Undeterred, Jones proceeded to pitch the program individually to PBS’s affiliates. 65% of them agreed to show the program, including those in most major markets, except one WETA in Washington, DC. Given the documentary’s subject matter and that DC is the nation’s capital, this would seem precisely the community which would be most interested in it. But WETA’s CEO is Sharon Percy Rockefeller, the wife of Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a man who certainly never opposed and may have abetted the Administration’s torture programs.

In response to the March 24, 2008 Frontline “Bush’s War”, a fairly conventional retelling of the run up to the Iraq War with no new material, the Administration threatened to cut in half and then eliminate federal funding for PBS within 3 years. Now it’s important to realize that, with a Democratic Congress, the Administration had no real ability to carry out its threat. But the pressure appears to have had its desired effect anyway.  Indeed PBS, far from being independent, has shown itself to be politically responsive to powerbrokers on both sides of the aisle.

Then just days before the convention opening, the FBI and local law enforcement, especially of diehard Republican loyalist Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, initiated a series of punitive raids over the weekend against various groups. The first occurred at a central clearinghouse for protestors known as the “Welcoming Committee”. Those there were handcuffed, computers were seized, but no arrests were made. Sheriff Fletcher released a statement in which he described the “Welcoming Committee” as a “criminal enterprise made up of 35 self- described anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts.” If such were the case, it is surprising no arrests were made. The following day raids were also carried out against other “dangerous” groups, such as Legalwatch and Food not Bombs. In one case, building inspectors arrived after a raid and gave owners until 6:30 the next morning to fix the door the police had kicked in or have the premises boarded up.

In the later raids, some 6 individuals were arrested but none charged. Instead they were kept on probable cause holds. Such a hold allows police to hold someone up to 36 hours, weekends not counting, without charge. Effectively, this permits law officers like Sheriff Fletcher to mete out 4-5 day jail sentences to anyone he doesn’t like, in other words, punishment without charge, conviction, or crime. Similar strong arm tactics by the New York police at the Republican convention in 2004 led to settlements in the millions. But with the federal government underwriting security costs this is not much of a disincentive.

On September 1, 2008, the police using pepper spray, tear gas, and “less lethal” projectiles fought numerous battles with demonstrators most of whom were peaceful. By the end of the first day, official figures listed 163 arrests, unofficial numbers 256.

This pattern of infiltration, fearmongering, high profile raids, large shows of military style force, aggressive indiscriminate treatment of demonstrators, and mass arrests has come to be known as the “Miami model” from its use against protesters to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations in Miami in November 2003.

In the early phases, police actions were largely ignored by the mainstream media and most of the reporting came from bloggers and independent media sources. As violence increased, the mainstream media did pick up the story but even they noted that most protesters were peaceful.

It is important to remember that the real object of these raids, seizures, and arrests is not to stop crime but dissent. They are meant to send a message, that if you protest, even legally, even peacefully, you risk arbitrary detention, seizure of your property, punishment, and humiliation by the powers that be. Dissent in this country has become for many un-American. Worse it is seen as a kind of terrorism. This is all the more bizarre and disheartening because our country was itself founded on dissent. Pilgrims, Quakers, believers and non-believers of all sorts, came to these shores precisely because they did not agree with the powers of their day. The Founding Fathers were dissenters and started a revolution and a country over their dissent. The Framers understood this and enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution the right to dissent in both the guarantees of freedom of speech and of peaceful assembly. Yet in the Age of Terror, dissent is no longer seen as a living, breathing expression of our democracy but as suspicious, probably criminal, certainly unpatriotic, a thing to be suppressed, especially so that the greater good, in this case the photo-ops of the national party conventions can proceed unquestioned, unchallenged, and unhindered.

Shortly after Steven Hatfill’s exoneration, on July 29, 2008, another researcher at the Fort Detrick facility Bruce Ivins committed suicide. Ivins had worked at the facility for 36 years and had been involved in research on a vaccine against multiple strains of anthrax. Initial reports suggested he had become the FBI’s prime suspect in the anthrax case after the bureau’s long investigation/persecution of Hatfill. His home was searched twice. He began attending group therapy. On July 9, 2008, he was escorted from his work and committed for psychiatric evaluation after a social worker Jean Duley who ran the group sessions alleged Ivins stated he was about to be charged with 5 capital murders and had discussed plans to kill his co-workers. A psychiatrist described Ivins as “homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions”. Despite this, he was released but refused access to his lab. On July 24, Duley sought a restraining order against him (at the suggestion of the FBI) citing threatening phone calls, and a history of threatening behavior going back to his graduate school days (although he had no criminal record). On July 27 Ivins was found at his home unresponsive having apparently taken a large number of Tylenol with codeine. He died two days later.

It all seemed so open and shut. The FBI had finally gotten the right man. Seeing the forces of the law closing in on him, the guilty man killed himself. Except there were questions. If Ivins had a history of threats going back decades, why had he been given clearances and allowed to work in such a dangerous area? If Ivins could become the government’s prime suspect so quickly after it dropped its investigation of Steven Hatfill, why had he not been more thoroughly investigated anytime in the previous 7 years? And while a guilty man might commit suicide so might a hounded one, especially with the spectacle of Steven Hatfill’s ordeal very much on his mind. Also how much weight was to be given to the statements of Jean Duley the “therapist” who it turned out had little training and no credentials but who did have an interesting rap sheet? Then there was the FBI’s case. Ivins certainly considered himself to be a target of its investigation. It is Department of Justice policy to inform a witness to a Grand Jury if he/she is a “target” of investigation, and Ivins had appeared before one. But not only did the FBI not arrest Ivins a suspected terrorist with access to deadly pathogens it made no attempt to have him removed from his lab. Finally, in an August 4, 2008 New York Times story published nearly a week after his death, it came out that the Grand Jury had not progressed very far in its investigation, that several more weeks (so nothing imminent as first reported) of testimony had been planned, that the case against Ivins was, as in the case of Hatfill, mostly circumstantial, and that there was no evidence showing that he had traveled to New Jersey at the time the anthrax letters were posted in 2001.

What is important to remember here is that the FBI has blown two investigations into the anthrax letters. What, if any, part Bruce Ivins had in them is and likely will remain unknown.

There are two other aspects of the anthrax attacks that should be mentioned. Because of its geographic location, the nature of its research, and the kind of anthrax it had access to and which was used in the letters, it has been understood from early on that Fort Detrick (not al Qaeda or Iraq) was the source of the anthrax used. Nor was Hatfill the first anthrax suspect who had worked at Fort Detrick.

An anonymous letter postmarked September 21, 2001, three days after the first anthrax letters were posted and twelve days before the first anthrax case was diagnosed, is sent to the FBI claiming that a former Fort Detrick researcher Ayaad Assaad might be planning a biological attack. Assaad was a naturalized Egyptian-American who had worked at Fort Detrick from 1989-1997. During that time he had been subjected to scurrilous racist attacks by some of his co-workers, most notably Lieutenant Colonel Philip Zack and Doctor Marian Rippy. Both were reprimanded. Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991. Rippy left shortly thereafter in February 1992. The FBI unconditionally cleared Assaad but the timing of the informant letter and the early connection to Fort Detrick are disturbing to say the least.

At the same time, the Bush Administration was quick to draw a relationship between the anthrax attacks and Iraq. Government scientists at Fort Detrick leaked to ABCNews investigative reporter Brian Ross that a particular preparatory material bentonite had been found in the anthrax samples recovered. Yes, the place that was the source of the anthrax was originally the same place that was tasked with investigating it. The claim was made that only Iraq used bentonite indicating clear Iraqi involvement in the attacks. Coming so quickly on the heels of 9/11, it suggested that the Iraqis might be involved in that as well. The problem was it wasn’t true. Yet as of August 2008 despite calls following the death of Bruce Ivins, Brian Ross has never given up the names of the “sources” who lied to him, had clear conflicts of interest in shifting attention away from Fort Detrick, and who helped generate a false argument for war with Iraq.

The New York Times did publish an apology for its part in hyping the case for WMD in the run up to the war. It did so on May 26, 2004 more than a year after the war began. It concentrated on 6 articles: 2 of which were written by Judith Miller and 2 she co-wrote with Michael Gordon. Yet this fact is never mentioned. Judith Miller’s name does not appear at all, and Michael Gordon is cited only once and that approvingly as a further source opining on the complexity of the aluminum tubes debate. Somehow this complexity went unappreciated by the IAEA which saw almost immediately that the aluminum tubes story was bogus. Judith Miller was let go by the Times but not for her role in lying the nation into an expensive, unnecessary, and endless war but for the far worse sin of embarrassing the paper in the Valerie Plame case. Gordon remains at the Times where he continues his career shilling for the Pentagon.

Even though by the time of its apology it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq, the Times was still not willing to give up on them entirely: “It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq.” The apology is rife with weasely phrases. “These accounts have never been independently verified.” Note the use of the passive. Translation: “We never verified them.” Or “we, along with the administration, were taken in.” Translation: “We didn’t verify this either, but it’s not our fault.”

The only bright spot in the Times apology is that it took the Washington Post even longer to come up with one. The Post published its apology on August 12, 2004. Bob Woodward’s laughably illogical take was “We did our job, but we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We did our job, except for the part about doing our job, which we did not do."

Along these lines, on May 28, 2008, former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan (July 17, 2003 – April 26, 2006) of all people wrote a more accurate and scathing assessment of the press than any it was willing to make itself:

And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it. … [T]he media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. [Page 125]

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. … In this case, the "liberal media" didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served. [Pages 156-157]

On June 5, 2008, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released what has come to be known as its Phase II report on intelligence and the run up to the Iraq war. It is actually two reports. The first of these compares what Bush and others said to what they knew as evidenced by the intelligence assessments at the time. In keeping with the Public Integrity report, it finds many discrepancies (lies) where the Administration overstated the case (lied) or made erroneous statements (more lies). Phase I came out on July 7, 2004. Phase II was stalled first by the Republicans while they were in the majority and then by weak kneed, conservative leaning Democrats like Jay Rockefeller the Committee Chair. While the report contains many interesting tidbits, the delay in its writing, measured in years, vitiates most of its findings (which was rather the point of the delay). Yes, Bush and Cheney lied the country into a war. Yes, this is an impeachable offense, a high crime if ever there was one, but the Democrats have done and will do nothing about it.

Overall the report is very badly written. It does not look at why the October 2002 NIE after considerable White House prodding made a more robust (although still highly conditioned) case for Iraq as a threat. It does not connect the dots. The intelligence community, for instance, concluded that even under optimum conditions if Iraq had somehow reconstituted its nuclear program, it would still take it 5-7 years to produce a nuclear device. This is important because it takes away the argument of Iraq as an imminent threat and turns a justified pre-emptive war into a preventive war, which is a war crime. Nor does it look at the likelihood that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program. Nuclear weapons are not something that are thrown together in one’s garage. They require a vast industrial undertaking which can not be hidden. It is also a multi-phased process: uranium ore must be acquired, enriched, processed, and machined; there must be a design; a device must be made and tested; then it must be miniaturized to fit on a vehicle (in this case a missile); finally the missile must be built and tested. When you consider how much of Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure was dismantled and destroyed in the inspections following the First Gulf War, the idea that Saddam could reconstitute a fully functioning nuclear weapons program on the sly is in the realm of pure paranoid fantasy. Now most Americans were not aware of this at the time but the Bush Administration, the intelligence community, and members of defense and intelligence committees in the Congress certainly were.

The run up to war, how it was treated then and later, is the paradigm for the Bush years. The White House committed acts which it knew to be illegal and then lied to us about them. Congressional Republicans covered for the Administration by blocking investigations when they were in the majority and belittling them when they went into the minority. Congressional Democrats (with few exceptions) did nothing to stop what was happening. The media (also with few exceptions) gave up their role as investigator for that of cheerleader. Now years later, we are at last beginning to see some investigation. Yet for the most part, it is too little, too late. Actual accountability remains as far off as ever.

With the Bush Administration in its last days on January 16, 2009, the Pentagon’s Inspector General released a report which found nothing improper in the Department’s pundits for hire program. The report illustrates once again how most Inspector Generals lack independence. (As noted in item 326, the Pentagon’s IG does not even have its own attorney but uses one from the department’s General Counsel’s office, a clear conflict of interest.) The Pentagon uses one of its own lawyer to investigate itself. Unsurprisingly, punches are pulled, and the result as here is a whitewash.