Background Q&A on the 9-11 Commission

The AP has put together some useful background information on the 9-11 Commission.

Sending Sick Troops Back to the Front

Bush claims to care about the military. At the same time, he is sending sick and injured troops back to Iraq, including soldiers with festering head wounds, stress injuries, neck injuries, broken toes and feet:

Late on March 23, Gunn told his mother, Pat, that his commanders were putting pressure on him to return to Iraq, but there was no way he was getting on that plane. A few hours later, he was airborne. This week, Gunn's distraught mother, who is herself a navy veteran, received a first official response to her demands to know why a soldier, who was being treated by military doctors for combat stress, was sent back to the war.

The note, which acknowledged Gunn suffered post-traumatic stress, said: "After discussion of his case it was determined ... this may be in his best interest mentally to overcome his fear by facing it. Therefore, he has been cleared for redeployment."

Gunn is not the only broken soldier being sent to battle. The Guardian has uncovered more than a dozen instances in which ill or injured soldiers were sent to war by a US military whose resources have been stretched near to breaking point by the simultaneous fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In its investigation, the Guardian learned of soldiers who were deployed with almost wilful disregard to their medical histories, and with the most cursory physical examinations. Soldiers went to war with chronic illnesses such as coronary disease, mental illness, arthritis, diabetes and the nervous condition, Tourette's syndrome, or after undergoing recent surgery.

Lying About Clinton's Anti-Terorism Record & the Presidential Records Act

Most people have heard by now the Bush administration's deplorable attempt to deny the 9-11 commission access to former President Clinton's presidential papers on terrorism. Throughout the month of March, while the administration was throwing spokespeople at every talk show, uniformly blaming Clinton for 9-11, they were stealthily hiding Clinton's actual, documentary record from the 9-11 commission.

Apparently Clinton authorized the release of some 11,000 papers, and the White House blocked the release of over a three quarters of them, an attempt at stonewalling only discovered when one of Clinton's attorneys, Bruce Lindsey, publicly protested. The White House said the Clinton documents were withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," "highly sensitive" and "the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways." [NYT 4/2/04] The Commission objected, and the administration caved (or flip flopped), agreeing to give the commission access to the records.

Of course, the White House's stonewalling is entirely within character. In November 2001, Bush issued an executive order eviscerating the Presidential Records Act, overruling by executive fiat a valid Federal Law.

John Dean has a good section on this Executive Order in his new book, Worse than Watergate:

When Bush entered office, it was time to release the 68,000 Reagan pages. But Bush's White House lawyers asked for an extension so they could review the "many constitutional and legal questions" relating to these documents. Then they asked for another, and then another. (One can only presume Bush's wariness may have something to do with what those papers say about his father or members of his administration.) Finally, they release most of those pages but refused to release the rest. Bush then issued an executive order on November 1, 2001, virtually gutting the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Bush's in-your-face Executive Order No. 13223 created an entirely new set of procedures for handling presidential papers and imposed new access standards never fathomed by Congress for obtaining the information about former presidents. In essence, Bush was repealing an act of Congress and imposing new law by executive fiat. [90]

The Executive Order gave both former and current Presidents veto power over the release of documents for pretextual reasons. It lets "representatives" of former presidents veto the release of papers. It requires researchers to provide "justification" for seeking Presidential documents. It authorizes Vice Presidents to claim executive privilege, an unprecedented power.

Presidential historians Robert Dallek, Joan Hoff and others, none of them partisans, attacked the executive order as being evidence of a "secrecy fetish," of being motivated by a desire to protect his father, his friends, and himself from the judgment of history.

Bush Flip Flops

Bush's flip flops are getting some attention. The AP has put out a piece, USA Today just ran an editorial, and the Center for American Progress has a list with 15 different flip flops. There are literally hundreds more.

Rice Testifying April 8

The Commission has set the date for Rice's public testimony: April 8, 2004. It will truly be must see TV. Rice will have a tough time defending both her inexcusable attacks on Richard Clarke and the administration's lackadaisical approach to terrorism prior to 9-11.

understanding Clarke's Allegatoins

The acronyms, the weird, counter-intuitive relationships, even the revolving door of personnel really complicate the story Richard Clarke is trying to tell, the story of how the Bush administration ignored terrorism before 9-11 and used it as a pretext to invade Iraq afterward. Fortunately, the 9-11 commission staff has put together an incredibly useful document explaining how the government coordinated its anti-terrorism policies in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses. I read about this stuff almost 24-7, and the staff report still was a huge help.

More Politicized Intelligence

Yesterday Charles Duelfer, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq (he replaced David Kay 6 weeks ago), spun the facts on the ground in Iraq to make Saddam Hussein's weapons programs look more threatening than they really were. Oddly, the public version of his testimony was contradicted by the classified version. Luckily, Sen. Carl Levin was on the case:

WASHINGTON – Following Mr. Charles Duelfer’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the senior Democrat of the committee, said the following:

I am deeply troubled by the contents of the declassified testimony of Mr. Charles Duelfer, the Director of Central Intelligence’s Special Advisor for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that has been released by the CIA this afternoon.

The public statement, in a number of instances, contains material that, when compared to the contents of the underlying classified status report from Mr. Duelfer that was submitted to the Armed Services Committee for the hearing this morning, includes material that suggests that Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program while leaving out information that would lead one to doubt that it did.

I am therefore calling for the CIA to declassify, to the extent possible, the whole report so the public can reach their own conclusions.

Mr. Duelfer’s public statement is written to express the author’s “suspicions” as to Iraq’s activities relating to possible weapons of mass destruction programs or activities while leaving out information in the classified report which points away from his suspicions.

Mr. Duelfer’s statement raises the same issues of selective use of information in public statements of the CIA that have been such a problem for the credibility of the Intelligence Community’s pre-war estimates related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Bush's Privilege II

The Bush administration claims that one of its main goals was to increase the powers of the presidency relative to Congress. Its sole purpose for these increased powers, though, is to deceive Congress, craft bad policy, and deny the public accountability. You can't have strong presidential privilege without trust, and Bush has done nothing to earn even a modicum of trust from Congress or the people. It has consistently stonewalled investigations by the Republican Congress and refused information necessary for the public to hold the administration accountable.

Moreover, it has demonstrated that it's "principles" serve one purpose: getting Bush re-elected and ramming Bush's extreme agenda through Congress. How else can you explain its willingness to waive its privilege whenever political pressure mounts, or its willingness to declassify nothing but that which helps it politically? Actually, it appears willing to declassify anything that helps it politically, including Richard Clarke's extremely sensitive 2002 testimony.

Just three days ago Condoleezza Rice stated:

Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there's an important principle involved here. We have separate branches of government - the legislative branch and the executive branch. This commission, it takes its authority, derives its authority from the Congress, and it is a long-standing principle that sitting National Security Advisors do not testify before the Congress.

If there's anything Bush understands, it's Privilege

It's easy for news of administration corruption to get lost in the labrynthine conservative machine. Yesterday, on the same day that President Bush gave up his "principled" position on executive privilege for Condoleezza Rice, he asserted it for his Health Policy Adviser, Doug Badger.

According to Medicare actuary Richard Foster, Mr. Badger told former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully to threaten Foster into misleading Congress about the costs of the administration's 2003 Medicare program.

The administration's deception of Congress is an egregious violation of the separation of powers. It was a deliberate attempt to deceive Congress. Nothing could serve to protect the relationship between executive and legislative powers more than getting to the bottom of this deception (much like determining how the administration politicized pre-Iraq war inelligence).

Unfortunately, determining how the administration suppressed this information would probably hurt Bush's campaign. Accordingly, they blame the departed Scully and stonewall any further investigation:

Administration officials have said former Medicare administrator Thomas A. Scully was solely at fault for suppressing information from Congress and threatening to fire the government's chief Medicare actuary if he disclosed too much. Scully, who left the government last December, said yesterday he was out of town and did not know if he would testify.

"Half-baked, Cockamamie, Crazy Scheme"

House Republicans again abused their rules, this time for the "principle" that tax cuts are never irresponsible.

The House has been considering a rules change that would encourage the Senate (where the rule has already passed) to offset both new spending increases and new tax cuts with spending reductions in other areas. The rule, called "PAYGO," was in force through most of the nineties, and was a moderate contributing factor to Clinton's unprecedented surplusses.

Yesterday the House voted on a version of the legislation that has already passed the Senate. The legislation failed on a tie vote, 209-209, but only after Republicans "flogg[ed] the House Rules.". House Republicans held the vote open 23 minutes longer than was allotted for it and coerced Republican moderates into switching their votes. They did the same thing in forcing through the Medicare legislation.

“Today, after holding a five-minute vote open for 28 minutes, Republicans ‘defeated’ a Democratic Motion to Instruct conferees on the budget to adopt the Senate’s bipartisan pay-as-you-go rules, requiring both spending increases and tax cuts to be offset elsewhere in the budget. Republican leaders in the House have demanded that such rules apply to spending only.

“A unanimous Democratic Caucus was joined by 11 Republicans in voting for this Democratic Motion. Seven other Republican Members cast ‘yes’ votes before Republican leaders, trying to stave off an embarrassing defeat, twisted their arms and convinced them to change their votes. [Steny Hoyer, Press Release 3/30/04]

The non-binding rule doesn't even apply to the House, but Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla) still argued: "Now is not the time to make it easier to raise taxes,...[Adopting a] half-baked, cockamamie, crazy scheme to deal with this issue is nuts." Republicans want the PAYGO rules to apply only to new spending programs, not to tax cuts; the Washington Post notes that the only "principle" at stake is "making certain that tax cuts can be enacted and extended without any procedural hurdles..."

Bush's Rice Flip Flop

President Bush has flip-flopped on National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's availability for public, under-oath, testimony before the 9-11 commission. This is an important victory for everyone that really wants to examine the policy failures that led to September 11th.

The victory was not total, though. President Bush has required the 9-11 Commission to accede to a bizarre condition for Rice's testimony: the Commission "must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice." This prior-restraint on the Commission could only have one purpose: to prevent the Commission from asking questions that could embarass the administration. Why would it bother asking questions if it has already agreed not to talk to anyone that can answer them?

Bush claims that he "ordered this level of cooperation because I consider it necessary to gaining a complete picture of the months and years that preceded the murder of our fellow citizens on September the 11th, 2001." Again, he has chosen the "big lie" approach. Pretend that this is "extraordinary cooperation," instead of the bare minimum (or below it). For a more accurate depiction of Bush's cooperation with the 9-11 commission, see our 5 minute guide.

More FAO Problems: Rand Beers

Rand Beers

"Beers put in 30-plus years working for the federal government in a series of national-security jobs. Unlike Clarke, he is a registered Democrat. But his reputation among career civil servants was sufficiently apolitical that he, like Clarke, received appointments from Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush." [Josh Marshall, The Hill 3/25/04]

Beers is now John Kerry's top national security advisor, but he used to be the NSC's senior director for counter-terrorism for the Bush administration.

He resigned just before the Iraq war, though he nominally denies it was in protest over the invasion of Iraq.

The administration had misplaced priorities.

"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out." [Washington Post 6/16/03]

Beers criticized the administration's focus on Iraq, which he said came at the expense of domestic security, damaged America's international alliances and could help breed a new generation of terrorists.
"I continue to be puzzled by it," said Beers, who did not oppose the war but felt the U.S. should have built a broader coalition. "Why was it such a policy priority?" He said the evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction – the official rationale for war – "was pretty qualified, if you listened carefully."
He said many of his colleagues considered Iraq an "ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy."[CBS News 6/16/03]

Former White House counter-terrorism coordinator Rand Beers, who resigned in March just before the Iraq war began, said that U.S. troops, CIA paramilitary officers and intelligence collection devices were withdrawn from Afghanistan and refurbished for use in the war against Iraq.
Beers - who now works for the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. - added that war with Iraq added to U.S. difficulties in committing the security force or aid needed to stabilize Afghanistan.
"We missed some opportunities," Beers said. [Knight Ridder 11/30/03]

More FAO Problems: Thomas Maertens

Thomas Maertens

Maertens, the National Security Council's director for nuclear nonproliferation on both the Clinton and Bush White House staffs, said Clarke had repeatedly tried to warn senior officials in the Bush administration about the growing threat of Al Qaeda.

"He was the guy pushing hardest, saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S.," Maertens said from his home in Minnesota.

But Maertens said the Bush White House was reluctant to believe a holdover from the previous administration.

"They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration," he said. "So anything they did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it. And it's disgusting to see the administration now putting a full-court smear on Clarke - for being right." [International Herald Tribune 3/23/04]

More FAO Problems: Greg Thielmann

Greg Thielmann was "director of the Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the US State Department until his retirement last year."

"[T]he credibility of the intelligence community has taken a real hit because of the way the information has been used by senior officials." [PBS 6/13/02]

One analyst, Greg Thielmann, told Correspondent Scott Pelley last fall that key evidence cited by the administration was misrepresented to the public.

Thielmann should know. He had been in charge of analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Powell's own intelligence bureau.

“I had a couple of initial reactions. Then I had a more mature reaction,” says Thielmann, commenting on Powell's presentation to the United Nations last February.

“I think my conclusion now is that it's probably one of the low points in his long, distinguished service to the nation."[CBS News 2/4/04]

"Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have seen al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated."[National Journal 8/8/03]

A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK that inside the government, "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn't think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers." [Newsweek 6/4/03]

Thielmann also tells Pelley that he believes the decision to go to war was made first and then the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion. “…The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,” says Thielmann.

“They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”[CBS News 10/15/03

More "Former Administration Official" Problems: Flynt Leverett

Flynt Leverett

"From February 2002 to March 2003 Dr. [Flynt] Leverett was Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council."

Not only has the war in Iraq not advanced the fight against terrorism, it has helped al-Qaeda regroup and recover. Flynt Leverett, a former director at the National Security Council in the Bush White House told NBC, "There were decisions made to take key assets, human assets, technical assets, out of theater in Afghanistan in order to position them for the campaign to unseat Saddam."

He added, "We see today that al-Qaida has been able to reconstitute leadership cells in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and it would seem in Eastern Iran."MSNBC 7/03

"Clarke's critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money."

Bush's "Former Administration Official" Problem

This administration is noted for its reluctance to fire people who fail. Perhaps that reluctance is based on experience: I have yet to find a "former administration official" that worked on national security issues and thinks this administration is doing a good job.

For example, look at former National Security Council member and expert on terrorism in both the Clinton and GWB White Houses, Roger Cressey:

One ally, Clarke's former deputy, Roger Cressey, backed the thrust of one of the most incendiary allegations in the book, about a conversation that Clarke said he had with Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001. Clarke said Bush pressed him three times to find evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The charge is explosive because no such link has ever been proved.

"'I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything,'" Clarke writes that Bush told him. "'See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.'"

When Clarke protested that the culprit was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, Bush testily ordered him, he writes, to "'look into Iraq, Saddam,'" then left the room.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, responded at a White House briefing on Monday by saying that Bush did not remember having the conversation and that there were no records that placed the president in the Situation Room at the time.IHT

And this MSNBC article from just before Clarke came out of the closet:

Now Cressey is speaking out for the first time. He says in the early days of the Bush administration, al-Qaida simply was not a top priority, “There was not this sense of urgency. The ticking clock, if you will, to get it done sooner rather than later.”

Cressey and other witnesses have told the 9/11 commission of long gaps between terrorism meetings and greater time and energy devoted to Russia, China, missile defense and Iraq than al-Qaida.

For example: One document shows a key high-level National Security Council meeting on Iraq on Feb. 1, 2001. Yet, there was no comparable meeting on al-Qaida until September.

Is Cressey saying that some senior members of the Bush administration viewed Saddam Hussein as a greater threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden? “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It was inconceivable to them that al-Qaida could be this talented, this capable without Iraq, in this case, providing them real support."

Cressey has made, if possible, even more incendiary comments than Clarke. He maintains that the US had the intelligence and a plan to strike terrorst Abu Musab Zarqawi and his training camps in the Kurdish controlled Northern Iraq area long before the Iraq war. We didn't execute those plans because George W. Bush was "more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists," according to Cressey.

Corroborating Clarke

Richard Clarke's criticism of the Bush administration's approach to the fight against terrorism cuts to the heart of the President's shameless re-election strategy. That's why they have tried so hard to undermine his credibility, employing the "politics of personal destruction" with unprecedented viciousness. Yet Clarke has withstood the assault, due to the truth of his accusations.

It is shockingly easy to find corroboration for Clarke's charges against the administration. Yesterday's Washington Post had an excellent article drawing support for Clarke's allegations from Bob Woodward's largely sympathetic portrayal of the administration's reaction to September 11th. The New York Times also commented on Woodward's well-noted corroboration of much of Clarke's case:

In Bob Woodward's Bush at War, the president himself acknowledged that Osama bin Laden had not been a central focus in the eight months before the attacks.

"I was not on point," Mr. Bush was quoted in the book as saying. "I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Military Families Have Had Enough

In mid-March the Washington Post reported on the birth of a new phenomenon: military families opposing an active war. War under false pretenses will do that:

When the invasion of Iraq began, Dvorin -- a 61-year-old Air Force veteran and a retired cop -- thought the commander in chief deserved his support. "I believed we were destroying part of the axis of evil," he says. "I truly believed that Saddam Hussein was a madman and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction and wouldn't hesitate to use them."

By the time Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin was sent to Iraq last September, however, his father was having doubts. And now that Seth had been killed, at 24, by an "improvised explosive device" south of Baghdad, doubt had turned to anger.

"Where are all the weapons of Mass Destruction?" Richard Dvorin demanded in his letter. "Where are the stockpiles of Chemical and Biological weapons?" His son's life, he wrote, "has been snuffed out in a meaningless war."

Yesterday, the Post had another story about the pressures extended military deployments and the military's "stop-loss" policies are imposing on military families:

This change is reflected in a recent poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, and in dozens of supplemental interviews. The poll, the first nongovernmental survey of military spouses conducted since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, included more than 1,000 spouses living on or near the 10 heaviest-deploying Army bases.

While most of them said they have coped well, three-quarters said they believe the Army is likely to encounter personnel problems as soldiers and their families tire of the pace and leave for civilian lives.