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Bush Scandals List:
updated 5/10/08, recent changes in red. please contact us with corrections and additions.
INTRODUCTION: George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice knew that once he has consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn't like to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic, reason, and facts have little or no role.
....Bush's Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty. A believer in the notion of "to the victor go the spoils," he was the perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it was catastrophic.
....At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway, regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just with opponents but with reality.
....What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even after 7 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the tragedy and crime of our times.
1. Walter Reed outpatient treatment, poor living conditions, undelivered mail, lack of caseworkers to oversee and facilitate patient care for amputees, brain injured, and psychologically disabled veterans; Walter Reed is not the only military hospital about which questions have been raised; also out there the underfunding of the VA.
....The problems at Walter Reed came to the public's attention through a series of articles by Dana Priest beginning February 18, 2007. Following them, Gen. George Weightman who ran Walter Reed for 6 months resigned March 1, followed by the forced resignation of Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey the next day. Weightman's boss Army Surgeon General Gen. Kevin "I don't do barracks inspections at Walter Reed" Kiley who lived across from the notorious Building 18 and who had run the hospital from 2002-2004 lasted one day as the new head of Walter Reed before he was removed. He resigned from the Army on March 12.
....One source of the difficulties at Walter Reed was the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) decision on August 25, 2005 to close Walter Reed. Planned renovations were canceled. Another was the privatizing of support services at the hospital. The workforce dropped from 350 experienced professionals to 50 who were not and the contract was given to IAP. IAP began work at Walter Reed in 2003. In 2004, IAP lobbied successfully against an Army recommendation not to privatize the workforce. The OMB reversed the Army finding and the services contract was given to IAP in January 2006 although its implementation was delayed a year. IAP is run by two former KBR executives and had a well connected board of directors as well as being owned by a powerful holding company the Cerberus hedge fund.
....However, the generally low priority given to ongoing patient care for wounded soldiers was probably the single greatest reason for the woes at Walter Reed. It bears remembering that there were problems noted as early as 2004 and certainly by 2005 and that Walter Reed is located in the nation's capital minutes from the White House, the Congress, and the offices of major media outlets. Washington didn't know about Walter Reed because it didn't want to know.
2. Firing of US attorneys. Most of the country's 93 US attorneys are usually replaced within the first 2 years of a new administration and this is what happened when Bush came into office in 2001. US attorneys are political appointees and are chosen to reflect the policy priorities of a President. Still their primary job is to uphold the law, and the law is not supposed to be partisan. Karl Rove, of course, had other ideas. He believes that government should be politicized and populated with compliant partisan hacks loyal to him and his.
....The plan was to create a list of political hires and fires of US attorneys under the direction of the White House (i.e. Rove and Harriet Miers) which Gonzales (and Bush) would then dutifully sign off on. There were two components. First, on February 7, 2006, regulations were published giving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the power to hire and fire all non-civil service employees of the Justice Department (DOJ). On March 1, 2006, Gonzales signed an order delegating this power (subject to his nominal final approval) to two fairly junior and inexperienced staffers: Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling his senior counselor and liaison with the White House and his Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson. Second, sometime late in 2005 (shortly before the conference report for the Patriot Act Extension was filed on December 8, 2005), language originating at the DOJ was surreptitiously inserted into the act by Brett Tolman which allowed Gonzales to make indefinite interim US attorney appointments without Senate approval. The conference report was passed and became law on March 9, 2006. So again, the two parts were first to set up a system where Rove could control the hiring and firing of US attorneys and second to bypass the Senate confirmation process which might interfere with the first part.
....On December 7, 2006, eight US attorneys were notified that they would be fired. Most came from swing states. Most were considered not to have aggressively enough prosecuted Democrats or voter fraud cases in the run up to November 2006 elections, the idea being that such prosecutions would have helped Republicans in close elections. Worse some were investigating and had even prosecuted prominent Republicans. And then there were those partisan hacks waiting in the wings to replace them.
1. Carol Lam, Southern California, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham and indicted the former No. 3 at the CIA Dusty Foggo.
2. H. E. Cummins III, Eastern Arkansas, had been asked to investigate the Republican Governor in the neighboring state of Missouri. He announced the investigation finished in October 2006 a month before the election but was fired anyway to make way for Timothy Griffin, an aide to Karl Rove who had been the principal opposition researcher in the Bush 2004 campaign.
3. David Iglesias, New Mexico, angered Republican Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson when he refused to push for indictments of Democratic officials before the election after they inappropriately contacted him.
4. Daniel Bogden, Nevada, similarly was replaced by Brett Tolman who was crucial to bypassing Senate scrutiny of these appointments.
5. Paul K. Charlton, Arizona, was investigating Republican Representative Rick Renzi for corruption.
6. John McKay, Western Washington, angered state Republicans for not creating voter fraud cases in the 2004 Governor's race which Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.
7. Margaret Chiara, Western Michigan. It is not clear why she was fired. She was on the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS) of US attorneys. It may have been to make way for Russell Stoddard who had been languishing out in Guam as First Assistant Attorney after Frederick Black got demoted for investigating Abramoff's activities in the North Marianas.
8. Kevin V. Ryan, Northern California, is the only one of the 8 who deserved to be on the list because he did run his office poorly. DOJ actually wanted to keep him on but a federal judge forced the issue and his name was added to the list.....As they say, it is not the crime but the coverup. Gonzales has given so many different and contradictory stories about the firings that it is hard to keep up and then there is his memory. In his Senate testimony of April 19, 2007, he answered he couldn't remember by some counts 71 times. He didn't know who had called for such a list. He couldn't remember having been very involved in the process. He even forgot to mention the March 1, 2006 order in his testimony. In fact, he knew very little about what were major decisions at the department he supposedly ran but, despite this, he did know there was nothing improper in any of it. Testifying in the House on May 10, 2007, his memory and his believability were little improved. Kyle Sampson too had memory problems but did contradict Gonzales' claim that he had not been involved. For his part, Sampson described himself as just the guy that others dropped their files off to and his contribution to the process was to keep them in his desk drawer. Initially, Monica Goodling took an indefinite leave of absence, then resigned, then said she would take the 5th in any Congressional testimony. On May 23, 2007, after a grant of immunity she testified that Paul McNulty the Deputy Attorney General was more aware of events surrounding the firings (although this is far from clear), that she had crossed the line (i.e. broken the law) in asking career DOJ hires about their political affiliations, that Gonzales' statements were inaccurate (i.e. he lied), and that Gonzales had sought to harmonize their stories (i.e. obstruct justice). Goodling, like Sampson, tried to portray herself as a bit player despite Gonzales' extraordinary grant of authority to them both. On June 21, 2007, Paul McNulty testified before the Congress and basically stonewalled, saying that he was out of the loop, that he didn't know who created the firing list, that there was no problem at the DOJ, and that there was no contradiction between his testimony and that of anyone else, including Monica Goodling. On July 11, 2007, Sara Taylor who left her post of White House political director in May randomly invoked Executive privilege and otherwise and like so many others had a bad memory. She did state that she had had no dealings with Bush concerning the firings. Along with her selective use of Executive privilege, this contention further undermined the claim that an Executive privilege was involved and left the possibility of a contempt citation. On July 12, 2007, former White House counsel Harriet Miers refused to appear pursuant to a House Judiciary Committee subpoena, leaving her open to contempt proceedings as well.
....From this use of Executive privilege, it is clear that the White House, and more specifically Karl Rove, was involved in the firings and was, in fact, calling the shots in this affair, and that those at Justice, including the Attorney General, were just the eager, if dim, facilitators of it.
....In addition to the Sampson and Goodling resignations, Michael Battle Director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA) who informed the US attorneys of their firing left the DOJ on March 16, 2007. Paul McNulty the No. 2 at the DOJ and Deputy Attorney General announced his resignation on May 14, 2007 to become effective later in the summer. Although left out of the loop on the details of the firings and giving false Congressional as a result for which he apologized, McNulty did approve the firings and through his Chief of Staff Michael Elston warned several of those fired to stay quiet about them. Elston announced his resignation on June 15, 2007. On June 22, 2007, Bill Mercer who was Acting Associate Attorney General (the No. 3 spot at the DOJ) withdrew his nomination for the permanent position. On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney General effective September 17, 2007.
....The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) informed the Senate in June 2007 that it was investigating Goodling's claim that Gonzales had tried to tamper with her testimony.
....Congress intervened and changed the relevant provision of the Patriot Act to re-instate the Senate's role in confirming US attorneys (May 22, 2007). This was signed into law June 14, 2007. Provocatively, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales continued to make interim appointments right up to the Presidential signing.
3. Plamegate. Scooter Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President was convicted on March 6, 2007 on two counts of perjury before the Grand Jury and one count each of obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. Placing political payback (against an individual and an agency) above national security, the Vice President's office orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, her cover company Brewster Jennings, other agents which had used this same cover, and her contacts. All this was done in retaliation for an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003 written by her husband ambassador Joe Wilson. In it, he publicly debunked the "16 words" in Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain uranium from Africa (Niger). This undercut the argument that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat and showed that the Bush Administration had known this was so in advance of the war. Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate this charge in February 2002 at the request of the CIA and had reported nearly a year before its use in the SOTU that it was false. After several attempts by among others Karl Rove to pitch Plame's identity to the media, on July 14, 2003, Valerie Plame was outed in a column by Robert Novak In his closing argument at the Libby trial, Patrick Fitzgerald detailed Cheney's guiding hand in the conspiracy behind the outing and spoke of a "cloud" over the Vice President. That cloud remains.
....On June 5, 2007, Scooter Libby received a preliminary sentence of 30-month term in federal prison, with a 2-year term of supervised release following the completion of that sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a requirement of 400 hours of community service. This was confirmed June 14 and bail during appeal was denied. Scooter's defense solicited letters on his behalf from Washington's conservative elite. These praised his legal expertise and national security credentials and were likely counterproductive since they made clear he was well aware of the legal ramifications of lying to a grand jury and the security implications of outing a CIA agent. A group of conservative attorneys led by Robert Bork also filed an unsuccessful, last minute amicus brief questioning the legitimacy of Patrick Fitzgerald's appointment as prosecutor. It called the appointment a "close" question although its rationale depended upon a lone Supreme Court dissent in a case that was not closely decided and its effect would be to prevent independent investigations of high US officials. On July 2, 2007, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit unanimously denied Libby's appeal. Hours later George Bush commuted Libby's sentence eliminating any jail time. This is an Administration that believes it is outside the law and acts accordingly. It is not so much that they have contempt for the law. Rather they have contempt for us. The cloud that was over Cheney now covers Bush as well.
....A civil suit filed by Valerie Plame was dismissed on July 19, 2007 by judge John D. Bates who ruled that, while Plame's complaint had merit, the court did not have jurisdiction.
....On December 10, 2007, Libby's lawyers announced that they were dropping his appeal. This is all part of a legal strategy to stonewall and run out the clock. Since Libby had his sentence commuted rather than receiving a pardon, he could continue to assert a 5th Amendment privilege if he were summoned to give testimony before Congress. Beginning an appeal gave a patina of credence to such a contention. However, to go forward with the appeal once this point had been made would have been expensive and unnecessary. The last thing Scooter wanted was a successful appeal since this could have resulted in a retrial and another conviction, very likely after Bush had left office. At that point Scooter would have no one to commute his sentence or pardon him and he could have faced real jail time. This was not the object of the exercise.
4. Iraq: axis of evil, lack of preparation for occupation, looting, including the National Museum, too few troops, lack of training, lack of equipment, lack of securing loose Iraqi munitions, disbanding the Iraqi army, banning the Baathists, the CPA, cronyism, Paul Bremer, losing tons of money literally, lack of international inclusion in reconstruction and security, weak Constitution, formation of sectarian parties, weak government, denial of actual conditions in Iraq, for example, its civil war, ignoring 4 years of failed policies and the basic proposal of the Iraq Study Group to withdraw, escalating instead, continuing lack of any discernible mission. A brief analysis of casualty figures can be found here and here.
5. Afghanistan, transferring resources to Iraq before the job was finished, the results: a resurgent Taliban, continuing warlordism, and exploding opium production. On January 30, 2008, three independent non-partisan reports on Afghanistan by the Center for the Study of the Presidency (Jones-Pickering), the Atlantic Council, and the National Defense University concluded that Afghanistan has been neglected and is in danger of becoming a failed state and that a new comprehensive policy for it is needed. You would think that after 6 years we would have one by now but this is the Bush Administration we are talking about.
6. Iran and saber rattling, axis of evil, lack of engagement, refusal to talk to, addressing the nuclear issue through threats, clumsy attempts to blame Iran for the debacle in Iraq and a failure to recognize their very real interests there.
7. North Korea, axis of evil, ditching the 1994 agreement and freezing of bank accounts because of dubious uranium program, the plutonium program which led to a fizzled first nuclear test, and something like a return to the 1994 agreement
8. Osama bin Laden, where are you? The blown opportunity at Tora Bora. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the roles of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in terrorism. Pakistan's intelligence service the ISI created the Taliban. Despite $11 billion in US aid from 2001 through 2007, the government of Pervez Musharraf continues to give it safe haven in Pakistan. As for al Qaeda, those efforts which do occur are limited and often timed to the visits of American dignitaries. In addition, Bush's oft stated policy of spreading democracy was dealt a blow when Musharraf fearing a Supreme Court decision preventing him from holding the Presidency and remaining Chief of Staff of the armed forces declared a state of emergency and instituted martial law on November 3, 2007.
....The Saudis for their part fund radical madrassas throughout the Moslem world and have a domestic educational system run by the most extreme of their homegrown extremists. Saudi and Gulf oil dollars find their way to many terrorist groups as well as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
9. Civilian contractors; also no bid contracts; in Iraq Halliburton tainted food and water, overpriced gas; Blackwater use of private security contractors, what used to be called mercenaries, with little or no accountability
10. The Military Commissions Act: torture, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, and kangaroo courts. One of the last acts of the Congress before the November 2006 elections, it passed the Senate on September 28 and the House the next day and was signed into law by Bush on October 17. The short story on this is that, pre-election, the Republicans pushed it and the Democrats caved on it. As bad as the military commissions envisioned in the act are, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) which designate who is to be tried are even worse. They were complete shams. Decisions were made on the flimsiest and most general information without challenge or taking into account the methods (torture) used to obtain it. Detainees lacked effective legal representation, and the CSRTs did not come close to meeting minimal standards of judicial process, even a preliminary one. To top it off, as later military judges have found, the CSRTs designated detainees "enemy combatants" which does not meet the Military Commissions Act standard of "unlawful enemy combatants" vitiating their findings to date. Even when they make up the rules they can't get it right.
....The case of Murat Kurnaz shows how flawed the CSRTs are. He was a Turkish citizen who had lived his entire life in Germany. On October 3, 2001, at the point of getting his German citizenship, he traveled to Pakistan to visit religious sites. In December 2001, he was removed from the group he was traveling with, arrested by Pakistani police, and flown to Guantanamo 4 weeks later. In September 2002, he was interrogated by American and German intelligence officers who concluded that he had no links to terrorism and should be freed. This view was repeated in a memo dated May 19, 2003 from the commanding general of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, the Pentagon unit responsible for interrogating detainees. Against this was a memo dated June 25, 2004 by Brigadier General David Lacquement, then head of the US Southern Command's intelligence unit, who said Kurnaz was a danger because he had among other things prayed during the national anthem, asked how high the basketball rim was in the prison yard (which in Lacquement-speak indicated a desire to escape), and enquired about guard schedules and detainee transfers. There was also the accusation that Kurnaz knew someone who knew a suicide bomber (except this was later shown to be untrue) and had stayed at a hostel in Pakistan run by a religious group linked to terrorism (the group's link was also untrue). Kurnaz's CSRT was held on October 4, 2004 where he was determined to be an enemy combatant. His lawyers challenged this in a DC District Court. (This was before the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.) In a January 2005 opinion, Judge Joyce Green found that the CSRT process had been biased and was contrary to US and international law. This opinion became public on March 25, 2005 when it was inadvertently released by court officials. Nevertheless, Kurnaz continued to be held. In January 2006, a yearly Review Board hearing reconfirmed.that Kurnaz was an enemy combatant. Meanwhile Kurnaz's detention and German participation in his interrogation was giving the story legs in Germany. Also in January 2006, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up the case with Bush. On May 31, 2006, the FBI weighed in indicating that it had no interest in Kurnaz. In July 2006, a special Review Board met and determined that he was no longer an enemy combatant. The reasons for this change of status remain classified. Kurnaz was flown back to Germany goggled and shackled where he was released on August 24, 2006. Despite repeated findings by the intelligence community that Kurnaz was innocent of any links to terrorism, flimsy, false, and easily refutable evidence allowed by the CSRTs resulted in his detention without any formal charge for more than 4 1/2 years, a detention that would have continued if it had not been for the accidental leak of details of his case by a DC court and the personal intervention of the head of the German government.
....On July 20, 2007, a three judge panel of the DC Circuit in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. US rejected parts of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of 2005 asserting that it will expect to examine all information bearing on a detainee's case and not just what the government used in deciding to hold a detainee. SCOTUS on June 29, 2007 changed its mind and decided to take a look at these cases in the fall, especially in light of what the Circuit Court might decide.
....On September 24, 2007 in the Khadr case, a military appeals court found that on hearing more evidence a military judge had the power to determine that an alien enemy combatant was also an "unlawful" one. If upheld, this could clear the way for trials under the MCA. On November 8, 2007, the government informed Khadr's defense that it had an exculpatory eyewitness which it had known about from the beginning but only chose to tell the defense about several years into Khadr's detention.
....On October 5, 2007, the chief Guantanamo prosecutor career Air Force Colonel Morris Davis resigned in a dispute with reserve Air Force Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann (until recently a corporate lawyer now legal adviser to the convening authority for the Military Commissions Susan Crawford). The function of the convening authority is to approve or reduce charges against the accused or make plea agreements with them. It is supposed to be an arbiter, but in a clear conflict of interest, Crawford and Hartmann pressed the prosecutor's office to file the most serious charges possible in an attempt to drum up publicity and support for the military commissions process. Davis has since said another reason for his departure was the placement of his office under that of the Department of Defense's General Counsel. The DOD GC is William Haynes (See item 194) who signed off on the torture memos prepared by John Yoo for the Department of Defense. No matter how rank and foul this travesty of American justice is, it seems to have a never-ending capacity to get worse.
....In Congressional testimony on December 11, 2007, Hartmann refused to say whether waterboarding was torture or whether waterboarding of an American soldier by a foreign government would be considered torture. He did suggest that he had no problem with evidence gained by torture being admitted into court proceedings.
....On March 8, 2008, Bush vetoed the Intelligence Authorization bill because it outlawed waterboarding and required intelligence agencies to adhere to interrogation methods authorized by the Army Field Manual. Bush reiterated his standard lies on the subject:
While details of the current CIA program are classified, the Attorney General has reviewed it and determined that it is lawful under existing domestic and international law, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. I remain committed to an intelligence-gathering program that complies with our legal obligations and our basic values as a people. The United States opposes torture, and I remain committed to following international and domestic law regarding the humane treatment of people in its custody, including the “Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 [On this last, he appended a signing statement saying that he would follow the DTA only if and when he felt like it].”On March 11, 2008, the House failed to override 225-188.
....On May 9, 2008, the judge Captain Keith Allred presiding over the first Guantanamo trial, that of Salim Hamdan, ordered Hartmann to have no further contact with the proceedings because he was too closely associated with the prosecution.
11. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, FEMA and "Heck of a job, Brownie," lack of preparation, lack of emergency aid, slowness of reconstruction, Bush ignores for days then gives address from Jackson Square in New Orleans promising aid which never comes or much of which goes to politically connected outstate no bid contractors, disparity between response to Louisiana and Republican Trent Lott's Mississippi; Bush refuses to waive 10% state match for federal funds (waived in many previous disasters) increasing the bureaucratic paperwork, reducing aid to affected areas, and further slowing and complicating rebuilding.
12. Bush authorized warrantless NSA wiretapping in October 2001. However, Joseph Nacchio former CEO of Qwest convicted April 19, 2007 of insider trading reported that the NSA in a meeting on February 27, 2001 (1 month after Bush became President and 6 1/2 months before 9/11) tried to sign Qwest up to a warrantless surveillance program and that when Nacchio refused the NSA pulled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts from the company.
....Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) a warrant would be needed from the FISA court (federal judges entrusted with these decisions in addition to their regular jobs) for domestic to international telephone or internet communication. The bar for such a warrant is extraordinarily low, has almost never been denied, and can be granted up to 3 days after the surveillance as begun (in order to give maximum flexibility in emergency situations). This is in contrast to international to international communications which have always been considered legitimate targets for US intelligence organizations and require no warrant.
....The post-9/11 Bush program acquired its legal basis from a John Yoo memo originating in the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It went much further than cutting FISA out of the loop and probably included surveillance of not just domestic to international communication but also domestic to domestic surveillance of any communication with the original domestic participant. It is conceivable that this continued to those domestic contacts and then to their contacts in ever expanding (and less relevant) circles of surveillance. Data mining may have been used to winnow down the number of contacts.
....Alternately, the Administration may have been exploiting the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This act required telecoms to configure their equipment to facilitate governmental wiretapping. While the act was not envisioned as a means of large scale warrantless wiretapping, it could with the help of service providers like the telecoms be turned into one. Supporting this view is that on March 10, 2004, the DOJ, FBI, and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) petitioned the FCC to extend CALEA to the internet (see item 252). This action coming as it did on the same day as the Ashcroft hospital visit (described below) may have been an effort to expand or acquire additional cover for a data mining program that was already in operation. It may have been the warrantless hoovering of domestic communications that troubled some at the DOJ.
....In any case in March 2004, the OLC under its new head Jack Goldsmith a defense oriented conservative rejected Yoo's reasoning and reversed its position on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey both conservatives and Bush appointees accepted this finding. Then Ashcroft came down with acute gallstone pancreatitis and transferred his powers to his deputy Comey who became Acting Attorney General. In a scheme apparently orchestrated by Vice President Cheney, Bush called Mrs. Ashcroft and Cheney "on the President's behalf" ordered then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to go to the hospital and get the ailing and doped up Ashcroft to sign off on the surveillance program. Mrs. Ashcroft informed her husband's Chief of Staff David Ayers about the impending visit and he contacted Comey. Comey in turn contacted FBI Director Robert Mueller to order the FBI agents guarding Ashcroft to remain in his room (as witnesses) and raced to the hospital and Ashcroft's room in the ICU. This set the scene for the now famous March 10, 2004 hospital room confrontation where Gonzales and Card ignoring Comey tried to get Ashcroft's signature. Ashcroft was, however, lucid enough to refuse to sign and to point out the obvious: that he did not have the power to do so since Comey was the Acting Attorney General. Despite the refusal by the DOJ to vouch for the program's legality, Bush re-authorized it anyway. A threat by Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller to resign did, however, result in changes to the program. The OLC came up with a narrower justification under the AUMF for a more limited program which became the TSP (Terrorist Surveillance Program). It should be noted that this program in all of its manifestations and despite its various justifications has been illegal on its face since its inception.
....The program became public when the New York Times reported on it in December 2005. In 2006 various unsuccessful attempts were made to accommodate the program. This included the infamous attempted "compromise" by Arlen Specter to legalize its worst excesses and retroactively amnesty any illegalities. Under mounting pressure and with a new Democratic Congress, Alberto Gonzales announced on January 18, 2007, a "deal" with the FISA court which would put the program under its supervision. Gonzales maintained, however, that Bush still had Article II power to go outside the court if he wanted to.
....On July 24, 2007, Gonzales testified under oath before Senate Judiciary Committee that before going to the hospital to see Ashcroft he had met with a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders overseeing intelligence matters (the Gang of 8) and that they had approved the predecessor to the TSP. Several of the Democratic members of the Gang of 8 denied that such approval was ever given. Additionally, Gonzales asserted that the program discussed was not the TSP but another program. Both General Hayden then head of the NSA and John Negroponte then DNI have indicated that this was precisely the program discussed albeit in its unmodified form. Finally, Gonzales maintained in his testimony that there had been no serious disagreement about the program despite the objections from the DOJ. Along with his constantly changing testimony concerning the US Attorney firings, this discrepancy led four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 26, 2007 to ask Solicitor General Paul Clement (in his role of Acting Attorney General for matters in which Gonzales has recused himself) to name a special prosecutor to determine whether Gonzales has obstructed justice, perjured himself, and made false statements.
....Despite previous abuses, April 10, 2007 intelligence czar DNI John "Mike" McConnell (not to be confused with Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell) proposes allowing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of foreign nationals completely outside of FISA, extend from 3 days to one week surveillance without seeking FISA permission "in emergency situations," immunize telecoms, and extend FISA warrants from 120 days to one year. McConnell has a large conflict of interest in the immunization of telecoms issue. Like too many others, McConnell has benefited from the revolving door between government and private enterprise. He has been director of defense programs at Booz Allen Hamilton a large defense and intelligence firm with CIA and NSA consulting contracts and chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association for NSA and CIA contractors. In short, he has intimate connections to precisely those corporate players most closely involved in promoting the use of telecoms in intelligence gathering and with the greatest vested interest in keeping this arrangement going .
....On August 5, 2007, Bush signed into law a 6 month revision of FISA which would allow warrantless wiretapping of non-American individuals "reasonably" thought to be outside the US and incidentally of US citizens as long as these are not the primary targets of surveillance. The Attorney General (at the time of the bill's signing this was still the eminently untrustworthy Alberto Gonzales) and the DNI (the as we will soon see truth challenged Mike McConnell) alone and without any outside judicial review would see the program was properly carried out. In effect, this was a backdoor way to surveil Americans without a warrant. It also granted telecommunication companies prospective immunity for aiding the government in these activities during this 6 month period but not retroactively for their past actions.
....The need for such a bill was raised at the last minute as lawmakers were on their way out of town for the August recess. Although it only became public later, the ostensible reason for modifying FISA at this particular juncture was an unspecified terrorist threat to the Capitol (which DNI McConnell knew at the time was based on an unreliable source). Mike McConnell then negotiated with Democratic Congressional leaders on a Democratic bill to address perceived shortcomings in the FISA law. The White House, however, wanted FISA gutted, and McConnell reneged on his deal with the Democrats. With the Congressional vacation coming on and members eager to leave, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid caved. Through their parliamentary machinations, the Democratic bill was defeated and the Republican version endorsed by the White House passed. The end result was, abetted by a dishonest DNI, another power grab by the Bush Administration and the failure of the Democrats to stand up to it.
....On September 10, 2007, DNI McConnell testified before a Senate committee that the newly gutted FISA law the Protect America Act resulted in the arrest of 3 Germans planning to attack Americans in Germany. When German authorities pointed out that the Germans in question had come to their attention through US surveillance initiated under the old FISA statute, McConnell retracted his statement without apologizing for it.
....On September 20, 2007, McConnell testified falsely again that surveillance of Iraqi insurgents holding American troops had been held up for 12 hours due to FISA court restrictions. The delay, however, occurred because of the initial weakness of the request submitted by the NSA to the DOJ (which given the low threshold for FISA warrants is telling) and subsequent foul ups in finding a senior official to sign off on it. Since the old FISA law allowed surveillance to begin up to 72 hours before the granting of a warrant, it is unclear why this was even an issue.
....Because the Protect America Act (PAA) was set to expire after 180 days, in December 2007, an attempt was made in the Senate to pass a permanent extension. There were two principal versions of this bill, the Intel version from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) chaired by the conservative Democrat Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and another a revision of the Intel version that came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The Intel version was Republican friendly and was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as the base or favored version. It granted the retroactive immunity the telecoms had been lobbying for (not in the SJC bill), allowed basket warrants for the surveillance, not of individuals, but of classes of persons, had weak minimization (i.e. disposal of information on Americans incidentally obtained) requirements and oversight, and gave only vague assurances that the program would not be used for reverse targeting (using a foreign national as an excuse to surveil an American). An objection by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) threw this well orchestrated process into disarray, and Reid pulled consideration of the bill on December 17, 2007.
....In January 2008, with the PAA due to expire on February 1, Reid made a second attempt to pass the Intel version. This time he was blindsided by Bush and the Republicans. Senate Republicans played politics. They refused to allow any face-saving amendments (all of which were likely to be defeated anyway) to be brought up and were willing to see the PAA expire instead. Bush for his part announced he would veto even a short extension of the PAA to give the Senate time to act. So on the one hand Bush and the Republicans argued that the PAA was absolutely necessary and if it was not passed the terrorists would win and we would all die. On the other, they were perfectly ready to see it expire just so they could stick it to Senate Democrats.
....On January 28, 2008, with the SOTU scheduled for later that evening, that is what happened. In a near party line vote, Democrats defeated the Republican move (48-45 with 60 votes needed) for cloture on the Intel version of the PAA with no amendments. The Republicans then defeated a similar motion for a 30 day extension of the PAA on a straight party line vote.
....So to recap briefly, Senate Democrats were ready to pass a bad bill, but the Republicans who supported the bad bill wanted to rub the Democrats’ faces in it first. As a result, everything fell apart, and the upshot was everyone could and did blame everyone else. High school was not this bad.
....On January 29, 2008, a 15 day extension (to February 15, 2008) was agreed to by voice vote in the House and by Unanimous Consent in the Senate. An agreement was made to consider amendments to the PAA in return for a cloture vote. All of the amendments were rejected by Republicans voting as a bloc and conservative Democrats voting as weasels.
SA 3915 (Feingold): stoppage of surveillance of an American upon finding of FISA court and minimization of information so acquired. Rejected: 40-56
SA 3913 (Feingold): No reverse targeting of Americans. Rejected: 38-57
SA 3910 (Feinstein): Exclusivity (surveillance must be conducted under FISA). Rejected: 57-41 (Needed 60)
SA 3979 (Feingold): Segregation and audit of communications involving Americans. Rejected: 35-63
SA 3907 (Dodd): No retroactive immunity for telecoms. Rejected: 31-67
SA 3912 (Feingold): No bulk surveillance. Rejected: 37-60
SA 3927 (Specter): Substitution of US for telecoms in civil suits. Rejected: 37-60
SA 3919 (Feinstein): Transferal of civil suits to FISA court (with an eye to dismiss). Rejected: 41-57 (Needed 60)The first two were defeated on February 7. The others on February 12, 2008. Cloture was invoked, and the bill passed in the Senate 68-29. Senate Republicans timed their votes close to the February 15 expiration date in an effort to force the House to drop consideration of its own bill and accept the Senate version without revision. Instead the Democratic House leadership played for time and sought a further 21 day extension to the PAA. On February 13, 2008, this action was defeated by House Republicans along with a small group of liberal Democrats 191-229. In effect, the liberal Democrats called the Republicans and Bush Administration’s bluff. The deadline passed, the country did not collapse, as right wing commentators ominously predicted. A few Democrats showed some backbone although the vast majority of them continued to punt or enable. Somewhat lost in all the kabuki was the real object of the exercise: to grant immunity for the telecoms. DNI Mike McConnell touched on this in a February 15, 2008 NPR interview:
The issue is liability protection for the private sector. We can't do this mission without their help.But even this admission is heavily spun. The telecoms have substantial protection from liability under existing law and their exposure to large payouts is minimal. The government and telecoms are intimately intertwined, and this relationship will not be changed by a failure to grant immunity to them. Further the telecoms can not duck future cooperation with the government (even if they were so inclined) if that cooperation is accompanied by a court order. No, immunity is not about protecting the telecoms (they don’t need it) but rather squelching civil lawsuits which if allowed to proceed could expose the extent of this government’s spying on its own citizens. This isn’t about national security. It is about CYA.
13. SWIFT surveillance of international financial transactions. After 9/11, the US Treasury Department began the Terrorist FinanceTracking Program which served the international secure messaging system known as SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) based in Belgium with broad subpoenas which resulted in the network turning over large parts of its database involving millions of records to US authorities.
....Essentially, the US government was allowed to peek in on most of the international wire transfers between banks in the world. As long as all parties are foreign, US law does not have much to say about this, but many transactions involved Americans. This brings up 4th Amendment considerations which expressly forbid “unreasonable searches and seizures” and demand a warrant that is both specific and based on “probable cause”. Hoovering up for data mining purposes millions of bank records of ordinary Americans sending money abroad violates all aspects of this Constitutional protection. The program came to light on June 23, 2006 in articles in major US papers. Subsequently, there were announcements that the program had been modified but it was not clear how. The real question is how many of these post-9/11 “emergency” programs of dubious legality are still out there running years later.
14. Black prisons and extraordinary rendition to facilitate interrogation by torture
....Khalid El-Masri a German citizen was detained by Macedonian police in late 2003. His name was similar to the alleged mentor of the al Qaeda Hamburg cell (of which two of the 911 pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as well as Ramzi Binalshibh were members). He was held for 3 weeks and then released. Although the CIA knew that this El-Masri was not the one they were looking for, they kidnapped him and took him to Afghanistan where he was interrogated and beaten for months. Eventually, on May 28, 2004, after two orders from then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and being made to promise never to talk about what happened, El-Masri was dumped at night on a road in Albania. On December 6, 2005, the ACLU filed suit on his behalf in federal court. On May 12, 2006, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III dismissed the case accepting the government's contention that a suit into Masri's illegal detention would compromise national security. The dismissal was upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 2, 2007. On January 31, 2007, a German prosecutor issued warrants for 13 people suspected of participation in the kidnapping. For his part, since his release, El-Masri has had a troubled history. On May 17, 2007, after an argument with clerks about a defective iPod, he set fire to the store and burned it down. On October 9, 2007, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to a suit by El-Masri and let stand a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion accepting the government's state secrets argument and dismissing the case.
....Meanwhile on February 17, 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric Abu Omar in Milan and rendered him to Egypt where he was held and tortured. In December 2005, an Italian court issued arrest warrants for 22 (now up to 26) CIA agents. Abu Omar was released early in 2007.
....Several European countries are looking into the rendition programs. These efforts are complicated by US stonewalling and the complicity of their own intelligence services.
....Something similar happened to Maher Arar. A Canadian resident with dual Canadian/Syrian citizenship was detained at JFK in New York on September 26, 2002 because he knew someone who knew someone who knew Osama bin Laden. He was held in US custody for 2 weeks without access to a lawyer. Then because the Canadian government falsely declared he was no longer a resident and with the knowledge of their intelligence services, he was rendered to Syria where he was held for a year and tortured. He was released October 5, 2003 and returned to Canada. The Canadian government eventually exonerated Arar and paid a $10.5 million settlement. A suit entered by Arar in US federal court was dismissed on February 16, 2006 on national security grounds. The US government has never admitted any wrongdoing and Arar continues to be on the US No-Fly list.
....As for black prisons, these were created to hold high value ghost detainees up to one hundred in number beyond the oversight of the judiciary and Congress, essentially so that they could be tortured. 14 of these, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were eventually transferred to Guantanamo. In Europe, Poland and Romania were rumored to be sites of the prisons. US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan held others. The remainder were scattered throughout the world in complicit countries and on other US bases. Although there had been previous revelations, the story broke officially in a Dana Priest Washington Post report of November 2, 2005. President Bush acknowledged their existence nearly a year later on September 6, 2006.
....The purpose of both rendition and black prisons was to gain actionable intelligence, an obsession in the Bush Administration. In its pursuit, they stooped to torture and bartered our image as a champion of human rights for a stack of unreliable information. It is an exchange that is impossible to justify.
15. Homeland Security: white elephant (organization), black hole (money), Tom Ridge and threat levels, Michael Chertoff and general incompetence.
....As of May 1, 2007 in a House report on DHS, under Chertoff's direction, there were 138 vacancies and another 92 currently being recruited among the department's top 575 positions. Most of these were in the department's policy, legal and intelligence sections, immigration agencies, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. Luckily, nothing important.
16. K Street Lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, North Marianas, removal of investigating US attorney Frederick Black (Guam), Gale Norton and Steven Griles at Interior, go betweens Italia Federici for Norton and Susan Ralston for Rove, tribal casinos; conviction of Rep. Bob "Freedom Fries" Ney (R-OH) for conspiracy and false statements re Abramoff's Indian casinos scam
17. Kyle “Dusty” Foggo was Executive Director under Porter Goss at the CIA from November 4, 2004 to May 12, 2006. In this, the No. 3 post at the agency Foggo ran daily operations. On February 13, 2007, Foggo was indicted along with Brent Wilkes by fired US attorney for Southern California Carol Lam (two days before she left her office) for wire fraud, deprival of honest services, money laundering, and conspiracy for steering business to Brent Wilkes, a figure in the Duke Cunningham scandal. This indictment concentrated mainly on a water contract for CIA personnel overseas and expensive vacations to Hawaii and Scotland paid for by Wilkes. On May 10, 2007, an expanded, superseding indictment was filed. This indictment added Wilkes-Foggo deals involving cover for CIA air operations, selling armored cars to the CIA, and rental of office space, $1.35 million transferred out of government contract accounts to Wilkes’ businesses, and details more of the expensive dinners Foggo was treated to. On February 19, 2008, Foggo’s case was transferred from the Southern District of California to the Eastern District of Virginia, nearer to Langley and CIA headquarters.
18. Duke Cunningham convicted of receiving $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion, the MZM connection. Mitchell Wade the founder of the defense contracting firm MZM purchased Cunningham's Del Mar home for $1,675,000 then put it back on the market a month later for $975,000. Cunningham lived in Washington on a yacht owned by Wade. In exchange for these kinds of bribes and favors, Cunningham steered contracts to MZM. One of the first in July 2002 was for $140,000 for computers and office furniture for Vice President Cheney which turned out in actuality to be for anthrax screening (for which MZM had zero expertise). Another in September 2002 was for a data storage system for CIFA (see item 158 on CIFA's domestic spying). $5.4 million of the $6.3 million contract was profit. As it turned out the system was incompatible with CIFA's and was never installed. As often happens in these kinds of arrangements, Lt. Gen. James C. King who helped set up CIFA went to work at MZM and became its President in June 2005 replacing Wade. By the time that Cunningham pled guilty on November 28, 2005, he had managed to steer $150 million in contracts to MZM, a firm which before Cunningham and Wade hooked up received no important government contracts.
....Another player in the Cunningham scandals was Brent Wilkes who founded ADCS a data conversion firm. He too won contracts through Cunningham and according to Wade set up a prostitution ring for the benefit of Cunningham and other legislators at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels. On November 5, 2007, Wilkes was convicted in federal court on all 13 felony counts he was charged with. These included conspiracy, bribery, money laundering and wire fraud. In addition to paying for flings in Hawaii and Las Vegas for Cunningham, Wilkes was accused of giving Cunningham $100,000. Wilkes said it was to buy Cunningham's boat although the deal never went through and Wilkes never asked for the money back. Wilkes also passed along $525,000 to help cover a mortgage for a house in Santa Fe for Cunningham. In exchange for these bribes, Wilkes' company received about $80 million dollars in contracts. The government lost $30-60 million and Wilkes made about $46 million as a result of his deals with Cunningham. On February 19, 2008, US District Court judge Larry Burns went against probation and prosecutorial recommendations and sentenced Wilkes to 12 years in prison. He could have gotten 60.
19. Tom Delay, creator of the K Street Project, squeezing lobbyists to finance Republicans only, indicted for conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws (money laundering) in Texas, also connections to the Abramoff scandal. Major figure in Washington culture of corruption
20. Mark Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, resigned over the House page scandal: sending sexually explicit messages to pages
21. Cheney's Energy Policy, Big Oil's writing of it, and refusal to divulge that participation
22. Tax cuts for the wealthiest, corporations and on capital gains; retention of the AMT.
HR 1836 the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law June 7, 2001. It was projected to reduce total surpluses by approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period. Its principal feature was a reduction spaced over the 2001 to 2006 period in the 4 highest tax brackets.
HR 2 the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law May 28, 2003. It increased the exemption amount for the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT), decreased the tax rates for income from dividends and capital gains, modified tax law relating to bonus depreciation and expensing, and allowed certain 2003 corporate estimated tax payments to be shifted into 2004. Its principal effects would occur in its first 5 years from 2003-2008 and would cost $342.9 billion in this period.
HR 1308 the curiously named Working Families Tax Relief Act was signed into law October 4, 2004. Its main feature involved extensions and changes in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Its principal costs occurred over the 2005-2009 period and were estimated to be $122 billion.
In 2005, there was an attempt at another tax cut bill which failed. In 2006, the Republicans broke their tax cuts up into a couple of bills .
HR 4297 was signed into law May 17, 2006. It was to cost about $70 billion, split roughly between cuts on dividends and capital gains on the one hand and cuts in the Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT) on the other.
HR 6111 was signed into law December 20, 2006. It was a minor catchall bill extending and modifying some expiring tax provisions and was projected to cost $40 billion over the period from 2007 to 2016.Looking over the various bills, it is likely they became increasing hard to sell over time. They certainly became smaller. Still a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. It's just that after Bush got a trillion dollars for the rich in his first bill, everything else seemed small by comparison.
23. Global warming: denial of manmade origin, followed by minimization of the effects of the manmade contribution, continued reliance on fossil and carbon based fuels, little movement on CAFE standards and conservation, and political interference in scientific reports.
March 13, 2001, Bush rejects Kyoto Protocols (finished December 1997 but never ratified by the US Senate) and casts doubt on the causes of climate change.
June 11, 2001, in reference to a report by the National Academy of Sciences, Bush questions both the extent of global warming, its impact, and the manmade contribution to it.
February 14, 2002, Bush announces his Clear Skies Initiatives which lacks any limits on CO2.
April 2002, at the urging of ExxonMobil Bush blocks reelection of Robert Watson, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.
June 3, 2002, an EPA report to the UN admits global warming largely due to human activities.
June 4, 2002, Bush dismisses the report as "put out by the bureaucracy" and reiterates his opposition to Kyoto.
August 19, 2002, White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) chief of staff Philip Cooney a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a non scientist questions why climate change is mentioned at all. In September 2002, for the first time in six years, the annual EPA report on air pollution "Latest Findings on National Air Quality: 2001 Status and Trends" omits the section on global warming.
November 2002, Our Changing Planet, an annual report to Congress on the Climate Change Science Program for oversight and budget purposes is heavily edited by Philip Cooney.
April-May 2003, CEQ Chairman Jim Connaughton edits the draft of what will be the August 2003 "Fabricant" opinion.
June 23, 2003, the EPA issues "Draft Report on the Environment 2003" in which the section on global warming was pulled after Philip Cooney sought to replace data showing sharp increases in global temperatures with references to a study funded by the API questioning the evidence for global warming.
July 2003, the Administration releases its Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program. Philip Cooney along with other CEQ officials made at least 181 edits emphasizing the uncertainty of global warming and 113 de-emphasizing the human contribution to it. The CEQ also inserted language about the possible benefits of global warming and removed recommendations to do something about it.
August 28, 2003, in response to a petition by environmental groups to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on new cars (based upon an April 10, 1998 opinion by then EPA General Counsel Jonathan Cannon which found that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases were air pollutants), the EPA denied the petition. The General Counsel at the time Robert Fabricant reversed what was known as the Cannon memo and declared that greenhouse gases were not air pollutants.
Early 2005, Bush meets with author, non scientist, and global warming skeptic Michael Crichton. Bush had read his novel "State of Fear" which depicts global warming as a conspiracy.
June 1, 2005, Rick Peltz a scientist at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (USCCSP) resigns and accuses Phillip Cooney, the then chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) of editing scientific papers so that they would agree with Administration policies on climate change.
June 10, 2005, Cooney resigns
June 13, 2005, Cooney is hired by ExxonMobil
September 21, 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Max Mayfield, the Director of the National Hurricane Center in testimony before the Commerce Committee denied a connection between Katrina and global warming, ascribing an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes to natural fluctuations. Mayfield was a popular and respected media figure whose thinking on this was out of the mainstream. His testimony, however, was carefully worked out between committee staff and the Office of Legislative Affairs at NOAA to in the words of one staffer Tom Jones smack "the shit out of this issue."
December 2005, NASA climatologist James Hansen reported his work was being monitored and his access to the press limited by a 24 year old Bush political appointee in NASA's PR department George C. Deutsch. Deutsch also tried to qualify references to the Big Bang as this conflicted with his fundamentalist beliefs.
February 7, 2006, Deutsch resigns after it becomes known that he lied on his resume about having a college degree.
April-November 2006, the Smithsonian (almost all of whose $1.1 billion budget comes from the government) self censors an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic which it had delayed six months while trying to tone it down.
July 20, 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center at NOAA had his Congressional testimony on global warming modified and weakened by political appointees at the White House Council of Environmental Quality, the OMB, the Commerce Department, and NOAA.
January 30, 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists releases a report indicating that 150 climate scientists from 8 federal agencies had personally experienced at least one instance of interference in their work in the previous 5 years (for a total of 435 incidents).
April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA rejects the Fabricant opinion and requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. The commonwealth of Massachusetts argued successfully that it and its citizens had suffered and would suffer ecological damage, including loss of coastal lands, due to global warming.
May 2007, Bush continues to use the mantra of short term, unsustainable "economic growth" to oppose meaningful international (G-8) approaches, such as carbon trading and emission caps.
May 31, 2007, in an NPR interview, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin admits that global warming exists but doubts that it is a problem "to be wrestled with".
September 28, 2007, Bush at a meeting held in competition with a UN conference on global warming called on those countries which emit the most greenhouse gases to set voluntary caps but did not say what those should be, even for the US.
October 23, 2007, the White House cut written testimony of Julie Geberding director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 14 pages to 6 removing references to specific diseases, health problems, and global warming as "a serious public health concern."
December 3-15, 2007, at the UN's Bali conference on moving beyond the Kyoto Accords, the Bush Administration continued to refuse binding commitments for reduction in carbon emissions. Instead there will be two more years of negotiations effectively punting any real decisions to the next Administration. Unfortunately, the effects of global warming are unlikely to wait on this further bout of procrastination.
April 16, 2008, in yet another attempt to pre-empt an international conference (this one in Paris opening the following day, Bush announced the goal of stopping the growth in greenhouse gases by 2025 long after he is gone and some 10 years after climatologists say this needs to happen to avoid catastrophic changes. Essentially, the Bush program is to let business be business, not raise taxes, and trust to new technologies without significantly funding them. Bush also criticized the Supreme Court decision that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Bush and the EPA continue to stall on this.(see also item 42)
24. Terri Schiavo (family and privacy rights in end of life cases); Senate Majority leader Bill Frist making his famous (and erroneous) video diagnosis; the memo written by Brian Darling, the legal counsel for Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) that the Schiavo case was a great political issue which could be used against the Democratic Senator from Florida Bill Nelson. Republicans who had cast the Schiavo case as a "moral" issue initially declared the memo a Democratic plant and dirty trick before the real source came out.
25. Big budget deficits and vastly increased national debt; the national debt as of the date of Bush's 2001 inauguration was $5.7 trillion. In January 2008, it was $9.2 trillion, an increase of 61%.
26. The stacking of SCOTUS with right wing conservatives Roberts and Alito; the threat to Roe v. Wade; April 18, 2007 in a 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart SCOTUS upholds a ban on "partial birth" abortions (intact dilation and extraction). The procedure is rare and performed for medical reasons. Such a ban has been a goal of abortion foes who see it both as a step in a direct overturning of Roe and as part of an indirect approach to place so many restrictions on abortions as to effectively eliminate them
....The opinion written by Kennedy is remarkable for its inflammatory use of language (partial birth abortion, abortion doctors, killing the fetus, etc.) and example (an account of the procedure by an anti-abortion nurse). Kennedy manages to condescend not only to women but to their physicians as well. He essentially gives them both his considered medical opinion, as a lawyer, and orders them to follow it. The word hubris comes to mind.
27. Medicare: a bigger time bomb than Social Security left unaddressed
28. Medicare Part D: In an effort to spike a Democratic issue and protect the interests of drug and insurance companies, Republicans came up with their version of a Medicare drug prescription bill (Medicare Part D). The fix as they say was very much in. Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA) Chairman of the Commerce Committee was listed as the principal "author" of the bill which was largely written by industry lobbyists. Shortly after its passage, Tauzin announced his retirement and swung a deal to become a lobbyist at $2.5 million/year with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Big Pharma's trade group. Thomas Scully who headed Medicare at the time lied to Congress about the program's expected costs, understating them by $134 billion, and then threatened the program's chief actuary Richard Foster with firing if he told Congress the truth. He too quickly returned to the private sector and a law firm lobbying for the healthcare industry.
....The bill came up for a vote in the House at about 3 AM on November 22, 2003. Votes are usually held open for 15 minutes. After 45 minutes, the bill was failing 215-219. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom Delay spent the next few hours engaged in arm twisting and, in the case of Nick Smith (R-MI), bribery. They were successful. The vote was closed at 5:53 AM after nearly 3 hours, and the bill passed the House 220-215. It passed 54-44 in the Senate 3 days later on November 25, was signed into law December 8, 2003, and, after a signup period, went into effect January 1, 2006.
....The bill prohibited Medicare from using its market share to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices and forced enrolling seniors into private insurance plans. It presented them with multiple and confusing plans which might cover some but not other of their prescriptions. On top of this, most plans had various co-pays and deductibles further complicating the situation. And it had its famous donut-hole, which was introduced to meet the Administration's fake cost estimates. Prescriptions would be covered up to a certain amount and then not covered until a higher threshold had been reached. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) described the program succinctly as "somewhere between a bureaucratic nightmare and elder abuse."
29. Healthcare (in general)
30. Cooked intelligence and the Office of Strategic Plans/ Doug Feith; stovepiping and Cheney's alternate intel operation; pitching stories to credulous compliant reporters like Judy Miller then citing these stories as independent evidence; Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress feeding fake stories and dubious sources like "Curveball" into the mix; the subsequent coverup and Republican delayed and deep sixed Congressional investigations into the politicization of intelligence; an Inspector General's report of February 9, 2007 declared Feith's activities inappropriate but stopped short of calling them illegal. The IG's rationale seemed more political than legal since Feith was running an intelligence operation which would be illegal.
31. 2000 Presidential election; voter suppression and cooked felons list, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Governor Jeb Bush, Bush consigliere Jim Baker oversaw the recount, Theodore Olson argued Bush v. Gore: SCOTUS decided 7-2 to stop recounts because of inconsistent procedures and 5-4 insufficient time to begin new recount, giving Bush the election
32. 2004 Presidential election; Ohio voter irregularities that consistently favored Bush; Ken Blackwell was the Republican Secretary of State and honorary co chair of the Bush campaign who oversaw the election in Ohio. He opted for touch screen voting machines which left no paper trail and were sold by Diebold whose CEO Walden O'Dell was a Republican fundraiser. Long lines and too few machines in traditionally Democratic and minority areas also occurred.
....The Ohio Republican Party was unusually corrupt and was largely voted out in the November 2006 elections. It was epitomized by Tom Noe a Bush Pioneer who made illegal contributions to the Bush campaign at the same time he was looting millions from the state's workers comp program in a kooky coin investment scheme. He's currently serving ~20 years on state and federal charges.
33. Attempts to torpedo the 911 Commission. Although now largely forgotten, the Bush Administration fought the 9/11 Commission every step of the way and it was only pressure from the American public and most especially from the families of the victims of 9/11 that the commission was formed and was able to come up with some kind of a report however flawed and incomplete.
....Bush and Cheney resisted calls for such a bipartisan commission for over a year arguing that the matter was best left to Republican controlled intelligence committees in the Congress. It was not until November 27, 2002 that Bush announced the commission's formation. He did his best to see that it went nowhere. Members were to be chosen by both Congress and the White House raising questions about the commission's independence. Democratic co-chair George Mitchell on December 11, 2002 and Republican chair Henry Kissinger (whom the White House had insisted on appointing) on December 13, 2007 resigned due to conflicts of interest. Kissinger did not want to make public the financial records (and connections) of his security consulting company Kissinger Associates. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton were named to replace them. The specter of conflicts of interest remained. Through their careers in government and on corporate boards, essentially all of the commission members had such conflicts. Perhaps the most egregious of these was Philip Zelikow the commission's executive staff director who had worked closely with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the first Bush Administration and co-written a book with her.
....Bush also tried to limit the commission's activities by giving it a budget of only $3 million to investigate the biggest terrorist attack in the country's history. The Challenger investigation cost $50 million by comparison. Later Kean and Hamilton asked for a further $11 million to be included in the $75 billion supplemental slated to fund the invasion of Iraq. The White House initially refused the funds before reversing itself.
....The White House also placed many roadblocks in the commission's path slowing its work. The commission was originally given 18 months or to the end of May 2004 to make its report. When a 60 day extension was requested, this too was initially denied. The commission report was eventually released on July 22, 2004.
....The White House sought both to shape and limit testimony. Before former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke testified, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales contacted two commission members Fred Fielding and James Thompson with information to discredit Clarke which they duly presented.
....On Presidential Daily Briefs, after dragging its heels for months, the White House allowed them to be viewed by only 4 of the 10 commissioners who were to report back to the others. However, the White House denied the full commission access to the notes made by the 4 approved commissioners. Moreover, of 360 PDBs requested, only 24 were made available by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. On March 14, 2004, the White House finally responded to the commission by releasing a 17 page summary of PDBs related to al Qaeda from the Bush and Clinton Administrations.
....The White House refused requests for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify. The rationale given was that historically National Security Advisers had not testified before Congress. This was completely untrue, and Rice finally testified on April 8, 2004. Rice's testimony, however, came with the price that no other White House aides were to be called.
....Bush initially placed a one hour limit on his testimony before the commission. This was rejected. But his testimony was highly conditioned. On April 29, 2004, he and Dick Cheney together met with the commission in private with no oath or transcript and only one staffer to take notes which were not to be made public.
....In an op-ed in the New York Times on January 2, 2008, chairmen Kean and Hamilton accused the CIA and the Bush Administration of obstruction by withholding information about taped interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri (see item 288).
....Finally, it should be remembered the 9/11 Commission was bipartisan. This does not mean the same thing as non-partisan. In order to achieve consensus, there was a deliberate decision not to assign personal blame. This was a critical shortcoming. Because as the Bush Administration's repeated obstruction of the investigation into its complacency and inaction before 9/11 showed, it had much to hide.
34. Failure to implement the 911 Commission recommendations. The Commission report was released on July 22, 2004 with its recommendations. A Republican President and Republican controlled Congress stalled and delayed them for 3 years. It was not until Democrats regained control of the Congress that anything was done. HR 1 on implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations passed the Congress on July 27, 2007 and was signed into law on August 3, 2007.
35. Marginalization of the UN. Neocons hate the UN.
A) It doesn’t do what neocons tell it to do.
B) It is multilateral and neocons think only unilateral action by the US is effective.
C) It does not opt for military force as a first resort.So, of course, on August 1, 2005, Bush named UN hating neocon John Bolton as UN Ambassador in a recess appointment. Bolton famously stated in a 1994 speech that “If the U.N. building in New York lost its top 10 stories it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” The top floors are where highest ranking UN officials have their offices. His thinking has not moderated since.
....Of course, the Administration has not hesitated to use the UN when it has suited its purposes. It cited Security Council resolutions from the First Gulf War in its AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Force against Iraq) (see item 128). It would have gone for a Chapter 7 UN resolution authorizing military force for the 2003 invasion of Iraq if it thought it could get one. That wasn’t in the cards. This explains why, despite the incongruity, resolutions from the First Gulf War were used to give a patina of international legitimacy to the Second Gulf War. Later on June 8, 2004 as the CPA was coming to a close, the Administration sought and obtained Security Council Resolution 1546 which sanctioned the presence of American forces in Iraq for a limited time subject to update. This permission was most recently updated in Resolution 1790 on December 18, 2006 which extends the American mandate in Iraq to December 31, 2008.
36. Preventive war doctrine, aka Cheney's one percent doctrine and the Bush doctrine. Bush first enunciated it at a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. Preventive war is different from pre-emptive war. In preventive war, there is no imminent threat and this type of war is considered a war crime. (Think of Hitler attacking Poland.) In pre-emptive war, there is an imminent threat and this type of war is sanctioned by international law. (Think of the Israelis striking the Egyptian army in the Sinai in 1967).
....Philip Zelikow a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, friend and colleague of Condoleezza Rice, and later Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was asked by Rice then National Security Advisor to rewrite a State Department paper on US policy in the post-9/11 world. The result was the National Security Strategy of September 2002. In it, Zelikow stated preventive war as US policy.
Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination . . . And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.If a threat is not fully formed (or if indeed it does not exist except as a manifestation of neocon paranoia), there is no imminence, and if there is no imminence, we are talking preventive war, a war crime.
....In a curious and very late attempt at revisionist history, on December 11, 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied that Iraq, the preeminent example of the Bush Doctrine, was about pre-emption, i.e. prevention.
QUESTION: After 9/11, the President declared policy of preempting threats to the nation before they fully manifested themselves. Yet we've seen some of the intelligence about those threats is often flawed, significantly. Can a preemption policy coexist with imperfect intelligence?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I would argue with you -- I don't think I would argue with you, I would argue that we have -- I don't think we've yet employed preemption. I would -- we could have a discussion about Iraq, continuing state of war since '91, shooting at our airplanes, almost a half dozen or more resolutions on this issue. I mean I think this was a long, long buildup. And I think it was a case in which you implement it or you had pretty much exhausted diplomatic options with Iraq.Problem, as Ross Perot used to say, solved.
37. Loss of US reputation internationally after massive post-911 world support. Here are some percentage US approval ratings pre-Bush and current. From here and here.
38. No serious attempt to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Bush's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would charitably be described as hands off and disengaged. On June 24, 2002, Bush did for the first time seem to support the creation of a Palestinian state:
And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.But as can be seen this declaration was highly conditioned and even then it would result initially in only "provisional" sovereignty for Palestinians. From this, it took almost a year for the Administration to come up with a more detailed plan. On April 30, 2003, it announced its Roadmap:
The following is a performance-based and goal-driven roadmap, with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the Quartet [the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Russia]. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in President Bush's speech of 24 June . . .
A settlement, negotiated between the parties, will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.The plan if not a quid pro quo for British participation in the invasion of Iraq was at least at the very strong suggestion of the British. The message was, however, stepped on by Bush as it came out just one day before his well known Mission Accomplished speech where he effectively and inaccurately declared victory in Iraq. After this, nothing happened except for the occasional vague pronouncement of even vaguer talks. The epitome of this was Condoleezza Rice's announcement in Luxor on January 15, 2007 of talks on talks to develop a "political horizon" for a return to the "Roadmap" leading to a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
....As the Bush Administration approached the end of its seventh year and the question of her legacy occupied Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, she arranged with Bush's general support the Annapolis peace conference. The conference was attended by representatives of more than 40 countries, including the Saudis and Syrians but not the Iranians (who were not invited) and the Iraqis (who were invited but declined). It lasted a grand total of one day (November 27, 2007) and ended not with a commitment to act but as on all previous occasions a commitment to talk. This was not surprising given the political weakness of the three primary participants Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olemrt and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush's detachment was exemplified by his inability to pronounce the names of either of his two guests of honor referring to them as "Ehud Elmo" and "Mahoomed Abbas" and his own rapid departure after his speech.
....Shortly before a week long trip (January 8-16, 2008) to the Middle East where he was to visit Israel for the first time, Bush philosophized in a January 6, 2008 interview for al Arabiya about his Administration's record on Israel-Palestine:
for the couple of years of my administration. It took a while to convince people that the two-state solution was in the security interests of both parties. And plus, there was a couple of difficult -- there was a difficult situation, the truth be known. One was the intifada, which made it awfully hard to discuss peace at that time. The other was the Iraq invasion. It just -- it created the conditions that made it more difficult to get people's minds in the right place to begin the process. And so now I think we've got the stars lined up, and I think we got a shot, and I'm going for it.Of course, he really isn't going for it. After having criticized Clinton's efforts as belated and incrementalist, Bush thinks he can achieve a deal by coming even later to the problem and solving it while being less involved. This is not serious.
39. Underfunding of basic research. The federal budget for R&D in 2006 (the last year that Republicans held a majority in the Congress) was $132.3 billion. In constant FY 2005 dollars (used hereafter), this broke down to around $73 billion in defense related R&D and $56 billion in non-defense R&D.
....Defense R&D increased 2001-2006 from $50 billion to $73 billion. Most of this increase came from weapons development, not basic science. From 2001-2005, defense spending on science and technology (basic research) rose from slightly more than $10 billion to about $13 billion before being cut back to 2001 levels in 2006.
....Non-defense R&D initially increased due to a 5 year initiative 1998-2003 (begun during the Clinton years) to double funding for the NIH from approx. $14 billion to $28 billion. After this point NIH funding (which accounts for half of non-defense R&D) stagnated. Non-defense non-NIH funding has remained essentially unchanged since 1992 (or for about 15 years).
....While Bush has greatly increased the size of the federal budget, during his tenure funding for basic research which has been the foundation of our technological preeminence has languished or been cut. Democrats since taking control of the Congress have made some moves to increase funding in the 2008 budget.
40. Alberto Gonzales: politicization of the department, even down to the intern program, decimation of career lawyers and evisceration of divisions, like civil rights. The US attorney firings and the use of political litmus tests in hiring. The use of corruption, voter suppression, and voter fraud cases to influence elections.
....Gonzales was counsel to the President before becoming Attorney General. This should have meant that he moved from being the President's lawyer to the people's lawyer but it is clear that he continues to see his main client as the President. Some think that he is dishonest; others say he is incompetent. He is both.
....On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney General effective September 17, 2007. While numerous scandals and investigations have swirled around him, it is not yet known what reason precisely forced him out or why this happened now.
41. FDA: drug testing; food safety: underfunding, cutback in inspections and inspection staff (a decrease of 12% between 2003 and 2006), reliance on self-policing, lack of inspection of imported foods, and inability to force recalls.
42. EPA: mercury levels for coal plants, delay in release of climate change reports; failure to address CO2 levels in global warming: Massachusetts v. EPA April 2007. On May 14, 2007, Bush asked government agencies to come up with a plan and submit it to him 3 weeks before he leaves office. The stalling continued on May 31, 2007, when Bush called for what was termed an aspirational goal of coming up with voluntary limits to greenhouse gases in the next 18 months (or again just before he leaves office) to go into effect after Kyoto expires in 2012. The number of civil cases brought against polluters decreased 70% between 2002 and 2006 compared to the rate in the 1990s.
....December 19, 2007, going against the unanimous recommendation of his legal and technical staff, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson refused to grant California a waiver so that it could enforce stricter than federal emissions guidelines. The state along with 16 others sought to force automakers to cut emissions in all their vehicles by 30% by 2016. On January 2, 2008, California sued the EPA to force a reversal of its decision.
....On January 18, 2008, Johnson sent heavily redacted documents to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works investigating his decision. In the accompanying letter, Associate Administrator Christopher Bliley in explaining the redactions cited executive privilege (even though none of the decision making involved Bush), a "chilling effect" upon his staff (even though he ignored them), confusion the public might have in understanding "the Agency's full and complete thinking on the matter" (even though it's clear what Johnson was up to), and the lawsuits by the states challenging Johnson's decision (which would not have been filed if Johnson had not made such an unjustifiable decision).
....On February 8, 2004, in New Jersey v. EPA, the DC Court of Appeals threw out the EPA’s plan to use a voluntary cap and trade system to reduce mercury emissions in coal and oil fired power plants. The plan would have allowed plants that failed to meet their emissions goals to purchase credits from those plants that had. The problem with this kind of system is that it would allow some plants to be dirtier than others and so expose some communities more than others.
....As to the facts of the case, the court found that in December 2000 the EPA had deemed it appropriate and necessary to regulate mercury emissions from coal and oil fired power plants under the mandatory and stricter rules of Section 112 of the Clean Air Act (USC Title 42 Sec. 4712). In 2005 under the Bush Administration, the EPA removed these power plants from the Section 112 list of polluters. To do so, the EPA needed to show that emissions from all such plants were at “a level which is adequate to protect public health with an ample margin of safety and no adverse environmental effect will result.” (Sec. 112 (c)(9)(B)(ii)) It didn’t do this. It couldn’t do this. A cap and trade system for a major pollutant would never fit such a requirement. As a result, the court ruled that the EPA decision to remove these power plants from Section 112 was unlawful as was consequently the EPA’s cap and trade scheme.
43. Porter Goss and the gutting of the CIA: Goss a conservative Republican Congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee was chosen to replace George Tenet in 2004. He promised to be non-partisan in his new role, a promise he did not keep and which it is difficult to imagine anyone took seriously at the time. He brought with him some of his Ho