behold, they snookered us again. Just a few months later, the plan now costs $540 billion, with more sure to be added as the plan actually begins the implementation process.

20. Ken Lay.

After the Enron scandal hit full force, Bush tried to downplay his relationship with Ken Lay by saying “he gave money to my opponent” Ann Richards. Suddenly Lay, whom Bush had previously called “Kenny Boy,” didn’t’ ring a bell. Despite the fact that Enron was Bush’s #1 contributor from 94-00, the fact that Bush was flown around the campaign trail in 1998 on Lay’s private plane, and Lay’s status as a Pioneer (and serious contender for Commerce Secretary) Bush and he really weren’t that close. Maybe that’s why Martha Stewart is on trial and not Ken Lay.

(By the way, does it strike anyone as odd that Martha is being tried for almost exactly what George W. Bush did when he left Harken Energy?)

21. I’m against Nation Building.

Throughout the 2000 campaign, Bush assailed Clinton’s successful military forays in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, saying he opposed “nation building.” Today, see Afghanistan; see Iraq. In fairness, when you look at the deteriorating situations in both countries, it is clear that Bush is not really doing any nation “building” right now. He has ignored the reconstruction of Afghanistan (famously forgetting to fund it in his 2003 budget. Sorry about that Mr. Karzai!) and he has, to put it diplomatically, completely screwed the pooch in Iraq by ignoring the possible resistance to a U.S. occupation, handing over the reconstruction to corporate cronies like Halliburton and the reigns of power to unpopular sycophants like Ahmed Chalabi. Disaster looms where we can least afford to fail.

22. “I remember that sign from the Old West: Wanted Dead or Alive.”

Following the 2001 terrorist attacks, Cowboy Bush repeatedly strapped on his star and gave us his best John Wayne impersonation, essentially guaranteeing that we would take out Osama bin Laden. Now, Bush says of capturing bin Laden: “I have no idea” (Meet the Press, February 8, 2004). What would John Wayne say?

23. We’re safer now that Saddam is caught.

Howard Dean was ridiculed for questioning this platitude, but he is right. Hopefully we will be safer, but that outcome is certainly not assured. Not if Iran is stronger in the region and Iraq splits apart, divided into three warring factions, any of which could destabilize Turkey, Syria or Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, scores of Al Qaeda fighters have streamed into Iraq since the war began, an outcome we had sought to avoid by taking Hussein out.

For the present, I think we should ask the boys and girls being shot at if they feel more or less safe since December.

24. I was never arrested after 1972 — unless you count that DWI. Err, those two DWIs.

Bush reportedly told the Dallas Morning News in 1999 that he was never arrested after 1972. Of course, as we all learned, he was arrested for drunk driving in 1978, with his younger sister and Australian tennis star John Newcombe, in the car. According to NBC News, Bush was also arrested for another DWI in Midland after 1972. Are his arrests the big deal? No, but his constant lying about them sure goes to character, don’t you think?

25. I supported the Patient Protection Act.

During the 2000 presidential debates, Bush claimed he supported the Patient Protection Act and the Patient’s Bill of Rights. I almost fell on the floor, especially since Al Gore, standing mere feet away, did not call him on one of the most obvious lies in campaign history. This one was actually well-explored by the media, but Gore let this meatball glide harmlessly over the plate without taking the bat off of his shoulder.

The truth is Bush vetoed the Patient Protection Act in 1995 and let the Patient’s Bill of Rights — landmark legislation that became the model for other states and the federal government –become law without his signature. So, if by support you mean “opposed and tried to kill”, then yes, you supported them.

26. “I signed the hate crimes bill”.

Another juicy whopper. Now Bush had won re-election mere months before with nearly 70 of the vote. If he wanted a bill passed, he got it. But, Bush ordered his legislative minions to kill the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, less than one year after the most gruesome hate murder of the post-Civil Rights era. The guy who was the leader in killing the bill? State Senator David Sibley (R-Waco), a man who had supported the same legislation just a few years earlier. You might recognize Sibley; he’s the guy you see driving Bush’s golf cart whenever Bush is back in Crawford playing golf.

27. I want to get to the bottom of the Plame leak.

Following the sliming of Ambassador Joseph Wilson for exposing the Nigerian “yellow cake” lie, and the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, Bush said it was “a very serious matter” and that he wanted to get to the bottom of it. But he never ordered his staff to do anything about it. Since very few members of the White House would have had the clearance to even know that Plame was an operative, and even fewer are even allowed to make eye contact with, much less to talk to the media, it shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find the culprit here. Instead, he actually lamented that “we may never know” who did it because Washington is full of leakers. Thankfully, after cajoling from Democrats forced Attorney General John “Inspector Clouseau” Ashcroft to recuse himself from the investigation, it appears that we may actually discover who is behind this act of treason. Scooter Libby, your lawyer is on the line.

28. “I will fight the war on terror.”

This claim, unfortunately, is also debatable. Just when we had “smoked them out of their holes and got them on the run” our intelligence services and our military were forced to change their focus from fighting Al Qaeda to invading Iraq, letting bin Laden off the hook. In addition, despite numerous reports on the vulnerability of our ports, little has been done to make them more secure from terrorism. Also, despite a serious congressional study, media scrutiny and an on-going non-partisan investigation, little has changed regarding how our intelligence is gathered and analyzed to avoid making the same mistakes. In fact, little has changed beyond making several bureaucracies into one huge bureaucracy under the banner of the Department of Homeland Security. And, in perhaps the most bizarre example of sleeping at the wheel, the 2004 Bush budget offers no funding for biothreat detection at Post Offices. This after the White House said they foiled a mail attack to the White House last year and days before Ricin was mailed to Senator Bill “Cat Murderer” Frist’s office.

Well, that’s my list. Please add to it, as it is far from all-inclusive.

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The Junk Science of George W. Bush
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Nation

March 8, 2004 Issue

As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth revolved around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church’s most central purpose–the search for existential truths.
Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration–aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals–are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration’s corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact “for partisan political ends.”

I’ve had my own experiences with Torquemada’s modern successors, both personal and related to my work as an environmental lawyer and advocate working for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Waterkeeper Alliance.

At the time of the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001, I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, cater-corner from the World Trade Center and within the official security zone to which access was, afterward, restricted for several months. Upon returning to the office in October my partner, Kevin Madonna, suffered a burning throat, nausea and a headache that was still pounding twenty-four hours after he left the building. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s claims that air quality was safe, Kevin refused to return and we closed the office. Many workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the EPA’s nine press releases between September and December of 2001 reassuring the public about the wholesome air quality downtown. We have since learned that the government was lying to us. An Inspector General’s report released last August revealed that the EPA’s data did not support those assurances and that its press releases were being drafted or doctored by White House officials intent on reopening Wall Street.

On September 13, just two days after the terror attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was “very low” or entirely absent. On September 18 the agency said the air was “safe to breathe.” In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples collected by the EPA before September 18 showed presence of asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among outside studies, one performed by scientists at the University of California, Davis, found particulates at levels never before seen in more than 7,000 similar tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose and throat problems in the months following the attack and that about half still had persistent lung and respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later.

Dan Tishman, whose company was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews to wear respirators but recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected–no doubt relying on the government’s assurances. “The frustrating thing is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health,” he says. “When that role is compromised, people can get hurt.”

I also recall the case of Dr. James Zahn, a nationally respected microbiologist with the Agriculture Department’s research service, who accepted my invitation to speak to an April 2002 conference of more than 1,000 family farm advocates and environmental and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick–and that are resistant to antibiotics–in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these “superbugs” were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their herds. I was shocked when Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under orders from the Agriculture Department in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from the National Pork Producers Council. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study and that he had been forced to cancel more than a dozen public appearances at local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the government in disgust.

Ignoring Bad News

The Bush Administration’s first instinct when it comes to science has been to suppress, discredit or alter facts it doesn’t like. Probably the best-known case is global warming. Over the past two years the Administration has done this to a dozen major government studies on global warming, as well as to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its own efforts to stall action to control industrial emissions. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government’s National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and by scientific teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, and a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies.

The Administration has taken special pains to shield Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, which is part of an industry that has contributed $58 million to Republicans since 2000. Halliburton is the leading practitioner of a process used in extracting oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, in which benzene is injected into underground formations. EPA scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it could contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of federal drinking water standards. A week after reporting their findings to Congressional staff members, however, they revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards. In a letter to Representative Henry Waxman, EPA officials said the change was made based on “industry feedback.”

As a favor to utility and coal industries, America’s largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on children’s health of mercury, finally releasing it in February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children.

The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted “outside” for “inside.” She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her. In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for extinction. According to Kelly, “The morale is very low among scientists here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the Klamath.”

Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard procedure at Interior. “It’s hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the Administration’s politicization of the scientific process,” he said, “its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public.”

Getting the Right Answer

But suppressing or altering science can be a tricky business; the Bush Administration has found it easier at times simply to arrange to get the results it wants. A case in point is the decision in July by the EPA’s regional office overseeing the western Everglades to accept a study financed predominantly by developers, which concludes that wetlands discharge more pollutants than they absorb. There was no peer review or public comment. With its approval, the EPA is giving developers credit for improving water quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf courses and other developments.

The study was financed by the Water Enhancement and Restoration Committee, which was formed primarily by local developers and chaired by Rick Barber, the consultant for a golf course development for which the EPA had denied a permit because it would pollute surrounding waters and destroy wetlands. The study contradicts everything known about wetlands functioning, including a determination by more than twenty-five scientists and managers at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program that, on balance, wetlands do not generate nitrogen pollution. Bruce Boler, a biologist and water-quality specialist working for the EPA office, resigned in protest. Boler says the developers massaged the data to support their theory by evaluating samples collected near roads and bridges, where developments discharge pollutants. “It was like the politics trumped the science,” he told us.

In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a private deal with a pesticide manufacturer to take over federal studies of a pesticide it manufactures. Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in America. First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as a potential carcinogen associated with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government’s “safe” 3 parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs. And this year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found reproductive consequences in humans associated with Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm communities that are 50 percent below normal. Iowa scientists are finding similar results in a current study.

The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening findings not by banning this dangerous chemical, as the European Union has, but by taking the studies away from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving the chemical’s manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta, control over federal research. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a spokesperson for Syngenta, praised without irony the advantages of having the company monitor its own product. “This is one way we can ensure it’s not presenting any risk to the environment.”

In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy, the Bush Administration now plans to systematically turn government science over to private industry by contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profits. The National Park Service is preparing a first phase of contracting reviews, involving about 1,800 positions, including biologists, archeologists and environmental specialists. Later phases may entail replacement of 11,000 employees, more than two-thirds of the service’s permanent work force.

At least federal employees enjoy civil service and whistleblower protection intended to allow them to operate professionally and independently. Private contractors don’t enjoy the same level of protection. “You can shop for the right contractor to give you the kind of result you want,” says Frank Buono, a retired Park Service veteran who now serves on the board of a nonprofit whistleblower protection organization.

As a Last Resort, Fire the Messenger

Most federal employees have gone along with the Bush Administration’s wishes, but a few have tried to stand up for sound science. The results are predictable. When a team of government biologists indicated that the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the Endangered Species Act in managing the flow of the Missouri River, the group was quickly replaced by an industry-friendly panel. (In an unexpected–and fortunate–development, the new panel ultimately declined to adopt the White House’s pro-barge-industry position and upheld the decision to manage the river to protect imperiled species.) Similarly, last April the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory panel that had spent nearly twenty-one months developing rules for stringent regulation of industrial emissions of mercury.

Or consider the case of Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro, members of a team of federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate the collapse of barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic wastes from mountaintop strip-mining. The 300-million-gallon spill was the largest in American history and, according to the EPA, the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States. Black lava-like toxic sludge containing sixty poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking water in seventeen communities. Unlike in other slurry disasters, no one died, but hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with contaminated water.

The investigation had broad implications for the viability of mountaintop mining, which involves literally lopping off mountaintops to get access to the underlying coal. It is a process beloved by coal barons because it practically dispenses with the need for human labor and thus increases industry profits. Spadaro, the nation’s leading expert on slurry spills, recalls, “We were geotechnical engineers determined to find the truth. We simply wanted to get to the heart of the matter–find out what happened and why, and to prevent it from happening again. But all that was thwarted at the top of the agency by Bush appointees who obstructed professionals trying to do their jobs.”

The Bush Administration appointees all had coal industry pedigrees. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (the wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s biggest recipient of industry largesse) appointed Dave Lauriski, a former executive with Energy West Mining, as the new director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which oversaw the investigation. His deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an Anamax Mining alumnus. His other deputy assistant, John Correll, had worked for both Amax and Peabody Coal.

Oppegard, the leader of the federal team, was fired on the day Bush was inaugurated in 2001. All eight members of the team except Spadaro signed off on a whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the others, was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor Department. Last June 4 he was placed on administrative leave–a prelude to getting fired.

Bush Administration officials accuse Spadaro of “abusing his authority” for allowing a handicapped instructor to have free room and board at a training academy he oversees, an arrangement approved by his superiors. An internal report vindicated Spadaro’s criticisms of the investigation, but the Administration is still going after his job. “I’ve been regulating mining since 1966,” Spadaro told me. “This is the most lawless administration I’ve encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners or the people in mining communities. They are without scruples.”

Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Over the past two decades industry and conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science. They distort the truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and global warming. In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the integrity of the scientific process.

Now Congress and this White House have used federal power for the same purpose. Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. The very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward moral relativism are fostering and encouraging the trend toward scientific relativism. The very ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of America’s federal agencies.

The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, “If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster.”

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, is working on a book about President Bush’s environmental policies, Crimes Against Nature, to be published this spring by HarperCollins.

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil
By Kevin Phillips
The Los Angeles Times

February 8th, 2004

Four generations have created an unsavory web of links that could prove an election-year Achilles’ heel for the president.

WASHINGTON - Despite February polls showing President Bush losing his early reelection lead, he’s still the favorite. No modern president running unopposed in his party’s primaries has ever lost in November.

But there may be a key to undoing that precedent. The two Bush presidencies are so closely linked, especially over Iraq, that the 43rd can’t be understood apart from the 41st. Beyond that, for a full portrait of what the Bushes are about, we must return to the family’s emergence on the national scene in the early 20th century.
This four-generation evolution of the Bushes involves multiple links that could become Bush’s election-year Achilles’ heel, if a clever and tough 2004 Democratic opponent can punch and slice at them. Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the clear Democratic front-runner, could be best positioned to do so. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he investigated the Iran-Contra and Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandals, both of which touched George H.W. Bush’s Saudi, Iraqi and Middle Eastern arms-deal entanglements.

Washington lawyer Jack Blum, the ace investigator for Kerry’s subcommittee back then, is said to be advising him now, which could be meaningful. Ironically, the Bush family’s century of involvement in oil, armaments and global intrigue has never been at the center of the national debate since the Bushes starting running for president in 1980.

The reason? Insufficient public knowledge. The only Bush biography published before George H.W. Bush won election in 1988 was a puff job written by a former press secretary, and the biographies of George W. Bush in 2000 barely mentioned his forefathers. Millions of Republicans who have loyally voted for Bushes in three presidential elections simply have no idea. Here are circumstances and biases especially worth noting.

The Bushes and the military-industrial complex: George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush were the dynasty’s founding fathers during the years of and after World War I. Walker, a St. Louis financier, made his mark in corporate reorganizations and war contracts. By 1919, he was enlisted by railroad heir W. Averell Harriman to be president of Wall Street-based WA Harriman, which invested in oil, shipping, aviation and manganese, partly in Russia and Germany, during the 1920s. Sam Bush, the current president’s other great-grandfather, ran an Ohio company, Buckeye Steel Castings, that produced armaments. In 1917, he went to Washington to head the small arms, ammunition and ordnance section of the federal War Industries Board. Both men were present at the emergence of what became the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator and grandfather of the current president, had some German corporate ties at the outbreak of World War II, but the better yardstick of his connections was his directorships of companies involved in U.S. war production. Dresser Industries, for example, produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and made gaseous diffusion pumps for the atomic bomb project. George H.W. Bush later worked for Dresser’s oil-services businesses. Then, as CIA director, vice president and president, one of his priorities was the U.S. weapons trade and secret arms deals with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about how “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” That complex’s recent mega-leap to power came under George H.W. Bush and even more under George W. Bush, with the post-9/11 expansion of the military and creation of the Department of Homeland Security. But armaments and arms deals seem to have been in the Bushes’ blood for nearly a century.

Oil: The Bushes’ ties to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil go back 100 years, when Rockefeller made Buckeye Steel Castings wildly successful by convincing railroads that carried their oil to buy heavy equipment from Buckeye. George H. Walker helped refurbish the Soviet oil industry in the 1920s, and Prescott Bush acquired experience in the international oil business as a 22-year director of Dresser Industries. George H.W. Bush, in turn, worked for Dresser and ran his own offshore oil-drilling business, Zapata Offshore. George W. Bush mostly raised money from investors for oil businesses that failed. Currently, the family’s oil focus is principally in the Middle East.

Enron is another family connection. The company’s Kenneth L. Lay made his first connections with George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s when the latter was working on energy deregulation. When Bush became president in 1989, he gave Lay two prominent international roles: membership on the President’s Export Council and the task of planning for a G-7 summit in Houston. Lay parlayed that exposure into new business overseas and clout with Washington agencies. Family favoritism soon followed. When Bush senior lost the 1992 election, Lay picked up with son George W., first in Texas and then as a top contributor to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Before Enron imploded in late 2001, it had more influence in a new administration than any other corporation in memory.

The intelligence community: Bushes and Walkers have been involved with the intelligence community since World War I. The importance of Sam Bush’s wartime munitions-regulating role was obvious. During the 1920s, when George H. Walker was doing a lot of business in Russia and Germany, he became a director of the American International Corporation, formed during the war for purposes of overseas investment and intelligence-gathering. Prescott Bush’s pre-1941 corporate and banking contacts with Germany, sensationalized on many Internet sites, appear to have been passed along to officials in government and intelligence circles.

George H.W. Bush may have had CIA connections before the agency’s unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. A number of published sources suggest that Zapata Offshore was a CIA front long before he went on to become director of Central Intelligence in 1976. As for George W. Bush, his limited ties are said to have come through investments in, and buyouts of, several of his oil businesses by CIA- and BCCI-connected firms and individuals.

Top 1% economics: Over four generations, the Bush family has been involved with more than 20 securities firms, banks, brokerage houses and investment management firms, ranging from Wall Street giants like Brown Brothers Harriman and E.F. Hutton to small firms like J. Bush & Co. and Riggs Investment Management Corp. This relentless record of handling money for rich people has bred a vocational hauteur. In their eyes, the economic top 1% of Americans are the ones who count. Investors and their inheritors are favored, a good explanation of why George W. Bush has cut taxes on both dividends and estates, where most of the benefit goes to the top 1%. Over the course of George H.W. Bush’s career, he was close to a number of the merger kings and leveraged-buyout specialists of the 1980s who came from Oklahoma and Texas: T. Boone Pickens, Henry Kravis and Hugh Liedtke. “Little guy” economics has almost no niche in the Bush economic worldview.

Debt and deficits: Whenever a Bush is president, private debt and government deficits seem to grow. Middle- and low-income Americans borrow to offset the income squeeze of recessions. The hallmark of Bush economics during both presidencies has been favoritism toward capital over workers. Federal budget deficits have soared because of a combination of upper-bracket tax favors, middle-income job shrinkage, big federal spending to hype election-year economic growth, huge defense outlays and overseas military spending for the wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Imperial hubris costs a lot of money.

Politically, over four generations the Bush past has been prologue. Despite George W. Bush’s new good ol’ boy image, cowboy boots and born-again ties to the religious right, his basic tendencies go in the same directions; oil, crony capitalism, top 1% economics and military-industrial-establishment loyalties, that the previous Bush and Walker generations have traveled. The old biases and loyalties seem ineradicable; so, too, for old grudges, like the two-generation fixation on Saddam Hussein.

The presidency is an old Bush ambition. As early as the 1940s, Barbara Bush talked to friends about becoming first lady. The current president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, told his wife before he retired in 1962 that he wished he’d been president. By 1963, George W. Bush, a student at Andover Academy, was talking about his own father’s desire to be president.

In short, the word “dynasty” fits the Bushes all too well. They have had plenty of time to sort out their ambitions, loyalties and intentions. They know what they’re in politics for, although this year may pose a new problem. The American people are also starting to find out.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush’s Missing Year
By Eric Boehlert
Salon.com

February 5th, 2004

In 1972, George W. Bush dropped out of his National Guard service and later lied about it. With the media finally paying attention, will he now come clean?

In 1972, George W. Bush simply walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas Air National Guard. He skipped required weekend drill sessions for many months, probably for more than a year, and did not take a mandatory annual physical exam, which resulted in his being grounded. Nonetheless, Bush, the son of a well-connected Texas congressman, received an honorable discharge.
If an Air National guardsman today vanished for a year, military attorneys say that guardsman would be transferred to active duty or, more likely, kicked out of the service, probably with a less-than-honorable discharge. They suggest the penalty would be especially swift if the absent-without-leave guardsman were a fully trained pilot, as Bush was.

Bush’s National Guard record, long ignored by the media, has surfaced with a vengeance. If the topic continues to rage, and if the media presses him, Bush may finally be forced to release his full military records, which could reveal the truth. By refusing to make all those records public, Bush has until now broken with a long-standing tradition of U.S. presidential candidates.

Democrats have seized on the story of Bush’s “missing year,” which was first raised in a 2000 Boston Globe article. This week Democratic front-runner Sen. John Kerry called on Bush to give a fuller explanation of his service record. That brought an outraged response from Bush-Cheney ‘04 chairman Marc Racicot, who denounced Kerry’s request as a “slanderous attack” and “character assassination.” White House spokesman Scott McClellan also tried to slam the door on the subject, declaiming that Democratic questions about Bush’s military service “have no place in politics and everyone should condemn them.”

In a sign that the Bush team is taking the issue seriously, on Wednesday Bush’s campaign spokesman questioned the integrity of the retired Guard commander who claims Bush failed to show for duty in 1972, citing the commander’s recent donation to a Democratic candidate for president.

Republicans clearly want to quarantine the issue of Bush’s service and have it labeled as outside the bounds of acceptable public discourse. With good reason: If the story takes root it could do real damage to Bush’s reelection run, which is anchored on his image as a trusted leader in America’s war on terrorism. Trying to make the subject go away could prove difficult, though. “It’s a booby trap that’s out there ticking for Bush,” warns retired U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth. “His opponents are going to keep turning this screw until something gives.”

Right now, the network news is covering the political jousting. It remains unclear, however, whether mainstream journalists will take the time to examine Bush’s military record and ask the president why, after receiving pilot training that cost 1970s taxpayers nearly $1 million, he took it upon himself to decide he was finished with his military requirements nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.

Bush’s infrequent responses to questions on the issue have been by turns false, misleading and contradictory. His memory has also proved to be highly unreliable: During 2000, Bush variously could not remember which weekends he served during the year in question, where he served, under whose command, or what his duties were.

The story emerged in 2000 when the Boston Globe’s Walter Robinson, after combing through 160 pages of military documents and interviewing Bush’s former commanders, reported that Bush’s flying career came to an abrupt and unexplained end in the spring of 1972 when he asked for, and was inexplicably granted, a transfer to a paper-pushing Guard unit in Alabama. During this time Bush worked on the Senate campaign of a friend of his father’s. With his six-year Guard commitment, Bush was obligated to serve through 1973. But according to his own discharge papers, there is no record that he did any training after May 1972. Indeed, there is no record that Bush performed any Guard service in Alabama at all. In 2000, a group of veterans offered a $3,500 reward for anyone who could confirm Bush’s Alabama Guard service. Of the estimated 600 to 700 Guardsmen who were in Bush’s unit, not a single person came forward.

In 1973 Bush returned to his Houston Guard unit, but in May of that year his commanders could not complete his annual officer effectiveness rating report because, they wrote, “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of the report.” Based on those records, as well as interviews with Texas Air National guardsmen, the Globe raised serious questions as to whether Bush ever reported for duty at all during 1973.

Throughout the 2000 campaign Bush aides never forcefully questioned the Globe’s account. Instead, they searched for military documents that would support Bush’s claim that he did indeed attend drill duties during the year in question. His aides eventually uncovered one piece of paper that seemed to bolster their case that he had attended a drill in late 1972, but the document was torn and did not have Bush’s full name on it.

Today, the White House says that although Bush did miss some weekend drills, he eventually made them up, and more importantly he received an honorable discharge. Bush supporters routinely cite the president’s honorable discharge as the ultimate proof that there was nothing unbecoming about his military service.

But experts say that citation does not wipe away the questions. “An honorable discharge does not indicate a flawless record,” says Grant Lattin, a military law attorney in Washington and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who served as a judge advocate, or JAG officer. “Somebody could have missed a year’s worth of Guard drills and still end up with an honorable discharge.” That’s because of the extraordinary leeway local commanders within the Guard are given over these types of issues. Lattin notes that the Guard “is obviously very political, even more so than other military institutions, and is subject to political influence.”

For failing to attend required monthly drill sessions and refusing to take a physical, 1st Lt. Bush just as easily could have been moved to active duty, given a less-than-honorable discharge, or had his flying rights permanently revoked, says Eugene Fidell, a leading Washington expert on military law. “For a fully trained pilot, he was assigned to a nothing job [in Alabama], and the available records indicate he never performed that job.”

In the Guard today, as a general rule, “if someone doesn’t show up for drill duty, doesn’t show up, and doesn’t show up, they’ll be separated from their unit and given an other-than-honorable discharge” most likely noting “unsatisfactory participation,” says D.C. military lawyer David Sheldon, who served in the Navy and represented officers before the Court of Military Appeals.

Meanwhile, recent questions have surfaced not only about Bush’s military service, but his official records. “I think some documents were taken out” of his military file, the Boston Globe’s Robinson tells Salon. “And there’s at least one document that appears to have been inserted into his record in early 2000.” That document — the aforementioned torn page that did not have Bush’s full name on it — plays a central role in the story.

“His records have clearly been cleaned up,” says author James Moore, whose upcoming book, “Bush’s War for Re-election,” will examine the issue of Bush’s military service in great detail. Moore says as far back as 1994, when Bush first ran for governor of Texas, his political aides “began contacting commanders and roommates and people who would spin and cover up his Guard record. And when my book comes out, people will be on the record testifying to that fact: witnesses who helped clean up Bush’s military file.”

If Bush wanted to resolve the questions about his National Guard service, he could do so very easily. If he simply agreed to release the contents of his military personnel records jacket, the Guard could make public all his discharge papers, including pay records and total retirement points, which experts say would shed the best light on where Bush was, or was not, during the time in question between 1972 and 1973. (Many of Bush’s documents are available through Freedom of Information requests, but certain items deemed personal or private cannot be released without Bush’s permission.)

Releasing military records has become a time-honored tradition of presidential campaigns. During the 1992 presidential election, Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, called on his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, to make public all personal documents relating his draft status during the Vietnam War, including any correspondences with “Clinton’s draft board, the Selective Service System, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, the United States departments of State and Justice, any U.S. foreign embassy or consulate.” That, according to a Bush-Quayle Oct. 15, 1992, press release.

Calls to the White House seeking comment on if and when the president’s full military records will be released were not returned.

The spark that reignited this issue came when ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, co-moderating a Democratic debate on Jan. 22, asked retired Gen. Wesley Clark why he did not repudiate comments made by his supporter, filmmaker Michael Moore, who publicly labeled Bush a “deserter.” Jennings editorialized, “Now that’s a reckless charge not supported by the facts.”

Republican pundits agreed. Bill Bennett, a director of Empower America, told Fox News that Clark’s “failure to distance himself, repudiate, absolutely condemn Michael Moore’s description of the president as a deserter was a terrible thing.”

Most informed observers agree that Moore’s choice of words was sloppy and inaccurate. “Deserter” is a criminal term: It refers to a military personnel who abandons his post with no intention of ever returning. But Democrats have taken hold of the broader issue of whether Bush was AWOL. Their willingness to bring up a previously off-limits subject reflects their sense that Bush’s aura of invincibility has worn off and the confidence imparted by Kerry’s resurgent campaign. Democrats feel Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, has the personal history to question Bush’s service.

But the issue is also ripe because of Bush’s own reelection strategy. By donning a fighter flight suit and landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln fora photo-op in May 2003, he has tried to paint himself as a seasoned military leader in the United States’ war on terrorism. With newfound aggressiveness, Democrats are trying to puncture that aura by hammering away on the fact that Bush’s own military record fails to back it up.

That’s what Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe did this Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week,” when he referred to Bush as “a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard.” That brought a quick rebuttal from South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who told CNN it was wrong for Democrats to be “taking shots at [Bush] for being a guardsman.”

In similar fashion, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claimed Tuesday night that by bringing up Bush’s National Guard service, the Democrats are impugning the patriotism of guardsmen, implying that their contributions are less worthy than those who serve in the military. As those disingenuous comments suggest, Republicans are trying to change the subject, falsely framing the debate as a repeat of the National Guard controversy that dogged Vice President Dan Quayle during the 1988 presidential campaign.

It’s easy to see why they’re pursuing this strategy. If the story were simply about how Bush used his family connections to land a slot in the Texas Air National Guard (and all indications are he did just that ), it wouldn’t matter much. But the real story is not how Bush got into the Guard. It’s how he got out.

Until the last two days the mainstream media has routinely ignored or downplayed the issue. Slate columnist Michael Kinsley took euphemism to new heights when he wrote in a Dec. 5 column that Bush was “lackadaisical” about fulfilling his Guard requirement. On Jan. 17, the Associated Press, recapping the “deserter” controversy, did Bush a favor, erroneously reporting that his absent-without-leave time lasted just three months in 1972, instead of the 12-18 months actually in question. And on Feb. 1, ABC News, suggesting Democrats might turn off voters by attacking Bush’s military service, reported Bush simply “missed some weekends of training.” None of those descriptions come anywhere near describing the established facts at the center of the controversy.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. The press, apparently deeming the National Guard story unworthy, paid more attention to the debate over Moore’s “deserter” comment than they did to the actual story of Bush’s unexplained absence when it came out during the 2000 campaign.

While co-moderating the Democratic debate, ABC News’ Jennings was sure he knew the facts about Bush’s military record. But as the Daily Howler noted, a search of the LexisNexis electronic database indicates that ABC’s “World News Tonight,” hosted by Jennings, never once during the 2000 campaign ran a report about the questions surrounding Bush’s military record. Asked if ignoring the story was a mistake, and whether ABC News planned to pursue it in 2004, a network spokeswoman told Salon, “We continue to examine the records of all the candidates running for president, including President Bush. If and when we have a story about one of the candidates, we’ll report it to our audience.”

ABC was not alone in turning away from the story in 2000. CBS News did the same thing, and so did NBC News. But it was the New York Times, and the way the paper of record avoided the issue of Bush’s no-show military service, that stands out as the most unusual. To this day, the Times has never reported that in 1972 the Texas Air National Guard grounded Bush for failing to take a required physical exam. Nor has the paper ever reported that neither Bush nor his aides can point to a single person who saw Bush, the hard-to-miss son of a congressman and U.S. ambassador, perform any active duty requirements during the final 18 months of his service. Instead, the Times served up stories that failed to delve deep into the issue.

The Boston Globe story broke on May 23, 2000. The next day Bush answered reporters’ questions on the campaign trail, defending his military record. His comments were covered by the Times Union (of Albany, N.Y.), the Columbus Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Houston Chronicle, among others, which all considered the story newsworthy. Not the Times: The paper ignored the fact Bush was forced to respond to allegations that he’d been AWOL during his Guard service.

Throughout the 2000 campaign, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote a series of biographical dispatches about Bush’s personal history. On July 11, he wrote about Bush’s post-college years, including his National Guard service, but no mention was made of the controversy surrounding Bush’s missing year.

The Times finally addressed the issue on July 22, two months after the Globe exposé was published. The Times article, written by Jo Thomas, focused on Bush’s post-Yale years in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In a section on the National Guard controversy, the Times reported that Bush’s commanding officer had told the Boston Globe that Bush had never showed up, quoted Bush as insisting that he had, and noted that “Emily Marks, who worked in the Blount campaign and dated Mr. Bush, said she recalls that he returned to Montgomery after the election to serve with the Air National Guard.” But then the Times went on to write, “National Guard records provided by the Guard and by the Bush campaign indicate he did serve on Nov. 29, 1972, after the election. These records also show a gap in service from that time to the previous May. Mr. Bush says he made up for the lost time in subsequent months, and guard records show he received credit for having performed all the required service.”

On Oct. 31, the Boston Globe published another damning story, suggesting Bush failed to serve — in fact, did not even show up for duty– during the final 18 months of his commitment. The Times’ Thomas quickly wrote, “A review of records by The New York Times indicated that some of those concerns [about Bush’s absence] may be unfounded.” Contradicting the Globe’s account of Bush war service, the paper reported that Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett “pointed to a document in Mr. Bush’s military records that showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May.”

The document cited by the Times is apparently the mysterious torn paper that appeared in Bush’s records in 2000. That document, a “Statement of Points Earned,” tracks when guardsmen have served, and whether they have fulfilled their annual duty. It contains references to “29″ and “14″ and other numbers whose meaning is not clear. The Times did not inform its readers that the document is badly torn, undated, and unsigned; does not have Bush’s name on it (just a wayward “W”); and has a redacted Social Security number.

“The Times got spun by Dan Bartlett,” Robinson at the Globe told Salon. He and others note that if the documents provided by the Bush campaign proved he did Guard duty upon returning to Houston in January and April of 1973, then why, on Bush’s annual effectiveness report signed by two superiors, did it say, “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of the report,” which covered the dates between May 1, 1972, and April 30, 1973?

“I had a lot of arguments with Dan Bartlett and never got spun by him,” says Thomas, now an assistant chancellor for public affairs at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. “But if he gave me some documents that proved his point, I’m not going to ignore them.” She added, “The Times carried no brief for or against Bush.”

Nonetheless, the author James Moore says it was those two Times stories, which seemed to back up Bush’s sketchy account of his Guard service, that effectively stopped other reporters from pursuing the story.

Here are the known facts of that story: Following his graduation from Yale University in 1968, with the Vietnam War raging, Bush vaulted to the top of a 500-person waiting list to land a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard. Then, despite having no aviation or ROTC experience, he was approved for an automatic commission as a second lieutenant and assignment to flight school.

By every indication, Bush’s service between 1970 and 1972 as a fully trained pilot in the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron near Houston was commendable. But then came the spring of 1972 — and Bush simply vanished.

Contrary to the official campaign biography that appeared on the Bush Web site during 2000, which stated he flew fighter planes until his discharge in late 1973, Bush flew for the last time ever in April 1972. In May, he moved to Alabama to help out in the Senate campaign of Winton Blount, a friend of Bush’s father. Bush asked to be transferred to an Alabama Air National Guard unit where he could do “equivalent training.” Bush asked to be transferred to a postal unit for paper-pushing duties — and remarkably, his Houston commanders signed off on the request. But officials at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver eventually overruled the request, pointing out the obvious: Doing paperwork in a postal unit did not qualify as “equivalent training” for a fully trained pilot.

The situation remained unresolved for months. During that time, Bush was still obligated to attend drill sessions with his regular unit near Houston. Guard records indicate he did not.

In September 1972, Bush won approval to do temporary training at the 187th Squadron in Montgomery. But the unit’s commander, retired Brig. Gen. William Turnipseed, told the Boston Globe he was “dead certain” Bush never showed. “Had he reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not. I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.”

On Wednesday, Bush-Cheney ‘04 spokesman Terry Holt told Salon that Turnipseed recently donated $500 to Sen. John Edwards’ campaign. Holt questioned whether the motives behind Turnipseed’s comments regarding Bush’s service were “pure,” or whether he’s part of a “political attack.” Turnipseed could not be reached for comment.

In any case, as already noted, there is no official National Guard record of Bush’s ever serving in Alabama, and not a single guardsman who served at that time has ever come forward and corroborated that Bush was there.

Meanwhile, in July of that summer, Bush’s “failure to accomplish” his mandatory annual physical (that is, to take it) forced the Guard to ground him.

Following Blount’s election loss in November, Bush returned to Houston. But he did not return to his Guard duties, at least according to his commanding officers. In May 1973, his two superior officers at Ellington Air Force Base noted on Bush’s evaluation that he had not been seen during the previous year. In the comments section, Lt. Col. William Harris Jr. wrote that Bush “cleared this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama.” The problem is, Bush never reported for duty there, or anywhere else in Alabama. According to his discharge papers, Bush took the whole year off instead.

Bush was finally recorded as having crammed in 36 active-duty credits during May, June and July 1973, thereby meeting his minimal requirement. But as the Boston Globe pointed out, nobody connected with the Texas unit recalls seeing Bush during his cram sessions, leading to suspicions that Bush was given credits for active duty he did not perform.

The suspicion stems in part from the incorrect, and inconsistent, answers that Bush and his spokesmen have given to the question of why, after going through extraordinarily rigorous flight training, he simply walked away from flying. The day the Globe story appeared on May 23, 2000, Bush explained to reporters that when he returned to Houston in 1973, his old fighter plane was being phased out. “There was a conscious decision not to retrain me in an airplane,” he said, suggesting it was the Texas Air National Guard’s decision to end his flying career. That’s not true. The plane to which Bush was referring, the F-102, was phased out during the 1970s, but it was still being used in 1973. Bush did not tell reporters about his failed physical exam and how that resulted in his being grounded.

That misleading answer about Bush’s Guard service was just one of many the candidate and his aides gave during the campaign. For instance, a campaign official told Cox News reporters in July 1999 that Bush’s transfer to the Alabama Guard unit was for the same flying job he held in Texas. That’s false. There was no flying involved at either Alabama unit (not that Bush ever reported to them, according to Guard records), and without passing a physical, Bush couldn’t fly anyway.

Also in July 1999, Bush’s then-spokeswoman Karen Hughes told the Associated Press it was accurate for Bush to suggest, as he’d done in a previous campaign, that he served “in the U.S. Air Force,” when in fact he served in the Air National Guard.

Asked in 2000 why Bush failed to take his physical in July 1972, the campaign gave two different explanations. The first was that Bush was (supposedly) serving in Alabama and his personal physician was in Texas, so he couldn’t get a physical. That’s false. By military regulations, Bush could not have received a military physical from his personal physician, only from an Air Force flight surgeon, and there were several assigned to nearby Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. The other explanation was that because Bush was no longer flying, he didn’t need to take a physical. But that simply highlights the extraordinary nature of Bush’s service and the peculiar notion that he took it upon himself to decide that a) he was no longer a pilot and b) he didn’t have to take a physical.

Early in September 1973, Bush submitted a request to effectively end any requirements to attend monthly drills. Despite Bush’s record, the request was approved. He was given an honorable discharge, and that fall he enrolled in Harvard Business School.

One of the obvious questions raised by Bush’s missing year is why he was never brought up on any disciplinary charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and why he was given an honorable discharge. (It’s unlikely Bush could have run for president if he’d been tainted with anything less than an honorable discharge from the military.)

But the issue is not that black and white. “An honorable discharge usually means the person has not committed any misconduct,” says retired JAG officer Lattin. “He may have failed to honor his obligation, but he hasn’t committed a criminal act. And that’s an important distinction.”

It’s important, because based on Lattin’s interpretation of the military law, a guardsman on non-active duty who fails to show up for his monthly drill sessions, as Bush did, is not subject to the UCMJ. The UCMJ, Lattin says, applies only to active-duty servicemen. And while guardsmen who report for weekend duty are covered for those 48 hours by the UCMJ’s unique codes (regarding desertion, being AWOL, etc.), a non-active guardsman who refuses to report for duty in the first place cannot be covered by the UCMJ. Instead, an absent-without-leave guardsman is subject to the state’s military codes of justice, which mirror the UCMJ.

But even then, says Lattin, cases of guardsmen who fail to attend drill sessions are rarely dealt with under the military’s criminal code, but rather administratively, which is less burdensome. Administrative options include transferring the solider to active duty, or separating him from his unit while beginning dismissal procedures that would likely — although not always — result in a less than, or other than, honorable discharge. Also in Bush’s case, he could have been permanently stripped of his flight privileges.

So why was no administrative action taken against Bush during his missing year or more? “It could have been mere inefficiency, or a reluctance to create controversy with the son of an important federal official,” says Fidell, the military law expert. “Observers of the Guard at that time have said it did seem to be an entity in which connections might be helpful.”

Lattin is more blunt. “The National Guard is extremely political in the sense of who you know,” he says. “And it’s true to this very day. One person is handled very strictly and the next person is not. If George Bush Jr. is in your unit, you’re going to bend over backward not to offend that family. It all comes down to who you know.”

Lattin stresses that the Bush episode, and the Guard’s failure to take any administrative actions against him, have to be viewed in context of the early ’70s. With the Vietnam War beginning to wind down and the U.S. military battling endemic low morale, the Pentagon showed little interest in chasing after absent-without-leave guardsmen. “It was too hard and there were too many of them,” says Lattin. “There was a ‘who cares’ attitude. Commanders didn’t want to deal with them. And they knew they’d stir up a hornet’s nest, especially if one of the [missing guardsmen] was named George Bush.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush’s Military Record Reveals Grounding and Absence for Two Full Years
By Robert A. Rogers
(Ret. 1st Lt. Mission Pilot)

October 4, 2000

With two years left in his six-year obligation to the Texas Air National Guard, 1st Lt. George W. Bush was mysteriously suspended from flight - and never again reported for a single day of duty.

Robert A. Rogers is a self-employed Northern Virginia businessman and an Air National Guard veteran of eleven years, 1954 through 1965. After this he had a 30-year career in the commercial airline industry, including independent consulting with various US Government civilian agencies and military services.
Major Findings

“I think that people need to be held responsible for the actions they take in life. I think that’s part of the need for a cultural change. We need to say that each of us needs to be responsible for what we do.” - George W. Bush in the first Presidential debate, October 3, 2000

‘’I did the duty necessary … That’s why I was honorably discharged” - George W. Bush, May 23, 2000

From the beginning of his Presidential campaign, George W. Bush has forcefully and repeatedly insisted that he faithfully fulfilled all his military obligations by serving his time as a member of the Texas Air National Guard.

But the first independent investigation of Bush’s military record by a former Air National Guard pilot has revealed the following:

READ THE COMPLETE REPORT HERE:
http://democrats.com/display.cfm?id=154

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Trip With Cheney Puts Ethics Spotlight on Scalia
By David G. Savage
The Los Angeles Times

Saturday 17 January 2004

Friends hunt ducks together, even as the justice is set to hear the vice president’s case.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck hunting together at a private camp in southern Louisiana just three weeks after the court agreed to take up the vice president’s appeal in lawsuits over his handling of the administration’s energy task force.
While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts about Scalia’s ability to judge the case impartially.

But Scalia rejected that concern Friday, saying, “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned.”

Federal law says “any justice or judge shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned.” For nearly three years, Cheney has been fighting demands that he reveal whether he met with energy industry officials, including Kenneth L. Lay when he was chairman of Enron, while he was formulating the president’s energy policy.

A lower court ruled that Cheney must turn over documents detailing who met with his task force, but on Dec. 15, the high court announced it would hear his appeal. The justices are due to hear arguments in April in the case of “in re Richard B. Cheney.”

In a written response to an inquiry from the Times about the hunting trip, Scalia said: “Cheney was indeed among the party of about nine who hunted from the camp. Social contacts with high-level executive officials (including cabinet officers) have never been thought improper for judges who may have before them cases in which those people are involved in their official capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity. For example, Supreme Court Justices are regularly invited to dine at the White House, whether or not a suit seeking to compel or prevent certain presidential action is pending.”

Cheney does not face a personal penalty in the pending lawsuits. He could not be forced to pay damages, for example.

But the suits are not routine disputes about the powers of Cheney’s office. Rather, the plaintiffs, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, contend that Cheney and his staff violated an open-government measure known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act by meeting behind closed doors with outside lobbyists for the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor, said Scalia should have skipped going hunting with Cheney this year.

“A judge may have a friendship with a lawyer, and that’s fine. But if the lawyer has a case before the judge, they don’t socialize until it’s over. That shows a proper respect for maintaining the public’s confidence in the integrity of the process,” said Gillers, who is an expert on legal ethics. “I think Justice Scalia should have been cognizant of that and avoided contact with the vice president until this was over. And this is not like a dinner with 25 or 30 people. This is a hunting trip where you are together for a few days.”

The pair arrived Jan. 5 on Gulfstream jets and were guests of Wallace Carline, the owner of Diamond Services Corp., an oil services company in Amelia, La. The Associated Press in Morgan City, La., reported the trip on the day the vice president and his entourage departed.

“They asked us not to bring cameras out there,” said Sheriff David Naquin, who serves St. Mary Parish, about 90 miles southwest of New Orleans, referring to the group’s request for privacy. “The vice president and the justice were there for a relaxing trip, so we backed off.”

While the local police were told about Cheney’s trip shortly before his arrival, they were told to keep it a secret, Naquin said.

“The justice had been here several times before. I’m kind of sorry Cheney picked that week because it was a poor shooting week,” Naquin said. “There weren’t many ducks here, which is unusual for this time of the year.”

Scalia agreed with the sheriff’s assessment.

“The duck hunting was lousy. Our host said that in thirty-five years of duck hunting on this lease, he had never seen so few ducks,” the justice said in his written response to the Times. “I did come back with a few ducks, which tasted swell.”

In October, Justice Scalia announced he would not participate in the court’s handling of a case involving the Pledge of Allegiance; that case is due to be heard in March. It stems from a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling two years ago that declared unconstitutional the use of the words “under God” in the Pledge that is recited daily by millions of schoolchildren. These words were added to the Pledge by Congress in 1954, and they amount to an official government promotion of religion, the appeals court said.

Last year, Justice Scalia appeared to criticize that ruling in a speech at a Religious Freedom Day event in Fredericksburg, Va. “We could eliminate ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance,” he said. “That could be democratically done.”

But this is contrary to the wishes of most Americans, and it should not be done by judges or courts, he added.

The California school district that was on the losing end in the Pledge case appealed to the Supreme Court last summer.

Its lawyers urged the justices to restore the use of the words “under God.”

While the appeal was pending, the Sacramento-area atheist who won the ruling in the 9th Circuit filed a motion suggesting Scalia withdraw from the case. He cited news account of Scalia’s speech and the federal law mandating disqualifications whenever the judge’s impartiality “might reasonably be questioned.” When the court announced it would hear the case, Scalia also announced he would not participate.

Steven Lubet, who teaches judicial ethics at Northwestern University Law School, said he was not convinced that Scalia must withdraw from the Cheney case but said the trip raised a number of questions.

“It’s not clear this requires disqualification, but there are not separate rules for longtime friends,” he said. “This is not like a lawyer going on a fishing trip with a judge. A lawyer is one step removed. Cheney is the litigant in this case. The question is whether the justice’s hunting partner did something wrong. And the whole purpose of these rules is to ensure the appearance of impartiality in regard to the litigants before the court.”

The code of conduct for federal judges sets guidelines for members of the judiciary, but it does not set clear-cut rules. A judge should “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary,” it says. “A judge should not allow family, social or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgments,” it says. Nor should a judge “permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge.”

In the lower courts, litigants may ask a judge to step aside. And if the request is refused, they may appeal to a higher court.

At the Supreme Court, the justices decide for themselves whether to step aside. On occasion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has withdrawn from business cases because she owns stock in one of the companies.

The justices have been reluctant to withdraw from a case simply because a former clerk is handling the dispute, or their son or daughter works at a law firm participating in the case. Last year, for example, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said he did not see a need to withdraw from a pending appeal in the Microsoft antitrust case simply because his son, a lawyer, was working on a related case.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Cheney, Scalia Socialized While Supreme Court Considered Case
Associated Press
By Jonathan D. Salant

January 18th, 2004

Washington - Government watchdogs are raising concerns about a potential conflict of interest for Justice Antonin Scalia because he had dinner and went on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney while the Supreme Court was involved in a case about the vice president’s energy task force.
Scalia and Cheney, longtime friends, had dinner at a restaurant on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in November, two months after the Bush administration asked the justice to overrule a lower court’s decision requiring the White House to identify task force members.

The men went duck hunting in Louisiana this month, not long after the court agreed to hear the case.

Scalia says there is no reason to question his ability to judge the case fairly. Cheney’s office referred questions about the propriety of the social encounters to the court. Watchdogs said Scalia and Cheney should have kept their distance until the court had ruled. “It gives the appearance of a tainted process where decisions are not made on the merits where you have judges fraternizing with people before the court,” said Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity.

Roga Kersh, a Syracuse University political science professor, said Scalia should withdraw from the case. He said questions remain about the court’s evenhandedness in the aftermath of its decision to stop the Florida recount, which gave the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. “There’s the adage of where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Kersh said.

The administration is resisting efforts by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, and the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, to make public the names of those on the task force.

“It certainly raises questions about the appearance of impropriety, which is the standard that judges are held to,” said David Bookbinder, the Sierra Club’s Washington legal director.

The groups contend that industry executives, including former Enron chairman Ken Lay, helped shape the administration’s energy policy.

Scalia, in a written statement to the Los Angeles Times for its story Saturday on the duck hunting trip, said: “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Sought “Way” To Invade Iraq?
By CBS News
Sunday 11 January 2004

Iraq War Planned Pre-9/11?

A year ago, Paul O’Neill was fired from his job as George Bush’s Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president’s policy on tax cuts.

Now, O’Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run.
Entitled “The Price of Loyalty,” the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.

But the main source of the book was Paul O’Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.

Paul O’Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.

Will this be seen as a “kiss-and-tell” book?

“I’ve come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I’m sure somebody will say all of that and more,” says O’Neill, who was George Bush’s top economic policy official.

In the book, O’Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection,” forcing top officials to act “on little more than hunches about what the president might think.”

This is what O’Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening. As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.”

He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn’t his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.

O’Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book’s author Ron Suskind, and he adds that he’s taking no money for his part in the book.

Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including several cabinet members.

O’Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration; Donald Rumsfeld - warned O’Neill not to do this book.

Was it a warning, or a threat?

“I don’t think so. I think it was the White House concerned,” says Suskind. “Understandably, because O’Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, ‘This could really be the one moment where things are revealed.’”

Not only did O’Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.

“Everything’s there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten “thank you” notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that’s sensitive,” says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. “You don’t get higher than that.”

And what happened at President Bush’s very first National Security Council meeting is one of O’Neill’s most startling revelations.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

As treasury secretary, O’Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as “Why Saddam?” and “Why now?” were never asked.

“It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’” says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’” adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in Jan. and Feb. of 2001.

Based on his interviews with O’Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth.

He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts,” which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.

“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”

During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.”

“The thing that’s most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,’” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.

But O’Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O’Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.’ O’Neill is speechless.”

“It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation’s resources to improve the condition of our society,” says O’Neill. “And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.”

Did he think it was irresponsible? “Well, it’s for sure not what I would have done,” says O’Neill.

The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of “a praetorian guard that encircled the president” to block out contrary views. “This is the way Dick likes it,” says O’Neill.

Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O’Neill. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control.

Twice during stock market meltdowns, O’Neill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono.

“Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,” says Suskind. “He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, ‘You know, you’re getting quite a cult following.’ And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest.”

Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at O’Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.

The two men were never close. And O’Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling him “The Big O.” He thought the president’s habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for O’Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.

“It’s a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there,” says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.

He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.

“He asks, ‘Haven’t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut’s gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.

“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’ Now, his advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they’re the entrepreneurs. That’s the standard response. And the president kind of goes, ‘OK.’ That’s their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ‘Well, shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle, won’t people be able to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?’”

But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.

“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says Suskind. “Don’t waver.”

In the end, the president didn’t. And nine days after that meeting in which O’Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.

With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O’Neill maintains he was in the right.

But look at the economy today.

“Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific,” says O’Neill. “I think the tax cut made a difference. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts.”

While in the book O’Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.

“Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”

“You’re giving me the impression that you’re just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And they’re going to say, I predict, you know, it’s sour grapes. He’s getting back because he was fired.’ “I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they’ll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.

Is he prepared for it?

“Well, I don’t think I need to be because I can’t imagine that I’m going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said “The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he’ll continue to do.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Spotlight Falls On Neil Bush’s Share Dealing
By David Rennie
Telegraph UK

Saturday 3 January 2004

Neil Bush, the scandal-struck younger brother of President George W Bush, is under the spotlight once more, after it emerged that he made more than £100,000 in a single day, buying and selling shares in an obscure company where he had been a consultant.
Mr Bush’s day saw him buy and sell a tranche of shares in the tiny Kopin Corp of Massachusetts on the day it announced good news about an Asian client, sending its share price rocketing.

Mr Bush denied any wrongdoing, saying he had been following a recommendation from his financial adviser.

“Any increase in the price of the stock on that day was purely coincidental, meaning that I did not have any improper information,” he said. “My timing on this transaction was very fortunate.”

In all, Mr Bush made profits of nearly £500,000 trading the shares, using options he was given after acting as broker between Kopin and an Asian firm. However, he noted that he later lost £170,000 on the stock after the hi-tech sector crashed.

Mr Bush, the third of five children of George Bush Snr, has endured several business failures, sweetened by a string of more lucrative deals, many brokered by wealthy friends and admirers of the family.

He is best known for his term as a board member of the Silverado Savings and Loan Corporation, whose collapse in 1988 cost taxpayers nearly £600 million.

Mr Bush was reprimanded by federal regulators for “multiple conflicts of interest”, involving two Denver property tycoons lent large sums by Silverado.

They had lent Mr Bush large sums of money a few years earlier, including £60,000 for him to gamble on the commodities market, with no need to pay it back unless he made money.

More recently, in 2002, Mr Bush became a consultant to Grace Semiconductor, a Shanghai-based company linked to Jiang Mianheng, the shadowy son of China’s ex-president Jiang Zemin. Mr Bush stands to be paid £1.2 million in shares over five years, plus £6,000 for every board meeting he attends.

Lawyers for his wife, Sharon, with whom he is fighting a messy divorce battle, last year challenged Mr Bush about his Asian business dealings, noting that he had “absolutely no educational background in semiconductors”.

“That’s correct,” Mr Bush replied.

The same legal deposition uncovered the saga of Mr Bush’s Asian business trips, during which he would answer knocks at his hotel room door, to find a beautiful woman eager to have sex with him, free of charge.

“Mr Bush,” the transcript reads at one point. “You have to admit that it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.”

“It was very unusual,” Mr Bush replied, adding that he could not remember exactly how many times it had taken place.

Mr Bush is also co-chairman of Crest Investment, a firm which pays him £35,000 a year for “miscellaneous” duties such as “answering phone calls” when Jamal Daniel, the other co-chairman, “called and asked for advice”, in Mr Bush’s words.

Mr Bush, whose wife says he asked for a divorce by email, after 22 years of marriage and three children, denies abusing his connections. “I have never used my family name to ‘cash in’,” he recently told The Washington Post.

“Unfortunately, such ridiculous charges come with the territory of coming from a famous and wealthy family.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Baker Takes the Loaf: The President’s Business Partner Slices Up Iraq
By Greg Palast
TomPaine.com

December 9, 2003

Well, ho ho ho! It’s an early Christmas for James Baker III.

All year the elves at his law firm, Baker Botts of Texas, have been working day and night to prevent the families of the victims of the September 11 attack from seeking information from Saudi Arabia on the Kingdom’s funding of Al Qaeda fronts.
It’s tough work, but this week came the payoff when President Bush appointed Baker, the firm’s senior partner, to “restructure” the debts of the nation of Iraq.

And who will net the big bucks under Jim Baker’s plan? Answer: his client, Saudi Arabia, which claims $30.7 billion due from Iraq plus $12 billion in reparations from the First Gulf war.

PUPPET STRINGS

Let’s ponder what’s going on here.

We are talking about something called “sovereign debt.” And unless George Bush has finally ‘fessed up and named himself Pasha of Iraq, he is not their sovereign. Mr. Bush has no authority to seize control of that nation’s assets nor its debts.

But our President is not going to let something as trivial as international law stand in the way of a quick buck for Mr. Baker. To get around the wee issue that Bush has no legal authority to mess with Iraq’s debt, the White House has crafted a neat little subterfuge. The official press release says the President has not appointed Mr. Baker. Rather Mr. Bush is “responding to a request from the Iraqi Governing Council.” That is, Bush is acting on the authority of the puppet government he imposed on Iraqis at gunpoint.

I will grant the Iraqi ‘government’ has some knowledge of international finance; its key member, Ahmed Chalabi, is a convicted bank swindler.

The Bush team must see the other advantage in having the rump rulers of Iraq pretend to choose Mr. Baker; the US Senate will not have to review or confirm the appointment. If you remember, Henry Kissinger ran away from the September 11 commission with his consulting firm tucked between his legs after the Senate demanded he reveal his client list. In the case of Jim Baker, who will be acting as a de facto US Treasury secretary for international affairs, our elected Congress will have no chance to ask him who is paying his firm.. nor even require him to get off conflicting payrolls.

This takes the Bush administration’ Conflicts-R-Us appointments process to a new low.

Or maybe there’s no conflict at all. If you see Jim Baker’s new job as working not to protect a new Iraqi democracy but to protect the loot of the old theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the conflict disappears.

Iraq’s debt totals something on the order of $120 billion to $150 billion, depending on who’s counting. And who’s counting is VERY important.

Much of the so-called debt to Saudi Arabia was given to Saddam Hussein to fight a proxy war for the Saudis against their hated foe, the Shi’ia of Iran. And as disclosed by a former Saudi diplomat, the kingdom’s sheiks handed about $7 billion to Saddam under the table in the 1980’s to build an “Islamic bomb.”

Should Iraqis today and those not yet born have to be put in a debtor’s prison to pay off the secret payouts to Saddam?

James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, says ‘No!’ Wolfensohn has never been on my Christmas card list, but in this case he’s got it right: Iraq should simply cancel $120 billion in debt.

Normally, the World Bank is in charge of post-war debt restructuring. That’s why the official name of the World Bank is “International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.” This is the Bank’s expertise. Bush has rushed Baker in to pre-empt the debt write-off the World Bank would certainly promote.

“I FIXED FLORIDA”

Why is our President so concerned with the wishes of Mr. Baker’s clientele? What does Bush owe Baker? Let me count the ways, beginning with the 2000 election.

Just last week Baker said, “I fixed the election in Florida for George Bush.” That was the substance of his remarks last week to an audience of Russian big wigs as reported to me by my somewhat astonished colleagues at BBC television.

It was Baker, as consiglieri to the Bush family, who came up with the strategy of maneuvering the 2000 Florida vote count into a Supreme Court packed with politicos.

Baker’s claim to have fixed the election was not a confession; it was a boast. He meant to dazzle current and potential clients about his Big In with the Big Boy in the White House. Baker’s firm is already a top player in the Great Game of seizing Caspian Sea oil. (An executive of Exxon-Mobil, one of Baker Botts’s clients, has been charged with evading taxes on bribes paid in Kazakhstan.)

ALL IN THE FAMILY

Over the years, Jim Baker has taken responsibility for putting bread on the Bush family table. As Senior Counsel to Carlyle, the arms-dealing investment group, Baker arranged for the firm to hire both President Bush 41 after he was booted from the White House and President Bush 43 while his daddy was still in office.

Come to think of it, maybe I’m being a bit too dismissive of the Iraqi make-believe government. After all, it’s not as if George Bush were elected by voters either. It would be more accurate to say that TWO puppet governments have agreed to let the man who has always pulled the strings come out from behind the curtain, take a bow, take charge — then take the money and run.

Hear Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, today on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now. And listen to “WEAPON OF MASS INSTRUCTION - PALAST LIVE AND UNCENSORED,” the CD from Alternative Tentacles, available this week only at www.GregPalast.com

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