After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law

After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
By Tim Golden
The Lakeland Ledger

Sunday 24 October 2004

Washington - In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.

Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.

But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.

"We've cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet," said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. "They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory."

The story of how Guantánamo and the new military justice system became an intractable legacy of Sept. 11 has been largely hidden from public view.

But extensive interviews with current and former officials and a review of confidential documents reveal that the legal strategy took shape as the ambition of a small core of conservative administration officials whose political influence and bureaucratic skill gave them remarkable power in the aftermath of the attacks.

The strategy became a source of sharp conflict within the Bush administration, eventually pitting the highest-profile cabinet secretaries - including Ms. Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - against one another over issues of due process, intelligence-gathering and international law.

In fact, many officials contend, some of the most serious problems with the military justice system are rooted in the secretive and contentious process from which it emerged.

Military lawyers were largely excluded from that process in the days after Sept. 11. They have since waged a long struggle to ensure that terrorist prosecutions meet what they say are basic standards of fairness. Uniformed lawyers now assigned to defend Guantánamo detainees have become among the most forceful critics of the Pentagon's own system.

Foreign policy officials voiced concerns about the legal and diplomatic ramifications, but had little influence. Increasingly, the administration's plan has come under criticism even from close allies, complicating efforts to transfer scores of Guantánamo prisoners back to their home governments.

To the policy's architects, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represented a stinging challenge to American power and an imperative to consider measures that might have been unimaginable in less threatening times. Yet some officials said the strategy was also shaped by longstanding political agendas that had relatively little to do with fighting terrorism.

The administration's claim of authority to set up military commissions, as the tribunals are formally known, was guided by a desire to strengthen executive power, officials said. Its legal approach, including the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions, reflected the determination of some influential officials to halt what they viewed as the United States' reflexive submission to international law.

In devising the new system, many officials said they had Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda in mind. But in picking through the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, military investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts, officials said. While important Qaeda figures have been captured and held by the C.I.A., administration officials said they were reluctant to bring those prisoners before tribunals they still consider unreliable.

Some administration officials involved in the policy declined to be interviewed, or would do so only on the condition they not be identified. Others defended it strongly, saying the administration had a responsibility to consider extraordinary measures to protect the country from a terrifying enemy.

"Everybody who was involved in this process had, in my mind, a white hat on," Timothy E. Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel, said in an interview. "They were not out to be cowboys or create a radical new legal regime. What they wanted to do was to use existing legal models to assist in the process of saving lives, to get information. And the war on terror is all about information."

As the policy has faltered, other current and former officials have criticized it on pragmatic grounds, arguing that many of the problems could have been avoided. But some of the criticism also has a moral tone.

"What several of us were concerned about was due process," said John A. Gordon, a retired Air Force general and former deputy C.I.A. director who served as both the senior counterterrorism official and homeland security adviser on President Bush's National Security Council staff. "There was great concern that we were setting up a process that was contrary to our own ideals."

An Aggressive Approach

The administration's legal approach to terrorism began to emerge in the first turbulent days after Sept. 11, as the officials in charge of key agencies exhorted their aides to confront Al Qaeda's threat with bold imagination.

"Legally, the watchword became 'forward-leaning,' " said a former associate White House counsel, Bradford Berenson, "by which everybody meant: 'We want to be aggressive. We want to take risks.' "

That challenge resounded among young lawyers who were settling into important posts at the White House, the Justice Department and other agencies. Many of them were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal fraternity. Some had clerked for Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in particular. A striking number had clerked for a prominent Reagan appointee, Lawrence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

One young lawyer recalled looking around the room during a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Of 10 people, 7 of us were former Silberman clerks," he said.

Mr. Berenson, then 36, had been consumed with the nomination of federal judges until he was suddenly reassigned to terrorism issues and thrown into intense, 15-hour workdays, filled with competing urgencies and intermittent new alerts.

"All of a sudden, the curtain was lifted on this incredibly frightening world," he said. "You were spending every day looking at the dossiers of the world's leading terrorists. There was a palpable sense of threat."

As generals prepared for war in Afghanistan, lawyers scrambled to understand how the new campaign against terrorism could be waged within the confines of old laws.

Mr. Flanigan was at the center of the administration's legal counteroffensive. A personable, soft-spoken father of 14 children, his easy manner sometimes belied the force of his beliefs. He had arrived at the White House after distinguishing himself as an agile legal thinker and a Republican stalwart: During the Clinton scandals, he defended the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, saying he had conducted his investigation "in a moderate and appropriate fashion." In 2000, he played an important role on the Bush campaign's legal team in the Florida recount.

In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Flanigan sought advice from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel on "the legality of the use of military force to prevent or deter terrorist activity inside the United States," according to a previously undisclosed department memorandum that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The 20-page response came from John C. Yoo, a 34-year-old Bush appointee with a glittering résumé and a reputation as perhaps the most intellectually aggressive among a small group of legal scholars who had challenged what they saw as the United States' excessive deference to international law. On Sept. 21, 2001, Mr. Yoo wrote that the question was how the Constitution's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure might apply if the military used "deadly force in a manner that endangered the lives of United States citizens."

Mr. Yoo listed an inventory of possible operations: shooting down a civilian airliner hijacked by terrorists; setting up military checkpoints inside an American city; employing surveillance methods more sophisticated than those available to law enforcement; or using military forces "to raid or attack dwellings where terrorists were thought to be, despite risks that third parties could be killed or injured by exchanges of fire."

Mr. Yoo noted that those actions could raise constitutional issues, but said that in the face of devastating terrorist attacks, "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." If the president decided the threat justified deploying the military inside the country, he wrote, then "we think that the Fourth Amendment should be no more relevant than it would be in cases of invasion or insurrection."

The prospect of such military action at home was mostly hypothetical at that point, but with the government taking the fight against terrorism to Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, lawyers in the administration took the same "forward-leaning" approach to making plans for the terrorists they thought would be captured.

The idea of using military commissions to try suspected terrorists first came to Mr. Flanigan, he said, in a phone call a couple of days after the attacks from William P. Barr, the former attorney general under whom Mr. Flanigan had served as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during the first Bush administration.

Mr. Barr had first suggested the use of military tribunals a decade before, to try suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Although the idea made little headway at the time, Mr. Barr said he reminded Mr. Flanigan that the Legal Counsel's Office had done considerable research on the question. Mr. Flanigan had an aide call for the files.

"I thought it was a great idea," he recalled.

Military commissions, he thought, would give the government wide latitude to hold, interrogate and prosecute the sort of suspects who might be silenced by lawyers in criminal courts. They would also put the control over prosecutions squarely in the hands of the president.

The same ideas were taking hold in the office of Vice President Cheney, championed by his 44-year-old counsel, David S. Addington. At the time, Mr. Addington, a longtime Cheney aide with an indistinct portfolio and no real staff, was not well-known even in the government. But he would become legendary as a voraciously hard-working official with strongly conservative views, an unusually sharp pen and wide influence over military, intelligence and other matters. In a matter of months, he would make a mark as one of the most important architects of the administration's legal strategy against foreign terrorism.

Beyond the prosecutorial benefits of military commissions, the two lawyers saw a less tangible, but perhaps equally important advantage. "From a political standpoint," Mr. Flanigan said, "it communicated the message that we were at war, that this was not going to be business as usual."

Changing the Rules

In fact, very little about how the tribunal policy came about resembled business as usual. For half a century, since the end of World War II, most major national-security initiatives had been forged through interagency debate. But some senior Bush administration officials felt that process placed undue power in the hands of cautious, slow-moving foreign policy bureaucrats. The sense of urgency after Sept. 11 brought that attitude to the surface.

Little more than a week after the attacks, officials said, the White House counsel, Alberto F. Gonzales, set up an interagency group to draw up options for prosecuting terrorists. They came together with high expectations.

"We were going to go after the people responsible for the attacks, and the operating assumption was that we would capture a significant number of Al Qaeda operatives," said Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department official assigned to lead the group. "We were thinking hundreds."

Mr. Prosper, then 37, had just been sworn in as the department's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. As a prosecutor, he had taken on street gangs and drug Mafias and had won the first genocide conviction before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Even so, some administration lawyers eyed him suspiciously - as more diplomat than crime-fighter.

Mr. Gonzales had made it clear that he wanted Mr. Prosper's group to put forward military commissions as a viable option, officials said. The group laid out three others - criminal trials, military courts-martial and tribunals with both civilian and military members, like those used for Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Representatives of the Justice Department's criminal division, which had prosecuted a string of Qaeda defendants in federal district court over the previous decade, argued that the federal courts could do the job again. The option of toughening criminal laws or adapting the courts, as several European countries had done, was discussed, but only briefly, two officials said.

"The towers were still smoking, literally," Mr. Prosper said. "I remember asking: Can the federal courts in New York handle this? It wasn't a legal question so much as it was logistical. You had 300 Al Qaeda members, potentially. And did we want to put the judges and juries in harm's way?"

Lawyers at the White House saw criminal courts as a minefield, several officials said.

Much of the evidence against terror suspects would be classified intelligence that would be difficult to air in court or too sketchy to meet federal standards, the lawyers warned. Another issue was security: Was it safe to try Osama bin Laden in Manhattan, where he was facing federal charges for the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in East Africa?

Then there was a tactical question. To act preemptively against Al Qaeda, the authorities would need information that defense lawyers and due-process rules might discourage suspects from giving up.

Mr. Flanigan framed the choice starkly: "Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?"

Military commissions had no statutory rules of their own. In past American wars, when such tribunals had been used to carry out battlefield justice against spies, saboteurs and others accused of violating the laws of war, they had generally hewed to prevailing standards of military justice. But the advocates for commissions in the Bush administration saw no reason they could not adapt the rules, officials said. Standards of proof could be lowered. Secrecy provisions could be expanded. The death penalty could be more liberally applied.

But some members of the interagency group saw it as more complicated. Terrorism had not been clearly established as a war crime under international law. Writing new law for a military tribunal might end up being more difficult than prosecuting terrorism cases in existing courts.

By late October 2001, the White House lawyers had grown impatient with what they saw as the dithering of Mr. Prosper's group and what one former official called the "cold feet" of some of its members. Mr. Flanigan said he thought the government needed to move urgently in case a major terrorist linked to the attacks was apprehended.

He gathered up the research that the Prosper group had completed on military commissions and took charge of the matter himself. Suddenly, the other options were off the table and the Prosper group was out of business.

"Prosper is a thoughtful, gentle, process-oriented guy," the former official said. "At that time, gentle was not an adjective that anybody wanted."

A Secretive Circle

With the White House in charge, officials said, the planning for tribunals moved forward more quickly, and more secretly. Whole agencies were left out of the discussion. So were most of the government's experts in military and international law.

The legal basis for the administration's approach was laid out on Nov. 6 in a confidential 35-page memorandum sent to Mr. Gonzales from Patrick F. Philbin, a deputy in the Legal Counsel's office. (Attorney General Ashcroft has refused recent Congressional requests for the document, but a copy was reviewed by The Times.)

The memorandum's plain legalese belied its bold assertions.

It said that the president, as commander in chief, has "inherent authority" to establish military commissions without Congressional authorization. It concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were "plainly sufficient" to warrant applying the laws of war.

Opening a debate that would later divide the administration, the memorandum also suggested that the White House could apply international law selectively. It stated specifically that trying terrorists under the laws of war "does not mean that terrorists will receive the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights that laws of war accord to lawful combatants."

The central legal precedent cited in the memorandum was a 1942 case in which the Supreme Court upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had sneaked into the United States aboard submarines. Since that ruling, revolutions had taken place in both international and military law, with the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1951. Even so, the Justice memorandum said the 1942 ruling had "set a clear constitutional analysis" under which due process rights do not apply to military commissions.

Roosevelt, too, created his military commission without new and explicit Congressional approval, and authorized the military to fashion its own procedural rules. He also established himself, rather than a military judge, as the "final reviewing authority" for the case.

Mr. Addington seized on the Roosevelt precedent as a model, two people involved in the process said, despite vast differences. Roosevelt acted against enemy agents in a traditional war among nations. Mr. Bush would be asserting the same power to take on a shadowy network of adversaries with no geographic boundaries, in a conflict with no foreseeable end.

Mr. Addington, who drafted the order with Mr. Flanigan, was particularly influential, several officials said, because he represented Mr. Cheney and brought formidable experience in national-security law to a small circle of senior officials. Mr. Addington turned down several requests for interviews and a spokesman for the vice president's office declined to comment.

"He was probably the only one there who would know what an order would look like, what it would say," a former Justice Department official said, noting Mr. Addington's work at the Defense Department, the C.I.A., and Congressional intelligence committees. "He didn't have authority over anyone. But he's a persuasive guy."

To many officials outside the circle, the secrecy was remarkable.

While Mr. Ashcroft and his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were closely consulted, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, Michael Chertoff, who had argued for trying terror suspects in federal court, saw the military order only when it was published, officials said. Mr. Rumsfeld was kept informed of the plan mainly through his general counsel, William J. Haynes II, several Pentagon officials said.

Many of the Pentagon's experts on military justice, uniformed lawyers who had spent their careers working on such issues, were mostly kept in the dark. "I can't tell you how compartmented things were," said retired Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who was then the Navy's senior military lawyer, or judge advocate general. "This was a closed administration."

A group of experienced Army lawyers had been meeting with Mr. Haynes repeatedly on the process, but began to suspect that what they said did not resonate outside the Pentagon, several of them said.

On Friday, Nov. 9, Defense Department officials said, Mr. Haynes called the head of the team, Col. Lawrence J. Morris, into his office to review a draft of the presidential order. He was given 30 minutes to study it but was not allowed to keep a copy or even take notes.

The following day, the Army's judge advocate general, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, hurriedly convened a meeting of senior military lawyers to discuss a response. The group worked through the Veterans Day weekend to prepare suggestions that would have moved the tribunals closer to existing military justice. But when the final document was issued that Tuesday, it reflected none of the officers' ideas, several military officials said. "They hadn't changed a thing," one official said.

In fact, while the military lawyers were pulling together their response, they were unaware that senior administration officials were already at the White House putting finishing touches on the plan. At a meeting that Saturday in the Roosevelt Room, Mr. Cheney led a discussion among Attorney General Ashcroft, Mr. Haynes of the Defense Department, the White House lawyers and a few other aides.

Senior officials of the State Department and the National Security Council staff were excluded from final discussions of the policy, even at a time when they were meeting daily about Afghanistan with the officials who were drafting the order. According to two people involved in the process, Mr. Cheney advocated withholding the draft from Ms. Rice and Secretary Powell.

When the two cabinet members found out about the military order - upon its public release - Ms. Rice was particularly angry, several senior officials said. Spokesmen for both officials declined to comment.

Mr. Bush played only a modest role in the debate, senior administration officials said. In an initial discussion, he agreed that military commissions should be an option, the officials said. Later, Mr. Cheney discussed a draft of the order with Mr. Bush over lunch, one former official said. The president signed the three-page order on Nov. 13.

No ceremony accompanied the signing, and the order was released to the public that day without so much as a press briefing. But its historic significance was unmistakable.

The military could detain and prosecute any foreigner whom the president or his representative determined to have "engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit" terrorism. Echoing the Roosevelt order, the Bush document promised "free and fair" tribunals but offered few guarantees: There was no promise of public trials, no right to remain silent, no presumption of innocence. As in 1942, guilt did not necessarily have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and a death sentence could be imposed even with a divided verdict.

Despite those similarities, some military and international lawyers were struck by the differences.

"The Roosevelt order referred specifically to eight people, the eight Nazi saboteurs," said Mr. Shiffrin, who was then the Defense Department's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters and had studied the Nazi saboteurs' case. "Here we were putting in place a parallel system of justice for a universe of people who we had no idea about - who they would be, how many of them there would be. It was a very dramatic measure."

Mounting Criticism

The White House did its best to play down the drama, but criticism of the order was immediate and widespread.

Civil libertarians and some Congressional leaders saw an attempt to supplant the criminal justice system. Critics also worried about the concentration of power: The president or his proxies would define the crimes (often after an act had been committed); set the rules for trial; and choose the judges, juries and appellate panels.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was among a handful of legislators who argued that the administration's plan required explicit Congressional authorization. The Congress had just passed the Patriot Act by a huge margin, and Mr. Leahy proposed authorizing military commissions, but with some important changes, including a presumption of innocence for defendants and appellate review by the Supreme Court.

Critics seized on complaints from abroad, including an announcement from the Spanish authorities that they would not extradite some terrorist suspects to the United States if they would face the tribunals. "We are the most powerful nation on earth," Mr. Leahy said. "But in the struggle against terrorism, we don't have the option of going it alone. Would these military tribunals be worth jeopardizing the cooperation we expect and need from our allies?"

Senators called for Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Ashcroft to testify about the tribunals plan. Instead, the administration sent Mr. Prosper from the State Department and Mr. Chertoff of the Justice Department - both of whom had questioned the use of commissions and were later excluded from the administration's final deliberations.

But the Congressional opposition melted in the face of opinion polls showing strong support for the president's measures against terrorism.

There was another reason fears were allayed. With the order signed, the Pentagon was writing rules for exactly how the commissions would be conducted, and an early draft that was leaked to the news media suggested defendants' rights would be expanded. Mr. Rumsfeld, who assembled a group of outside legal experts - including some who had worked on World War II-era tribunals - to consult on the rules, said critics' concerns would be taken into account.

But all of the critics were not outside the administration.

Many of the Pentagon's uniformed lawyers were angered by the implication that the military would be used to deliver "rough justice" for the terrorists. The Uniform Code of Military Justice had moved steadily into line with the due-process standards of the federal courts, and senior military lawyers were proud and protective of their system. They generally supported using commissions for terrorists, but argued that the system would not be fair without greater rights for defendants.

"The military lawyers would from time to time remind the civilians that there was a Constitution that we had to pay attention to," said Admiral Guter, who, after retiring as the Navy judge advocate general, signed a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of plaintiffs in the Guantánamo Supreme Court case.

Even as uniformed lawyers were given a greater role in writing rules for the commissions, they still felt out of the loop.

In early 2002, Admiral Guter said, during a weekly lunch with Mr. Haynes and the top lawyers for the military branches, he raised the issue with Mr. Haynes directly: "We need more information."

Mr. Haynes looked at him coldly. "No, you don't," he quoted Mr. Haynes as saying.

Mr. Haynes declined to comment on the exchange.

Lt. Col. William K. Lietzau, a Yale-trained Marine lawyer on Mr. Haynes's staff, often found himself in the middle. "I could see how the JAGs were frustrated that the task of setting up the commissions hadn't been delegated to them," he said, referring to the senior military lawyers. "On the other hand, I could see how some of their recommendations frustrated the leadership because they didn't always appear to embrace the paradigm shift needed to deal with terrorism."

Some Justice Department officials also urged changes in the commission rules, current and former officials said. While Attorney General Ashcroft staunchly defended the policy in public, in a private meeting with Pentagon officials, he said some of the proposed commission rules would be seen as "draconian," two officials said.

On nearly every issue, interviews and documents show, the harder line was staked out by White House lawyers: Mr. Addington, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Flanigan. They opposed allowing civilian lawyers to assist the tribunal defendants, as military courts-martial permit, or allowing civilians to serve on the appellate panel that would oversee the commissions. They also opposed granting defendants a presumption of innocence.

In the end, Mr. Rumsfeld compromised. He granted defendants a presumption of innocence and set "beyond a reasonable doubt" as a standard for proving guilt. He also allowed the defendants to hire civilian lawyers, but restricted the lawyers' access to case information. And he gave the presiding officer at a tribunal license to admit any evidence he thought might be convincing to a "reasonable person."

One right the administration sought to deny the prisoners was the ability to appeal the legality of their detentions in federal court. The administration had done its best to decide the question when searching for a place to detain hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Every location it seriously considered - including an American military base in Germany and islands in the South Pacific - was outside the United States and, the administration believed, beyond the reach of the federal judiciary.

On Dec. 28, 2001, after officials settled on Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Philbin and Mr. Yoo told the Pentagon in a memorandum that it could make a "very strong" claim that prisoners there would be outside the purview of American courts. But the memorandum cautioned that a reasonable argument could also be made that Guantánamo "while not part of the sovereign territory of the United States, is within the territorial jurisdiction of a federal court." That warning would come back to haunt the administration.

A Shift in Power

Some of the officials who helped design the new system of justice would later explain the influence they exercised in the chaotic days after Sept. 11 as a response to a crisis. But a more enduring shift of power within the administration was taking place - one that became apparent in a decision that would have significant consequences for how terror suspects were interrogated and detained.

At issue was whether the administration would apply the Geneva Conventions to the conflicts with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and whether those enemies would be treated as prisoners of war.

Based on the advice of White House and Justice Department lawyers, Mr. Bush initially decided on Jan. 18, 2002, that the conventions would not apply to either conflict. But at a meeting of senior national security officials several days later, Secretary of State Powell asked him to reconsider.

Mr. Powell agreed that the conventions did not apply to the global fight against Al Qaeda. But he said troops could be put at risk if the United States disavowed the conventions in dealing with the Taliban - the de facto government of Afghanistan. Both Mr. Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, supported his position, Pentagon officials said.

In a debate that included the administration's most experienced national-security officials, a voice heard belonged to Mr. Yoo, only a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel. He cast Afghanistan as a "failed state," and said its fighters should not be considered a real army but a "militant, terrorist-like group." In a Jan. 25 memorandum, the White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, characterized that opinion as "definitive," although it was not the final basis for the president's decision.

The Gonzales memorandum suggested that the "new kind of war" Mr. Bush wanted to fight could hardly be reconciled with the "quaint" privileges that the Geneva Conventions gave to prisoners of war, or the "strict limitations" they imposed on interrogations.

Military lawyers disputed the idea that applying the conventions would necessarily limit interrogators to the name, rank and serial number of their captives. "There were very good reasons not to designate the detainees as prisoners of war, but the claim that they couldn't be interrogated was not one of them," Colonel Lietzau said. Again, though, such questions were scarcely heard, officials involved in the discussions said.

Mr. Yoo's rise reflected a different approach by the Bush administration to sensitive legal questions concerning foreign affairs, defense and intelligence.

In past administrations, officials said, the Office of Legal Counsel usually weighed in with opinions on questions that had already been deliberated by the legal staffs of the agencies involved. Under Mr. Bush, the office frequently had a first and final say. "O.L.C. was definitely running the show legally, and John Yoo in particular," a former Pentagon lawyer said. "He's kind of fun to be around, and he has an opinion on everything. Even though he was quite young, he exercised disproportionate authority because of his personality and his strong opinions."

Mr. Yoo's influence was amplified by friendships he developed not just with Mr. Addington and Mr. Flanigan, but also Mr. Haynes, with whom he played squash as often as three or four times a week at the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club.

If the Geneva Conventions debate raised Mr. Yoo's stature, it had the opposite effect on lawyers at the State Department, who were later excluded from sensitive discussions on matters like the interrogation of detainees, officials from several agencies said.

"State was cut out of a lot of this activity from February of 2002 on," one senior administration official said. "These were treaties that we were dealing with; they are meant to know about that."

The State Department legal adviser, William H. Taft IV, was shunned by the lawyers who dominated the detainee policy, officials said. Although Mr. Taft had served as the deputy secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, more conservative colleagues whispered that he lacked the constitution to fight terrorists.

"He was seen as ideologically squishy and suspect," a former White House official said. "People did not take him very seriously."

Through a State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, Mr. Taft declined to comment.

The rivalries could be almost adolescent. When field trips to Guantánamo Bay were arranged for administration lawyers, the invitations were sometimes relayed last to the State Department and National Security Council, officials said, in the hope that lawyers there would not be able to go on short notice.

It was on the first field trip, 10 days after detainees began to arrive there on Jan. 11, 2002, that White House lawyers made clear their intention to move forward quickly with military commissions.

On the flight home, several officials said, Mr. Addington urged Mr. Gonzales to seek a blanket designation of all the detainees being sent to Guantánamo as eligible for trial under the president's order. Mr. Gonzales agreed.

The next day, the Pentagon instructed military intelligence officers at the base to start filling out one-page forms for each detainee, describing their alleged offenses. Weeks later, Mr. Haynes issued an urgent call to the military services, asking them to submit nominations for a chief prosecutor.

The first trials, many military and administration officials believed, were just around the corner.

(Found @ http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102504D.shtml)

'Saving Our Nation'

Jack Lessenberry: 'Saving the nation'
Posted on Wednesday, October 27 @ 10:28:22 EDT
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This column doesn't contain enough space to recite all the appalling deeds of the Bush administration.

By Jack Lessenberry, Metro Times

Nobody among the intellectual and power elites was overwhelmed by the Democratic candidate for president; the only thing they agreed on is that he would be marginally better than the alternative, who was a disaster.

And while they wanted him to win, they worried about whether he was decisive enough. They regarded him as a rich guy with a high society wife who liked hanging out with the beautiful people as well as the movers and shakers. While they didn't expect great things, they thought he'd be pretty safe, at least.

That's what they're saying now about John Forbes Kerry.

Which makes me smile, because that's exactly what they said back in the day about John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.



Pardon me, but I'm very optimistic about the prospect of a president who is intelligent, tested in battle, has a lifetime record of public service, and who, unlike any other chief executive in decades, actually knows how Congress works.

Incidentally, the record shows that presidents who actually fought in a war are less likely to send young men into half-baked military adventures. I actually have a growing feeling that Kerry might surprise us all and be a superior president. I thought I was out there alone on this until The New York Times, in one of the best editorials I can remember reading, said the same thing last week, praising "his wide knowledge and clear thinking, and adding that "he strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core."

But what if I'm wrong? What if Kerry is merely another establishment politician? Well, at the very least, it will be nice to have a president who's not actively hostile to science and intelligent thought. It will be nice not to have to worry that he'll name Useless P. Claypool to the U.S. Supreme Court, or try to dig up Yellowstone National Park if Halliburton thinks it might have oil.

That is, if John Kerry makes it.

What is dismaying beyond belief is the thought that the smirking chimp, the worst president we've had since at least the Civil War, might still win. The polls are neck and neck, many with a slight edge for Bush. This election ought to have been over the moment it was demonstrated that the Democratic nominee could read, write and wasn't an al Qaeda spy.

The mess is such that Kerry, if he wins, is likely to have to make rapid decisions that will make enemies and disillusion some. You could, in fact, make a powerful case that the best thing that could happen to the Democratic Party would be to have Dubya narrowly re-elected next week.

So monumental are the looming disasters that the Democrats would be a cinch to win both houses of Congress two years from now, and then reclaim the presidency, possibly with John Edwards as the candidate, in two years more.

But I don't especially care about the Democrats; I care about this country. George W. Bush has been a disaster in nearly every way, and a second term would be disaster beyond belief for this nation.

It's not so much that the man's policies are ridiculously and dangerously wrongheaded, although they are. It isn't even that he'd be in a position to do far more damage to our rights and liberties for decades by naming a bunch of new Supreme Court justices, although that is a hugely legitimate fear.

What's most frightening about George W. Bush is his seemingly total inability to admit error, let alone change course. Asked repeatedly during press conferences and during a debate to name a mistake he has made, he refused.

Worse, he seems to think any admission of error is a weakness. Whether this is because of his own insecurity or, ominously, because he thinks that God talks directly to him, that's a potential prescription for the end of the world.

This column doesn't contain enough space to recite all the appalling deeds of the Bush administration, from running up huge deficits that our children will pay for to needlessly creating new enemies for our nation. Social Security is a mess; public education is getting there, and the national health system is worse.

Cheerfully ignorant of legal and political traditions, Bush has angered even true conservatives with the pseudo-fascist portions of the Soviet-sounding "Department of Homeland Security," and the truly Orwellian "Patriot Act." The Patriot Act, by the way, is so bad that the right-wing Detroit News said it "trashed personal privacy protections, suspended due process safeguards and upset the balance between the power of the government and the rights of the individual."

The full effects of the incompetence and the recklessness of the Bush administration's policies are unlikely to be realized for many years to come. You can count for sure on high inflation, growing unemployment and a health care crisis that will take resources we can't even imagine to solve, not to speak of new waves of terrorism created by our ham-handed actions in the Middle East.

Yet even if the nation were prosperous, if we had caught Osama bin Laden, if thousands of jobs weren't continuing to be shipped offshore, we'd have to vote out George W. Bush for the biggest reason of all: Iraq.

This nation never before launched a pre-emptive attack on another nation that hasn't attacked us. Nor have we gone into war based on a complete lie -- that the "enemy" had weapons he never had at all.

Nor have we ever so blown the aftermath of combat. Our occupation of Iraq has been perhaps the worst failure in our nation's modern history. We have lost the peace. The other night I saw a shaken Martha Raddatz, the veteran ABC correspondent who covered Bosnia, discussing a recent visit to Iraq.

While she was there, the "insurgents" put a dozen Iraqi National Guard (our puppets) against a wall and blew them away. It didn't even make the papers here; things like that are too common. We've lost the occupation; Iraq is, by any rational measure, worse off than under Saddam, and it will get worse still.

Does anyone really believe the American people will tolerate our staying there for much longer? Whoever wins will have to withdraw our troops sooner rather than later, and likely leave the place to civil war and an eventual Shiite strongman. We've taken a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is the Middle East, and there's no sign that Bush has a clue about what the long-term effects of what he's done are likely to be. The fact is, Osama couldn't have asked for better.

The Detroit News has never -- repeat, never -- endorsed a Democrat for president of the United States. Yet Sunday, in the strongest language possible, they told their readers that George W. Bush was a monumental failure who doesn't deserve another term. (They didn't endorse Kerry either. Apparently afraid that its editorial writers' fingers would fall off if they endorsed a Democrat, The News bizarrely declared Kerry an enemy of the auto industry, and took the weasel course of endorsing nobody, though it's impossible to read its editorial as anything but a call to transplant the Shrub.)

Anyone who sits this one out deserves what they get. And if the wrong man wins this election, we're all terribly likely to get it good and hard.

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times.

(c)2004, Metro Times, Inc.

Reprinted from The Metro Times:
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=6900

...The War Bin Laden Wanted...

The War Bin Laden Wanted
By Paul W. Schroeder
The American Conservative

Monday 25 October 2004

How the U.S. played into the terrorist’s plan.
George W. Bush’s re-election campaign rests on three claims, distinct but always run together: that the United States is at war against terror, that it is winning the war, and that it can ultimately achieve victory but only under his leadership.

The second and third propositions are hotly debated. Critics of Bush contend that the U.S. is losing the struggle against terror on the most important fronts and that only new leadership can bring victory, but except for a few radicals, no one denies that the struggle against international terrorism in general and groups like al-Qaeda in particular constitutes a real war. The question comes up in the campaign only when Republicans such as Vice President Cheney charge that Democrats view terrorists as mere criminals and do not recognize that the country is at war. The charge, though false - no Democratic leader would commit political suicide by even hinting this - is effective politically.

Some experts on international law and foreign policy object to calling the struggle against terrorism a war, pointing for example to the legal problem of whether under international law a state can declare war on a non-state movement and claim the rights of war, or arguing that terrorism constitutes a tactic and that no one declares war against a tactic. Both arguments indicate the sloppy thinking that pervades the rhetoric of the War on Terror. The first point, moreover, has important practical consequences for such questions as the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere, and for our relations with allies, other states, and the UN. Yet these kinds of arguments seem too academic to matter. The general public can hardly understand them, much less let them influence their votes.

Other reasons, however - different, more powerful, highly practical, and astonishingly overlooked - argue against conceiving of the struggle as a war and, more important still, waging it as such. The reasons and the logic behind them are somewhat complicated, but the overall conclusion is simple: by conceiving of the struggle against international terrorism as a war, loudly proclaiming it as such, and waging it as one, we have given our enemies the war they wanted and aimed to provoke but could not get unless the United States gave it to them.

This conclusion is not about semantics or language but has enormous implications. It points to fundamentally faulty thinking as one of the central reasons that America is currently losing the struggle, and it means that a change in leadership in Washington, though essential, will not by itself turn the course of events. What is required is a new, different way of thinking about the struggle against terrorism and from that a different way of waging it.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda repeatedly and publicly declared war on the United States and waged frequent attacks against its property, territory (including embassies abroad), and citizens for years before the spectacular attack on 9/11. This admission would seem to destroy my case at the outset and end the discussion. If bin Laden and al-Qaeda declared war on the United States and committed unmistakable acts of war against it, then obviously the U.S. had no choice but to declare war in reply, just as it had to do so against Japan after Pearl Harbor.

No, not really. Some other obvious facts also need consideration. First, states frequently wage real, serious wars of the conventional sort against other states without declaring war or putting their countries on a war footing. In the latter 20th century, this practice became the rule rather than the exception. Korea and Vietnam are only two of many examples. Second, revolutionary and terrorist organizations and movements have for centuries declared war on the governments or societies they wished to subvert and overthrow. Yet even while fighting them ruthlessly, states rarely made formal declarations of war against such movements. Instead, they treated these groups as criminals, revolutionaries, rebels, or tools of a hostile foreign power, not as organizations against which a recognized legitimate government declares and wages war.

The reasons are obvious. A revolutionary or terrorist movement has much to gain from getting a real government to declare war upon it. This gives the movement considerable status, putting it in some sense in the same league with the government with which it is now recognized as at war. No sensible government wishes to give such quasi-legitimacy to a movement it is trying to stamp out. Consider Napoleon’s treatment of the insurrection in Spain from 1808 to 1813. The insurgents had powerful claims to belligerent status and even legitimacy. They maintained a government in a small corner of Spain, represented the former legitimate Bourbon government Napoleon had overthrown, included the regular Spanish army, and were supported and recognized by a major power, Great Britain. But Napoleon always insisted they were nothing but brigands, used this designation as justification for the brutal campaign he waged against them, and acknowledged a state of war with them only when, defeated in Spain and on other fronts, he decided to cut his losses, evacuate Spain, and make peace with them and the Bourbon regime.

Other reasons further explain why legitimate governments have not declared war on terrorist or revolutionary organizations that waged war against them - for example, the fact that when one declares war one has to operate under the prevailing laws of war, and these can be constricting for a legitimate government, as the United States is currently finding out in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Thus declaring a war on terrorism and waging it as a genuine war has to be justified as an exception to a powerful rule, not accepted as the obvious response to a terrorist attack.

Readers may find this an impractical, academic argument and respond, "So what? This is a unique situation. Our country never faced a threat just like this before. Besides, what difference does it make what you call a campaign against terrorism if in fact you intend to wage an all-out fight to exterminate terrorist organizations with every weapon at your command? In practical terms, that is war, whatever name you use for it, and it is good for the American public, the world, and the enemy to face it."

Again, not so fast. The issue is not whether the American public after 9/11 needed squarely to face the fact that the United States had been attacked by a dangerous enemy and had to fight back. It still needs to understand this - and does. Neither is the issue whether in fighting back the U.S. had a right to use military force against that enemy anywhere (though only where) it was sensible and practical to do so. Those points are not in dispute. The relevant, practical questions instead are, first, whether it was necessary to declare war on that enemy in order to confront the attack and fight back with every useful means, including military force. As just indicated, the historical and practical answer to that question is no. Second, was a public declaration of war against terrorism in general needed to prepare psychologically for a serious campaign against the enemy? The reaction of the American public and virtually every other government and people to the 9/11 attack and the subsequent American counterattack makes clear that for this purpose a formal declaration was unnecessary. The support in America and abroad for a powerful campaign against al-Qaeda was overwhelming.

The only question left is the one central to the argument: did the American government, by constantly and solemnly declaring the nation at war against terrorism and repeatedly summoning the rest of the world to join up or else be ranked among America’s enemies actually help or hurt the campaign against the terrorist enemy?

The natural response might be, "How could the declarations of war possibly have hurt? Even if they were not strictly necessary, they served to unite the American people and gird them for possible sacrifices and losses and to rally the rest of the world behind the American effort. What harm did they supposedly do?"

It was never in dispute that Osama bin Laden deliberately, repeatedly, and in the most spectacular way possible provoked a war with the United States. What should that tell us? Why did he do this? What was he after?

Once again this looks like an intellectual befogging the issue and ignoring the obvious. Osama bin Laden did this because America is his enemy. He hates America and its ideals, America stands in the way of his creating the kind of world he is fanatically determined to bring about, and so he declared war on America and tried to destroy it and kill as many Americans as possible. This interpretation is perfectly understandable and defensible from a moral and emotional standpoint. Unfortunately, it is counterproductive from the standpoint of rational analysis and policymaking.

Two vital principles in foreign-policy thinking are, first, know the enemy - this means doing one’s best to enter into his thought world and decision-making processes, to think from his presuppositions and standpoint - and second, expect a hidden agenda and look for it. Assume that the enemy’s decisions and actions have a purposive rationality behind them, that he hopes to achieve by them some concrete result that is rational in terms of his goals and worldview, however fanatical, irrational, or simply evil his actions may seem.

Apply these two principles to the question here. Take for granted that Osama bin Laden is an evil fanatic, totally determined to pursue his goals and wholly unscrupulous in the means he is willing to use to reach them. But assume also that he is highly intelligent, shrewd, patient, and focused in his strategy. Supposing this and knowing that he is the leader of a relatively small, highly secret terrorist organization, strong in devotion to its cause but weak in both numbers and weapons in comparison to the resources available to any major state, much less the world’s one superpower, ask yourself: why would he go out of his way to challenge that superpower with its awesome array of resources and weapons, deliberately provoking it into declaring war to the death upon him and his organization? The enormous risks are obvious. What were the potential gains?

Any serious and unemotional consideration of this question makes it apparent that the answer "He hates America and wants to destroy it" will not do. If that were his concrete strategy and end, that would make him a fool, which he is not. Any fairly intelligent person would know that an attack like that of 9/11, or even ten such attacks, would not suffice to defeat the United States or make it give up the struggle against terrorism and accept the unhindered spread of radical revolutionary Islam in the world. Any intelligent person would instead expect the attack on the American homeland to have precisely the political, psychological, and military effects it actually had - to mobilize the government, the American public, and many of its allies around the globe for an all-out struggle against al-Qaeda and international terrorism. Anyone with intelligence would also have anticipated the huge risks to himself and his organization from the inevitable counterattack - a military campaign by an overwhelmingly superior foe against his political base and secret camps in Afghanistan, blows to his cells wherever they could be found, international police, intelligence, and financial measures against his organization on a vastly increased scale, heavy pressure on regimes that had secretly supported or tolerated his activities to crack down on them, the imprisonment or death of anyone in al-Qaeda’s ranks from bottom to top - in short, all the measures that the Bush administration carried out and has trumpeted as successes in the War on Terror. Why would bin Laden knowingly risk all this for the sake of an attack, however spectacular, that he knew would not seriously damage the United States as a nation?

Two replies frequently offered need to be considered before getting to the real answer. Each, though superficially more plausible than "He did it because he’s evil," is fundamentally no more satisfactory. The first is that bin Laden did it to demonstrate the power, bravery, skill, and fanatical resolve of his organization and thereby gain new recruits and allies. This is undoubtedly true in a sense but far too vague. As just noted, the overwhelming surface probability was that the attack would result in gravely weakening and threatening al-Qaeda. That is certainly what the Bush administration confidently promised. Why precisely did bin Laden expect, against all probabilities, that the attack would eventually expand and strengthen his organization and cause?

The second reply is that the 9/11 operation was intended as only one step in a long campaign against the United States, a kind of dress rehearsal for worse blows, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, biological, or chemical. Once again, this argument makes no sense. If one intends to start a long campaign to destroy the enemy, one does not begin with an action that can be expected to galvanize rather than cripple the enemy and make him more prepared to anticipate, prevent, and counter new attacks. It would be as if Japan in 1941, having decided to fight the United States and needing first of all to cripple American naval power in the Pacific, chose to attack by bombing buildings in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The only sensible answer, once the foolish and inadequate ones are discarded, is that Osama bin Laden anticipated the American reaction and wanted it. His purpose in attacking the United States directly in its homeland was to get the American government to do what it had not done in response to his previous attacks: to declare an all-out war against him and al-Qaeda and a worldwide War on Terror led and organized by the United States, with every other country in the world summoned to follow and support or be considered an enemy. That seems to deepen the puzzle. Why thus deliberately multiply the ranks of his enemies and organize their efforts under the leadership of a single, powerful, aroused country?

The answer, if one thinks about it free from emotion and preoccupation with oneself, is clear. Deliberately provoking the United States into open, declared war against him, his forces, radical Islamism, and worldwide terrorism was bin Laden’s way of expanding a struggle he was already waging but losing, one he could not win on account of its insoluble contradictions, into a larger war free from internal contradictions that he could hope ultimately to win. To put it in a nutshell, Osama bin Laden needed the United States as a declared enemy to enable him to win his war against his primary enemies and thus achieve his goals.

To understand this, we need once again to take bin Laden’s fanatical ideology and his hatred for the United States and the West for granted and concentrate on his situation and the purposive rationality behind his tactics. Consider his central goal - a Muslim world ruled by true Islamic law and teaching, purged of all evil, materialist, secular, infidel, and heretical influences. Of course he regards the West, especially the United States, as the source of many of the evils corrupting and oppressing Islam and would like ideally to destroy it, but the immediate obstacles to achieving his vision and the main foes to be overcome have always lain within the Muslim world itself. (There is a good parallel here with 16th-century Europe. The Ottoman Turks were the great military and religious threat to Christendom, but the most bitter quarrels and wars were between Christians of different creeds, churches, rulers, and countries.) The obstacles he faced consisted of the divisions in sects, beliefs, and world visions within Islam; hostile governments ruling in Islamic countries, virtually all of whom regarded his kind of Islamic radicalism as a threat to their rule and were determined to repress it; and the attitude of most Muslims, loyal to their creed but unwilling to sacrifice what security and well-being they had in his kind of jihad. Osama bin Laden tried to overcome these obstacles and foes directly but the struggle, besides being difficult, dangerous, and largely unsuccessful, was inherently divisive and counterproductive. It meant pitting Muslim against Muslim, alienating more followers and potential recruits to the movement than it attracted, and giving free rein to the spread within Islam of infidel influences from outside while Muslims fought each other.

There was, however, one good way to overcome these obstacles - that is, to unite Muslims of divergent beliefs, sects, and visions against a single foe; to discredit, paralyze, and possibly overthrow secular Muslim governments; and to galvanize more believers into that suicidal zeal that al-Qaeda and its kindred organizations need as a baby needs its mother’s milk. That way was to make the United States, already the Great Satan in much of the Muslim world for a variety of reasons - its support of Israel against the Palestinians, its support of corrupt dictatorships and secular regimes, its encouragement of Iraq’s war against Iran and toleration of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, its later conquest, humiliation, and ongoing punishment of the Iraqi people through sanctions, its long record of imperialism, its greed for Arab oil, its military occupation of sacred Muslim soil, its penetration of Muslim societies with its decadent culture and values - declare open war on him and his followers united in a true, heroic Islamic resistance movement.

The solution, further, was if possible to provoke the U.S. into actually attacking Muslim countries, using its awesome weapons against pitifully outmatched Muslim forces, destroying and humiliating them, killing and wounding civilians and destroying much property, occupying more Muslim land, and miring itself in an attempt to control what it had conquered and to impose its secular values and institutions on Arab and Muslim societies. From this would arise the chance to demonstrate that faithful Muslims under leaders and movements like bin Laden and al-Qaeda could be David to America’s Goliath. If they could not immediately slay the oppressor, they could survive its onslaught, grow and spread despite it, and gradually reduce it to a helpless giant, isolated from its former friends, trapped in an interminable occupation of hostile territory and peoples, with its armed forces stretched thin and its awesome weapons unusable, while al-Qaeda and similar groups could continue to launch even bolder attacks against it or anyone still associated with it.

That, I believe, is a reasonable rendition of Osama bin Laden’s hopes and strategy. It was a tremendous gamble, of course, and he could not possibly have predicted exactly how it would turn out. But it is beyond doubt that his gamble succeeded, that for more than three years after 9/11 things have generally been going his way, and that he could not have achieved this huge, improbable victory without indispensable American help. In declaring and waging a War on Terror with al-Qaeda as its initial announced focus and the United States as its self-acclaimed World Leader, America gave bin Laden precisely the war he needed and wanted.

One can anticipate at least three reactions to this conclusion (three that are printable, that is). Starting with the least important, they are:

1. This is all hindsight, Monday - morning quarterbacking.

2. Given the circumstances, there was nothing else the United States could have done.

3. Even if this is all true, it is water under the bridge, useless in deciding what to do now.

The first is easy to answer. Hindsight is a good exercise in politics, especially for the public at election time - but this is not that. Quite a few observers warned about these dangers at the time, and I was among them. In an article written just after 9/11 and published in November 2001 ("The Risks of Victory," The National Interest, Winter 2001/2002) I argued, among other things, against allowing a necessary and justified military campaign in Afghanistan to draw us into leading a general War on Terror in the wider Middle East and the world. More warnings were included in my "Iraq: The Case Against Preventive War," appearing in this journal in October 2002. Mine was only one voice in a steady, growing chorus, though one always drowned out by crowds of raucous hawks.

The second objection has a little more substance. Certainly 9/11 required strong action including military measures against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the natural, inevitable war psychology pervading the country had to be reckoned with. Yet as was pointed out earlier, these needs required actions like those taken initially more than words. As far as the public rhetoric and justification was concerned, nothing hindered the administration from conceiving and explaining the undertaking differently both to the American public and the world, especially the Arab-Muslim world that was Osama bin Laden’s real target.

There is little point now in drafting the kind of address Bush should have delivered to Congress and the public. But one can readily imagine an American president (though not Bush) persuasively making the two cardinal points. First, the United States intended to pursue al-Qaeda with all the weapons at its command on grounds of legitimate self-defense and, while respecting the rights of other countries, would allow no one to interfere with these actions. It would not, however, dignify al-Qaeda’s atrocious crimes by calling them acts of war or give Osama bin Laden and his fellow criminals what they obviously wanted, a pretext to portray themselves as soldiers in a holy war against the United States. Instead, it would pursue them ruthlessly the way civilized nations had always pursued criminal organizations, as international outlaws and pirates, enemies of all governments and of civilization itself, and it expected other countries to co-operate in this struggle.

Second, the United States recognized that though it was the direct target of this attack and that in one sense it represented al-Qaeda’s final enemy and target, it was not the country most menaced by the current threat from al-Qaeda and international terrorism generally. As bin Laden well knew, neither this attack nor possible future ones, tragic though the individual deaths and losses were, could really hurt the United States, much less deter it from its purpose of hunting down the criminals behind the atrocities. The attack instead had already had just the opposite effect. It had strengthened the country and united Americans and their friends throughout the world for a long struggle against him and his fellow terrorist criminals. America’s government, institutions, and civil society were rock solid. It had no homegrown terrorist organizations to fear or ethnic and religious differences for terrorists to exploit. Its relatively small Muslim population was well integrated and overwhelmingly loyal to the United States, thankful for its blessings and freedoms.

Many other countries in the world could not say this, especially the Arab and Muslim countries that Osama bin Laden wanted to subvert and revolutionize as he had already done in Afghanistan. These countries and governments had the most to fear from al-Qaeda and international terrorism; they and not the United States were the real targets of the 9/11 attack. Even America’s European allies and friends, sound though their countries and institutions were for the most part, had more to fear directly from terrorism than the United States, given their large unassimilated Muslim populations and their proximity to the Middle East. The United States was, of course, vitally concerned with the general problem of international terrorism. It had interests around the world to protect, including those in the Middle East and other threatened regions. Nonetheless, this was not first and foremost America’s problem, nor was it America’s place primarily to provide the solution. The terrorists wanted to make the United States appear an imperialist Great Satan imposing its will and its solutions on others and forcing them to follow its lead. America would not fall into that trap. The U.S. had a particular right and duty to its citizens and the world to pursue al-Qaeda and exterminate it as a criminal organization. It would help, advise, support, and even where specifically desired lead others in the global struggle against terrorism. But it would not try to force others who had an even greater and more immediate stake in that struggle to do what their own self-interest ought to compel them to do, nor would it try to dictate the kinds of internal measures and reforms they needed to take to combat the common enemy.

That kind of language would have done everything language can do both to free the United States to attack al-Qaeda and to put pressure on other governments, especially in the Middle East, to confront their own problems and responsibilities and seek help if necessary from the United States, rather than hiding behind it. It also would have undercut the al-Qaeda strategy of making the United States into the main enemy, helped place responsibilities where they belonged, and galvanized genuine world support in the struggle against terrorism. What is more, it would have been entirely consistent with the campaign against terrorism the United States actually waged at the outset. That was very much an international effort, a largely proxy war directed but not mainly fought by the U.S. and focused strictly on destroying al-Qaeda’s organization and governmental base - until this focus was foolishly abandoned to attack Iraq.

To heighten the irony, this kind of language would have conformed to the actual wartime policies the administration has followed. Let us be honest: the "War on Terror" in America is basically a sham, a charade. While great, even ultimate sacrifices have been demanded of relatively few, chiefly those in the armed forces, for the overwhelming majority of Americans having the country at war has meant massive tax cuts, exhortations to spend and consume, enormous deficits, politics and government spending as usual - in short, no wartime sacrifice at all. The rest of the world knows this and sees the hypocrisy, if we do not.

As for the last reply, that this argument now represents water under the bridge, useless for current or future policy, if that were true, it would constitute the most devastating indictment of the Bush strategy possible. It would mean that the administration had so ruined America’s position that nothing could now remedy it. But it is not true. This administration’s policy deserves harsh condemnation for the reckless incompetence that has made the way out now much more painful and costly, but a way out still lies in recognizing that the United States needs to abandon not the struggle against international terrorism but the conception of that struggle as a war fought and led mainly by the United States, making itself the chief target of the enemy.

This is a change only a new administration could make, though obviously not during the electoral campaign, when it would be suicidal. Once in office, however, it could claim that it had found things to be even worse than it knew and could make the kind of 180-degree turn Bush executed after his election. A gradual disengagement from Iraq and re-concentration on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the pursuit of al-Qaeda, a devolution of tasks onto the UN and NATO on the grounds that even the best meant efforts of the United States are frustrated by the fact that it is seen as the enemy by too many in the region, a willingness to admit past mistakes and agree to focus co-operatively on other problems as well - all this would become possible, though not easy, if only the current American war mentality and psyche gave way to a saner one. This still could happen - but of course not under Bush.

...Bush Admin Drops Ball AGAIN...

(CNN) -- Some 380 tons of explosives powerful enough to detonate nuclear warheads are missing from a former Iraqi military facility that was supposed to be under American control, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog says.

Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told CNN the interim Iraqi government reported several days ago that the explosives were missing from the Al Qaqaa complex, south of Baghdad.

The explosives -- considered powerful enough to demolish buildings or detonate nuclear warheads -- were under IAEA control until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. IAEA workers left the country before the fighting began.

"Our immediate concern is that if the explosives did fall into the wrong hands they could be used to commit terrorist acts and some of the bombings that we've seen," Fleming said.

She described Al Qaqaa as "massive" and said it is one of the most well-known storage sites. Besides the 380 tons, there were large caches of artillery there.

Fleming said the IAEA does not know whether some of the explosives may have been used in past attacks.

The multinational force in Iraq and the Bush administration's Iraq Survey Group have been ordered to "look into" the disappearance of the explosives, a senior Pentagon official said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush wants to determine what went wrong.

McClellan, on Air Force One, stressed that the missing explosives were not nuclear materials, and said the storage site was the responsibility of the interim Iraqi government, not the United States, as of June 28, when the United States turned over the nation's administration to the Iraqis.

McClellan said the Iraqi government reported the missing weaponry to the IAEA on October 10, and the IAEA informed the U.S. mission in Vienna on October 15. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice was told a few days later, then informed the president.

According to the Pentagon official, coalition forces, who went to the area around Al Qaqaa in the months after the war ended, searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings. They found no weapons of mass destruction, but indications of looting.

The discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let enemies know such information, said a senior administration official.

There are hundreds of tons of other weapons and munitions missing around the country, and it is impossible for the United States to track down all of them, the official said.

Even so, he conceded, the story is not a good one for the White House, just over a week from Election Day.

Threat from terrorists
A European diplomat told The New York Times that Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpiles is its potential use by insurgents to make small, but powerful, bombs, an expert told the Times. The expert said the explosives could be transported easily across the Middle East.

According to the Times, the stockpiles missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe.

The Iraqi letter to IAEA identified the vanished explosives as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or "pentaerythritol tetranitrate."

Fleming said the IAEA, whose mission is to keep track of everything with potential nuclear weapons applications, had been monitoring about 100 sites in Iraq, but there were only a few of special concern, including Al Qaqaa.

"The concern is that other sites that have items that are potentially dangerous have gone missing," Fleming added.

The senior administration official downplayed the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but "stuff you can buy anywhere." The official added that the administration did not see this necessarily as a "proliferation risk."

"In the grand scheme -- and on a grand scale -- there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq," the official said. "And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials."

The official said the Iraq Survey Group, the administration's weapons investigators, concluded that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and documented the scope of the problem.

Political fallout
Reacting to the IAEA announcement on Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry said the "incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be."

In response, the Bush campaign accused Kerry of using the IAEA announcement to attack the president.

"John Kerry has no vision for fighting and winning the war on terror, so he is basing his attack on the headlines he wakes up to each day," said Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt.

"If John Kerry wants to spend the next eight days trying to explain positions again, we welcome that debate. John Kerry can't lead the nation to victory in a war he doesn't believe in." (Full story)

(Found @ http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/25/iraq.explosives/index.html)

My views; why I do this...

...explanation from Quill (this one I ask that you all read)...

I know some people aren’t too thrilled with all the political postings that I have been making as of late. I thank each of you for bearing with me. I feel some explanation about my true stance on this election is clearly overdue and in order:

As you have noticed, I have no real love for George W. Bush, or his administration. Believe it or not, I was behind Bush in the days after September 11th, after we were attacked. It is my belief that at that moment, he was exactly the type of man we needed in office; someone who wasn’t going to pussy out, who was going to take this fight to our enemies and show them that they had made the worst mistake ever.

However, since then, I have sat back and watched this man make every colossal mistake a president could possibly make. Our health-care system is crappier than it’s EVER been; the Patriot Act side-steps several rights of individuals (and no, I’m not just saying that because of that stupid Fahrenheit movie); I’ve watched him lie and appear to be probably the dumbest C.I.C. we’ve ever had; although the numbers on paper look good for our economy, the job market for the middle/lower class is unbelievably shitty; I’ve seen him take us into war in Iraq.

About Iraq: I agree that Saddam was, simply put, an evil fucker, and he needed to be taken down. I’ve believed that since we DIDN’T finish things the first time, since Bush Sr. dropped the ball. However, Bush’s reasons for going to war weren’t true; the truth is, he DID lie to the American people. And sure, Saddam was TRYING to get those weapons; but at the very least, we could have delayed doing this for about a year before it because a desperate situation. Bush just got us into this war too fast; he rushed it.

Because of Bush’s decision, there have been many more casualties than were necessary. Think about that for just a second. A president’s JOB is to act in the best interests of his people; and there is no bigger judgment for a president to make than how to go into a war situation. Bush didn’t act in the best interest of our troops, and he clearly doesn’t have the proper judgment about war. For all the good in the world that’s resulting from it, the hard fact of the matter is that people, like Shark, and dying when they don’t necessarily need to, had Bush just had us go in there PREPARED. It’s good that Iraq has hope now; but was that hope worth the 1000 plus brave souls that have died for this cause, died when they might not have had to? Dammit, if we had just gotten allies, if we had the proper equipment out there…and on top of it all, those were things Bush PROMISED and SAID he was going to do, and he didn’t. The soldiers that are fighting in Iraq right now are in a greater level of danger than they would have been if we hadn’t rushed into this.

My main reason for believing so strongly in this is our job market and the economy. I graduated with a bachelor of science in construction management from SMSU in December of 2002. I didn’t get a job in my field until mid-July of 2004. That’s nearly TWO YEARS. And it wasn’t because of laziness on my part. It was not because I didn’t have an impressive enough resume, or because I don’t know how to interview. It’s because the job market, and our economy, sucked for jobs. When I finally landed my position with LaClair, it was a right-place, right-time situation. It helps that my resume and interviewing skills and portfolio is top-notch, but for the most part, in THIS job market we’re in, I got lucky. For nearly two years I struggled, battling both the shitty state of the market and my own internal struggle. There were times that I felt like just curling up into a ball and dying, it was so hard; and by nature I am one of the most optimistic and positive people you will meet, EVER. I don’t ever need to go to hell, because I’ve already lived through it, guys. I went through doubts about my own abilities to wondering if I was ever going to make it through this tough time. I suffered through Radio Shack, being on unemployment for a time, having to swallow every bit of pride I’ve ever had and more. Starting about Christmas of 2003, when I got FIRED (yes, fired) from Radio Shack because they had to let someone go, I was operating solely on the belief that I had to keep my hope alive for just one more day. That if I could just make it through ONE more day, tomorrow might just produce something. I did that for the remainder of my days before being saved by LaClair.

The whole job market thing is my personal story in all of this; like so many others, I’ve experienced, tasted, first hand what this president has allowed to happen to our country’s economy. Now, he’s begun to outsource jobs, making an already flailing job market/economy even worse.

Why do I care so much? Why do I beat this issue into the ground? I don’t want anyone to have to go through the hell that I did. I don’t want my friends who are getting out of college in a year or two to have to struggle like I did. I don’t want anyone else to die for a war in which we were ill prepared to go into. I have my issues with Shark; but I don’t wish him to die. Phoenix’s husband, Cyclops, is going to be a marine in just a few short weeks, and he quite possibly could be sent off right away. There are 1000 people, people with families, even people that some of you KNEW, that are dead that might not have died under safer circumstances.

My reasons for fighting tooth and nail on this election are not selfish; I have my job now, I don’t necessarily have an uber-personal bid for our market anymore. I think of my friends; I think of my family; I think of the families of those thousand plus soliders that were put in more danger than they needed to be. I think of the future of our country in this.

Bush has made a fucking mess of things. I can’t deny that there’s no guarantee that Kerry can do any better; but there’s a pretty clear picture of why Bush definitely isn’t good for this country. Is the worth of Bush’s resilience in this whole “War on Terror” really equal to thousands of lives? Does it balance out the way he’s let our health system turn to complete shit, or how the school systems are rapidly disintegrating in his administration’s wake? Do the ends of his methods in Homeland Security justify the means by which he accomplishes them, namely by stomping on rights that have existed since the U.S. began? How many middle class families are struggling just to make ends meet while tax breaks are given to the richest in our country, as a result of his doing? I mean, wake the fuck up…do you guys honestly think that if Bush has done this for the part FOUR YEARS that another four with him in office will get any better?! He’s had four years to do anything for our country, and the only thing he did of any worth was to go after the 9/11 terrorists, which looking back at it, I think any president would have done as well. Would Clinton have let it slide? Would Reagan? I don’t think they would have.

With every new president we’ve ever had, there’s been a 50/50 chance that they’d just fuck everything up. With politicians, you can never predict if they’ll be good or bad; you can only listen to what they say and hope you make the right choice. Kerry does have some bad points about him. I’m not talking about the ‘flip-flop’ issue, because we all know that’s bullshit, tripe slung around to make Kerry look bad, a.k.a. the politics game; Bush ‘flip-flops’ on things as well. And I’m not even talking about the so-called “shady” war record. The way I look at it, Kerry went to war and fought for his country; Bush did not. Kerry got wounded in war, thus he received the Purple Heart three times; it shouldn’t matter how wounded he was or how deep the bullet went into him. If you fight in a war, and you get wounded as a result of that fighting, you deserve whatever the military deems fit to decorate you with. Bush would understand all of this, had he gone to war himself. I would have come home from Vietnam and protested the war, too; history has shown us that Vietnam was a mistake for us. We got our asses handed to us in that war, and it was a situation that we shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place.

Bush has proven that he is not a good president. I could cite a million different examples of this and some still wouldn’t accept it. Personally, I think you’d have to be blind not to see how terrible he’s done in office. Voting for Bush won’t change anything about the current state of our country. Voting for Kerry might change things. It comes down to voting for things to be crap for the next four years and voting for a chance, a shot, that things might get better.

Bush is a man of great faith; he believes in Jesus and the Bible. He believes that life is precious. He believes what a lot of religious, faithful people can get behind. He believes what people who are pro-life can get behind. But there’s more at stake here than abortion rights and religion. There’s an entire world of issues outside of this, and they affect everyone, whether you realize it or not. Just as an example, some people say, “I don’t care about health care issues; Bush is pro-life and I’m voting for him.” To this person I confidently say, “You are blind to the world around you, and it is people like you that allow people like Bush to fuck things up for everyone.” It blows my mind that some people would rather stick with what they know rather than take a chance with Kerry, given what Bush has done and the state of our country in general.

Bottom line: I don’t care if we have a democrat, republican, independent, hell, even a chinchilla with mange and an overbite in office, as long as things are good in our country. I’m a split-ticket voter; I go for the best man for the job, regardless of political affiliation. Bush is not good for our country. Kerry may not be the BEST choice for president, but he’s a league better than Bush. And the only way to get Bush out of office, due to our current political system, is to vote for John Kerry.

...Voter Fraud in Florida...

Florida fields widespread voter complaints

State investigates allegations of fraud in registration

Friday, October 22, 2004 Posted: 1:00 PM EDT (1700 GMT)

(CNN) -- With 11 days to go before the November 2 presidential election, officials in the battleground state of Florida are looking into complaints of widespread voter fraud, the state's Department of Law Enforcement said.

Over the last several weeks, the department has received numerous complaints from elections supervisors, the secretary of state's office and citizens alleging "sometimes organized efforts" to commit fraud in voter registrations, party affiliation forms and absentee ballots, the department said in a statement.

Investigations are under way throughout the state. (Showdown state Florida)

Some people who thought they were signing petitions apparently "later found out that their signatures or possible forged signatures were used to complete a fraudulent voter registration," the department said. (Special Report: America Votes 2004)

There were also reports of problems involving workers hired to obtain legitimate voter registrations.

Some allegedly "filled in the information on the registration forms that should have been completed by the registrants," and in several cases workers "appear to have signed multiple voter registrations themselves using information obtained during the registration drive," the department said.

"In many of the situations complained about, the workers were being paid on the basis of each registration form submitted."

Most cases of voter fraud are third-degree felonies in Florida, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine for each charge, the department said.

Florida became the central battleground of the 2000 presidential race after Election Day, when the tally proved extremely close and questions were raised about voter intimidation, people being refused the right to vote and problems with the state's electoral process.

After weeks of legal battles, the U.S. Supreme Court determined the matter.

State officials have vowed to avoid a repeat of such problems.

Florida -- where the governor is President Bush's brother Jeb -- is one of the most hotly contested states in this year's election. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry have teams of lawyers in the state.

The Department of Law Enforcement said regional task forces are addressing voter safety issues and looking into groups that may be involved in voter fraud.

The task forces communicate directly with local law enforcement, state attorney's offices, the FBI and elections supervisors, the department's statement said.

"While we conduct this investigation, we are mindful that our No. 1 priority will be to protect the rights of those individuals that are eligible to vote and allow them the opportunity to do so," department Commissioner Guy Tunnell said in a written statement. "Our agents will do nothing that will impede or hinder that process."

The department encouraged voters to check with local elections supervisors to ensure their registration information is accurate and report any irregularities or suspected fraud.

(Found @ http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/22/florida.registration/index.html)

...even more information...

The Ashcroft Report

Bush Pushes Expansion of Controversial Patriot Act
"Acting at the Bush administration's behest, a joint House-Senate conference committee has approved a provision in the 2004 Intelligence Authorization bill that will permit the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to demand records from a number of businesses without the approval of a judge or grand jury," OneWorld U.S. News Service reports. This measure, which builds on the USA Patriot Act, would extend the FBI's power to seize records from securities dealers, currency exchanges, travel agencies, car dealers, post offices, casinos, pawnbrokers and any other business that has a "high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters." Until now, only banks, credit unions and similar financial institutions were required to turn over such records to the FBI. According to the New York Times, lawmakers from both parties expressed concerns that the measure gave the government too much authority and that the public had been shut out of the debate.
Sources: New York Times, "Lawmakers Approve Expansion of F.B.I.'s Antiterrorism Powers," Nov. 20, 2003; OneWorld U.S. News Service, "Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress," Nov. 21, 2003.

Justice Department Reportedly Deletes Information from Report to Cover Up Its Poor Diversity Record
According to the New York Times, "an internal report that harshly criticized the Justice Department's diversity efforts was edited so heavily when it was posted on the department's Web site two weeks ago that half of its 186 pages, including the summary, were blacked out." The deleted sections showed the department's record on diversity as "seriously flawed, specifically in the hiring, promotion, and retention of minority lawyers." The unedited report, completed by the consulting firm KPMG, "found that minority employees at the department, which is responsible for enforcing the country's civil rights laws, perceive their own workplace as biased and unfair." Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) have asked the Justice Department's inspector general to investigate the decision to delete large parts of the report before releasing it to the public. Reps. Conyers and Nadler wrote in a letter to the inspector general that the Justice Department had ignored the Freedom of Information Act "simply to cover up its own poor record" with minority employees. They went on to say that they found it "outrageous that the very agency that is charged with rooting out discrimination would make it so difficult for the public to scrutinize its own civil rights record."
Sources: New York Times, "Critical Study Minus Criticism of Justice Department," Oct. 31, 2003; New York Times, "Inquiry Is Sought About Deletions in Report on Justice Department," Nov. 4, 2003.

Ashcroft Promotes the Patriot Act
The Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal Gazette reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft is turning "front-line federal prosecutors into a politicized lobbying team to defend an ill-conceived law." On Sept. 3 in Indianapolis, U.S. Attorney Susan Brooks hosted an intense primer on the USA Patriot Act as part of a coordinated nationwide effort initiated by Ashcroft to require U.S. attorneys to conduct community meetings promoting the Act. Under Ashcroft, these attorneys have been directed to engage in lobbying for partisan gain rather than focus exclusively on the prosecution of federal crimes. Many believe that Ashcroft is shamelessly misusing the general high regard that U.S. attorneys enjoy to lobby in favor of keeping the controversial Patriot Act, which has triggered a vital debate about civil liberties and the law.
Source: Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal Gazette, "Shilling for Ashcroft," September 5, 2003.

Internal Investigators Find 34 "Credible" Claims of Abuse Under Patriot Act
In a report recently released by the Justice Department, internal investigators indicated that between Dec. 16, 2002, and June 15, 2003, their office received 1,073 complaints of civil liberties infractions under the enforcement of the USA Patriot Act. Of these complaints—by and large filed by Muslim and Arab immigrants and naturalized citizens—34 were considered "credible" complaints under the jurisdiction of the inspector general, with the potential to be proven. According to the New York Times, the complaints against Justice Department employees range from the alleged physical and verbal abuse of detainees to accusations against the F.B.I. from one man who claimed they invaded his home and accused him of having an AK-47 rifle based on false information. Another complaint involved a federal prison doctor who reportedly remarked to a prisoner during an exam that, if he was in charge, he would "execute every one" of the detainees for crimes they supposedly committed.
Sources: New York Times, "Report on USA Patriot Act Alleges Civil Rights Violations," Philip Shenon, July 21, 2003

Justice Department Reports Abuse of Immigrants in Post-9/11 Pursuit of Terrorists
A recent report released by the Justice Department showed that the government’s treatment of 762 illegal immigrants during the investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. was riddled by "significant problems" including physical and verbal abuse. The report, which prompted sharp criticism of Attorney General John Ashcroft, catalogs the harsh conditions encountered by the detainees including: confinement to their cells for 23 hours a day, being slammed against walls and taunted by guards, and an allowance of only one legal phone call per week and one social phone call per month. The report indicated that detainees—who were mostly held in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and the Passaic County jail in Paterson, N.J.—were not told for unusually long periods why they were being held. Although Ashcroft claims the Department of Justice did not violate the law in any of the detainees' cases, none of the 762—who, on average, were held for 80 days—were charged as terrorists.
Sources: Washington Post, "Justice Dept. Report Faults Post-9/11 Detention Practice," Deborah Charles, June 2, 2003; New York Times, "Ashcroft Defends Detentions as Immigrants Recount Toll," Eric Lichtblau, June 5, 2003; Washington Post, "Justice Dept. Review Outlines Immigrant Rights Violations," Steve Fainaru, June 3, 2003

Ashcroft Defends Mistreatment of Detainees and Pushes for Greater Power to Pursue Terrorists
Attorney General John Ashcroft undermined the criticism arising from a recent Justice Department report which indicated that illegal immigrants detained after Sept. 11, 2001 experienced harsh conditions during their detention. According to the New York Times, Ashcroft told members of the House Judiciary Committee that authorities "need still greater powers to track and pursue terrorists" and claimed that the USA Patriot Act—the anti-terrorism law passed in response to the 9/11 tragedies that has been fervently opposed by civil liberties proponents—does not go far enough. According to the New York Times, several committee members expressed concern that civil liberties may be undermined if Ashcroft's bid for increased power—including the ability to institute the death penalty for terrorism-related crimes—is granted. In his comments, Ashcroft expressed no qualms about detaining suspects indefinitely, or in other words, as long as it takes to determine that they have no ties to terrorists.
Source: New York Times, "Ashcroft Seeks More Power to Pursue Terror Suspects," Eric Lichtblau, June 6, 2003

Ashcroft to Issue New Regulations for Asylum for Battered Women
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he will issue new gender-persecution regulations limiting battered immigrant women seeking asylum in the United States. Immigration and women's rights groups have expressed concern that Ashcroft does not support regulations proposed by former Attorney General Janet Reno that would have allowed battered women to be considered for asylum. The decision stems from a case involving Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman whose husband threatened to kill her if she returned home. Alvarado was granted asylum by Reno, who reversed the INS' original decision. Ashcroft is reportedly reconsidering the decision to grant asylum to Alvarado, who could be forced to return to Guatemala.
Source: Washington Post, "Ashcroft Reconsiders Asylum Granted to Abused Guatemalan," George Lardner, Jr., March 3, 2003

Details of 'Patriot Act II' Released
As a follow-up to the 2001 U.S.A. Patriot Act, the Justice Department is reportedly preparing "Patriot Act II," which will beef up the surveillance and law enforcement powers granted to the government under the guise of fighting terrorism. According to David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor, the proposed legislation would "reduce or eliminate judicial oversight over surveillance, authorize secret arrests ... create new death penalties, and even seek to take American citizenship away from persons who belong to or support disfavored political groups."
Source: The Center for Public Integrity, "Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act," Charles Lewis and Adam Mayle, Feb. 7, 2003

New Detention Sweep Targets Individuals from Muslim Nations
The Justice Department announced the Absconder Apprehension Initiative, targeting immigrants from Middle East nations against whom deportation orders are outstanding. The department seeks to apprehend and interview Middle Eastern citizens to "prosecute any who have ties to terrorism and [compile] the results of interviews in a new computer database." According to the New York Times, many of those picked up in this sweep are individuals with strong community ties, including small business owners, families, and parents of U.S. citizens.
Sources: The New York Times, "Cost of Vigilance: This Broken Home," Susan Sachs, June 4, 2002; The Washington Post, "Tenet Paints Grim Picture Of A …," Feb. 10, 2002

Ashcroft Supports Bush's Faith-Based Initiative
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft expressed strong support for George Bush's faith-based initiative, which would permit discrimination in the provision of federal social services. Ashcroft, who hosts prayer meetings for Justice Department staff, crafted legislation while a senator to facilitate the federal funding of religious social services programs. "I find it sad that the person who ought to be the top law enforcement official in America is actively trying to erase both civil rights and First Amendment protections," said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Source: The Associated Press, "Attorney General Speaks Up for Religious Initiative Criticized by Some," P. Solomon Banda, Jan. 14, 2003

Ashcroft Criticized for Politicizing Justice Department Hiring Process
Current and former Justice Department officials have accused Ashcroft of politicizing the hiring process for the prestigious Attorney General's Honors Program. Under past Democratic and Republican administrations, the recruitment program had been managed by career employees in the department, but it is now under the direct control of Ashcroft and his aides. Career employees and school placement officers have expressed concern that Ashcroft's real objective is to hire more conservatives into the Justice Department. Although Justice Department spokesperson Mark Corallo denies the allegations, school placement officers have privately indicated there has been "a marked shift to the right in the political makeup of students who were approached for interviews this year."
Source: The Washington Post, "Justice Dept. Hiring Changes Drawn Fire," Dan Eggen, Jan. 12, 2003

Ashcroft Collects Personal Data on College Students, Staff
Attorney General John Ashcroft has requested that U.S. colleges and universities submit personal information about foreign students and employees to the FBI, angering civil liberties activists. In late 2002, the FBI asked colleges to turn over information such as names, addresses, telephone numbers and citizenship information of foreign students and employees, allegedly to help avert terrorist attacks. The Association of American College Registrars and Admissions Officers has advised its members "not to pass on information unless served with a court order," and according to the FBI, compliance is voluntary.
Source: The Independent, "FBI Asks Colleges to Hand Over Files on All Foreigners," Andrew Gumbel, Dec. 26, 2002

Ashcroft Wins Broad Powers to Spy on Citizens
Shortly after a three-judge panel ruled favorably on the Justice Department's plans to broaden its power to wiretap powers and secretly investigate suspects in the United States in November 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft released a number of new directives to increase the use of secret surveillance. The ruling will make it easier for Justice Department lawyers and investigators to obtain approval to conduct wiretaps and carry out search warrants in the United States by sidestepping stiffer requirements they would face seeking a standard warrant in a criminal court. Civil libertarians expressed concern that the ruling, issued by a panel comprised of judges appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, will give the government free rein "to spy on U.S. citizens with few restrictions and little oversight."
Source: The Washington Post, "Broad U.S. Wiretap Powers Upheld," Dan Eggen, Nov. 19, 2002

Ashcroft Refuses to Identify Detainees
The Justice Department is appealing a ruling ordering the government to release the names of those detained as part of the war against terrorism. According to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gregory Katsas, the government opposes releasing the names of detainees, as well as the charges against them, on the grounds that it would allow terrorists to cull vital information. According to Kate Martin, the lawyer for one of the 22 groups asking that the government release the detainees' names, "the concept of secret arrests is odious to a democratic society."
Source: The Associated Press, "U.S. Argues for Secret Detentions," Jonathan D. Salant, Nov. 18, 2002

Ethnic/Gender Profiling of Visitors from Muslim Countries Raises Concerns
The Department of Justice issued guidelines in early November 2002 requiring male students, workers and temporary residents from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria to be fingerprinted and photographed. Muslim and Arab American groups criticized the initiative as "ethnic profiling" that was "drawn out of political convenience" and emphasized that none of the Sept. 11 hijackers came from the countries on the list. Although the program will affect a small segment of the tens of millions of individuals who cross the country's borders each year, the American Immigration Lawyers Association expressed concern that the plan will be a "burden on visitors and yield few positive results."
Source: The Washington Post, Mary Beth Sheridan, "U.S. Wants Prints of Muslim Visitors," Nov. 7, 2002

Ashcroft Can't Bear Bare Statues
Ashcroft was reportedly so disturbed by the insufficiently clad (in his view) torsos of two statues in the Great Hall of the Justice Department building, the Spirit of Justice and her partner, Majesty of Law, that he ordered them covered by blue drapes. Ashcroft is apparently concerned about the fact that photographers often "go to great lengths" to include the Spirit of Justice's bare breast in pictures taken in the Justice Department building.
Source: The Independent, "Cover-up at U.S. Justice Department," Andrew Buncombe, Jan. 29, 2002

Ashcroft's Dragnets Yield Few al Qaeda Links
After the September 11 attacks, Ashcroft oversaw massive dragnets that resulted in the detention of hundreds of people, mostly Arabs or Muslims, who were mostly detained on charges completely unrelated to terrorism. Less than a dozen are believed to have any ties to al Qaeda. The Justice Department refused to release the names of nearly 550 of the 1200 persons who had been detained by November 2001. Law enforcement officials involved in the operation also said they were "skeptical" of Ashcroft's assertion that the detentions were having a "profound impact on interrupting terrorist activity" in the United States.
Source: The New York Times, "Al Qaeda Link Seen In Only a Handful of 1,200 Detainees," David Firestone and Christopher Drew, Nov. 29, 2001

Ashcroft Reluctant to Protect Abortion Providers from Violence
Attorney General John Ashcroft demonstrated a worrisome unwillingness to take actions needed to support women's reproductive rights when he initially declined to enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act during an announced summer 2001 campaign by violent anti-abortion extremists. Ashcroft originally decided not to provide protection to a Kansas clinic operated by Dr. George Tiller, who in 1993 was shot in front of his clinic. Only after three abortion rights groups called a news conference to denounce Ashcroft's decision did the Justice Department reverse itself and announce it would send U.S. Marshals to help protect Tiller and his staff.
Source: People for the American Way, "John Ashcroft's First Year as Attorney General."

Ashcroft's Opinions Show He Is an Anti-Abortion Extremist
John Ashcroft's reluctance as attorney general to protect women in the exercise of their constitutional right to choose abortion is entirely consistent with his extremist views. Prior to landing the job, Ashcroft openly espoused the view that life begins at conception, that any abortion kills a human being, and that all abortions should be banned, even those resulting from rape and incest. At one point Ashcroft even claimed he would try to dismantle the Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, although he backed away from that stance during his confirmation hearings.
Source: People for the American Way, "John Ashcroft's First Year as Attorney General."

Ashcroft's Justice Department Offers Little Support for Affirmative Action
John Ashcroft's Justice Department is systematically undermining affirmative action programs and other efforts to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Early in Ashcroft's tenure, the department offered only tepid support, in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, for the rule allowing the U.S. Department of Transportation to operate affirmative action programs. Furthermore, Departing from the Clinton Administration's support for diversity in higher education, Ashcroft's Justice Department chose not to file a brief in a case before the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the University of Michigan Law School's diversity program. Moreover, when the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Federal Communications Commission's equal employment opportunity rules—which, according to the Washington Post, represented "the most inoffensive corner of affirmative action," because they only required broadcasters to make an effort to inform women and minorities about job openings and encourage them to apply—Ashcroft's department filed a brief urging the Supreme Court not to review that regressive decision.
Source: People for the American Way, "John Ashcroft's First Year as Attorney General."

Ashcroft Hides Behind Sept. 11 to Trample Civil Liberties
Attorney General John Ashcroft has aggressively used the September 11 tragedy to justify policies that trample civil liberties, the cornerstone of a democratic society, according to People for the American Way. PFAW concluded that Ashcroft's proposed anti-terrorism legislation "aimed to radically broaden the government's wiretapping, surveillance and search-and-seizure authority, as well as its power to detain non-citizen suspects indefinitely while radically shrinking or abolishing meaningful judicial review or oversight of executive branch actions, a key part of our constitutional system of checks and balances."
Source: People for the American Way, "John Ashcroft's First Year as Attorney General."

Ashcroft Holds Bible Study Class in Office, Concerns Civil Libertarians
A Washington Post article revealed that Attorney General John Ashcroft, a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian, holds a Bible study class with Justice Department staffers in his office. Although Ashcroft's spokesperson insisted that attendance is not compulsory, many Justice Department employees privately expressed concern that not attending the prayer meetings might have repercussions. Employees and civil liberties advocates also expressed concern about the fact that Ashcroft, as the nation's top law enforcement official, is the person entrusted with enforcing the separation of church and state.
Source: The Washington Post, "Ashcroft's Faith Plays Visible Role at Justice," Dan Eggen, May 14, 2001